by Mark Silva
Dick Cheney, the former vice president, has been pressing the Obama administration to declassify memos which he says show that the harshest interrogation tactics of the Bush administration produced valuable, life-saving information.
How's that going, he was asked today?
"I would not ordinarily be leading the charge to declassify classified information,'' Cheney said in an appearance at the National Press Club this afternoon.... "Otherwise, they would not be calling me Darth Vader for nothing,'' he said to some laughter. " I think the declassification of those documents would serve a public purpose, and enlighten the public.''
Asked about the relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, Cheney said this: "The prime source of information on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda was George Tenet,'' former CIA director. "There was a relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq that stretched back 10 years. That's not something I made up... That's something the director of the CIA was telling us.
"We know that he was making $25,000 payments to the families of suicide bombers... We know there were other terrorists... who had found safe harbor in Iraq over the years,'' Cheney said. "I do not believe, and I have never seen any evidence to confirm, that he was involved in 9/11... But the fact of Saddam Hussein being a terrorist-sponsoring state... was, I think, a fact.''
Cheney, appearing at an awards ceremony for Washington journalists in the name of the president whom he served as chief of staff, the late Gerald Ford, delivered a conversational response to questions about the rationale for the war in Iraq and war against terrorism that he has addressed in more strident speeches in recent weeks.
Was the case made for war in 2002 stronger then than it is today?
"I felt it was strong at the time, and I do so today,'' Cheney said softly, but sternly. "In the months after 9/11, we were felt with a situation where we felt we had to take action... to reduce the possibility that terrorists would ever get their hands on (nuclear) technology or that terrorist-sponsoring states would share that...
"I looked at the world the morning after 9/11, and I saw 16 acres of ashes in downtown Manhattan,'' the former vice president said. "I knew, for a fact, that if the passengers on Flight 93 weren't successful, they (hijackers) probably would have taken out either the White House or the Capitol.
"We had to do everything in our power to prevent that next attack,'' Cheney said. "To some extent, our success has allowed our fellow citizens to say, 'Oh, there was nothing to worry about.'
"If I had it to do all over again, I would do exactly the same thing,'' he said. "I don't have much tolerance or patience for those who have the benefit of hindsight eight years later and have forgotten what happened on 9/11.... Just imagine, what would happen if you had 19 men in one of our cities... armed with a nuclear weapon or (a biological weapon.)''
Cheney was asked about a derisive comment that he had made about The New York Times' revelation of the once-secret Terrorist Surveillance Program in which the National Security Agency has monitored the phone conversations and email of people in the United States communicating with suspected terrorists. He said at the American Enterprise Institute that it had "impressed the Pulitzer committee.''
"We found ourselves in a situation where The New York Times received a leak - we called them into the Oval Office,'' Cheney said. "The publisher, the editor and the Washington Bureau chief... all came down to the Oval Office and talked to the president,'' where they were told that writing about the program would let terrorists know the U.S. is reading their mail and would break some laws.) " They went ahead and they published it anyway, and their award for doing it was they won the Pulitzer.''
"My own personal view is that damaged our security,'' he said.
The former vice president also expressed great doubt about the Obama administration's determination to close the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"I think it's going to be very difficult to close Guantanamo,'' Cheney said. "The New York Times again, one of my favorite publications... referred to the prisoners at Guantanamo as abductees... These are bad actors.... The ones that are left, these are the worst of the worst... There is not a lot of great demand out around the country to have those folks shipped to the nearest facility.''
"We need Guantanamo... If we didn't have it, we'd need to (invent) it... If you don't have a place to hold these people, the only other option is to kill them... We don't operate that way.''
On the harshest iterrogation tactics that the Bush administration employed against detained terrorists: "I don't believe we tortured,'' Cheney said today, insisting that authorities followed the guidance of Justice Department lawyers and did not cross a "red line'' into illegal conduct. "There were three people who were water-boarded.... It was well-done.''
Comments
Trying to re-write history again. Cheney was a liar back then and he remains a liar.
Posted by: Tim | June 1, 2009 1:42 PM
How can this guy possibly say that if he knew then what he knew now, he'd do the exact same thing? If he really was concrened about terrorists getting WMDs, then the War in Iraq was a complete and unecessary diversion from efforts to make that less likely. They didn't have active WMD programs, let alone weapons. There was no threat there. We know that. Why would he make that same mistake again?
Posted by: Nel | June 1, 2009 2:07 PM
And-- here we have a play I'd like to call the calamity of ironies. If you'd didn't know Bush Jr was the 43rd POTUS, you'd swear, by Cheney's activity, he ran the whole thing. Can't he just retire. Isn't this bad for his health, or is this what keeps him alive. Apparently, he's had time to get acquainted with his nick name and watch some episodes of 24. The punch line: "We had to do everything in our power to prevent that next attack." Everything EXCEPT catch the guy who was not only willing but proved to be capable of pulling of a once in a gazillion chances attack, on, not one, but several high end targets. I wonder if to him, "we'll get him dead or alive" has just as much meaning now as it did then. Given, "we don't operate that way." We don't operate at all. Our house is invisible on Google, we served as the fourth branch of the US government, we don't call it torture, ever-- until it's time to declassify, sheesh, we classify everything just so we can blame someone else for not disclosing what we ourselves wouldn't in the first place. We are Darth Vader and the Invisible Cloak. We don't operate. We hover through the air.
Posted by: octopusrex | June 1, 2009 2:08 PM
You're a LIAR Cheney (not that we didn't already know that). Carl Levin has seen the memo's that you keep babbling about and they do NOT support any of your BS claims.
http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=313722
Cheney, Rummy, Gonzo, Bush, Rove etc are sweating bullets right now, they know if and when the mood shifts and a greater push comes to hold them accountable, they will end up in orange prison jumpsuits. Releasing the torture memo's probably had them completely beside themselves. Cheney's response to that sort of situation is to behave like a cornered, rabid dog and he bullies, confronts, and lies with unbelievable ease. He is on the offensive in an attempt to defuse that threat.
Posted by: former Republican | June 1, 2009 3:06 PM
You know, it would have been a lot better for everyone if Bush / Cheney had spent just a fraction of the time"looking" and being concerned about potential bad things happening to the US pre-9/11/01 as they did post 9/11/01.
Post 9/11/01 it was oh so easy to wake up, realize you were wrong and not paying attention and over-react.
Over-reaction, that's all they did. And for that they want a medal.
Overreacting is both easy and typically ineffective. Heckuva job, Cheney. Heckuva job.
Posted by: po | June 1, 2009 3:39 PM
The article states Cheney would do it all over again. That would be ignoring the classified intelligence received from England and Israel and the internal CIA memo's regarding the impending 9/11 attacks against the WTC which insinerated nearly 3,000 Americans. After the attacks, chickenhawk Cheney was hurried off to a secret undisclosed location where he remained in hiding for months. Bush ran to Crawford Texas to play cowboy.
Why is Cheney running around squealing like a stuffed pig about all this??
Posted by: Doug R. | June 1, 2009 3:46 PM
Isn't one definition of insanity doing what you know is wrong over and over?
Posted by: Kenny Bunkport | June 1, 2009 5:09 PM
It is hard to figure whether Shooter is doing all this talking on his own as a free agent, or whether by tacit agreement he is the mouthpiece for the Busy Dynasty.
Either way, he seems mighty defensive.
He apparently is not sleeping the sleep of the righteous.
Is he doing, in his own Dr. Szell-ish way, his version of the Blagojevich routine:
Trying to get his version of the "facts" out there before there is a Truth Commission?
Posted by: ornery | June 1, 2009 5:26 PM
Saddam did assist al Qaeda with money and safehaven. Don't believe me? Ask them...www.regimeofterror.com
Posted by: M.E. | June 4, 2009 6:28 PM
WHY THE CHENEYS WON’T LEAVE THE SCENE: A QUESTION OF JOURNALISTIC DEONTOLOGY!
The recent appearances of the Cheneys over the media as a credible political opponent on par to the Obama administration's policies and stances raises an issue of journalistic deontology! This is definitely of artificial making. On the one hand, we've got a legitimately elected President of the United States who has undergone the rigorous electoral process having to make his case to the American people and coming out successful in eliciting the policies he intends to carry out during his mandate within the confines of the American political institutional structure and process. On the other hand, we've got political personae (the Cheneys) who are effectively being presented by the media as a legitimate opponent on par to the Obama administration whereas they do not bear any electoral mandate whatsoever for the political views they profer and with no consequent responsiblity, stake and risk that will arise from any such mandate while the President is tied to them.
The latest case in point, is Liz Cheney's appearance on the Scarborough Show with her critical and undermining views of the President presented in effect as critical views to the Obama speech delivered in Egypt under the disguise of expressing her opinions. For comments/expressions of opinion on the President's policies, her views as well as those of her father have been given such a broad artificial reception by the media that runs very contrary to the expression of opinion as we've come to know it. These views are rather given almost the same weight and placed on par as the political stances of a legitimately elected president with a legitimate mandate for the policies he is undertaking while the Cheney's hold no such legitimate mandate and with no accompanying political accountability whatsoever. The issue here is that such attitude by the media is contrary to what we've come to expect from normal implicit democratic rules. If the Cheneys had any pretense for policies they wished to be implemented after the Bush Administration, the solution would have simply been for Dick or Liz to run for president. Since they didn't, it is artificial for the media to strive to present them as a counterweight on par to the Obama administration's policies well beyong what will be expected for the opinion of a simple citizen that the Cheneys are now notwithstanding their previous political roles. And by the way, by extension is it acceptable that any citizen, no matter what self-righteous pretense they might have, to be artificially given a similar counterweight role on par with the President on any policy issues of the Obama administration while not holding any legitimate political mandate for which they will be politically accountable for their stances? It can be understandable, that the Cheneys can be of direct concern when it comes to matters of direct relation to political issues having to do with Cheney's role in the Bush administration. But to raise their views on the policies and stances the administration should take on par with the President undermines appropriate journalistic deontology because as we should all know by now "elections do matter".
What strikes the mind here is that the Cheneys have perfectly understood this "naïvété" of the media and are using this "media confusion about fairness" to artificially strive to extirpate Mr. Dick Cheney from accusations of introducing torture policies during the Bush Administration among other political accusations. Their strategy is very simple. Legally, Cheney can't make it (they know that secretly). In all courts of law, so-called EITs are definitely torture practices. Besides, the facts as we know them are overwhelmingly against him and the Bush Administration, and Dick Cheney's contradictions are extensive. The real strategy of the Cheney's here is totally otherly: turn it "political". First, saying torture works and was for the good of the country should elicit the fervour of many Americans. Afterall, all what is needed is that a substantial number of Americans polled buy to this argument, and then the issue’s legal underpinning may be undermined. Secondly, posing artificially as the right wing counterweight to the Obama's administration policies elicits the impression and fervour in some quarters particularly to the right that he is making the President moderate and thus he is political useful. A look at this second political trick shows how the media has effectively been manipulated: knowing fairly well that in his administrative role the President will have to take practical and pragmatic postures with respect to the release of photos of abused detainees as well as on other policies, all what Dick simply have to do is to posit that he is against releasing the pictures and pretend to take critical policy issues postures on the right, making him seemingly a moderating influence on the President. Thirdly, the Cheneys simply have to claim that Obama is following the Bush Administration’s policies he criticized pointing to his strategies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. In this case too, the media is manipulated as they ignore the fact that the Obama administration does not have the luxury of starting from scratch as Bush had on all these issues but rather adopts a “course correction strategy” of the situations to bring them as close as possible to what he advocates. The fact is that, the underlying strategy of Dick and her daughter is to make this three steps political trick extirpate Dick from the accusations levied against the former administration. The sad thing is that the media is "naïvely" falling for these political tricks!
Posted by: James Aluceo | June 6, 2009 12:02 PM