TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Cheney: CIA Did Nothing Wrong During Interrogations

ADVERTISEMENT

The Associated Press

Published: January 8, 2009

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday that
he sees no reason for President George W. Bush to pre-emptively
pardon anyone at the CIA involved in harsh interrogations of
suspected terrorists.

"I don't have any reason to believe that
anybody in the agency did anything illegal," he said.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Cheney also said that
Bush has no need to apologize for not foreseeing the economic
crisis.

"I don't think he needs to apologize. I think what he needed to
do is take bold, aggressive action and he has," Cheney said. "I
don't think anybody saw it coming."

During a wide-ranging interview in his West Wing office, Cheney
also said Iran remains at the top of the list of foreign policy
challenges that President-elect Barack Obama will face. He said an
"irresponsible withdrawal" from Iraq now would be ill-advised.

And he said he's confident that North Korea helped Syria build a
reactor - a site that Israel suspected of being a nuclear
installation and bombed in 2007.

After Obama takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, the 67-year-old
Cheney plans to possibly write a book and spend time with his wife,
Lynne, their two daughters and six grandchildren. He and his wife
will split their time between their house in Virginia and their
hometown of Casper, Wyo.

An avid angler, Cheney said the first river he wants to fish is
the South Fork of the Snake River on the Wyoming-Idaho border.

Cheney is leaving the White House after a government career
spanning four decades, including stints as defense secretary,
President Gerald R. Ford's chief of staff and a longtime
congressman from Wyoming.

The vice president often laughs off talk that he played his role
as second-in-command to Bush like a wizard, controlling the levers
of the presidency from behind the scenes. Still, Cheney will go
down in history as one of, perhaps, the most influential vice
presidents in U.S. history.

During the interview, he strongly defended the administration's
terrorist-fighting policies.

Cheney said the administration rightly used programs to
intercept communications of suspected terrorists and use tough
methods to interrogate high-value detainees. He also said he did
not have any qualms about the reliability of intelligence obtained
through waterboarding - an interrogation technique simulating
drowning used on three top al-Qaida operatives in 2002 and 2003.

"It's been used with great discrimination by people who know
what they're doing and has produced a lot of valuable information
and intelligence," he said.

Obama has criticized interrogation practices he says amount to
torture and has promised to close the U.S. detention center at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Cheney acknowledges that there is still a lot of work to be done
in Iraq, but he said much progress has been made.

"I hear a lot of people, among our critics, who keep saying
`Iraq's a mess, pull out.' Well, that's not true. It's not a
mess," Cheney said. "We have made major progress. We have come
close to achieving a significant proportion of our objectives, and
an irresponsible withdrawal now is exactly the wrong medicine."

Asked if he was concerned that removing U.S. troops would cause
the nation to backslide into the violence of a few years ago,
Cheney said it all depends on what the U.S. does under the next
administration. Obama has said he wants all combat troops out of
Iraq by the spring of 2010, leaving a residual force of trainers,
air controllers, advisers and logistics soldiers until the end of
the mission.

Cheney said that Obama's decision to keep Robert Gates on as
defense secretary makes "some of us cautiously optimistic that the
new administration is going to be more reasoned and responsible in
terms of how they proceed, and not take action that would undermine
the basic fundamental system that we put in place."

On Iran, a nation he said was one of the prime sponsors of
terror in the world, Cheney said more sanctions will likely be
needed to get the Iranians to stop enriching uranium. Uranium
enriched to a low level is used to produce nuclear fuel, but
further enrichment makes it suitable for use in nuclear weapons.

"One of the things I worry about most is that linkage between a
government that supports terror and terrorists on the one hand, and
on the other hand is developing a number of deadlier of weapons,"
he said. "And I think that's a combination that is a scary
prospect, and ought to be."

North Korea also will be a trouble spot that Obama will have to
watch and address, he said.

North Korea continues to be a problem partly because it hasn't
kept its commitment to provide a complete declaration of its
nuclear activities, he said. In addition, Cheney said: "It looks
like they have a continuing, ongoing program to produce highly
enriched uranium" and "they helped the Syrians build a nuclear
reactor."

In 2007, Israel bombed the Syrian reactor.

In April 2008, seven months after the facility was hit, the
White House said that North Korea's secret work on the reactor with
Syria was "a dangerous and potentially destabilizing development
for the world." The White House said the destroyed facility was
not intended for "peaceful purposes."

But besides the comments in April, top Bush administration
officials have said little publicly on the issue, which is still
being investigated by the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT