ny b9 farmer misc- wh 2 of 3 fdr- 5-19-02 tony snow-fox news sunday interview of cheney 464

8/14/2019 NY B9 Farmer Misc- WH 2 of 3 Fdr- 5-19-02 Tony Snow-Fox News Sunday Interview of Cheney 464

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Fox News SundayMay 19, 2002

TONY SNOW, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: September 11: What did ourgovernment know, and why didn't anybody do anything aboutit? The bipartisan war on terror is giving way to politicalwarfare in Washington.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

G E O R G E W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: YOU know,what's interesting about Washington, it's the kind of placewhere second- guessing has become second nature.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SNOW: We'll cover the issues with our special guests, Vice

President Dick Cheney and House Minority Leader Richard

Gephardt .

Plus Brit Hume, Mara Liasson, Fred Barnes and MortKondracke with words of wisdom.

Good morning, and welcome to Washington.

Partisan fisticuffs broke out this week in the nation'scapital, marking the end of bipartisanship in the war onterror. The question: Did bureaucratic bungling preventintelligence officials from predicting and foiling the

September 11 attacks? And what about reports that Al Qaedais planning further mayhem? We'll get answers from VicePresident Dick Cheney.

Mr. Vice President, welcome.

DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Goodmorning .

SNOW: Is Al Qaeda planning to strike American targets?

CHENEY: We assume they are. There is certainly a level ofnoise out there in the system that would indicate thatthose efforts are continuing.

There's a great temptation, Tony, for people to look backat September 11 and say, well, we haven't been hit in eightmonths, therefore the threats have ceded or gone away. I

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don't think that's the case at all. I think that theprospects of a future attack on the U.S. are almost acertainty. It could happen tomorrow, it could happen nextweek, it could happen next year, but they will keep trying.And we have to be prepared.

SNOW: Do we have any sense of potential targets? Will theybe, for instance, modes of conveyance, transportation,trains, planes?

CHENEY: No, you can't, if you look back over the reportingover the last several months, all of the above plus. Imean, at one time or another, there is informationcollected or that comes to our attention that suggestsevery imaginable conveyance, type of facility, building,geographic location. A lot of it turns out to be falsereporting. A lot of it, I think, may be attributed toefforts to deliberately off obfuscate. In other cases, it'snuts. It's, you know, people who want, for some reason, toengage in that kind of activity.

When we think about Al Qaeda and their operations, probablyonly a handful of people who actually know what's going tohappen. Even in the September 11 attack, there is somesuggestion that some of the people who were actually on theplanes, some of the hijackers, did not know it was asuicide mission. One of the bin Laden tapes, for example,hinted at this possibility.

So if they can keep the people who actually are carryingout the attack in the dark, then obviously the extent towhich you can get access to find out the details of theoperation is very limited and it's very hard. We don't get-- you know, nobody mails in a plan that says, you know,"12 noon on August 14, we're going to do X." It's bits andpieces. It's a little bi t here, little bi t there. Sometimescommunication, sometimes walk-in traffic. It's just -- it'sa very tough task to sort it all out.

SNOW: If you were giving advice to Americans right now

about what they should be on the lookout for, what shouldthey look for?

CHENEY: Stay vigilant. Watch for things that are out of theordinary or unusual. Go on about your lives. We've got todo that. We can't shut down the country because of thepossibility of another attack. The terrorists win if they

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shut down our country and don't even attack; just simply doit based on the threat.

We're doing everything we can with the Homeland SecurityOffice and the effor ts that are under way to make us atougher target. And I think we've, in fact, had significantsuccess there.

But the important thing for people to remember, from astrategic standpoint, if you will, it's almost impossibleto erect a 100 percent perfect defense. The Israelis havegot maybe the best intelligence service in the world.They've got a very narrow target to focus on,geographically and in terms of who their adversaries are. .And yet, suicide bombers get through. So after you've doneeverything you can, you can still have to assume you mayget hit.

And the ultimate answer, of course, here is to go destroythe terrorists, to go on offense as well as defense. Andwe're doing that too.

SNOW: Are we planning to ratchet up the level of ourmilitary offensive so that we can try, once and for all, toget Osama bin Laden.

CHENEY: Well, it's not, in my opinion, so much ratchetingup. I mean, it's a sustained effort over time. We're doingeverything we can right now in Afghanistan and working

other potential locales around the world. We're workingthroughout the Middle East and Southeast Asia, variousplaces where the organization has cells. But getting Osamabin Laden, which obviously we'd love to do, nonethelessdoesn't solve our problem.

SNOW: We haven't gotten him, have we?

CHENEY: We don't know. At this point, we don't have anyevidence that we have.

CHENEY: We don't know. At this point, we don't have anyevidence that we have.

SNOW: Last August 6, the president got a briefin g, andamong the other items discussed was the possibility that AlQaeda would hijack jets. It's now known that for yearspeople had been assuming that Al Qaeda might be hijacking

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jets and flying them into buildings someplace.

Why didn't we connect the dots?

CHENEY: Well, I think if you go back -- first of all, putthe briefing in context. Every day the president and I andour other senior...

SNOW: So you were in this meeting, correct?

CHENEY: I was actually in Wyoming at the time, but I gotthe same briefing. It's a written -- written briefing. Itcovers the world. It deals with all kinds of issues. Aportion of which, from time to time, deals with threatsagainst the United States.

And I've gone back and looked at that particular issue ofAugust 6, and even after the fact, it didn't give us any

actionable intelligence. It basically was based on earlierreporting. There wasn't anything really knew in it. Theidea of hijacking by terrorists, that goes back 30 years.The PLO was doing that in the 1970s. The idea that Al Qaedawas after us wasn't new. We'd seen the USS Cole attack,East Africa bombings.

So there was -- it sort of pulled things together in thesense that it reviewed the bidding, but it didn't reallygive us anything knew or anything precise or specific. Itdid not talk about hitting buildings. It did not talk about

time, location or anything like that. It was one more sortof rehash, if you will, of the material that was out there.

S N O W: S o . . .

CHENEY: From that standpoint, it doesn't give you anythingyou could have acted on.

SNOW: So when Senator Richard Shelby said that, based oninformation we had available plus that particular briefing,we might have been able to prevent September 11, he waswrong? CHENEY: My assessment -- and it's only an assessmentat this point, obviously -- is that there wasn't anythingout there that would have allowed us to predict what wasgoing to happen. We found out since September 11 that theFBI had Moussaoui in custody in Minnesota. We didn't knowthat before the llth. That didn't trickle up to thepresidential level.

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We've since heard about the so-called Phoenix memo that] dates back to sometime in July, but again that didn't come

up.

You had -- what the PDB is, is it's sort of the tip of theiceberg.

SNOW: Presidential daily brief?

CHENEY: President's daily brief. And it will deal witheverything from the outlook for an election in LatinAmerica to the Russian negotiating position on an importanttreaty -- assessments trying to give the presidentinformation he needs to do his job.

In terms of getting down into the nitty gritty, into theweeds of this kind of intelligence reporting, you know,we're not in the habit of reading the raw intelligencereports from the FBI. There are 56 bureaus around thecountry, and that stuff -- there aren't enough hours in theday for us to do all of that, so you need a system thatdeals with it.

"^ SNOW: Senator Arlen Specter wants to see that presidential./ daily brief. You going to turn it over?

CHENEY: My strong feeling is that we should not.

SNOW: Why?

CHENEY: Because it comes from the most sensitive sources and methods that we have as a government. It's the familyjewels, from that perspective. And the thing we need morethan anything else to defeat terror is intelligence. Weneed to be able to know what the bad guys are doing, and weacquire that information from a variety of sources andtechniques.

I know with absolute certainty that our target is toughertoday. It's more difficult to penetrate those organizations

today. It's more difficult to know what they're doingbecause of previous leaks, previous disclosures, withrespect to...

S N O W: Such as?

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CHENEY: ... sources and methods. If I talk about them, thenI validate a specific piece of action. One in particularthat I'm familiar with of a story that was published in oneof our major newspapers, it subsequently led to the deathof an individual who had provided us access to one of theterrorist organizations.

SNOW: S o . . . CHENEY: It's a very real concern that if we'regoing to deal with the next attack -- and we started thismorning talking about the prospects of another attack --the last thing we want to do is to go out and lay out onthe record now our capabilities in terms of how we collectinformation.

We got to work with the intelligence committees. They cansafeguard classified intelligence. We're doing that. We'respending a lot of time now working with the jointcommittees to help them understand.

We want an investigation. We want to know what happened inthe run-up to August 6. It's a valuable lesson to thefuture. But it's absolutely essential that we do it in away that protects and preserves our capabilities to dealwith security in classified information.

SNOW: Let me back up, I also want to go over some of thethings you just mentioned.

From an intelligence standpoint, are we better off today

than we were on September 10?

CHENEY: Ye s .

SNOW: We are. How about a year ago?

CHENEY: I think so. I think we made a number ofimprovements that mean that we're better able to deal withthis problem today than we were previously.

SNOW: How about in terms of our ability, however, topenetrate the very organizations we are trying at thispoint to penetrate?

CHENEY: Well, let me see, I'm not trying to think of how todescribe this without crossing over the line and notviolating my own deeply held convictions that you shouldn'ttalk about classified information.

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CHENEY: Since September 11, in terms of our ability tocollect overseas, I think we have strengthened ourrelationships with a number of liaison services and that,because of the cooperative venture that's under way, thatwe're getting more now, more valuable stuff.

I think we're much better here at home now. DirectorMueller is doing an excellent job of reforming the FBI andgetting it focused more on prevention of the next attack ,rather than prosecutio n of the last one.

We meet every morning in the Oval Office . The president andI sit down with the director of the FBI and the director ofCentral Intelligence, so everything gets tied together atthat level.

So we're doing better in those respects.

By the same token, when we get a lot of disclosures, if youwill, there is no question but what our adversary learnshow to change their operations so that they're more secure,so that it's a difficult target for us to track. And wehave not had good, hard data on Osama bin Laden now forseveral months.

SNOW: All right. If Congress then does ask for thispresidential daily brief, your strong recommendation is tosay "We won't do it" and cite executive privilege?

CHENEY: It's not my decision to make...

SNOW: That's right, but your recommendation?

CHENEY: ... but my recommendation would be no. I think weought to be prepared to discuss it maybe with the chairmanand ranking members. Maybe there's some way we can work outan arrangement there, so they can know what they think theyneed to know with respect to their investigation.

But the idea that we're now going to bundle up the PDB andship it up to the committees, that's never been done, itsets a terrible precedent.

It'll have another effec t as well, too. If we're going totake the PDB that goes to the president and now it's goingto be made available to Congress -- they get a different

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version that covers some of the same ground, but i t 's

somewhat sanitized -- it's going to go to the Congress, andit's going to end up in the press, it will have a chillingeffect on the people who prepare the PDB. They'll spendmore time worried about how the report's going to look onthe front page of The Washington Post or on Fox News thanthey will making their best judgment and taking risk and

giving us the best advice they can, in terms of what theythink's going on. Because they're always having to fill inholes. You never have a complete picture.

SNOW: Do you also, therefore, oppose a proposal by SenatorsMcCain and Lieberman that there be a special commissionempaneled, an independent commission, to take a look atintelligence failures prior to September 11?

CHENEY: I do . I think it's the wrong way to go. We've gotan ongoing investigation now. We've got the House and

Senate intelligence committees working jointly, it'sbipartisan, one's chaired by a Republican, one by aDemocrat, made up of members of both bodies. They've gotthe staff to deal with these kinds of matters. They've gotthe processes and procedures to safeguard classifiedinformation. We've given them over 180,000 pages ofdocuments so far in their investigation. They've alreadyinterviewed 184 individuals.

So there is a robust investigation under way, but it'sbeing done by an organization that we have confidence inhas some possibility of safeguarding the information...

(CROSSTALK) " "-

SNOW: Should Congress also investigate its performanceprior to September 11?

CHENEY: That's another whole proposition. I wouldn't couchit in those terms. I think we have a need to improve ourinstitutional performance in many areas, and that's one ofthe key lessons out of this. And Congress obviously bearssome responsibility for the current state of thebureaucracy.

But we want to work with them, we want to improve theperformance of the executive branch. But it's got to bedone in a careful way that safeguards our ability toprevent the next attack, not sacrifice that capability to

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CHENEY: No. My comment was a cautionary note, and I wasvery careful up front to say we want an investigation. It's

j got to be conducted in a responsible fashion. We have tosafeguard secrets, et cetera. I said all those things.

I also cautioned the Congress against incendiary statementsdesigned to achieve some political advantage. Because, infact, there is the very real possibility of additionalattacks. We need to have our intelligence agencies focusedon preventing those attacks. We need to avoid the kinds ofunauthorized disclosures that have damaged our capacity inthe past to deal with these problems.

And that was the sum and substance of my comments. I didn'tmention Congressman Gephardt. He and I have had ourdifferences, obviously. But we've very hard and we'llcontinue to work hard to see to it that it's conducted in aresponsible fashion.

S N O W: You have been described as being on the politicaldefensive since this story appeared. Let me first ask aslightly different question. Do you think it was leakedby... a members of the Congress?

I CHENEY: It was leaked by somebody.j

S N O W: ... members of the Congress?

CHENEY: I have no idea. I don't know who leaked it.

SNOW: Do you feel that you're on the defensive? Or was thespeech Thursday night designed as a preemptive strike, onyour part, to silence Democratic critics?

CHENEY: I don't have any problem with a legitimate debateover the performance of our intelligence agencies, etcetera. I've got a real problem with the suggestion thatsomehow my president had information and failed to act uponit to prevent the attack of September 11. That strikes me -- as long as I've been in this town and as many years asI've been involved at the national level in politics, that

strikes me as beyond the pale. That is an allegation thatis without merit and falls into the category of outrageous.And I was expressing my own personal strong views aboutthat on Thursday night.

S N O W: Final question: Saddam Hussein has said he'd let

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weapons inspectors back. Is it the administration'sposition that he would never accept an inspection regimethat would be acceptable to us and, therefore, the militaryoption is alive even if he lets inspectors back in?

CHENEY: Well, inspectors aren't the issue. They're a means.The issue, though, is that Saddam Hussein has violated,continues to violate the U.N. Resolution 687 that

specifically requires him to get rid of all of his weaponsof mass destruction, biological, chemical and nuclearcapabilities, and that he allow international inspection toverify that. The inspectors are just a means.

He'll probably want to have a big debate about inspectors.But the real issue over here is getting rid of thosematerials that he must get rid of in order to come intocompliance with the U.N. resolution.

SNOW: And changing his regime.

CHENEY: And we think the region would be much more secureand the people of Iraq would be much freer if they hadsomebody else at the helm.

SNOW: Vice President Dick Cheney, thanks for joining us.

CHENEY: Thank you.

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