White House press secretary Josh Earnest on Monday jabbed back at former Vice President Dick Cheney’s vigorous defense of the CIA’s extreme interrogation program.
Cheney on NBC’s “Meet the Press” denied that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics amounted to torture and said he would “do it again in a minute” to protect the American people.
The former vice president, one of the fiercest advocates of extreme interrogations in the Bush administration, declined to criticize any of the descriptions of interrogation episodes depicted in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, including “rectal feeding” and “rectal rehydration,” saying he believed it was done for medical reasons.
Earnest could not say whether President Obama saw Cheney’s remarks, but he took issue with his arguments.
“I can say unequivocally that the president certainly believes that the former vice president’s assessment is wrong,” Earnest said during a briefing with reporters on a short Air Force One trip to New Jersey where Obama was scheduled to address the troops at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.
Earnest repeated the White House argument that the interrogation program damaged the nation’s international standing and said that even the former vice president would probably agree that “our moral credibility around the globe is an important tool in our arsenal for advancing and promoting America’s interests around the world.”
