Cheney's Interview

rimrocker · Mar 15, 2009

The man is insane and his spin is really old. Here are some "highlights."

Economic crisis is blamed on Fannie/Freddie/Dems and Bush is not to blame...

KING: Is that how you see it? Just about every day I assume you're reading the newspapers now that you're out of office, the president says, well, we have got a lot to do but it's not my fault, I inherited a mess. Did you leave him a mess?

CHENEY: Well, I don't follow the news quite as closely as I once did. But there's no question that what the economic circumstances that he inherited are difficult ones. You know, we said that before we left. I don't think you can blame the Bush administration for the creation of those circumstances.

It's a global financial problem. We had, in fact, tried to deal with the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac problem some years before with major reforms and were blocked by Democrats on the Hill, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.

So I think the notion that you can just sort of throw it off on the prior administration, that's interesting rhetoric but I don't think anybody really cares a lot about that. What they care is what is going to work and how we are going to get out of these difficulties.
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Cutting taxes is the answer.

Is the president of the United States trying to brazenly deceive the American people?

CHENEY: Well, I think they've taken liberties, if you will, with the arguments. Given the importance to the country and to all of us of having a healthy economy and getting the economy back on track, it seems to me an administration does have an obligation to set priorities and go after that first.

It also occurs to me that one of the tools that is most important to doing that is tax policy, and cutting taxes, especially for those who invest and create wealth and create jobs. That's not what we're seeing.

We're seeing an argument made that we've got economic difficulties, therefore, we're going to have a cap and trade program with respect to carbon emissions. That's a huge energy tax that's going to be applied across the society.

Or that we're going to fundamentally change the health care system, we haven't had a debate is on the health care system, well, since '93.

Perfectly fine to have a debate on it, but we're not having a debate on it.

I was concerned when the first stimulus program wasn't put together in the administration but, rather, was something they sort of chucked up on Capitol Hill and let the Congress write that legislation which says, to me, there really isn't a coherent approach at this point to try and improve the economy.
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9/11, 3,000 dead, Katrina was a problem, WOT is similar to WWII...

KING: There are people I assume watching this interview right now, and people in this town who would say, why should we listen to you? And they would say that because of the context of the Bush administration numbers.

They would say, you know, what did you do when you were in charge?

And they have some numbers to back up their case. And I want to show some to our viewers When you came to office, the unemployment rate in the country was 4.2 percent, when you left it was 7.6 percent.

The number of Americans in poverty when you arrived, just under 33 million, over 37 million when you left. The number without health insurance, a little over 41 million when you came, over 45 million approaching 46 million when you left.

And you came with a budget surplus of $128 billion and in the final year, the budget deficit was a record $1.3 trillion. So what would you say to someone out there watching this who is saying, why should they listen to you?

CHENEY: Well, there are all kinds of arguments to be made on that point. But there's something that is more important than the specific numbers you're talking about, and that had to be priority for our administration.

Eight months after we arrived, we had 9/11. We had 3,000 Americans killed one morning by al Qaeda terrorists here in the United States. We immediately had to go into the wartime mode. We ended up with two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of that is still very active. We had major problems with respect to things like Katrina, for example. All of these things required us to spend money that we had not originally planned to spend, or weren't originally part of the budget.

Stuff happens. And the administration has to be able to respond to that, and we did.

I think it's also -- you talked the unemployment...

KING: But you're a conservative administration, spending more than

$1 trillion.

(CROSSTALK)

CHENEY: We always said -- I always said that wartime scenario is cause for an exception in terms of spending. It was appropriate in World War II, certainly, and I think it's appropriate now.
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Fannie/Freddie/Dems again, money for bankers is OK, but money for other parts of the economy is not...

KING: I think some people do go back to that, sir, and say, understanding that. And the Democrats were in charge the last two years of your administration. That's a point that should be made. And you're right, other governments around the world have been caught up in this.

But I think some Americans say, wait a minute, he was the MBA. Dick Cheney was the veteran Washington insider and a CEO who came back into government. How could they have not seen this coming? Was everybody, not just the administration -- I'm not trying to pin this on the Republicans -- but was the White House, everybody in Congress, regardless of party, leaders around the world so caught up in the boom that they had blinders on and didn't see the warning signs?

CHENEY: I think so. I don't recall, you know, sort of a general warning of concern until things started to turn -- turn south on us.

I do remember, and I mentioned earlier, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

As best I can tell, from looking at the evidence, the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was one of the key ingredients that caused the subsequent financial problem and economic recession. We did try, earlier in the administration, to impose reforms on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and we ran into a stone wall on Capitol Hill in the form of the chairmen and -- of the Banking Committee in the House and the Senate, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. The Democrats absolutely opposed any effort to reform those two institutions, and I think the collapse of those two institutions, as much as anything, contributed to the financial difficulties we've been living with since.

KING: I want to move on to other issues after a break, but before we go to the break, any regrets about the financial bailout package that started in your administration? The Obama administration is building on it. They say they are fixing some things they thought went wrong in the Bush administration, but I know hindsight is easy, but looking back now from outside of the government, was it a mistake? Should you have let the market run its course and let some of those institutions you deemed too big to fail to let them fail? Would that have been a better course than where we are now?

CHENEY: I don't think so. And I think you've got to remember, we were talking here about financial institutions. And the federal government is -- does have the lead responsibility for those financial institutions. That's what the Federal Reserve is part of. That's what the FDIC does. That's what we do with budgets and treasury functions and so forth.

Those financial powers and responsibilities belong to the federal government. If the system is bad, if it freezes up, the only one that can fix that is the federal government. That's different than getting into the industrial sector of the economy or necessarily the housing sector or other parts of the economy.

And I believe, as much as a conservative as I am in limited government, I did believe that with respect to the financial problems we had, when the credit market seized up, only the federal government could address those issues.
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Iraq... "accomplished nearly everything we set out to do," Iraq is now democratic, Iraq success a major defeat for Iran, we were just acting on the intelligence we were given...

KING: All comments you made over the years, Mr. Vice President, and we are back with our interview with Vice President Dick Cheney. All comments you made over the years about the Iraq war that proved to be quite controversial.

I do not want to relitigate the past six years. You've been asked about these things, you've answered these questions many times, and people out there either accept those answers or many people are infuriated by those answers, as you well know.

But I do want to ask this, because we're in a unique position this morning. You're out of government now. When all of those statements were made, you were trying to build up public support for administration action, you might have been in a reelection campaign, you might have been heading into a new presidential campaign or a debate in Congress about spending or about withdrawing the troops and timelines. That's all gone. You're out of government. I just want to ask you now that you're free of all that, and you're free of worrying about what you say and could it hurt George W. Bush, because you were the vice president of the United States -- is there anything that you wish you could have said during those debates or in response to those controversies that you feel free to say now?

CHENEY: That's an interesting question, John. I -- I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do.

Now, I don't hear much talk about that, but the fact is, the violence level is down 90 percent. The number of casualties and Iraqis and Americans is significantly diminished. There's been elections, a constitution. They're about to have another presidential election here in the near future. We have succeeded in creating in the heart of the Middle East a democratically governed Iraq, and that is a big deal, and it is, in fact, what we set out to do.

KING: It's a dangerous term because of the political debates in the past, but mission accomplished?

CHENEY: I wouldn't use that, just because it triggers reactions that we don't need. But I would ask people and the press, too, to take an honest look at the circumstances in Iraq today and how far we've come. The defeat of Al Qaida in Iraq, the writing of that democratic constitution, a series of elections that involve power sharing among all the various groups, the end of sectarian violence. I think a major defeat for the Iranians living next door to Iraq, who tried to influence events there.

KING: Do you think it would be a lot easier, though, to make that case if you hadn't made and others hadn't made those statements before the war? Because many were, they believed that this was not going to be so hard, and this is where we are, nearly six years later. Six years, the war has cost $657 billion, and that spending will continue. More than 4,200 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq and more than 31,000 U.S. troops wounded, and 63 percent of the American people now think this war was a mistake.

Is that, in part, you think, as you make the case for where things are now, are the feelings about this war based on the fact that the American people think they didn't get what they were sold?

CHENEY: Well, a lot of what we said in terms of the elements you had on the program in response to questions and reporting we're received. And we were receiving intelligence reports right along that said that he did, in fact, have weapons of mass destruction. The director of the CIA said it's a slam-dunk case, et cetera. I would be asked questions by your colleagues and respond to the best of our ability.

The circumstances, though, that in terms of whether or not this was worth doing, I think it was. I think if you hark back and look at the biggest threat we faced after 9/11, it was the idea of a rogue state or a terrorist-sponsoring state with weapons of mass destruction -- say, nukes, for example -- and providing those to terrorist organizations.

What happened in Iraq is we've eliminated that possibility. We got rid of one of the worst dictators in the 20th century. We got rid of his government. There is no prospect that Iraq is going to become a place where once again they produce weapons of mass destruction or support terrorists, as they...

KING: No prospect or a less likely prospect?

CHENEY: Well, I think 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, I think there is no prospect that you're going to see the kind of behavior out of this new government in Iraq that we saw out of the old one over a period of 20 or 30 years.

So I think it was absolutely the right thing to do, and I think when history reviews this period, 10 or 20 years hence, that what will be significant was that we did, in fact, accomplish what we set out to do, and that the other things are interesting and important, but, you know, they are secondary to the basic -- basic result.
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Doggone it, we came close to getting OBL, but we did get #3, defends torture, suggests Obama is putting us at a greater risk of a terrorist attack, Obama's looking at terrorism as a law enforcement problem...

KING: That's a conversation we had a little more than two years ago at the vice president's residence. You have since moved out.

You say that capture and kill people and it's not a pleasant business. One of the people you were unable to capture or kill, Osama bin Laden, released another audiotape this weekend. Is that a cloud on your legacy, that Osama bin Laden is still out there?

CHENEY: Well, we certainly would have liked to nail him on our watch, if I can put it in those terms. We didn't, but we had a major effort to do so, and we passed that on to our successor.

KING: What's the closest you ever got?

CHENEY: Well, of course, we don't know for certain. We were fairly confident where he was located. We also believed, though, that he is buried so deep that it's very rare that he is able to communicate with his associates. We also had a very great effect upon the number three in Al Qaida. That was the most dangerous job in the world for a long time was to become the number three, because that was the one that sort of interacted between bin Laden and Zawahiri and the rest of the organization, and we were often able to capture or kill him.

KING: You made clear in an interview with the Politico when you left office that you were a little worried that President Obama might not be up to this challenge of fighting terrorism. I want to read you from that interview. You said you think there's a high probability of such an attempt, meaning a major attack on the United States like 9/11.

And you said, whether or not they can pull it off depends whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts since 9/11 to launch mass casualty attacks against the United States."

Well, since taking office, President Obama has done these things to change the policies you helped put in place. He has announced he will close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. He has announced he will close CIA black sites around the world, where they interrogate terror suspects. Says he will make CIA interrogators abide by the Army Field Manual, defined waterboarding as torture and ban it, suspend trials for terrorists by military commission, and now eliminate the label of enemy combatants.

I'd like to just simply ask you, yes or no, by taking those steps, do you believe the president of the United States has made Americans less safe?

CHENEY: 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. I think that's a great success story. It was done legally. It was done in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles.

President Obama campaigned against it all across the country. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.

KING: That's a pretty serious thing to say about the president of the United States...

CHENEY: Well...

KING: ... and commander in chief of the military. So I want to give you a chance, because many people will say, Vice President Cheney just said Barack Obama, President Obama is making us less safe, more at risk, which you just said. I want to give you a chance -- and take as much time as you want -- to prove it. Because you put that list up there, and I know you say there have been three cases, I believe, of waterboarding in the past, and you say that specific things have been prevented. I know some of this is classified intelligence, but now that you're out of government, to the degree that you can, tell the American people, because of those tactics, because of those, yes, sometimes extreme tactics, we stopped this.

CHENEY: Well, I would say that the key to what we did was to collect intelligence against the enemy. That's what the terrorist surveillance program was all about, that's what the enhanced interrogation program was all about.

KING: But another 9/11, because of a tactic like waterboarding or a black site, can you say with certainty you stopped another attempt to do something on that level?

CHENEY: John, I've seen a report that was written based upon the intelligence that we collected then that itemizes the specific attacks that were stopped by virtue of what we learned through those programs.

It's still classified. I can't give you the details of it without violating classification, but I can say there were a great many of them.

The one that has been public was the potential attack coming out of Heathrow, when they were going to have several American planes with terrorists on board, with liquid explosives, and they were going to blow those planes up over the United States.

Now, that was intercepted and stopped, partly because of those programs that we put in place.

Now, I think part of the difficulty here as I look at what the Obama administration is doing, we made a decision after 9/11 that I think was crucial. We said this is a war. It's not a law enforcement problem.

Up until 9/11, it was treated as a law enforcement problem. You go find the bad guy, put him on trial, put him in jail. The FBI would go to Oklahoma City and find the identification tag off the truck and go find the guy that rented the truck and put him in jail.

Once you go into a wartime situation and it's a strategic threat, then you use all of your assets to go after the enemy. You go after the state sponsors of terror, places where they've got sanctuary. You use your intelligence resources, your military resources, your financial resources, everything you can in order to shut down that terrorist threat against you.

When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they're doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth, that they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required, and that concept of military threat that is essential if you're going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks.
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Scooter got a raw deal, W and Dick still talk, Dick wants to write a book...

KING: Back now with our exclusive conversation with the former Vice President Dick Cheney. You noted earlier you disagreed with the president's strategy on Iran and North Korea.

I am told by people close to you and close to the former president that the most tense moment came late, when you wanted the president to pardon your friend and your former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and the president said no. How tense did that get?

CHENEY: Well, it was -- it was one of the moments that occurred in the administration where we had fundamental difference of opinion. I believe firmly that Scooter was unjustly accused and prosecuted and deserved a pardon, and the president disagreed with that.

KING: Angry? Tense? Shouting?

CHENEY: Those kinds of details, I think, are best left to history.

Maybe I'll write about it in my book.

KING: You're writing a memoir. What is the title going to be?

CHENEY: We haven't decided on one yet, but I am seriously interested in writing about my 40 years in Washington and all kinds of different jobs, and I think that's how I'll spend the bulk of my time the next few months.

KING: Did that hurt? Did the Scooter Libby disagreement hurt your relationship with the president of the United States? Do you still speak?

CHENEY: Yes, we do. We've had three calls in the last few weeks.

So, you know, obviously, we traveled a long way together in eight years and two presidential campaigns, and that built a very solid, lasting relationship.

I was clearly not happy that we, in effect, left Scooter sort of hanging in the wind, which I didn't think was appropriate. I think he's an innocent man who deserves a pardon.
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On Rush...

KING: What next for your party? There has been a big dust-up in recent days, in parts stoked by the White House, about Rush Limbaugh making some comments. David Frum, a conservative who worked in your administration, says that Rush Limbaugh is kryptonite, because he drives away the voters the Republicans need to build the road to discovery. Is Rush Limbaugh kryptonite?

CHENEY: No, Rush is a good friend. I love him. I think he does great work and has for years. He's now offered to debate President Obama on his radio show. Hell, I'd pay to see that! It would be interesting to have developed.

I think Rush is a good man and serves a very important purpose.
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Dick identifies the dumbest people in the GOP...

KING: Step down and let others take over mean fade from the scene, or will we hear from Dick Cheney beyond his memoir? Will you be active in the party? Will you be active in politics, take another job in business?

CHENEY: Well, I don't have any plans to run for office. I also don't have any plans to retire. We've got a lot of good folks out there. I think a new generation of leaders is coming along, people like Rob Portman in Ohio, Mark Sanford in South Carolina, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan in the House. There are some really, really talented people in the Republican Party. And I look forward to helping them someday if they need my help in terms of whatever I can do to see them succeed.
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http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2009/03/cheney_on_cnns_state_of_the_union_with_john_king_w.php

By the way, I can't believe King didn't ask him about the Hersh comment.

basso · Mar 15, 2009

Biggus Dickus said:

I do.
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We hold these truths to be self-evident.

El_Conquistador · Mar 15, 2009

Cheney is not the slickest speaker, who is able to smoothly deliver 'inspiring' speeches by mouthing words from a teleprompter... BUT, he is a very calculating and intelligent individual with a track record of leadership and experience. He is a work horse. Obama is a show horse, totally lacking in the ability to roll up his sleaves and solve problems.

And of course, Cheney, despite the media hit job that no doubt is forthcoming, and has been delivered against him since 2000, is 100% right. Again.

rimrocker · Mar 15, 2009

Trader_Jorge said:

Cheney is not the slickest speaker, who is able to smoothly deliver 'inspiring' speeches by mouthing words from a teleprompter... BUT, he is a very calculating and intelligent individual with a track record of leadership and experience. He is a work horse. Obama is a show horse, totally lacking in the ability to roll up his sleaves and solve problems.

And of course, Cheney, despite the media hit job that no doubt is forthcoming, and has been delivered against him since 2000, is 100% right. Again.
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What's a sleave? You again demonstrate the basic Republican dynamic... as long as it sounds good, who cares if it is utterly wrong

basso · Mar 15, 2009

Trader_Jorge said:

Cheney is not the slickest speaker, who is able to smoothly deliver 'inspiring' speeches by mouthing words from a teleprompter... BUT, he is a very calculating and intelligent individual with a track record of leadership and experience. He is a work horse. Obama is a show horse, totally lacking in the ability to roll up his sleaves and solve problems.

And of course, Cheney, despite the media hit job that no doubt is forthcoming, and has been delivered against him since 2000, is 100% right. Again.
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Right.

and

On.

mc mark · Mar 16, 2009

So according to Cheney logic, Obama is a better president than Bush because there hasn't been an attack on the US since Obama took office.

Got it!

SWTsig · Mar 16, 2009

how anyone can support cheney even a little bit is beyond me. my mind honestly doesn't even comprehend it. how someone could consider themselves an american and look at this monster's track record of blatantly and arrogantly bypassing and ignoring our constitution blows my mind.

i wish nothing but ill will towards him and his cronies.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/...ent/index.html

(CNN) -- Dick Cheney has finally found the limits of government power.
In his interview with CNN's John King -- his first television interview since leaving the vice presidency -- Cheney revealed a view of federal power that is incoherent and hypocritical.

According to recently released legal memos from the Bush-Cheney administration, the former vice president believes that the federal government can ignore the First Amendment and suppress free speech and freedom of the press as part of its "war on terror."

An October 23, 2001, memo from Justice Department lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty said, "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully."

Former Vice PresidentCheney also believes, according to these same memos, that the federal government can send troops to burst into the homes of American citizens without a search warrant, despite the Fourth Amendment's protection against such unreasonable searches. He believes that the federal government has the right to arrest an American citizen on American soil and hold him in prison without charges. He believes that the federal government can listen in on your phone conversations without a court order.

Cheney believes that the federal government can ignore the Geneva Conventions, binding treaties largely written by the United States, signed by the president and ratified by the Senate. He believes that the federal government can commit torture, despite laws and treaties making torture a crime.

As the Washington Post reported, "Starting in January, 2002, Cheney turned his attention to the practical business of crushing a captive's will to resist. The vice president's office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion of prisoners in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the Bush administration has since portrayed as the initiatives, months later, of lower-ranking officials."
The newspaper said, "Cheney and his allies ... did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from Yoo and others, into the operational language of government."

In fact, Yoo has said the federal government has the power to grab your young son and crush his private parts if the president thinks that will help the "war on terror."

Think I'm kidding? Here's the verbatim exchange from a debate between Yoo and Notre Dame professor Doug Cassel:

Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty ...

Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo ...

Yoo: I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.

Wow. That is a sick, twisted, sadistic world view. It is also a breathtakingly expansive view of federal power over citizens. Indeed, the position of Cheney and his allies seems to be that the federal government has limitless power over people. If the government can censor the free press, restrict free speech, listen in on your private conversations, burst into your home, take you away, hold you in prison without charges and torture you, it raises an interesting question: What on Earth does Dick Cheney think the federal government can't do?

Thanks to John King, we now know: Cheney believes that the government cannot help with health care, improve education or wean America off Middle East oil. I'm not kidding.

Cheney, whose authoritarian impulses run deep, is suddenly worried that the federal government might become too powerful under President Obama.

"I worry a lot," he told King, "that they're using the current set of economic difficulties to try to justify a massive expansion in the government, and much more authority for the government over the private sector. I don't think that's good. I don't think that's going to solve the problem."

Set aside the, umm, irony of a guy who is alive, thank God, because of government-provided health care opposing health care for taxpaying Americans. And set aside the hypocrisy of the Bush-Cheney Medicare prescription drug entitlement, the greatest expansion of the federal role in health care since President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Focus instead on Cheney's alarmist rhetoric: "a massive expansion in the government", "much more authority for the government." Cheney is comfortable with a government that has the authority to torture, imprison, censor and kill. Just not a government that has the capacity and compassion to write a health insurance policy or take on Big Oil.

I write this only hours after King's interview with Cheney, and yet I believe it will live in history. Right there, in his own words, Cheney gives historians a candid explication of his world view: that government may claim dictatorial powers when he and his ilk are in charge, but when we the people call on our government to act to address recession, illness and ignorance (made worse by Cheney's policies) well, then we've reached Cheney's boundaries of the government's power.
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pgabriel · Mar 17, 2009

mc mark said:

So according to Cheney logic, Obama is a better president than Bush because there hasn't been an attack on the US since Obama took office.

Got it!
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amazing isn't it. anyway I didn't read rimrocker's post so I don't know if this is addressed but did anyone see the questions on Scooter Libby? He said he and the president argued about giving a pardon.

Afterwards on Chris Matthews' show they were saying that Cheney wants to give that impression because he doesn't want Scooter to get out and tell all.

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