Video: Cheney Defends CIA, Interrogation Techniques on Meet The Press

Guy Benson | December 16, 2014 10:25 AM

Former Vice President Dick Cheney sat down with NBC's Chuck Todd on Sunday and mounted an aggressive defense of the CIA's terrorist interrogation program implemented after 9/11. In one of his

strongest answers, Cheney backhanded calls for criminal prosecutions from a UN official, and upbraided Senate Democrats for "trashing a very, very good program that worked and saved lives and kept us from another attack" (videos courtesy of the WFB):

At another point in the exchange, Cheney adroitly demolished the premise of a hypothetical question from Todd about the nature of waterboarding:

Todd: So if an American citizen is waterboarded by ISIS, are we going to try to prosecute ISIS for war crimes?

Cheney: He's not likely to be waterboarded. He's likely to have his head cut off. Not a close call.

The Vice President's performance elicited a predictable cascade of enraged virtual heckling from his political and media detractors. This is a New York Times writer:

So if we have reason to think Dick Cheney seeks to destroy our vital values & institutions, at cost of US lives, is it OK to torture him?
— David Dobbs (@David_Dobbs) December 14, 2014

A batch of new polling indicates that the public

Democrats are the only demographic cohort in which "not justified" responses outnumber "justified." Yes, pluralities of women (+16), young voters (+8), Hispanics (+13) and blacks (+4) all side with Cheney over Feinstein & Friends on this question. I'll leave you with two items: First, Eli Lake poking another hole in the 'torture'-doesn't-work dogma, and second, former Bush administration adviser Dan Senor challenging David Axelrod on the Left's politicized "no to 'torture,' yes to deadly drone strikes" hypocrisy we underscored last week: