Former Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News' Chris Wallace that politics are driving a decision to investigate the possible torture of detainees.
August 30, 2009

Former Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News' Chris Wallace that politics are driving a decision to investigate the possible torture of detainees. "I think it's a terrible decision," he said. "It's clearly a political move. I mean, there's no other rationale for why they're doing this."

WALLACE: But when you say it's not going to stop there, you don't believe it's going to stop there, do you think this will become an investigation into the Bush lawyers who authorized the activity into the top policymakers who were involved in the decision to happen, an enhanced interrogation program?

CHENEY: Well, I have no idea whether it will or not, but it shouldn't.

The fact of the matter is the lawyers in the Justice Department who gave us those opinions had every right to give us the opinions they did. Now you get a new administration and they say, well, we didn't like those opinions, we're going to go investigate those lawyers and perhaps have them disbarred. I just think it's an outrageous precedent to set, to have this kind of, I think, intensely partisan, politicized look back at the prior administration.

I guess the other thing that offends the hell out of me, frankly, Chris, is we had a track record now of eight years of defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaeda. 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?

A full transcript of Cheney's interview is available here.

John Amato:

Hey, Dick, torturing people offends the hell out of me but I'm not a sociopath. He must be worried that if a whistleblower surfaces, he could be facing a real legal problem. I'm also sick and tired of hearing that he kept us safe for eight years AFTER the attacks.

Cheney: 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.

You see, 9/11 doesn't count. Cheney and his ilk make it sound as if America was being attacked every week and once he started torturing they all magically stopped. Why was the US safe from 1993-2001, without using torture or the Patriot act? And the Trade Center bombers were all caught, but using Cheney's method Bin Laden is still free.

Chris Wallace was such a nice little puppy dog interviewer that he even asked Cheney if thought Democrats were soft on terror.

Wallace: Republicans have made the charge before, do you think Democrats are soft on National Security?

CHENEY: 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.

Nice job Chris, I'm sure Cheney has sent a very nice fruit basket to your house.

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