Recently Vice President Dick Cheney gave an interview covering several topics from the invasion of Iraq to the torturing of people at good ole' G-Bay.....
Cheney Defends His Torture Policies
"I have been ... focused very much on whatwe needed to do to defend the nation."– Dick Cheney, December 15, 2008
Saddam Defended His Torture Policies
"I'm doing it for Iraq. I'm not defendingmyself. But I am defending you."– Saddam Hussein, December 5, 2005
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KARL: Now, President Bush recently said that his greatest regret was that the intelligence was wrong on weapons of mass destruction. Is that your biggest regret?
CHENEY: No, I wouldn't -- I understand why he says that. I certainly share the frustration that the intelligence report on Iraq WMD generated but in terms of the intelligence itself, I tend to look at the entire community and what they've done over the course of the last several years. Intelligence -- it's not a science, it's an art form in many respects and you don't always get it right.
I think while I would mention that as a major failure of the intelligence community, it clearly was. On the other hand, we've had other successes and failures. I think the run-up to 9/11 where we missed that attack was a failure. On the other hand we've had great success since 9/11 in terms of what the intelligence community has contributed overall to the defense of the nation, to defeating al Qaeda, to making it possible for us to do very serious damage to our enemies.
KARL: You probably saw Karl Rove last week said that if the intelligence had been correct we probably would not have gone to war.
CHENEY: I disagree with that. I think -- as I look at the intelligence with respect to Iraq, what they got wrong was that there weren't any stockpiles. What we found in the after action reports, after the intelligence report was done and then various special groups went and looked at the intelligence and what its validity was. What they found was that Saddam Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. He had the technology, he had the people, he had the basic feed stocks.
They also found that he had every intention of resuming production once the international sanctions were lifted. He had a long reputation and record of having started two wars. Of having brutalized and killed hundreds of thousands of people, some of them with weapons of mass destruction in his own country. He had violated 16 National Security Council resolutions. He had established a relationship as a terror sponsoring state according to the State Department. He was making $25,000 payments to the families of suicide bombers.
This was a bad actor and the country's better off, the world's better off with Saddam gone and I think we made the right decision in spite of the fact that the original NIE was off in some of its major judgments.
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