Pat Dollard

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The Swamp: Dick Cheney, the former vice president, has been pressing the Obama administration to declassify memos which he says show that the harshest interrogation tactics of the Bush administration produced valuable, life-saving information.

How’s that going, he was asked today?

“I would not ordinarily be leading the charge to declassify classified information,” Cheney said in an appearance at the National Press Club this afternoon…. “Otherwise, they would not be calling me Darth Vader for nothing,” he said to some laughter. ” I think the declassification of those documents would serve a public purpose, and enlighten the public.”

Asked about the relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, Cheney said this: “The prime source of information on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda was George Tenet,” former CIA director. “There was a relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq that stretched back 10 years. That’s not something I made up… That’s something the director of the CIA was telling us.

“We know that he was making $25,000 payments to the families of suicide bombers… We know there were other terrorists… who had found safe harbor in Iraq over the years,” Cheney said. “I do not believe, and I have never seen any evidence to confirm, that he was involved in 9/11… But the fact of Saddam Hussein being a terrorist-sponsoring state… was, I think, a fact.”

Cheney, appearing at an awards ceremony for Washington journalists in the name of the president whom he served as chief of staff, the late Gerald Ford, delivered a conversational response to questions about the rationale for the war in Iraq and war against terrorism that he has addressed in more strident speeches in recent weeks.

Was the case made for war in 2002 stronger then than it is today?

“I felt it was strong at the time, and I do so today,” Cheney said softly, but sternly. “In the months after 9/11, we were felt with a situation where we felt we had to take action… to reduce the possibility that terrorists would ever get their hands on (nuclear) technology or that terrorist-sponsoring states would share that…

“I looked at the world the morning after 9/11, and I saw 16 acres of ashes in downtown Manhattan,” the former vice president said. “I knew, for a fact, that if the passengers on Flight 93 weren’t successful, they (hijackers) probably would have taken out either the White House or the Capitol.

“We had to do everything in our power to prevent that next attack,” Cheney said. “To some extent, our success has allowed our fellow citizens to say, ‘Oh, there was nothing to worry about.’

“If I had it to do all over again, I would do exactly the same thing,” he said. “I don’t have much tolerance or patience for those who have the benefit of hindsight eight years later and have forgotten what happened on 9/11…. Just imagine, what would happen if you had 19 men in one of our cities… armed with a nuclear weapon or (a biological weapon.)”

Cheney was asked about a derisive comment that he had made about The New York Times’ revelation of the once-secret Terrorist Surveillance Program in which the National Security Agency has monitored the phone conversations and email of people in the United States communicating with suspected terrorists. He said at the American Enterprise Institute that it had “impressed the Pulitzer committee.”

“We found ourselves in a situation where The New York Times received a leak – we called them into the Oval Office,” Cheney said. “The publisher, the editor and the Washington Bureau chief… all came down to the Oval Office and talked to the president,” where they were told that writing about the program would let terrorists know the U.S. is reading their mail and would break some laws.) ” They went ahead and they published it anyway, and their award for doing it was they won the Pulitzer.”

“My own personal view is that damaged our security,” he said.

The former vice president also expressed great doubt about the Obama administration’s determination to close the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“I think it’s going to be very difficult to close Guantanamo,” Cheney said. “The New York Times again, one of my favorite publications… referred to the prisoners at Guantanamo as abductees… These are bad actors…. The ones that are left, these are the worst of the worst… There is not a lot of great demand out around the country to have those folks shipped to the nearest facility.”

“We need Guantanamo… If we didn’t have it, we’d need to (invent) it… If you don’t have a place to hold these people, the only other option is to kill them… We don’t operate that way.”

On the harshest iterrogation tactics that the Bush administration employed against detained terrorists: “I don’t believe we tortured,” Cheney said today, insisting that authorities followed the guidance of Justice Department lawyers and did not cross a “red line” into illegal conduct. “There were three people who were water-boarded…. It was well-done.”