Former Vice President Dick Cheney spoke out Wednesday against a scathing Senate report regarding CIA torture practices after 9/11, calling it '"full of crap" and a "classic example" of politicians throwing professionals under the bus.
"The men and women of the CIA did exactly what we wanted them to do," Cheney told Fox News in the video below, adding that former President George W. Bush "knew everything he needed to know and wanted to know about the program."
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According to the Senate intelligence committee report released Tuesday, the CIA lied to Bush, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others about enhanced interrogation techniques.
Cheney wasn't the only insider to blast the report. Former CIA directors Porters Goss, Michael Hayden and George Tenet described the report as a one-sided attack on the CIA in an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal.
When prodded by Fox News' Bret Baier regarding a technique called "rectal rehydration," in which interogees who wouldn't eat were force fed through IV tubes inserted into their rectums, Cheney distanced himself.
"I don't know anything about that specific instance. I can't speak to that. I guess the question is what are you prepared to do in order to get the truth about future attacks on the United States," he said, noting that rectal rehydration was not one of 12 authorized interrogation techniques, which included waterboarding.
Cheney said "torture was something we very carefully avoided," although both politicians and human rights advocates have defined waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA as torture. President Barack Obama banned Bush-era interrogation tactics in an executive order when he took office in 2009.
There may have been some problems with the intelligence gathering program, Cheney said, but the ones highlighted by the Senate report weren't true. He went on to describe the CIA's work as justified and "absolutely essential," even though the Senate report outlined multiple instances when that wasn't the case.
"I'd do it again in a minute," Cheney said.