He has no defense for the actual facts of the situation.
Last week, I noted the Dick Cheney interview in which Brett Baier of Fox News caught him in a lie. One moment, Cheney claimed that the CIA was fully informing the White House about its interrogation tactics. The next moment, Cheney insisted that he hadn't known prisoners were raped by interrogators who ground up food and forced it into their anuses. He said that tactic wasn't approved.
I hoped Chuck Todd would press him on this contradiction. Either President Bush and Cheney knew that the CIA was engaged in a tactic that even the neoconservative Weekly Standard calls torture, or the CIA kept the White House in the dark.
Here's what happened when the subject came up on Meet the Press:
CHUCK TODD:
Let me go through some of those techniques that were used, Majid Khan, was subjected to involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration. It included two bottles of Ensure, later in the same day Majid Khan's lunch tray consisting of hummus, pasta, sauce, nuts and raisins was pureed and rectally infused.
DICK CHENEY:
That wasn't--
CHUCK TODD:
Does that meet the definition of torture?
DICK CHENEY:
--that does not meet the definition of what was used in the program as--
CHUCK TODD:
I understand. But does that meet the definition of torture in your mind?
DICK CHENEY:
--in my mind, I've told you what meets the definition of torture. It's what 19 guys armed with airline tickets and box cutters did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11. What was done here apparently certainly was not one of the techniques that was approved. I believe it was done for medical reasons.
CHUCK TODD:
I mean, medical community has said there is no medical--
DICK CHENEY:
If you go and look, for example, at Jose Rodriguez book, and he was the guy running the program, he's got a very clear description of how, in fact, the program operated. With respect to that I think the agency has answered it and its response to the committee report and I--
CHUCK TODD:
--but you acknowledge this was over and above.
DICK CHENEY:
--that was not something that was done as part of the interrogation program.
CHUCK TODD:
But you won't call it torture.
DICK CHENEY:
It wasn't torture in terms of it wasn't part of the program.
CIA officers assigned to the interrogation program forced food up the anuses of prisoners. And what's Cheney's answer to whether they perpetrated torture? It "wasn't part of the program," so no (as if that makes any sense). And they shouldn't be punished either. "I believe," he says, "it was done for medical reasons."
Does anyone think that he really believes that?
His attempt to redefine torture as "what the 9/11 hijackers did" is no more coherent. The point came up repeatedly and seemed to be something that Cheney prepared.
CHUCK TODD:
Well, let me start with quoting you. You said earlier this week, "Torture was something that was very carefully avoided." It implies that you have a definition of what torture is. What is it?
DICK CHENEY:
Well, torture, to me, Chuck, is an American citizen on a cell phone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York City on 9/11. There's this notion that somehow there's moral equivalence between what the terrorists and what we do.
And that's absolutely not true.
This is unusually naked nonsense.