In the process of criticizing the Obama administration for releasing the torture memos, Cheney told Fox News:
"One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort," Cheney said.
Cheney said he's asked that the documents be declassified because he has remained silent on the confidential information, but he knows how successful the interrogation process was and wants the rest of the country to understand.
"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.
This strikes me as eminently reasonable. Up until now, the case against torture has been an easy one to make, since there's been nothing in the way of solid evidence (sorry, Marc Thiessen's fulminations don't count) that waterboarding, walling, etc actually worked and produced useful intelligence. It's possible that these reports Cheney mentions won't amount to solid evidence either, but, at this point, all the evidence should be on the table (with redactions where necessary, of course).
--Jason Zengerle