Cheney: I'd do it again in a minute

Torture, to me, is an American citizen on a cellphone 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 (do) and what we do. And that's absolutely not true. We were very careful to stop short of torture. All of the techniques that were authorized by the president were, in effect, blessed by the Justice Department.

I have no problem (with the techniques) as long as we achieve our objective. (The program) worked. It worked now for 13 years.

We've avoided another mass casualty attack against the United States. And we did (get Osama) bin Laden. We did capture an awful lot of the senior guys at al-Qaeda who were responsible for that attack on 9/11. I'd do it again in a minute.

We didn't read them their Miranda rights, either. These are not American citizens. They are unlawful combatants. They are terrorists. They are people who have committed unlawful acts of war against the American people.

And we put them in places where we could proceed with the interrogation program and find out what they knew so we could protect the country against further attack. And it worked.

We're still at war. The terrorists that are out there today are as bad as on 9/11. We've got ISIL talking about attacking the United States, having created a caliphate. We're in a situation at least as bad as we had on 9/11 when after the attack, we had word that al-Qaeda was trying to acquire nuclear weapons.

Now we're sitting here today. We are castigating the CIA for doing what the president ordered it to do and the Justice Department said was legal. We're doing enormous damage to our relationship overseas with our friends and allies who've supported us and worked with us.

We're making it very, very difficult to be able to go recruit foreign agents to work with us because they're likely to be hung out to dry by politicians on Capitol Hill who've got some kind of political ax to grind.