Monday
Jun012009
Cheney Won’t Budge On National Security
Monday, June 1, 2009 at 6:26PM
By Celia Canon- Talk Radio News Service
Former Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated his support for the Bush administration’s national security approach today during an address to the Gerald Ford Foundation's annual journalism awards ceremony at the National Press Club.
When questioned about President Barack Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility by the end of the year, Cheney said that the administration had erred by ordering to discontinue use of the facility without a plan for the distribution of the prisoners.
“If you don’t have a place to hold these people, the only other solution is to kill them, and we don’t operate that way. We capture people in combat, we hold them as prisoners, we treat them as prisoners of war and are to be held till the end of the conflict,” Cheney said.
Since January, Obama has signed two presidential orders to close the facility within a year.
Cheney recently asked Obama to declassify the CIA’s interrogation documents related to water-boarding so as to prove that the Bush administration was not responsible for what is considered as the widespread condoning of torture by U.S. government officials under the Bush administration.
“[Obama] could with the stroke of a pen, declassify those documents that I’ve asked for,” Cheney said, adding,“The president has the authority to declassify whatever he wants, he is the ultimate classification authority of the federal government.”
When asked if he still believed there was a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, “The fact that he was a state sponsor of terror, provided sanctuary and safe harbor and resources to terrorists is I think without question, a fact,” adding, “That’s not something I made up. That’s not something I thought of. That’s something the director of Central Intelligence was telling us,” Cheney answered.
Since leaving office in January, Cheney has emerged as a frequent critic of Obama’s national security policies. He accused Obama of making the U.S. less safe during a CNN appearance in March and then again during a speech to the American Enterprise Institute late May. He has also given numerous television interviews conveying the same theme.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated his support for the Bush administration’s national security approach today during an address to the Gerald Ford Foundation's annual journalism awards ceremony at the National Press Club.
When questioned about President Barack Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility by the end of the year, Cheney said that the administration had erred by ordering to discontinue use of the facility without a plan for the distribution of the prisoners.
“If you don’t have a place to hold these people, the only other solution is to kill them, and we don’t operate that way. We capture people in combat, we hold them as prisoners, we treat them as prisoners of war and are to be held till the end of the conflict,” Cheney said.
Since January, Obama has signed two presidential orders to close the facility within a year.
Cheney recently asked Obama to declassify the CIA’s interrogation documents related to water-boarding so as to prove that the Bush administration was not responsible for what is considered as the widespread condoning of torture by U.S. government officials under the Bush administration.
“[Obama] could with the stroke of a pen, declassify those documents that I’ve asked for,” Cheney said, adding,“The president has the authority to declassify whatever he wants, he is the ultimate classification authority of the federal government.”
When asked if he still believed there was a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, “The fact that he was a state sponsor of terror, provided sanctuary and safe harbor and resources to terrorists is I think without question, a fact,” adding, “That’s not something I made up. That’s not something I thought of. That’s something the director of Central Intelligence was telling us,” Cheney answered.
Since leaving office in January, Cheney has emerged as a frequent critic of Obama’s national security policies. He accused Obama of making the U.S. less safe during a CNN appearance in March and then again during a speech to the American Enterprise Institute late May. He has also given numerous television interviews conveying the same theme.
Amnesty International Wants Cheney Investigated For War Crimes
Eight activists representing Amnesty International donned orange jumpsuits Tuesday and held a protest in front of the Department of Justice in hopes of convincing the Obama administration to investigate former Vice President Dick Cheney for alleged war crimes.
“[Cheney] was one of the principal architects of a policy that instituted the torture of US detainees,” Tom Parker, the Policy Director for Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights at Amnesty International USA told TRNS. “That torture included threatening people with power drills, discharging weapons right near their heads, threatening to lock them in a box of insects, throwing them against the wall, heat exhaustion, sleep depravation, withholding food and water and of course, the most infamous of all, waterboarding.”
Although the Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques have been controversial for years, they have returned to the spotlight with the release of Dick Cheney’s memoir “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” in which Cheney describes different interrogation techniques used on detainees.
“We’re here today to mark the publication of Dick Cheney’s memoirs and to present a copy of those memoirs to the Justice Department as exhibit A in a case to prosecute him for committing war crimes in the context of the global war on terror,” Parker said.
Cheney’s memoir was officially released Tuesday by Simon & Schuster
Click here to view a photo from today’s protest.