Wow - AP's Deb Reichmann actually asked Dick Cheney the question we've been asking for months: will Bush pre-emptively pardon torturers? She even credits unidentified "blogs" with the question! (Who knew she and Cheney read blogs?)

Interestingly, Cheney refused to deny such pardons would occur. All he said is the torturers did nothing wrong in his opinion. But that leaves wide open the possibility that others in the Administration disagree. And those others could include George Bush, who might therefore issue pre-emptive pardons. In other words, Dick Cheney left the door wide open for pre-emptive pardons for torturers - and for those who authorized torture, including Cheney and Bush himself.

Q You think that waterboarding, for example, was warranted in the three cases that it was used. Do you have any qualms about the reliability of that -- of the information that comes out of a technique like that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I don't. I think your question is -- I think that it's been used very -- with great discrimination by people who know what they're doing and has produced a lot of valuable information and intelligence.

Q Okay. Is there any real contemplation being given to preemptively pardon any of the interrogators, or is that just something that's just been in blogs?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I think you see a lot of it on blogs, but I don't -- I don't have any reason to believe that anybody in the agency did anything illegal.

Q So the administration is not really -- has not really been contemplating that or working on that idea? I mean, maybe they thought about it but --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I can't -- you know, I can't speak for everybody in the administration, but my view would be that the people who carried out that program -- intelligence surveillance program, the enhanced interrogation program, with respect to al Qaeda captives -- in fact were authorized to do what they did, and we had the legal opinions that -- and in effect said what was appropriate and what wasn't. And I believe they followed those legal opinions and I don't have any reason to believe that they did anything wrong or inappropriate.

Q Wouldn't need one, right? Do you think that we really did miss Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora?

Reichmann's little editorial question at the end is bizarre and telling. Cheney didn't say exactly what she wanted to hear, so she tried to put the words she wanted to hear in his mouth. But she didn't want to risk the possibility of disagreement, so she changed the topic before Cheney could respond.