In an exit interview with PBS’s Jim Lehrer for the “NewsHour” airing tonight, Vice President Cheney repeats claims that Saddam Hussein worked with al-Qaeda. Asked if he made any mistakes in his eight years as V.P., Cheney only mentions underestimating the psychological harm Saddam had done to his own people. He said his administration bore no blame for the economic problem: “I think we had good economic policies, especially in the early years.” And the terror threat was inherited because of the poor handling by previous presidents.
On polls showing he is overwhelmingly unpopular among the American people: “I don’t buy that.”
And he shrugged off a critical statement today by a key figure, who used to work under him – she called the handling of one terror suspect as clear “torture”…
MR. LEHRER: But just, for a general premise here, looking back, you don’t – nothing happened that you feel was over the line or that you feel that was a miscalculation or mistake of some kind?VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Well, in terms of the treatment of a specific individual, I can’t say that. We had Abu Ghraib, for example. In that case, I believe, based on what I’ve seen, that that was the result of some military personnel who were improperly supervised – weren’t given the right kind of guidance, weren’t managed properly. As we dig in and look at hundreds of cases, we may well find a few people who were not properly treated. You know, I ran the Pentagon. I know that you can’t absolutely guarantee, at all times, that everybody’s doing it the way they’re supposed to be doing it.VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: I can tell you what the policy was; I can tell you that we had all the legal authorization to do it, including the sign-off of the Justice Department. I can tell you it produced phenomenal results for us, and that a great many Americans are alive today because we did all that. And I think those are the important considerations.
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Good policy.
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Legal backup from the DoJ.
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Great results.
These are premeditated answers, constructed at the time the policy was instituted. It goes like this. “We need to use torture to find Bin Laden. Let’s do it. Research the legal blockades and let’s find a way around them.” And that’s exactly what they did. It was the same with the Domestic wiretaps. “We can’t have the Courts interfering with this program. Research the legal blockades and let’s find a way around them.” So the rationalizations were in place from the very start. He was primed for these questions in 2001 when these programs were instituted.
So Lehrer says: “… nothing happened that you feel was over the line or that you feel that was a miscalculation or mistake of some kind?” Cheney doesn’t answer the question. Instead he rolls out the formulaic answer: “I can tell you what the policy was; I can tell you that we had all the legal authorization to do it, including the sign-off of the Justice Department. I can tell you it produced phenomenal results for us.” What about Abu Ghraib? He says, “… some military personnel who were improperly supervised – weren’t given the right kind of guidance, weren’t managed properly.” He just doesn’t respond to the obvious implications in Lehrer’s question – Cheney’s policy lead to Abu Ghraib.
- that the polls were done
- that polls have meaning
- that people actually don’t like him
- that it’s even possible that people might not like him
And that’s why Cheney’s been such a terrible leader. He believes what he thinks, he and arch-Narcissist David Addington. In their folie à deux, they just “know” what’s right and they just “know” that others are wrong. They’re both smart as hell, and when confronted with evidence that they’re way off base, they automatically counter because it simply can’t be true that they are wrong. Bush does the same thing, but he’s so bad at it that it’s laughable. Cheney and Addington aren’t lightweights like their boss.
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