History > 2006 > USA > Politics > Vice-President

Cheney visits Saudi

for talks on Middle East

Sat Nov 25, 2006
8:42 AM ET
Reuters



RIYADH (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in Saudi Arabia on Saturday for talks with King Abdullah on the Middle East.

He was met in Riyadh by Crown Prince Sultan, government ministers and leaders of the Saudi armed forces, before traveling to the U.S. embassy in the Saudi capital and the monarch's palace for what a spokeswoman said would be "comprehensive" talks on regional issues.

"The vice president is looking forward to meeting with King Abdullah, a strong ally, to discuss regional issues of mutual interest," said Lea Anne McBride, Cheney's spokeswoman,

With Iraq near all-out civil war, the Bush administration is renewing efforts to break the cycle of violence there by enlisting the help of moderate Arab nations.

President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are due to meet next week.

The United States wants Saudi Arabia to use its influence with Iraq's Sunni minority to help stabilize the country. On Thursday, car bombs killed more than 200 people in a Shi'ite stronghold in Baghdad in the worst attack since U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Bush and Maliki will discuss security in Iraq at their meeting, in what is shaping up to be a crisis summit.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will also join

Bush in Amman. She will then attend an annual Middle East conference in Jordan, where key Arab players may meet on the sidelines to discuss Arab-Israeli issues.

The surge in violence in Iraq came as U.S. public discontent with the Iraq war was hammered home in November 7 elections in which Bush's Republican Party lost control of both houses of Congress.

    Cheney visits Saudi for talks on Middle East, R, 25.11.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-11-25T134220Z_01_N22216331_RTRUKOC_0_US-MIDEAST-CHENEY.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C2-TopNews-newsOne-5

Cheney says

U.S. must not retreat from Iraq

Fri Nov 17, 2006 10:41 PM ET
Reuters
By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney insisted on Friday that America must not turn its back on Iraq, even as the Bush administration considers a course change in the war after voters vented anger over it in this month's elections.

"Some in our country may believe in good faith that retreating from Iraq would make America safer. Recent experience teaches the opposite lesson," Cheney said in a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

Cheney was speaking publicly for the first time since the November 7 elections in which voter anger over Iraq helped oust President George W. Bush's Republicans from power in Congress.

He praised departing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a reformer and "one of the great public servants of the age," drawing applause from the audience.

Cheney is a close ally of Rumsfeld. Some analysts believe Bush's announcement of the Pentagon chief's dismissal the day after the election may signal diminished influence for Cheney, seen by some historians as one of the most influential vice presidents in modern history.

Cheney made no mention of the man Bush nominated to succeed Rumsfeld, Robert Gates. Bush said he turned to Gates, who headed the CIA during the president's father's administration, because he wanted a "fresh perspective" on the war.

Underscoring his openness to a new approach in Iraq, Bush has also said he is eager to hear the recommendations of an independent panel led by former Secretary of State James Baker and ex-congressman Lee Hamilton that is weighing alternative strategies. The commission is expected to report its findings within the coming weeks, likely next month.

Cheney, echoing Bush, said adjustments in military tactics were always under review.

"We'll be flexible. We'll do all we can to adapt to conditions on the ground. We'll make every change needed to do the job," Cheney said, reiterating the current U.S. strategy of helping to train Iraqi forces with the aim of eventually turning over security to them.

WARNS ABOUT AL QAEDA

But the vice president said pulling out of Iraq would only embolden militant groups like al Qaeda, which he warned were aiming to find a safe haven to plot attacks against the United States.

"The notion that we can turn our backs on what happens in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, or any other possible safe haven for terrorists is an option that we cannot indulge after 9/11," Cheney said.

"To get out before the job is done would convince the terrorists, once again, that free nations will change our policies, forsake our friends, and abandon our interests whenever we are confronted with violence and blackmail," he added.

Democrats set to take over the House and Senate in January are trying to boost pressure on Bush to overhaul his strategy in Iraq, where 2,864 U.S. troops have died and sectarian violence is raging.

The incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin of Michigan, wants to see a phased pullout of troops beginning in four to six months.

The vice president, who attended post-election meetings hosted by Bush to find common ground with Democrats, made only a veiled reference to the November 7 vote, saying nothing had changed in the past two weeks to prevent Bush from pushing ahead with his aim of appointing conservative judges.

    Cheney says U.S. must not retreat from Iraq, R, 17.11.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-11-18T034108Z_01_N17434506_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-USA-CHENEY.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-3

White House denies Cheney endorsed 'water boarding'

Updated 10/28/2006 12:58 AM ET
AP
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush said Friday the United States does not torture prisoners, trying to calm a controversy created when Vice President Dick Cheney embraced the suggestion that a "dunk in water" might be useful to get terrorist suspects to talk.

Human rights groups complained that Cheney's words amounted to an endorsement of a torture technique known as water boarding, in which the victim believes he is about to drown. The White House insisted Cheney was not talking about water boarding but would not explain what he meant.

Less than two weeks before midterm congressional elections, the White House was put on the defensive as news of Cheney's remark spread. Bush was asked about it at a White House photo opportunity with NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. Presidential spokesman Tony Snow was pelted with questions at two briefings with reporters.

Democrats also pointed to Cheney's statement.

"Is the White House that was for torture before it was against it, now for torture again?" tweaked Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. Kerry, in his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency, had been skewered by Bush for saying he had voted for war funds before he voted against them.

Cheney triggered the flap in an interview Tuesday by radio broadcaster Scott Hennen of WDAY in Fargo, N.D. Hennen said callers had told him, "Please, let the vice president know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves lives."

"Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" Hennen asked.

"Well, it's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there I was criticized as being the vice president for torture," Cheney said. "We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in."

On Friday, Cheney called reporters to his cabin on Air Force Two as he returned from a trip to Missouri and South Carolina.

"I did not talk about specific techniques and won't," the vice president said. "I didn't say anything about water boarding. ... He (Hennen) didn't even use that phrase."

"I have said that the interrogation program for a selected number of detainees is very important," Cheney said. "(It) has been I think one of the most valuable intelligence programs we have. I believe it has allowed us to prevent terrorist attacks against the United States."

At his photo op, Bush said, "This country doesn't torture, we're not going to torture. We will interrogate people we pick up off the battlefield to determine whether or not they've got information that will be helpful to protect the country."

Snow, at a morning meeting with reporters, tried to brush off the controversy.

"You know as a matter of common sense that the vice president of the United States is not going to be talking about water boarding. Never would, never does, never will," Snow said. "You think Dick Cheney's going to slip up on something like this? No, come on."

Snow said Cheney did not interpret the question as referring to water boarding and the vice president did not make any comments about water boarding. He said the question put to Cheney was loosely worded.

In water boarding, a prisoner is tied to a board with his head slanted down and a towel covering his face. Water is then poured on his face to create the sensation of drowning.

The administration has repeatedly refused to say which techniques it believes are permitted under a new law. Asked to define a dunk in water, Snow said, "It's a dunk in the water."

At a televised briefing later, the questions turned tougher and more pointed.

"The vice president says he was talking in general terms about a questioning program that is legal to save American lives, and he was not referring to water boarding," Snow said.

Yet, the spokesman conceded, "I can understand that people will look at this and draw the conclusions that you're trying to draw."

Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in a statement, "What's really a no-brainer is that no U.S. official, much less a vice president, should champion torture. Vice President Cheney's advocacy of water boarding sets a new human rights low at a time when human rights is already scraping the bottom of the Bush administration barrel."

Human Rights Watch said Cheney's remarks were "the Bush administration's first clear endorsement" of water boarding.

A new Army manual, released last month, bans torture and degrading treatment of prisoners, explicitly barring water boarding and other procedures.

    White House denies Cheney endorsed 'water boarding', UT, 28.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-27-cheney_x.htm

Judge orders Cheney visitor logs opened

Updated 10/19/2006 6:26 PM ET
By Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press Writer
USA Today

WASHINGTON — A federal judge has ordered the Bush administration to release information about who visited Vice President Dick Cheney's office and residence, an order that could spark a late election-season debate over lobbyists' White House access.

While researching the access lobbyists and others had on the White House, The Washington Post asked in June for two years of White House visitor logs. The Secret Service refused to process the request, which government attorneys called "a fishing expedition into the most sensitive details of the vice presidency."

U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina said Wednesday that, by the end of next week, the Secret Service must produce the records or at least identity them and justify why they are being withheld.

The Secret Service can still try to withhold the records but, in a written ruling Thursday, Urbina questioned the agency's primary argument — that the logs are protected by Cheney's right to executive privilege.

Republicans have suffered a spate of bad news lately. Ohio Rep. Bob Ney pleaded guilty in the Jack Abramoff lobbying investigation, Florida Rep. Mark Foley resigned after reports of his sexually explicit Internet conversations with teenage House pages, and the FBI intensified its corruption investigation into Pennsylvania Rep. Curt Weldon.

If Cheney's visitor logs show meetings with lobbyists, releasing them just weeks before Election Day could provide ammunition to Democrats.

"The political price is very high," said L. Sandy Maisel, director of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs at Colby College. "Even more than that, Cheney has a vested interest in keeping them out of public eye at a time when people will pay attention to them. After the election, they will pay much less attention."

The newspaper sought logs for anyone visiting Cheney, his legal counsel, chief spokesman and other top aides and advisers.

The Secret Service had no comment on the ruling Thursday. In court documents, government attorneys said releasing the documents would infringe on Cheney's ability to seek advice.

"This case is about protecting the effective functioning of the vice presidency under the Constitution," attorneys wrote.

A lawsuit over similar records revealed last month that Republican activists Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed — key figures in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal — landed more than 100 meetings inside the Bush White House.

The Post cited those records, which were released to the Democratic Party and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, as evidence that the documents should be released.

    Judge orders Cheney visitor logs opened, UT, 19.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-19-cheney-logs_x.htm

Cheney Hits Heartland, and He Can Feel the Love

October 17, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK LEIBOVICH

TOPEKA, Kan., Oct. 12 — Grace Mosier lives with her mom and dad, goes to birthday parties, takes ballet classes and is just like a lot of other 6-year-old girls. Except that she happens to be obsessed with Dick Cheney.

“I really, really like him,” says Grace, who can tell you what state the vice president was born in (Nebraska), where he went to grade school (College View, in Lincoln) and the names of his dogs (Dave and Jackson). She gets her fix of Cheney fun-facts by visiting the White House Web site for children. It says there that his favorite teacher was Miss Duffield and that he used to run a company called Halliburton.

So when Mr. Cheney came to town Thursday, Grace was at Forbes Field, holding a little American flag and a sign that said, “Welcome, Mr. Vice President, pet Dave and Jackson for me.” She watched him get off Air Force Two, step into a car and speed off to a fund-raiser.

“Like a rock star coming to town,” says Dene Mosier, Grace’s mother. And while Mr. Cheney might be an unusual object for a 6-year-old’s fixation, it is probably less unusual here, in the heart of Cheney Country.

The terrain consists of hotel ballrooms, military bases and private homes deep in the reddest of red states like Kansas (where President Bush and Mr. Cheney won by 25 percentage points in 2004). As a rule, people still love Mr. Bush in Cheney Country, at least relative to some locales. But the president cannot be everywhere, so Mr. Cheney comes instead, exposing as he goes the durability and devotion of his party’s base.

He is dispatched around the country — to Topeka last week, to Casper, Wyo., the week before, and to Wyoming, Mich., the week before that — to preside over events largely ignored by the national news media but covered big-time by the local press. He raises a lot of cash for the Republican Party and its candidates — more than $40 million at 114 events since January 2005, many of them in off-Broadway political settings like Topeka.

And he reaps a full helping of love.

“How about a big Kansas welcome for Vice President Dick Cheney?” Representative Jim Ryun, a five-term Republican, says at a lunchtime fund-raiser on Thursday.

And a big Kansas welcome he gets: cheers, sustained applause, even some war whoops — yes, war whoops. Loving ones.

“Well, that warm welcome is almost enough to make me want to run for office again,” the vice president responds. “Almost.”

Mr. Cheney’s favorability ratings might be in an underground bunker, somewhere beneath the president’s (at 20 percent in the most recent New York Times poll). Critics deride him as a Prince of Darkness whose occasional odd episodes — swearing at a United States senator, shooting a friend in a hunting accident and then barely acknowledging it publicly — suggest a striking indifference to how he is perceived. Even admirers who laud his intellect and steadiness rarely mention anything about his electrifying rooms or people.

But then there are people like these, at the Capitol Plaza Hotel Manor Conference Center in Topeka.

“It’s just such a big thrill to see and hear this man,” says Marvin Smith, a farmer and former teacher.

Mr. Smith says most people he knows feel the same way, “except for a few of those peacemakers.” He means protesters, a smattering of whom are picketing down the street.

“We love him here,” Susan Wagle, a state senator, says of Mr. Cheney.

After a sustained and rollicking ovation that inspires a rare smile with both sides of his mouth, Mr. Cheney starts into a variant of the same talk he has delivered literally hundreds of times. He tells how the first vice president, John Adams, enjoyed Senate floor privileges until they were revoked. (Mr. Cheney has told this story at least 48 times in official remarks since 2001, according to the White House’s Web site.)

He skips the bit about how he had been the lone congressman from Wyoming — “It was a small delegation, but it was quality,” which he has told at least 67 times as vice president.

He offers his standard homage to tax cuts, a warning about how terrorists are still trying desperately “to cause mass death here in the United States” and a derisive cataloging of the various “Dean Democrats,” congressmen including Charles B. Rangel of New York, Henry A. Waxman of California and Barney Frank of Massachusetts, whose influence would grow if the apocalypse came and Democrats took over Congress.

The crowd boos.

“Don’t hold back,” Mr. Cheney urges.

The crowd laughs.

The lights over Mr. Cheney’s head keep getting dimmer and then brighter, the kind of inexplicable distraction that can get an advance person fired but that also adds sizzle to the floor show. (There were no audible requests for Mr. Cheney to crowd-surf, shed his tie or perform “Free Bird.”)

None of the Cheneyphiles here are mentioning Mark Foley, the former Republican congressman at the center of the House page scandal, or the precarious hold Republicans might have on Congress or, for the most part, the problems in Iraq. Nor is anyone mentioning Mr. Cheney’s unpopularity in the polls, except in terms of all the unfair attacks from Democrats and the “liberal media.”

“They throw so much trash at him, it’s just unbelievable,” says Morris Thomason, a rancher who lives in Belvidere, Kan., but who grew up in Casper, Wyo., Cheney’s boyhood home. He spent his formative years with Dick Cheney himself.

Young Dick even came to his 13th birthday party, Mr. Thomason recalls, and gave him a bunch of stamps and a book. They water-skied together in an irrigation canal near Casper.

He has not spoken to Mr. Cheney since the latter was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, or, Mr. Thomason says, maybe it was when he was chief of staff under President Gerald R. Ford. He will not be seeing him today, either, at least up close, because that would require a $1,000 contribution for the photo op, and Mr. Thomason’s $100 ticket is only for the speech.

Mr. Cheney starts his 20-minute talk early and then is off to tour a barge factory in New Orleans and to speak at another fund-raiser.

“There was a peacefulness and a truthfulness to this man that really caught my heart,” says the congressman’s wife, Anne Ryun, who is clutching a Bush-Cheney placard from the 2000 campaign that the vice president has just autographed.

Ms. Ryun had spoken briefly to Mr. Cheney and says she had told him she was praying for him. She adds that his wife, Lynne, “is the most gracious, intelligent woman I’ve ever known of,” and that she wants to model her life after her. Recounting this, Ms. Ryun’s voice goes soft, and her eyes become a little glassy.

While Mr. Cheney spoke, 6-year-old Grace stayed behind at the airport and scored a private tour of Air Force Two. The Secret Service agents were impressed with her Cheney knowledge and admitted that it exceeded their own. She got her picture in the paper, made the local newscasts and became quite a sensation in her own right on the day Dick Cheney came to town, and it was a big deal.

    Cheney Hits Heartland, and He Can Feel the Love, NYT, 17.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/washington/17cheney.html?hp&ex=1161144000&en=29fd0b2552851cd2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The Vice President

Cheney Returns to a 9/11 Forum for Latest Iraq Defense

September 11, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 — Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday backed away from his insistence last year that the insurgency in Iraq was in its “last throes,’’ but in a contentious television interview he said that even if he had known in 2003 that his claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were mistaken, “we’d do exactly the same thing.’’

Mr. Cheney’s appearance on “Meet the Press’’ on NBC was part of the administration’s drive before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to change the minds of Americans who tell pollsters that they now believe the invasion of Iraq was a misguided diversion in the battle against terrorism.

By the end of the interview he appeared to be preparing the ground for arguments that the country would be far less safe if Republicans lost control of one or both houses of Congress in the November elections.

Mr. Cheney, who is rarely challenged in public, was returning to a forum he used just after the terrorist attacks and just before the Iraq war.

He sounded uncharacteristically defensive at moments, particularly as he tried to explain statements he had made over the past five years about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities and ties to Al Qaeda.

After watching videotape of himself declaring in May 2005 that the level of military conflict in Iraq “will clearly decline’’ and his now-famous characterization of the insurgents, Mr. Cheney told the program’s host, Tim Russert: “I think there’s no question, Tim, that the insurgency has gone on longer and been more difficult than I anticipated. I’ll be the first to admit that.’’

But he defended the invasion of Iraq as being in America’s long-term strategic interests. Arguing that “the world is much better off today” with Mr. Hussein in jail, Mr. Cheney said: “Think where we’d be if he was still there. He’d be sitting on top of a big pile of cash, because he’d have $65- and $70-oil. He would by now have taken down the sanctions” imposed by the United Nations. “He would be a major state sponsor of terror. We also would have a situation where he would have resumed his W.M.D. programs.”

He also argued that in a decade’s time, “2005 will have been the turning point’’ in giving Iraqis responsibility for running their country.

Mr. Cheney also struggled to explain his statements, three days before the war began in 2003, that American forces “will, in fact, be greeted as liberators’’ and that the war was unlikely to become long or costly.

Asked if — more than 2,500 American deaths and 20,000 casualties later — his statement had been “overly rosy,’’ Mr. Cheney responded that he had been correct that the battle to depose Mr. Hussein “was over in a relatively short period of time.’’ But he conceded that “the insurgency has been long and costly and bloody, no question.’’

He did not answer questions about why the administration had not made adequate contingency plans for the rise of Sunni insurgents or for the outbreak of sectarian war, questions that President Bush has also sidestepped in interviews dating to the 2004 election campaign.

Mr. Cheney appeared to blame the former director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, for much of the misleading intelligence leading up to the war. But Mr. Cheney did not explain why he had been so dismissive of contrary evidence provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors re-entered Iraq in 2002, shortly after he had argued that their return would be counterproductive because they would be misled by Mr. Hussein.

Asked on Sunday if the director general of the agency, Mohammed el-Baradei, had been “right about Iraq,’’ Mr. Cheney said: “I haven’t looked at it. I have to go back and look at it again.’’

Mr. Cheney’s view of the atomic agency’s reliability appears to have changed, however. Asked how, after the failures surrounding Iraq, he could defend the intelligence suggesting that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon, he noted that the agency’s inspectors were in the country, and he called the agency “an international body that, I think, most people wouldn’t question.’’

Mr. Cheney would not speculate on whether the administration would turn to military force if diplomacy with Iran failed. And he did not directly respond to Mr. Russert’s contention that North Korea had built up its nuclear capabilities while the United States focused on Iraq.

Mr. Cheney also declined to be led into a discussion of what he intended in 2003 when he wrote a note to I. Lewis Libby Jr., then his chief of staff, on the margin of a copy of an Op-Ed article in The New York Times written by Joseph C. Wilson IV. In the article, Mr. Wilson accused the administration of manufacturing reports that Mr. Hussein had sought uranium in Africa.

The note, in Mr. Cheney’s hand, read “or did his wife send him on a junket?’’

Mr. Cheney would not say if he had asked Mr. Libby to talk to reporters about Mr. Wilson or his wife, Valerie, then a C.I.A. officer, whose exposure became the focus of a long investigation. Last week, Richard L. Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state and no ally of Mr. Cheney’s, said he had been the inadvertent source of the leak of Ms. Wilson’s name.

“I’ve said all I’m going to say on the subject, Tim,’’ Mr. Cheney repeated three times, explaining he could be called as a witness in the perjury case against Mr. Libby, which resulted from the inquiry.

Mr. Cheney was also asked about an article in The Times on Sunday citing reports from his associates that his influence in the administration had weakened.

Saying he had not “read the story in any great detail,’’ Mr. Cheney, who had declined to be interviewed for the article, said, “It looks like one of those thumbsuckers that’s done periodically,” adding, “It’s probably as valid as the ones that were done saying I was in charge of everything.’’

On a less political topic, he said he would hunt again, despite the accident this year in which he shot a good friend.

“Should I be relieved you didn’t bring your shotgun today?’’ Mr. Russert asked with a smile.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,’’ Mr. Cheney responded. “You’re not in season.’’

    Cheney Returns to a 9/11 Forum for Latest Iraq Defense, NYT, 11.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/washington/11cheney.html

Cheney defends hardline role in administration and past statements

Updated 9/10/2006 2:56 PM ET
AP
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Cheney on Sunday defended his lightning-rod role as a leading advocate for invading Iraq, for a warrantless surveillance program and for harsh treatment of suspected terrorists.

"Part of my job is to think about the unthinkable, to focus what in fact the terrorists may have in store for us," Cheney told NBC's Meet the Press when asked about his "dark side."

Cheney said he now recognizes that the insurgency in Iraq was not "in its last throes," as he said in May 2005. "I think there is no question but that we did not anticipate an insurgency that would last this long," the vice president said.

"It's still difficult. Obviously, major, major work to do is ahead of us. But the fact is, the world is better off today with Saddam Hussein out of power. Think where we'd be if he was still there," Cheney said.

Cheney shrugged off news reports that his influence was waning, partly as a result of foreign policy miscalculations and partly as other advisers, especially Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, were getting more attention from President Bush.

The vice president said the reports were about as valid "as the ones that said I was in charge of everything."

Rice told Fox News Sunday that "these stories float around Washington — who's up, who's down. The vice president remains a crucial adviser to the president. His role is different than my role. ... These stories are simply ridiculous."

Cheney challenged polls suggesting that a majority of people in the United States do not believe the Bush administration's claim that the war in Iraq is the central front in the fight against terrorism.

"We're here on the fifth anniversary (of the Sept. 11 terror attacks). And there has not been another attack on the United States. And that's not an accident," Cheney said in the broadcast interview.

He said the U.S. had done a good job on "homeland security, in terms of the terrorist surveillance program we put in place, the financial tracking we put in place, and because of our detainee policy."

Cheney disputed that he ever directly said Saddam had any role in the Sept. 11 attacks.

He defended his past statements both on links between Iraq and the al-Qaeda network, and on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, saying the pronouncements were based on the best intelligence he had at the time. No such weapons were found, nor is there clear evidence of links between Saddam's government and Osama bin Laden's organization.

Cheney cited various statements by former CIA Director George Tenet, both on Iraqi links to al-Qaeda and weapons programs, including Tenet's often-quoted comment to Bush that it was a "slam dunk" that Iraq had such weapons

The vice president was asked on NBC whether there more terrorists in the world now than there were before the Sept. 11 attacks. "It's hard to say. Hard to put a precise number on it," Cheney said.

Asked if the U.S. still would have invaded Iraq had the CIA told Bush and him that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction in 2003, Cheney answered yes. He said Iraq had the capability of obtaining such weapons and would have done so once U.N. penalties were eased.

Democratic senatorial campaign chairman, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, said Cheney "represents what's wrong with this country." Schumer told CBS' Face the Nation that said because of policies championed by Cheney, "Things in Iraq are getting worse. ... We seem to be policing a civil war."

In an hourlong interview, Cheney also:

•Acknowledged the recent rise of violence in Afghanistan and the resurgence of the Taliban, saying the U.S. military would be in the country "for some considerable" time. He said the hunt for bin Laden remains a priority for the administration.

•Said he still disagrees with the Supreme Court's decision in June that the administration overstepped its authority in holding suspected terrorists without trials or Geneva Conventions protections. He declined to discuss specific treatment of detainees, but said information gleaned from interrogations "helped us prevent attacks against the United States."

•Declined to criticize plans by Republicans to spend millions on negative campaign ads against Democrats. "I hope our guys have good hard-hitting advertisements. Certainly, the opposition does," he said. He predicted Republicans would keep control of both House and Senate.

•Called his former aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby "a good man ... entitled to a presumption of innocence." Libby is awaiting trial in the CIA-leak case. Cheney declined comment on what his own role in that case may have been.

•Said he has not been hunting since a Feb. 11 hunting trip in Texas when he accidentally shot lawyer Harry Whittington in the torso, neck and face, but that he intended to go hunting again. "I don't know that you ever get over it. Fortunately, Harry is doing very well."

Host Tim Russert asked Cheney if he should be relieved that the vice president did not show up for the interview with a shotgun. "I wouldn't worry about it. You're not in season," Cheney said.

    Cheney defends hardline role in administration and past statements, UT, 10.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-10-cheney_x.htm

Cheney says did "helluva job" since September 11

Sun Sep 10, 2006 1:53 PM ET
Reuters
By Steve Holland and Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The government has done "a helluva job" guarding America, Vice President Dick Cheney said on Sunday, as President George W. Bush prepared to visit Ground Zero amid an election-year debate on whether the country is safer five years after the September 11 attacks.

Cheney and other top administration officials sought on the eve of the anniversary to promote what they say is progress in protecting against a second Sept 11.

Democrats countered that the administration had used the attacks for political gain, underlining the bitter divisions that have emerged since the attacks on New York and Washington killed nearly 3,000 people and united the nation in grief.

"I don't know how you can explain five years of no attacks, five years of successful disruption of attacks, five years of defeating the efforts of al Qaeda to come back and kill more Americans. You have got to give some credence to the notion that maybe somebody did something right," Cheney told NBC's "Meet the Press."

He added: "We've done a helluva job here at home in terms of homeland security."

But many Americans have doubts. ABC News said a poll it conducted found the number of Americans who think the country is safer now than four years ago had dropped to about 52 percent from around 88 percent previously.

Democrats charge the Iraq war has sucked away billions of dollars that could have been spent to improve domestic security, served as a breeding ground for terrorists, left Osama bin Laden still at large and exposed Afghanistan's U.S.-backed government to a renewed threat from the Taliban.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Bush had used the attacks for political gain ahead of November elections in which Democrats see a good chance to take control of one or both chambers of the U.S. Congress from Republicans.

"We think the president has played too much politics," he said. "They think they can't win the elections unless they talk about terrorism all the time."

Dean said the administration had got bogged down in Iraq when it should have been going "full-scale" after Osama bin Laden.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that the trail for bin Laden has gone "stone cold" and that U.S. commandos looking for him have not gotten a credible lead on his whereabouts in more than two years.

UNITY LOST

Bush's approval ratings soared and his presidency was altered forever after he stood in the ruins of the World Trade Center days after the 2001 attacks and sought to rally the country by shouting into a bullhorn.

But the unity that arose as Americans grieved those killed in the hijacked airplane attacks has long since given way to sharp divisions over the Iraq war and Bush's approval ratings slid as U.S. casualties in Iraq rose.

Top administration officials argued that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was justified even though the promised weapons of mass destruction were never found.

"One cannot imagine a Middle East that would be different and would not be a place in which extremism thrives without Saddam Hussein's removal and the chance for a different kind of Iraq," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on CBS.

In a two-day tour of all three Sept 11. crash sites -- the World Trade Center, Pentagon and the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 crashed -- Bush will strive to put aside partisan acrimony, if only temporarily.

He has no prepared remarks for the visits, according to White House spokesman Tony Snow. Bush will attend a Sunday prayer service in New York and visit firefighters on Monday.

He will save his formal remarks for a televised speech on Monday night.

The invasion of Iraq soured relations between the United States and much of Europe, but European leaders on Sunday returned to the brief unity that followed the attacks.

In a letter to Bush, French President Jacques Chirac expressed "the friendship and solidarity of the French people with the American people."

"Together we are pursuing our determined struggle against this plague which nothing ever can justify," he wrote.

    Cheney says did "helluva job" since September 11, R, 10.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-09-10T175321Z_01_N08186074_RTRUKOC_0_US-SEPT11.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C1-TopStories-newsOne-2

Cheney’s Power No Longer Goes Unquestioned

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 — From those first moments five years ago when Secret Service agents burst into Vice President Dick Cheney’s office on Sept. 11, lifted him off his feet and propelled him to the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the man who had returned to Washington that year to remake the powers of the presidency seemed unstoppable.

Within minutes, Mr. Cheney was directing the government’s response to an attack that was still under way. Within weeks, he was overseeing the surveillance program that tracked suspected terrorist communications into and out of the United States without warrants. Within months, he and his staff, guided by a loyal aide, David S. Addington, were championing the reinterpretation of the rules of war so that they could detain “enemy combatants” and interrogate them at secret detention facilities run by the C.I.A. around the world.

It was Mr. Cheney and his staff that helped shape the rules under which the Taliban and Al Qaeda were denied some of the core rights of the Geneva Conventions and tried by “military commissions” at Guantánamo Bay — if they faced trial at all.

“I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it,” Mr. Cheney said last December on a flight from Pakistan to Oman. “You know,” he added, “it’s not an accident that we haven’t been hit in four years.”

But as the nation marks the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Cheney finds the powers he has asserted under attack and his own influence challenged. Congress and the Supreme Court have pushed back at his claim that the president alone, as commander in chief, can set the rules for detention, interrogation and domestic spying.

On Wednesday afternoon in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Cheney sat silently as President Bush urged Congress to restore to him the powers, stripped away by the Supreme Court in a 5-to-3 ruling in June, to create military commissions and define the precise meaning of the Geneva Conventions when it comes to interrogations.

There is little question that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney still share the goal of expanding the power of the presidency: legislation they have sent to Congress would, if passed unamended, essentially allow them to set the rules of evidence, define interrogation techniques and intercept domestic communications as they have for the past five years.

But they have been stymied in their effort to simply assert those powers and carry them out with minimal oversight, as part of Mr. Cheney’s declared goal to restore to the presidency an authority that he believed was dangerously eroded after Vietnam and Watergate.

On national security issues, Mr. Cheney, once the unchallenged adviser to a president who came to office with little experience in foreign affairs, remains a pivotal figure but now vies for influence with other powerful officials like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser. Over the past 18 months, Mr. Cheney appears to have reluctantly given ground on detention practices and, at least for now, on policy disputes involving Iran and North Korea.

Mr. Cheney’s prediction in 2002 that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would force radical extremists “to rethink their strategy of jihad” proved wrong, as President Bush implicitly acknowledged last week when he described how the array of enemies facing America has multiplied. Mr. Cheney’s friends and former aides say they are mystified about how the same man who as defense secretary in 1991 warned that “for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire” managed, 15 years later, to find himself facing that prospect.

Measuring the accumulation or the erosion of power is an imprecise art. But interviews with more than 45 people over the past five months — including current and former White House aides, foreign diplomats, members of Congress and confidants of Mr. Cheney — painted a picture of a vice president who, while still influential, has seen his power wane. Few said they had detected any change in Mr. Cheney’s views; the difference, they said, was that those views were no longer automatically triumphant.

Most agreed to speak candidly only if their names were not used. Mr. Cheney himself declined repeated requests for an interview. Instead, his office encouraged Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley to give interviews to dispute the view that Mr. Cheney’s power is in decline.

Mr. Hadley said the vice president “is often the first to insist that the president hear a variety of views” and argued that reports of his powers in the first term were always exaggerated. “It’s the president who creates the foreign policy around here,” Mr. Hadley said, “not some hidden hand.”

Ms. Rice disputed the view that she had supplanted Mr. Cheney, pointing out that the vice president still has one-on-one lunches with Mr. Bush where he can make his views known “in his quiet way.”

Mr. Cheney’s defenders note that over the summer he was among the strongest voices arguing within the White House that the United States had to give Israel as much time as possible to strike a decisive blow against Hezbollah..

But those same insiders say that in retrospect Mr. Cheney was at his peak in 2003 and 2004, before Iraq’s insurgency flared, before the abuses at Abu Ghraib were revealed, before the setbacks in Congress and at the Supreme Court. Without the help of his closest adviser, I. Lewis Libby Jr., who resigned last fall after his indictment in the Central Intelligence Agency leak case, Mr. Cheney has lost the early warning radar that gave him and his staff such command over the federal bureaucracy. Administration insiders say that Mr. Cheney and his aides are now having to fight hard to maintain positions that just a few years ago he would have won handily.

“During the first term, Cheney was considered one of the smartest guys in the administration,” said Representative Ray LaHood, Republican of Illinois. “But his influence has been diminished because of the Scooter Libby thing and because the war in Iraq has not gone well.”

In his second term, Mr. Bush has grown less dependent on Mr. Cheney for information, current and former officials say. When Joshua B. Bolten became White House chief of staff earlier this year, he told associates he wanted to make sure the president heard from more voices. “My impression is that there are a lot more data points or gathering points now,” said Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota.

For instance, Mr. Bush has turned to another Washington insider, James A. Baker III, who served Mr. Bush’s father as secretary of state, for help as the co-chairman of an outside group developing options for dealing with Iraq. One group member said, “You get the sense that the president now realizes, perhaps a little late, that he needs Baker to find him an exit door.”

Mr. Cheney told NBC News in May that his influence with Mr. Bush was unchanged. “I feel like he gives me the access that I need to be able to do my job,” Mr. Cheney said, adding later: “I give him the best advice I can. He doesn’t always agree. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t.”

Perhaps nowhere has Mr. Cheney’s shifting influence been more visible than on Capitol Hill, where the vice president’s ability to win his way without challenge — a luxury he enjoyed through much of the first term — has evaporated.

During the first four years, Mr. Cheney often bypassed Congress on issues like detention policy.

The vice president and Mr. Addington began to pave the way for the reassertion of executive power that they had long talked about. Mr. Cheney took control of crucial intelligence-gathering programs, including the one that involved eavesdropping on conversations between suspects in the United States and their overseas counterparts without getting a warrant from a special court set up by Congress for such cases.

“They have a view of executive authority that basically smothers the other two branches,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who found himself at odds with Mr. Cheney on detention and interrogation policy.

But in the second term, whether the issue was the treatment and prosecution of terror suspects or Congressional oversight of domestic spying, Mr. Cheney has been forced into an unhappy retreat.

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling struck at the heart of Mr. Cheney’s goal to expand presidential powers. By mid-July, it prompted the White House to concede that terror suspects held by the United States had a right under international law to basic human and legal protections under the Geneva Conventions.

Similarly, Mr. Bush’s announcement on Wednesday amounted to an opening gambit in negotiations with Congress over the rules of tribunals, in what could amount to bargaining over the scope of Mr. Bush’s powers as commander in chief.

Mr. Hadley said in an interview that in recent weeks Mr. Cheney has offered advice to Mr. Bush about how to deal with the court’s decision. But Mr. Hadley, not Mr. Cheney, has been acting as negotiator with Congress, a decision that administration officials say reflects the rockiness of the vice president’s relationship with Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Cheney discovered the depth of that opposition last summer, when Republicans began to rebel against the White House after he tried to block a bill by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, that would bar cruel and inhumane treatment of all prisoners in American custody.

In a tense, 30-minute meeting last July, Mr. Cheney scolded three Republicans — Mr. McCain, Mr. Graham and Senator John W. Warner of Virginia — for proposing legislation that he said interfered with the president’s authority to protect Americans against terrorist attacks.

But the senators did not budge despite the threat of a veto. “The three of us were firmly of one view, he of another,” Mr. Warner said.

After the Senate and the House voted overwhelmingly against Mr. Cheney’s position, the White House decided that the vice president had become so radioactive that his interventions were losing votes, rather than winning them, White House officials acknowledge. So Mr. Cheney stepped aside, and the less ideological, more lawyerly Mr. Hadley was sent to deal with Mr. McCain. The result was a deal that Mr. Cheney himself had previously rejected.

The White House also appeared to yield in July when it agreed to allow a secret intelligence court to rule on the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program. Civil rights groups and lawmakers from both parties have since criticized the agreement and cast doubt on whether it will be approved by Congress.

At the height of his influence in the Bush White House two years ago, Mr. Cheney stepped into the Oval Office early one June evening and raised an alarm about an agreement that American negotiators were about to sign in Beijing.

The negotiators, largely from the State Department, were trying to entice North Korea to sign a document outlining the steps for resolving the standoff over the country’s nuclear weapons. But it lacked the tough language on disarmament that North Korea had rejected and that Mr. Cheney knew Mr. Bush wanted.

With Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and his deputy, Richard Armitage, at a black-tie dinner where they could not be easily reached on secure telephones, Mr. Cheney “declared this thing a loser,” said a former senior official involved in the discussions that night.

While Mr. Powell and Mr. Armitage were still eating, Mr. Bush sent new instructions to the negotiators in Beijing — through the National Security Council, rather than the State Department — that essentially killed the deal. “Powell and Armitage were not happy,” one official said. “But it was too late.”

It would be hard to imagine a similar course of events today. Soon after the start of the second term, President Bush began signaling to foreign leaders visiting him in the Oval Office that he knew much had gone wrong in his first term, and that he empowered Ms. Rice to put a new emphasis on consultation and teamwork with allies. Ms. Rice, aides say, asserted her authority early, sending her own envoy to the North Korean nuclear talks last September, a process that she largely controlled but has since proved fruitless.

But the real evidence came this spring, when Ms. Rice determined that the only way to hold together the international coalition against Iran was to volunteer to sit down and join negotiations with Tehran, but only if it first agreed to suspend its production of uranium. (So far, the Iranians have balked.)

The proposal was notable because during the first term, Mr. Powell’s top aides, led by Richard N. Haass, the director of policy planning, had tried and failed to promote direct engagement with the Iranians.

Ms. Rice said that when her proposal to engage Iran was presented to the president this spring, Mr. Cheney agreed that it was worth a try and that changed circumstances required a changed strategy.

“The constellations have shifted somewhat,” said Dov S. Zakheim, who served as an undersecretary of defense in Mr. Bush’s first term, giving an image used by others to suggest that Mr. Cheney has been partially eclipsed.

In particular, Mr. Cheney has fewer allies in critical posts than he once did. Those who have left the administration include Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, who quit as deputy defense secretary and undersecretary of defense last year.

Mr. Cheney’s associates say the forced departure last fall of Mr. Libby, known as Scooter, was particularly severe. As Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, Mr. Libby served as the vice president’s eyes and ears around Washington, working the bureaucratic machinery deftly and choking off ideas Mr. Cheney opposed before they rose to the Oval Office. “Scooter was a big loss,” Mr. Feith said.

For his part, Mr. Cheney has said he does not believe his influence with Mr. Bush has diminished, and he brushes off poll approval ratings now hovering around 20 percent.

“I suppose, sometimes, people look at my demeanor and say, well, he’s the Darth Vader of the administration,” Mr. Cheney told CNN in June. “I’m not running for anything. My career will end, politically, with this administration. I have the freedom and the luxury, as does the president, of doing what we think is right for the country.”

Mr. Cheney maintains that what matters now is convincing the country that it is really at war and that defeat is not an option. And at 65, he seems willing to wait for his vindication. As Mr. Cheney recently told NBC, “History will decide how I did.”

    Cheney’s Power No Longer Goes Unquestioned, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/washington/10cheney.html?hp&ex=1157860800&en=c089e65ca50c998c&ei=5094&partner=homepage