Dick Cheney’s is the gift that keeps on giving. On Fox today, he really said this:

“The bottom line is we successfully defended the nation for seven and a half years against a follow-on attack to 9/11. That was a remarkable achievement,” he told FOX News. “I think that we are stripping ourselves of some of the capabilities that we used in order to block, if you will, or disrupt activities by Al Qaeda that would have led to additional attacks.”

The primary “additional capabilities” Cheney referred to that Pres. Obama has “stripped” from the U.S. approach to dealing with terrorists is torture. Without torture as an interrogation technique, therefore, Obama is making us vulnerable to new terror attacks.

It is hard to parse what Cheney hopes to gain from this media junket. It smacks of desperation, in part because of the contrast between Cheney’s sudden availability now and his lack of availability to the media when he was in office. But mostly because he is such an unpopular figure — his approval rating was 13 percent when he left office — that it would be smarter if left the defense of his torture regime to others.

And that may well be the problem. There is no one else who is will step forward with as full-throated a defense of Torquemada’s torture techniques as old Torquemada himself.