Dick Cheney is happy to be Darth Vader

Dick Cheney, America’s out-going Vice-President, will be remembered for many things – the day he accidentally shot a 78-year-old Texan lawyer on a quail hunt in 2006 to name but one – but the legacy of his eight years in office will, rightly or wrongly, focus on his hawkish support for the invasion of Iraq and his decision to establish the prison camp for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

On Wednesday, in his first television interview since the election of Barack Obama, Cheney robustly defended his record on these issues. When quizzed about the use of torture on terror suspects, he told ABC News: "We don't do torture. We never have. It's not something this administration subscribes to."

However, when asked if he supported the use of waterboarding – a technique that induces the sensation of drowning and which is widely regarded as a form of torture - in the interrogation of the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, he replied: "I do."

On Guantanamo, he said that President-elect Obama should think hard about his avowed aim of dismantling the camp. "What are you going to do with those prisoners?" he asked. "I don't know any other nation in the world that would do what we've done in terms of taking care of people who are avowed enemies."

As to the invasion of Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction said to be held by Saddam Hussein, he was certain the right action had been taken: "He [Hussein] had the technology, he had the people. This was a bad actor and the country's better off, the world's better off with Saddam gone. We made the right decision."

A rare flash of humour came when Cheney, 67, was asked about Hillary Clinton's comment that he was like the Star Wars character Darth Vader. To this, he said: "I asked my wife about that, if that didn't bother her. She said, no, it humanises you." ·