WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that Americans are less safe now that President Barack Obama has overturned Bush terrorism-fighting policies and that nearly all the Republican administration’s goals in Iraq have been achieved.
“There is no prospect” that Iraq will return to producing weapons of mass destruction or supporting terrorists, Cheney asserted, “as long as it’s a democratically governed country, as long as they have got the security forces they do now and a relationship with the United States.”
Obama suspended military trials for suspected terrorists and announced he will close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as overseas sites where the CIA has held some detainees. The president also ordered CIA interrogators to abide by the U.S. Army Field Manual’s regulations for treatment of detainees and denounced waterboarding, or simulated drowning, as torture.
Asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” if he thought Obama has made Americans less safe with those actions, Cheney replied, “I do.”
“I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11,” Cheney said.
“I think that’s a great success story. It was done legally. It was done in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles,” he said. “And now (Obama) is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.”
Also Sunday, The Washington Post reported that the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaida captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.
The findings were based on an investigation by ICRC officials who were granted exclusive access to the CIA’s “high-value” detainees after they were transferred in 2006 to the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The 14 detainees, who had previously been kept in isolation in CIA prisons overseas, gave remarkably uniform accounts of abuse that included beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and, in some cases, waterboarding.
The report was barred from public release by Red Cross guidelines intended to preserve the group’s strict policy of neutrality in conflicts.
A U.S. official familiar with the report told the Post that “it is important to bear in mind that the report lays out claims made by the terrorists themselves.”
Former president George W. Bush acknowledged the use of coercive interrogation tactics on senior al-Qaida captives detained in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but he insisted that the measures complied with U.S. and international law.
In Sunday’s wide-ranging interview, Cheney also:
“We are in the midst of a worldwide economic period of considerable difficulty here,” he said. “It doesn’t do just to go back and say, ‘Well, George Bush was president and that is why everything is screwed up,’ because that is simply not true.”
Worried that Obama was using the economic crisis “to justify a massive expansion in the government and much more authority for the government over the private sector, and I don’t think that’s good.”
Called his former chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby “an innocent man” who deserved a pardon from Bush. The issue of pardoning Libby was a subject of intense disagreement with Bush at the close of his presidency, Cheney said.
Libby was convicted of perjury and obstructing justice in the investigation of the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. Bush commuted Libby’s sentence and saved him from serving time in prison, but Libby remains a convicted felon.
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