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.
In a story posted immediately after the interview, Politico’s Mike Allen predicted that this part of the interview was “likely to get the most reaction.” He was right. And the response from Cheney critics, many of them in the news media, has ranged from surprised to outraged — as if Cheney’s claim is somehow radical or impolite. Democrats spent much of the last five years making the argument that Bush administration policies have made the country less safe. Indeed, much of the debate on national security policy during the last two presidential elections was devoted to the subject. And Cheney has defended those policies, sometimes without the help of the Bush White House and often virtually alone, without regard his standing in public opinion polls. So it is completely unsurprising that he would restate those views now. The most interesting part of the interview, in my view, came when Cheney warned that Obama is, in effect, ending the War on Terror in favor of a return to law enforcement.
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.
