Former President George W. Bush spoke out in an interview shown on CNN over the weekend backing the C.I.A. leaders, calling them “patriots” and saying any report that diminished them was “off base.” Some former Bush administration officials had urged that he seize on the report’s conclusions to distance himself from the program, but he and his top advisers rejected that suggestion.
Mr. Cheney went further than Mr. Bush by arguing that the program itself was worth it. And he suggested that the Democrats on the Senate committee were trying to rewrite history to absolve themselves of their own involvement as legislative overseers.
“It occurs to me it was sort of a cover for those on the Democratic side who were briefed on the program, but then were subsequently embarrassed to admit that and so are going back to construct a rationale to say, ‘They didn’t tell us the truth,’” Mr. Cheney said.
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