Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was wrong to the oppose the reauthorization of the National Security Agency’s phone metadata collection program. It was a useful tool in the fight against terrorism, he said, and the U.S. remains at risk of another attack.
“I disagree with Rand Paul on that. … It’s an important program. It’s a good program,” Cheney said during an interview Sunday on the “John Catsimatidis Roundtable,” a New York-based radio talk show. “I think a lot of what’s been going on there is frankly all politics.”
Cheney said he believed the program, had it been in place, might have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks and said the possibility of another such attack remained “very real.” He added that this was the wrong time to “weaken the tools” available to intelligence agencies.
“It strikes me we need to be doing everything we can to stop that attack and to capture the terrorists instead of weakening the tools intelligence people have to effectively combat terrorists. It’s a big deal,” he said.
Last week, Paul used Senate parliamentary tactics to delay a vote on a bill to reauthorize the Patriot Act, resulting in its temporary expiration. Later that week, the Senate passed a separate bill that reauthorized most of the act but ended the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone data records.
Paul’s office responded, telling Buzzfeed, “Sen. Rand Paul agrees with former Vice President Cheney that we must always remain vigilant to the real threat of radical Islamic jihadism, but Sen. Paul, like most Americans, does not believe we should continue the NSA’s illegal and expensive bulk collection program which has not led to a single terror conviction or foiled any plots.”
