WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that Americans are less safe after President Barack Obama overturned Bush terrorism-fighting policies and that nearly all the Bush administration’s Iraq goals have been achieved.
“There is no prospect” that Iraq will return to producing weapons of mass destruction or supporting terrorists, Cheney asserted, “as long as it’s a democratically governed country, as long as they have got the security forces they do now and a relationship with the United States.”
Obama has suspended military trials for terrorism suspects and announced he will close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as overseas sites where the CIA had detainees.
The president also ordered CIA interrogators to abide by the U.S. Army Field Manual’s regulations for treatment of detainees and denounced waterboarding, part of the Bush program of enhanced interrogation, as torture.
Asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” whether he thought Obama has made Americans less safe, Cheney replied, “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,” he said.
“I think that’s a great success story. It was done legally. It was done in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles,” he said. “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.”
