Ex-Bush aide praises torture as 'the right thing' in glowing account of Dick Cheney

Dana Perino, who served in the Bush administration as White House press secretary, lauded the CIA’s systematic torture program in a glowing tribute to her old boss, former Vice President Dick Cheney, after his death on Tuesday.

Cheney, who played a central role in pushing falsified evidence to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, died on Tuesday at 84 years old. Speaking with Fox News in the wake of Cheney’s death, Perino recalled the controversy late into Bush’s second term after reporting revealed that the CIA had destroyed about 90 video tapes of agents torturing detainees.

“I woke up to headlines in The New York Times that there was an accusation that a CIA interrogator had destroyed interrogation tapes, so then I knew what my day was going to be like!” Perino told Fox News.

“I didn't have all the information — of course the interrogation program was such a highly classified program — and that morning before I briefed, everybody came to see me. I ended up going into the Oval Office and I saw the president, I saw the vice president, I saw the national security advisor, and I'll never forget that the one thing I was assured of.”

Perino went on to share how Cheney and others warned her that her impending briefing with reporters was “going to be very difficult for you,” but that they assured her that “with 100% conviction that those interrogations saved American lives.”

“I felt my spine straighten, I walked out, I did the briefing – best briefing I ever did!” Perino said. “I was so assured by the courage of their conviction to do the right thing, the very difficult thing – and always to protect the men and women in our intelligence.”

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the CIA established a network of detention centers across the globe known as “black sites,” where detainees were subjected to numerous forms of torture, including sexual torture, exposure to freezing tempratures for extended periods of time, forced sleep deprivation, and confinement in enclosed spaces for hundreds of hours at a time.

For Perino, however, interrogators did “the right thing,” and furthermore, she went on to attack former President Barack Obama, falsely claiming that he sought to prosecute CIA interrogators that tortured detainees. In actuality, Obama issued an executive order that sought to prohibit the CIA agents from torturing detainees going forward, and his administration declined to prosecute agents for having tortured detainees in the past.

“Now, you'll remember, President Obama wanted to prosecute them!” Perino said. “And Dick Cheney – who always stayed pretty quiet after the White House – the one time that Dick Cheney came out was to spite President Obama on that and defend those men and women in intelligence.”