Dick Cheney On the CIA, Enhanced Interrogation, Obama & Osama

Obama has gutted the CIA's Enhanced Interrogation program that ultimately gave us bin Laden. He has taken the CIA completely out of the business of interrogating high level detainees. And on top of that, outrageously, Obama continues to investigate those CIA employees who in fact applied enhanced interrogation, despite all of them having been cleared in a prior investigation by a career Justice Dept. employee. Dick Cheney discusses each of these points while explaining why we need the CIA's program reconstituted on Fox News Sunday.



Obama did not capture bin Laden, I am convinced, because he did not want to have to deal with bin Laden within the gutted, ridiculous framework for high level detainees that he is responsible for since coming to office. Nonetheless, the fact is that our soldiers did walk away from the bin Laden compound with a treasure trove of intelligence that will likely lead us to the identities of many new people in the war on terror. The irony is that our ability to to exploit that information is, thanks to Obama, seriously constrained. As Michael Mukasey put it in his recent WSJ article:

But policies put in place by the very administration that presided over this splendid success promise fewer such successes in the future. Those policies make it unlikely that we'll be able to get information from those whose identities are disclosed by the material seized from bin Laden.