By PAMELA HESS
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WASHINGTON (AP) - Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday defended the interrogation methods used against suspected terrorists and said the Bush administration obtained specific information critical to combatting would-be attackers.
In a speech challenging President Barack Obama's policies, Cheney said the national security decisions made by former President George W. Bush kept America safe and were rooted in a determination to ensure the Sept. 11 attacks didn't become "a prelude to something worse."
Responding to critics of the interrogation tactics, Cheney said the United States did obtain useful information.
"It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation. You've heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists," Cheney told an audience at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
"Yet for all these exacting efforts to do a hard and necessary job and to do it right, we hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative," Cheney said. "In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists."
Pelosi has said the CIA misled her in 2002 about whether waterboarding, which simulates drowning, had been used.
Cheney delayed the start of his address until after Obama's speech defending his plan to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for suspected terrorists and transfer some detainees to U.S. facilities.
Cheney criticized that move as one made with "little deliberation and no plan."
In the fight against terrorism, Cheney said, there is no middle ground. "Half measures keep you half exposed," he said.
Cheney said the Bush policies were intended to prevent attacks similar in scale to the hijacking of the Sept. 11, 2001, that killed more than 3,000 people.
"To the very end of our administration, we kept al-Qaida terrorists busy with other problems. We focused on getting their secrets, instead of sharing ours with them. And on our watch, they never hit this country again," Cheney said.
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Congrats to Pamela Hess and/or her editor for not screwing up anything in the story. I actually doubt the AP has editors, so hats off to Pamela! Well written, well done. Maybe with this economic downturn, AP can afford good people who are now willing to work for AP wages.
But about the story: Shortly after giving his speech, Cheney went home, got a shotgun and shot his neighbor in the face. He then had a heart attack but was revived in what Joe Biden calls, "Cheney's medical department under his house that everyone knows about." When asked why he shot his neighbor, Cheney replied that shooting people in the face has kept this country safe, and that not one terrorist has happened in the US since he started shooting friends in the face.
In unrelated news, Treasury Secretary Geitner has approved 15 billion in stimulus money to shotgun manufacturers.
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