Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday defended the administration’s penchant for secrecy by citing a newspaper story that alerted terrorists in Iraq of a new U.S. military technology.
Although Cheney did not specifically mention The Los Angeles Times, he criticized a story the newspaper published in February that previewed a new technology for combating roadside bombs.
“Within five days of the publication of that story, there were posted ways to deal with that and to neutralize our activities on one of the jihadist Web sites,” Cheney said at the National Press Club. “Now that strikes me as a pretty straightforward, direct example of why it is important that there be secrets.”
Failure to keep such secrets can breed mistrust among American allies, Cheney said.
“Intelligence services who need to have confidence in our ability to keep a secret find it difficult to work us with because the United States has oftentimes demonstrated an inability to maintain the security of classified information,” he said. “So it’s a problem.”
Without prompting, Cheney also raised the issue of the administration’s terrorist surveillance program, which was disclosed by The New York Times. The disclosure prompted administration officials to fret that terrorists would alter their methods of communication.
Cheney said the classified program, along with the Patriot Act, has helped prevent terrorists from carrying out a major attack on the U.S. in the nearly five years since Sept. 11, 2001. He aggressively defended the legality of eavesdropping on international telephone conversations of suspected terrorists.
The vice president also stood by his controversial statement that the insurgency in Iraq is in its final throes, though he acknowledged the administration underestimated the challenges of the post-Saddam Hussein era.
“I don’t think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we have encountered,” he said.
