US senator rejects Cheney torture claim as 'lie'

A US senator says claims by former Vice President Dick Cheney that enhanced interrogation techniques -- torture -- saved countless American lives are wrong.

The powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin, said an investigation into detainee abuse charges over the use of the tactics "gives the lie to Mr. Cheney's claims," CNN reported.

In April, President Barack Obama released classified CIA memos that showed Bush administration lawyers authorized the use of techniques such as waterboarding, which stimulates drowning, against enemy combatants.

Later, Obama banned the use of the techniques.

Levin noted that the two CIA documents that Cheney wants released "say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of abusive techniques."

"I hope that the documents are declassified, so that people can judge for themselves what fact is, and what is fiction," he added.

Cheney had asked the Obama administration to declassify the documents to make more "honest debate" on the Bush administration's decision to use the methods on suspected terrorists, but his request was rejected by the CIA.

Cheney argued that those techniques provided valuable intelligence that saved American lives, but critics say they amounted to the illegal torture of prisoners in US custody.