Click photo to enlarge
Vice President Dick Cheney listens to a question during an
interview at the White House in Washington. Photo Ron
Edmonds/AP.
Vice President Dick Cheney says that he sees no reason
for President George W Bush to pre-emptively pardon anyone at
the CIA involved in harsh interrogations of suspected
terrorists.
"I don't have any reason to believe that anybody in the
agency did anything illegal," he said.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Cheney also said
that Bush has no need to apologise for not foreseeing the
economic crisis.
"I don't think he needs to apologise. I think what he needed
to do is take bold, aggressive action and he has," Cheney
said. "I don't think anybody saw it coming."
During a wide-ranging interview in his West Wing office,
Cheney also said Iran remains at the top of the list of
foreign policy challenges that President-elect Barack Obama
will face.
He said an "irresponsible withdrawal" from Iraq now would be
ill-advised.
And he said he's convinced that North Korea helped Syria
build a reactor - a site that Israel suspected of being a
nuclear installation and bombed in 2007.
After Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, the
67-year-old Cheney plans to spend time with his wife, Lynne,
their two daughters and six grandchildren. They probably will
split their time between houses in Virginia and their
hometown of Casper, Wyoming.
Cheney said he also may write a book.
An avid fisherman, Cheney said the first place he wants to
fish is the South Fork of the Snake River on the
Wyoming-Idaho border.
Cheney is leaving the White House after a government career
spanning four decades, including stints as defence secretary,
President Gerald R Ford's chief of staff and a longtime
congressman from Wyoming.
The vice president often laughs off talk that he played his
role as second-in-command to Bush like a wizard, controlling
the levers of the presidency from behind the scenes. Still,
Cheney will go down in history as one of the most influential
vice presidents in US history.
During the interview, he strongly defended the
administration's terrorist-fighting policies.
Cheney said the administration rightly used programs to
intercept communications of suspected terrorists and used
tough methods to interrogate high-value detainees.
He also said he did not have any qualms about the reliability
of intelligence obtained through waterboarding - an
interrogation technique simulating drowning used on three top
al Qaeda operatives in 2002 and 2003.
