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Cheney: Torture probe 'offends hell out of me'

by Mark Silva

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who administration authorized and legally justified interrogation tactics for detainees captured in its "war on terror,'' has this to say about the Obama administration's investigation of interrogations that may have exceeded the authority given the interrogators:

"I think it's a terrible decision,'' Cheney said in an interview aired this morning on FOX News Sunday.

And a political decision, he maintains"absolutely.''

"I guess the other thing that offends the hell out of me, frankly, is we had a track record now of eight years of defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from al Qaeda,'' Cheney said. "The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, how did you do it? What were the keys to keeping this country safe over that period of time?"

And, Cheney maintains, he has "serious doubts'' about whether President Barack Obama "understands and is prepared to do what needs to be done to defend the nation."

Obama, whose administration has denounced as "torture'' some of the harshest tactics condoned by the Bush administration, has maintained that he is looking forward, rather than backward. But Attorney General Eric Holder now is reexamining some of the harshest interrogations conducted.

"President Obama made the announcement some weeks ago that this would not happen, that his administration would not go back and look at or try to prosecute CIA personnel,'' Cheney told FOX News' Chris Wallace. "Now we've got a political appointee coming back, and supposedly without the approval of the president, going to do a complete review, or another complete investigation, possible prosecution of CIA personnel.

"The negative consequences of that, about the terrible precedent it sets, to have agents involved, CIA personnel involved, in a difficult program that's approved by the Justice Department, approved by the National Security Council, and the Bush administration, and then when a new administration comes in, it becomes political,'' the retired vice president maintained.

"In the intelligence arena, we ask those people to do some very difficult things,'' Cheney said. "Sometimes, that put their own lives at risk. They do so at the direction of the president...if they are now going to be subject to being investigated and prosecuted by the next administration, nobody's going to sign up for those kinds of missions.... It's a very, very devastating, I think, effect that it has on morale inside the intelligence community....''

Cheney, who also said that he "was probably a bigger advocate of military action (against Iran) than any of my colleagues,'' allowed: "It was not my decision to make.

""I thought that negotiations could not possibly succeed unless the Iranians really believed we were prepared to use military force,'' Cheney said of the standoff with Iran over its enrichment of nuclear material. "And to date, of course, they are still proceeding with their nuclear program and the matter has not yet been resolved... The president made the decision and, obviously, we pursued the diplomatic avenues."

Asked if he will speak with the Justice Department's prosecutor, should it come to that, Cheney said: "It will depend on the circumstances and what I think their activities are really involved in. I've been very outspoken in my views on this matter. I've been very forthright publicly in talking about my involvement in these policies.... I'm very proud of what we did in terms of defending the nation for the last eight years successfully. And, you know, it won't take a prosecutor to find out what I think. I've already expressed those views rather forthrightly...

The vice president certainly knew about, and condoned, the interrogations taking placedocuments released have revealed that a few detainees were "water-boarded'' many dozens of timesthe practice, a simulated drowning, has now been banned.

And some of the harshest interrogation practices revealed by an CIA inspector general's report from 2004 that was released, in part last weeksuch as the threat of an electric drill in one casehad been well-known for some time internally, Cheney says.

"I knew about the waterboarding. Not specifically in any one particular case, but as a general policy that we had approved.'' Cheney said. "The fact of the matter is, the Justice Department reviewed all of those allegations several years ago. They looked at this question of whether or not somebody had an electric drill in an interrogation session.

"It was never used on the individual, or that they had brought in a weapon, never used on the individual.,'' he said. "The judgment was made then that there wasn't anything there that was improper or illegal with respect to conduct in question...

"My sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States, and giving us the intelligence we needed to go find al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed,'' Cheney said. "Those interrogations were involved in the arrest of nearly all the al Qaeda members that we were able to bring to justice... I think they were directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States. It was good policy. It was properly carried out. It worked very, very well."

Asked if he believes the Democrats have gone "soft'' on national security, Cheney saidL "I do, I've always had the view that in recent years anyway that they didn't have as strong of advocates on National Defense or National Security as they used to have, and I worry about that, I think that things have gotten so partisan that the sort of the pro defense hawkish wing of the Democratic party has faded and isn't as strong as it once was.''

And he said this about Obama:

"I was not a fan of his when he got elected, and my views have not changed any... have serious doubts about his policies, serious doubts especially about the extent to which he understands and is prepared to do what needs to be done to defend the nation."