Dick Cheney unrepentant after CIA torture report – 'I'd do it again in a minute'

Revelation comes days after the former vice president warned the Senate report was "full of crap"

Dick Cheney, former US vice president (Getty)

Former US vice president Dick Cheney has defended the CIA's brutal interrogation techniques against prisoners.

His statement comes days after a Senate report exposed the extent of the use of torture by US agents during the George W Bush presidency.

Mr Cheney, a former oil CEO who was second in command during the Bush administration, said he would happily give the order again for such actions “in a minute” and insisted they did not amount to torture.

“Torture to me is an American citizen on his cell phone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the [World Trade Center] on 9/11,” Mr Cheney told US new channel NBC’s Meet The Press programme.

“There’s this notion that there’s moral equivalence between what the terrorists did and what we do and that’s absolutely not true. We were very careful to stop short of torture … I’d do it again in a minute.”

The landmark investigation last week by the United States Senate found that torture meted out by US forces was completely ineffective in obtaining reliable intelligence in the fight against terrorism.

The former vice president said he did not believe the report, however.

“It worked,” he maintained. “It absolutely worked.”

Earlier this week Mr Cheney took to the FOX News television station to denounce the 6000-page classified document, which he admitted he had not yet read.

The report was “full of crap”, he said, denying that the president had been unaware of the operations of the CIA.

“[The president] was in fact an integral part of the program," he said. "He had to approve it before we moved forward with it. He knew everything he needed to know and wanted to know about the program."