Dick Cheney on Homeland Security Vice President of the United States under George W. Bush

Sub-sections under Homeland Security:
• Gulf War
• GWOT
• Military Rebuilding
• Torture
• Other issues under Homeland Security

OpEd: Frustrated when definitions of torture changed

I understood why people like by Vice President Cheney were frustrated when the Department of Justice changed its legal opinions. But much of the responsibility for the original flawed legal work could be laid at the feet of policymakers like the vice president--powerful leaders who were absolutely certain what needed to be done and who demanded quick answers from a tiny group of lawyers. Their actions guaranteed the very problem we were forced to deal with down the road.

OpEd: Pressured DOJ to declare NSA domestic spying legal

COMEY: I was the #2 person at the Justice Department then, the deputy attorney general. And we were in a dispute with the White House about whether there was a lawful basis for surveillance activities that the president had authorized the NSA to engage in [domestically]. We had concluded--and I agreed--that there wasn't a lawful basis for a big part of these activities. Vice President Cheney presided at a meeting to pressure me to change my view. He looked me in the eye and said, "Thousands of people are going to die because of what you're doing." What he meant was, "Because you are making us stop this surveillance program." I responded, "I have to say what we find lawful. So I can't change my view." I felt like I was going to be crushed like a grape, frankly. But in a way, there was no other way I could act. The law was clear.

OpEd: torture detainees to prove Al-Qaida-Saddam connection

OpEd: Guantanamo torture creates new terrorists

Disagreed on Iraq & interrogation, bur endorsed McCain

McCain noted that the VP had said he was "delighted" to support to GOP nominee.

1980s: Supported squadron of 132 B-2 stealth bombers

And we weren't talking about just one B-2. Initially, there was to be a squadron of 132 of these bombers, a number that was whittled down to 75 & eventually to 20, although that figure remained open for discussion.

At one point, Cheney made a deal with me to freeze the number of planes on order at 20, in exchange for my agreeing to back down in my fight, which [B-2 supporters] could then take as my grudging support. We even shook hands on it, and yet a year or so later Cheney was out there thumping for 40. I went onto the House floor and accused him of breaking his word, and to this day he despise me for it, but I felt it was the right thing to do, to call him out in this public way.

For my money, which I tended to see as the American taxpayer's money, I wanted to cancel the plan and redirect some of those funds to develop standoff weapons.

Wolfowitz Doctrine disowned by Bush-I became Bush-II policy

Under the Wolfowitz Doctrine, US military supremacy was to remain sufficiently dominant to deter all "potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."

Reaction was sharp. Sen. Joe Biden denounced the memo as the blueprints for "a Pax Americana." Sen. Edward Kennedy said the Pentagon plans "appear to be aimed primarily at finding new ways to justify Cold War levels of military spending." Disowned by the Bush I White House, the memo was seemingly forgotten. But in Sep. 2002, with Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Libby restored to power, the Wolfowitz memo reappeared in an official document released by the White House, titled The National Security Strategy.

Steady, focused, relentless campaign against US enemies

Not long after September 11th, one high-ranking al Qaeda official said, “This is the beginning of the end for America.” It’s pretty clear this terrorist did not know us. It’s clear the terrorists who attacked us did not understand the strength and the resilience of this country. And they, clearly, did not understand the determination of our President.

Pro-Israel lobby's influence sometimes is overstated

On the Middle East, Straw asked how difficult it was having such a strong pro-Israel lobby. Cheney said its influence is sometimes overstated and that at the moment they were pretty subdued. Jack said [Israeli leader] Sharon was doing things which were dangerous and could not be part of our strategy. I had always assumed that Cheney would be more open and forthcoming when he was in charge of meetings rather than, as when Bush was there, clearly comfortable playing 2nd fiddle. But he was not one to speak too much for the sake of it. He had cold, slightly menacing body language, listened very intently without giving much away, and usually paused before giving a thought-through answer.

Swift retaliation for USS Cole terrorist attack

American military is worse off today than in 1992

LIEBERMAN: I want to assure the American people that the American military is the best-trained, best-equipped, most powerful force in the world, and that Al Gore and I will do whatever it takes to keep them that way. It’s not right and it’s not good for our military to run them down, essentially, in the midst of a partisan political debate. And judging by its results, from Desert Storm to Kosovo, the American military has performed brilliantly.

CHENEY: The facts are dramatically different. I’m not attacking the military, Joe. I have enormous regard for the men and women of the US military. But it’s irresponsible to suggest that we should not have this debate in a presidential campaign.

We must not send unprepared, demoralized troops to war

LIEBERMAN: Secretary Cohen, General Shelton, will tell you that the military is ready. If you look at our budget, we commit more than twice as much as Governor Bush. I don’t want the American people to feel insecure. We have met our recruitment targets in each of the services this year. In fact, in the areas where our opponents have said we are overextended, such as the Balkans, the soldiers there have the highest rate of reenlistment than anywhere else. This administration has begun to transform the military to prepare it to meet the threats of weapons of mass destruction, of ballistic missiles, of terrorism.

CHENEY: Everybody wearing the uniform is a volunteer. When we don’t give them leadership, we undermine morale. There is no more important responsibility for a president than his role as commander in chief, and his decision when to send our men and women to war. When we send them without the right kind of training, we put their lives at risk.

We cannot allow Saddam to have nuclear weapons

CHENEY: We might have no choice. At the end of the war, we had pretty well decimated their military. We had a strong international coalition against them, effective economic sanctions and a very robust inspection plan. Now we have a situation where the coalition now no longer is tied tightly together. Recently two Gulf states have reopened diplomatic relations with Baghdad. The Russians and the French now are flying commercial airliners into Baghdad. UN inspectors have been kicked out. If Saddam Hussein were taking steps to rebuild nuclear capability or weapons of mass destruction, we’d have to give very serious consideration to military action to. I don’t think you can afford to have a man like Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons.

Restore bond of trust between military and President

The first order of business is to renew the bond of trust between the commander in chief and the military. This means:
• higher pay, improved housing, and better schools for their children.
• reviewing our overseas deployments in dozens of countries, and insisting that deployments have well-defined objectives.
• providing first-rate health care and treating veterans with dignity.
• Above all, it means respecting the military and earning their trust in return.

Warned of nuclear proliferation in 1990s

Complained that Congress gave DoD unwanted weapons & forces

Added technology & infrastructure as pillars of military

Americans support force when appropriate & clear objective

Supported fully funding SDI in 1990s

Co-sponsored SDI; “peace thru strength”; base closings

Cheney co-sponsored the following bills in Congress:
• H.CON.RES.83 (1984) & H.CON.RES.150 (1986):A concurrent resolution to express the sense of the Congress that the national security policy of the US should reflect a national strategy of peace through strength.
• H.CON.RES.98 (1984):A resolution calling for support for the President’s efforts to develop strategic defensive systems to make nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
• H.CON.RES.129 (1986):A concurrent resolution to establish a Congressional Commission to be known as the “Perot Commission on Americans Missing in Southeast Asia” to determine whether or not U.S. POWs are being held in Southeast Asia and to report to Congress appropriate action to effect the release of any POWs found to be alive.
• H.R.1583 (1988):A bill to establish the Bipartisan Commission on the Consolidation of Military Bases.

Criticizes Clinton/Gore’s neglect, not military itself

I would suggest to Mr. Gore that when he speaks of “running down the military,” he has made a poor choice of words. When you triple our commitments around the world, while at the same time taking the Army from 14 divisions down to 10, the Air Force from 17 wings to 13, and the Navy from well over 400 ships down toward fewer than 300 - that, Mr. Gore, is “running down the military.”

We all know that everyone in the service, from the highest officer to the newest recruit, is not fully free to speak about mission or morale. That is as it should be. But for the Vice President to claim - on their behalf, without fear of contradiction - that all is well in the military, is only to take further advantage of them.

Gulf War: Rejected frontal assault in favor of “left hook”

Cheney says his best decision was to suggest Colin Powell become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Cheney wasn’t afrgaid to rebuke his friend. Powell, in his autobiography, ‘’My American Journey,’’ recalls that Cheney was upset with him for questioning the idea of liberating Kuwait. Powell thought it made more sense to defend Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. ‘’Colin, you’re chairman of the Joint Chiefs,’’ Powell quoted Cheney as saying. ‘So stick to military matters.’’

Congressional authorization wasn’t needed for Kuwait

A: It was my view at the time that we were absolutely committed to getting Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait one way or the other, no matter what we had to do. We had to have the Saudis as allies in that venture, but if no-one else had been with us if it had just been the US and Saudi Arabia, without the UN, without the authorisation of the Congress, we were prepared to go ahead. I argued in public session before the Congress that we did not need Congressional authorisation. That in fact we had the Truman precedent from the Korean crisis of 1950 that the Senate and all ratified the UN charter. By this time the UN Security Council had authorised the use of force, saying that we could do it by January 15th if he wasn’t out by then and that legally and from a constitutional stand point we had all the authority we needed. [However], I think having had the Congress vote ultimately was a major plus.

Gulf War: No, we should not have gone to Baghdad

One of the reasons we were successful from a military perspective was because we had very clear-cut military objectives. The President gave us an assignment that could be achieved by the application of military force. He said, “Liberate Kuwait.” He said, “Destroy Saddam Hussein’s offensive capability,” -- both definable military objectives. And as soon as we had achieved those objectives, we stopped hostilities, on the grounds that we had in fact fulfilled our objective.

Now, the notion that we should have somehow continued for another day to two is, I think, fallacious. At the time that we made the decision to stop hostilities, it was the unanimous recommendation of the President’s military advisors that we had indeed achieved our objectives, and therefore it was time to stop the killing and the destruction.

Gulf War: We did it right to avoid a quagmire

I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it’s my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.

Effective nonproliferation policy holds rogues accountable

The sixteen words were true; Saddam sought Niger uranium

I was under the impression that the president had decided against a public apology, and was therefore surprised a few days later when National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told the White House press pool, "We wouldn't have put it in the speech if we had known what we know now." The result was the conflagration I had predicted. Rice realized sometime later that she had made a major mistake by issuing a public apology. She came into my office, sat down in the chair next to my desk, and tearfully admitted I had been right. Unfortunately, the damage was done.

Spent 9-11 in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center

We stopped at the bottom of the stairs in a tunnel outside the PEOC. I watched as Secret Service agents positioned themselves at the top, middle, and bottom of the staircase, creating layers of defense in case the White House itself should be invaded. The Agent had evacuated me from my office, he said, because he'd gotten word over his radio that "an inbound unidentified aircraft was headed for 'Crown,'" code name for the White House. Within moments another report came in. An agent said, "the plane headed for us just hit the Pentagon." Now I knew for certain that Washington as well as NY was under attack.

Recommended Bush stay away from DC during 9-11

This was the second call I had made to President Bush since hijacked airliners flew into the World Trade towers, and he'd been trying to reach me as well. A communications glitch had cut us off earlier, and as I waited to talk to him now, I watched images of the burning towers on an old television set that had been set up in the tunnel. When the president came on the line, I told him that the Pentagon had been hit and urged him to stay away from Washington. The city was under attack, and the White House was a target. I understood that he didn't want to appear to be on the run, but he shouldn't be here until we knew more about what was going on.

9-11: Authorized shootdown of non-responsive civilian planes

At about 10:15, a plane, believed hijacked, was 80 miles out and headed for DC. [An aide] asked me whether our combat air patrol had authority to engage the aircraft. Did our fighter pilots have authority, in other words, to shoot down an American commercial airliner believed to have been hijacked? "Yes," I said without hesitation. A moment later he was back. "It's 60 miles out. Do they have authorization to engage?" Again, yes.

There could have been no other answer. As the last hour had made brutally clear, once a plane was hijacked it was a weapon in the hands of the enemy. In one of our earlier calls, the president approved my recommendation that the combat air patrol be authorized to fire on a civilian airliner if it had been hijacked and would not divert.

6 years after 9/11, the war on terror is still real

2004: Wrong choice for president & we'll get hit again

"It's absolutely essential that 8 weeks from today, on November 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the US, and that we'll fall back into the pre-0/11 mindset, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts and that we are not really at war."

Captured or killed thousands of Al Qaida members

A: We’ve actively and aggressively pursued him. We’ve captured or killed thousands of Al Qaida in various places around the world and especially in Afghanistan. We’ll continue to very aggressively pursue him, and I’m confident eventually we’ll get him. The key to success in Afghanistan has been, again, to go in and go after the terrorists, which we’ve done, and also take down the Taliban regime which allowed them to function there, in effect sponsors, if you will, of the Al Qaida organization. Here we are, two and a half years later, we’re four days away from a democratic election, the first one in history in Afghanistan. We’ve got 10 million voters who have registered to vote, nearly half of them women. That election will put in place a democratically elected government that will take over next December. We’ve made enormous progress in Afghanistan, in exactly the right direction.

Deal with Zarqawi by taking him out

CHENEY: We know Zarqawi is still in Baghdad today. He is responsible for most of the major car bombings that have killed or maimed thousands of people. He’s the one you will see on the evening news beheading hostages. He is, without question, a bad guy. He is, without question, a terrorist. He was, in fact, in Baghdad before the war, and he’s in Baghdad now after the war. The fact of the matter is that this is exactly the kind of track record we’ve seen over the years. We have to deal with Zarqawi by taking him out, and that’s exactly what we’ll do.

Use a very aggressive policy of going after the terrorists

EDWARDS: We were attacked. But we weren’t attacked by Saddam Hussein. The reality is that the best defense is a good offense, which means leading America returning to its proud tradition of the last 75 years, of once again leading strong coalitions so we can get at these terrorist cells where they are, before they can do damage to us and to the American people. We made clear that we will do that, and we will do it aggressively.

If Bush not elected, great danger of terrorist attack

Biggest threat today is terrorists getting nuclear weapons

No permission slip to defend the American people

Urged shooting down hijacked planes on 9/11

The fact that Cheney recommended shooting down any commercial planes that might have been hijacked validated Bush’s decision to place him on the ticket. Only someone with his experience in the Defense Department could have conceived on the spot of such a drastic but necessary measure.

US military is best in world, but trend is wrong direction

Military reductions are too much for post-Cold War

LIEBERMAN: And the fact is that Governor Bush recommended in his major policy statement on the military earlier this year that we skip the next generation of military equipment: helicopters, submarines, tactical air fighters, all the rest. That would really cripple our readiness, exactly the readiness that Dick Cheney is talking about.

Decreased army means increased risk to lives of troops

Military today is overused and underresourced

Our military today is overused and underresourced.
• Over the last decade, commitments worldwide have gone up 300%, while our military forces have been cut by 40%.
• Budget shortfalls have slowed some training missions and brought others to a complete stop.
• Defense spending today is lower as a percentage of GNP than at any time since 1940 -- the year before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
• As of January 1993, 85% of Air Force combat units were fully ready for their mission. Today that number is at 65%.
• Pilots are flying more missions on older aircraft. The average plane is 20 years old. And even with new planes coming online, by the year 2015, the average plane will be 30 years old.
• At the same time, overseas deployments have multiplied, stretching the services to the limit, and causing shortages of spare parts and equipment.
• All of this has brought on serious problems of readiness, recruiting, retention and morale.

Need to spend more, but spend it wisely

The needs of our nation’s defense, and the needs of our defenders, are not merely relevant in a national campaign. They must be front and center. Seizing this opportunity will require not just spending more, but spending more wisely.
• It means giving today’s military what it needs.
• It means beginning to create the military of the future, by capitalizing on new technologies and placing greater emphasis on R & D.
• It means accelerating research and deployment of missile defenses.

Cautious cuts: A-12, V22, F14D, Seawolf, 500,000 troops

Still, by 1991, Cheney eventually agreed to arms control proposals. Cheney killed a number of major weapons systems, most notably the Navy’s A-12 Stealth fighter-which, at $30-$60 billion, was the biggest program ever terminated by a defense secretary. He also tried to kill the V22 vertical take-off aircraft, the F14D fighter jet, and the Seawolf submarine. But Congress restored them to the budget. Cheney also moved to cut the armed forces by a half-million troops, and to shut down more than 40 military bases that, as a result, would no longer be needed. He also held the B-2 Stealth bomber program to 20 planes, when the Air Force wanted at least four times that number.

In Congress, consistently voted to raise military spending

Downsized military while protecting “people programs”

2002: CIA acted lawfully with enhanced interrogation

Despite the invaluable intelligence we were obtaining through the program of enhanced interrogation, in 2005 there was a move on Capitol Hill, led by Sen. John McCain & Lindsey Graham, to end it and require that all US government interrogations be conducted under the rules of the US Army Field Manual.

2002: Enhanced interrogation techniques worked

The techniques worked. Zubaydah gave up information about Ramzi bin al Shibh, who had assisted the 9/11 hijackers. Information from Zubaydah and bin al Shibh led in turn to the capture of KSM, who after being questioned with enhanced techniques became a fount of information. A CIA report, declassified at my request, notes that KSM was the "preeminent source on al-Qa'ida." According to the 2004 report: "Debriefings since his detention have shed light on the plots, capabilities, the identity and location of al Qa'ida operatives and affiliated terrorist organizations and networks."

Dunking terrorists ‘no brainer’ not endorsing waterboarding

Don't prohibit US military forces from degrading detainees

Representing the Bush administration, Vice President Cheney has made strenuous efforts to block the legislation, and the White House has warned that the $442 billion defense bill would be vetoed, claiming that it "would restrict the president's authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attacks and bring terrorists to justice."

Increase defense spending to meet global responsibilities.

American defense policy is adrift. Conservatives have not fought for a defense budget that would maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century. We aim to change this.

We are living off the capital--both the military investments and the foreign policy achievements--built up by past administrations. Cuts in foreign affairs and defense spending, inattention to the tools of statecraft, and inconstant leadership are making it increasingly difficult to sustain American influence around the world. As a consequence, we are jeopardizing the nation's ability to meet present threats and to deal with potentially greater challenges that lie ahead.

We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan Administration's success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges.

We need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;