CHENEY: Yes, well, that specifically talked about detainees, about the
contributions that we got to our overall intelligence picture. Publicly
General Hayden, who used to be director of the CIA, said as late as 2006
a majority of the intelligence we had gotten about al Qaeda came from
detainees, high-value targets like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, like Abu
Zubaydah, people that we captured during the course of our campaign
against al Qaeda.
And they, of course, were obviously also the people that the debate has
focused on with respect to enhanced interrogation techniques. So I…
CAVUTO: Have you spoken to anyone in the White House lately about this?
And did they give you a head's up, we're going to release all of these
interrogation…
(CROSSTALK)
CHENEY: Well, what I did was make a formal request for declassification
through the National Archives, which is the way you do it, and then it
goes out to the agency responsible, in this case, the CIA. And I'm still
awaiting a formal answer from them.
CAVUTO: Your daughter, Liz, was on a rival news network this morning.
CHENEY: She was.
CAVUTO: And she made the comment that the White House should have called
my dad, I'm paraphrasing here, Mr. Vice President, but it was clearly --
the inference was that that did not happen.
What happened? When this whole dust-up started happening on
interrogation and then eliminating waterboarding, did anyone from the
White House give you or President Bush a head's up that this policy was
about to be reversed?
CHENEY: Well, I didn't discuss it with anybody in the administration,
but I'm not offended by that. They campaigned all across the country,
from one end of the country to the other against enhanced interrogation
techniques, and made it very clear they were opposed to that. They
called it torture.
I don't believe it was torture. We had attorneys who gave us a clear
guidance as to what was appropriate and what wasn't. The reason we've
gotten into this debate at all is because the administration saw fit to
go back and release OLC opinions, opinions out of the Office of Legal
Counsel and the Justice Department dealing with its classified program.
Now that's a very rare occurrence. You don't ordinarily release those
opinions, especially when it deals with classified programs. They did it
in a way that sort of blocked so far any real discussion of the results
of the program, and instead focused upon the techniques themselves.
And they really began the debate then with the suggestions that perhaps
people should be prosecuted for having participated in the program or
the lawyers who gave us these opinions should be disbarred. I think it's
an outrage.
