VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY
October 12, 2001

Vice President Cheney discusses his absence from Washington, the breadth of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network and the loss of America's perceived invulnerability.

 

Online NewsHour Special Report: The Reponse: After the September 11 Terrorist Attacks July 18, 2001: Vice President Cheney examines U.S. energy consumption and conservation. July 2, 2001: Vice President Cheney has a pacemaker implanted. March 12, 2001: Discussion of the ways that Vice President Cheney could redefine the vice president's role. March 5, 2001: Vice President Cheney is hospitalized for chest pains. Aug. 2, 2000: A Newsmaker interview with Dick Cheney. July 26, 2000: A look at Cheney's political voting record Browse past NewsHour coverage of: Congress Military Terrorism   White House Federal Bureau of Investigation Central Intelligence Agency U.S. State Department Justice Department Department of Defense	JIM LEHRER: There was a mixed message question last night, in fact, to the president about you. The question goes like this: Hey, you tell us to go about our business and yet the Vice President of the United States is in a secure location and out of public sight for four days. Does that bother you?
	New precautions for the government
	VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: No, I think it's a reasonable precaution. It's something that we have dealt with in the past by, for example, when there was a State of the Union speech - the president, the vice president, the speaker, the president pro-tem of the Senate all in the Capitol -- we always had one cabinet member who was in the line of succession absent. But now we've reached the point where, especially with Washington targeted as it was on September 11, with the possibility that the White House or the Capitol or other facilities here could be targeted in a terrorist attack - that generally it's not a good practice for the president and I to spend a lot of time together. We had already adopted before September 11 a practice that we never flew together; after the campaign we stopped that. I've never been on Air Force One since he was sworn in as president. Now we also now generally avoid large public gatherings here in Washington, the two of us together; that becomes an enticing target, if you will, for the terrorists, and that it's important from the standpoint of our responsibility to maintain the continuity of government to always see to it that nobody - no adversary or enemy would have the capacity of, in effect, decapitating the federal government by taking out the president and the vice president and other senior management, senior leadership. So frequently we will separate. Now, I'm here this afternoon. The president is headed for Camp David. He'll be up there this weekend; I'll be in Washington. That's a fairly easy one to work out. Next week he'll be traveling to the Far East and I'll be in Washington. It doesn't mean that we never get together. JIM LEHRER: Sure. VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: And when I'm gone, I'm very much in touch, as he is. Tomorrow we'll have a National Security Council meeting. I'll be in the Sit. Room with the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense. The president will be out at Camp David. We'll be all tied together with video conferencing. We have that capacity; there's no reason not to use it, but it's just prudence, if you will, at this stage for us, and minimize the extent to which we're out traveling around, attending events, or always in the same building. JIM LEHRER: Any sympathy for somebody who would say, hey, wait a minute, the government cannot protect the President of the United States and the Vice President of the United States at the same time, and the vice president has to go someplace, to a hiding place somewhere? VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Well, we have secure facilities that have been developed over the years for good and sufficient reasons; they come in handy now at a time like this. But the reality is, Jim, that we lost more people in the Pentagon on September 11 than we had killed in action in the Gulf War, and it happened right here in Washington D.C., in the Pentagon, and the home, the central command post of our Department of Defense. We are vulnerable as a society to people who want to commit suicide during the course of trying to launch that kind of terrorist attack, and the prudent thing for us to do is to take note of that and conduct ourselves accordingly, so that means that the president and I don't spend as much time together as we did in the past. We're in touch all the time; we talk all the time. We did have an NSC meeting together this morning where we were together, so it's not an absolute prohibition; it's just - we'll be pretty fluid and flexible and from time to time we find it necessary to separate. And I think that's still a wise thing to do.
	The sudden emergence of al-Qaida
	JIM LEHRER: Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network. I was struck and others were too that within hours after the attacks on September 11 there were people in the government, officials of the government coming on television programs like ours and saying, oh, yeah, that's Osama bin Laden; he has a network - a terrorist network called al-Qaida - he's got thousands of people all over the world in fifty or sixty countries; they all hate the United States, and are dedicated to our destruction. The question is still hanging out there: Why in the world didn't we do something about it before September 11? VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Well, I think the Clinton administration tried; they weren't successful obviously. But there had been some efforts previously. To that we saw the cruise missile attack after the bombing of the - the embassies in East Africa a few years ago, but clearly they never were successful in prosecuting this to the point where they eliminated Osama bin Laden and his organization. We're going to change that. JIM LEHRER: But do you agree it was kind of common knowledge that this guy was there and he had these people all over the world and all that - and nothing was happening to try to get rid - I don't mean just get Osama bin Laden but his whole network all over the world, fifty, sixty countries -- VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Again, it's a question of priorities, I suppose. I can't -- I wasn't here during those years in terms of when those decisions were made with respect to Osama bin Laden and how aggressively to go after him. It's also fair to say that up till that time, up till September 11, there had never been attack by Osama bin Laden -- as far as we know - that had cost thousands of American lives here at home. So I'm not trying to criticize the prior administration. JIM LEHRER: Sure. VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: The fact that he's been there, that he's been a terrorist engaged in terrorist activities, that he has, in fact, cost us lives overseas -- all of that was known for some considerable period of time.
	Puncturing America's invulnerability
	JIM LEHRER: Based on all your experience in government and your knowledge that you have, that you got before when you were in government and you've had since you've been Vice President of the United States, were you personally surprised that something like that could happen on September 11? VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: I was. I think, like everybody, I -- when I was first saw - was told that a plane had struck the World Trade Center and turned on the television - sat and watched for a few minutes and saw the second plane hit. And it was when the second plane hit that it really registered this is a terrorist attack; it's got to be - it's not an accident - it's a coordinated attack. But I think everybody was surprised by it. I mean, I don't find that unusual at all. JIM LEHRER: Was it because we had a kind of sense of invulnerability in our country that we're the most powerful country in the world and nobody would ever attack us on our home ground - did we all kind of collectively think that, Mr. Vice President? VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: I think we did. I think we -- we had 150 years of experience. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in World War II, it was a territory then, it wasn't a state. But the fact is I thought, like most Americans, that we were relatively invulnerable. There was thing out here called terrorism, and asymmetric warfare and so forth that I've looked at, spoke about, others had as well, too. But a war was something that took place overseas, across the ocean. We might send 500,000 troops to the Gulf to liberate Kuwait or to defend Europe or Korea or Vietnam or conduct operations in Somalia or elsewhere. But we were behind our oceans, behind the Pacific and the Atlantic, and there wasn't really anybody who threatened us, other than the Cold War, and there we dealt with that through deterrence and arms controls treaties and so forth. War had become so horrific when we thought about it in terms of nuclear terms that it didn't seem like it was a very realistic prospect. Now we're faced with a very different situation where we have people who don't have anything to defend. I mean you talk about trying to deter Osama bin Laden - how? What is it that he cares about, other than his own life? He doesn't have any territory to defend. So deterrence doesn't work in a traditional sense. He is able to smuggle material, people, weapons into the United States, or simply send people in to use our own systems, turn our own systems against us, our airliners against our World Trade Center -- and do enormous damage if you can get a few people who are willing to commit suicide during the course of that enterprise. So it's a very different kind of conflict in the 21st century than what we got used to dealing with in the 20th century. And we all have to change, adjust and adapt to that. I think we've got to make the U.S. a harder target; it's got to be tougher to come after us and to attack us here at home than it's ever been before. That's Tom Ridge's job; he's up and running -- and working very aggressively on that. It means we've got to aggressively go after terrorists overseas, because in the end the best defense is a good offense. And that's exactly what we're doing in Afghanistan going after not only Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida - his network that's headquartered there -- but also the country, the government, in effect, in this case the Taliban that hosted and provided the sustenance and support for him. More of the Interview...