CIA should keep an eye on Dr Khan, says Cheney

WASHINGTON: Former US vice-president Dick Cheney said on Sunday that instead of probing CIA’s interrogation techniques, the Obama administration should use the agency to find what A. Q. Khan was up to.Mr Cheney – an outspoken critic of the Obama administration, particularly on national security issues – took the administration head on in his pre-taped interview to Fox News, calling the investigation of CIA interrogators an ‘outrageous political act’.‘The courts in Pakistan have ruled that A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistan nuclear weapon, who provided assistance to the Iranians, the North Koreans, the Libyans, has now been released from custody,’ Mr Cheney said.‘It’s very, very important we find out and know long-term what he’s up to. He’s so far the worst proliferator of nuclear technology in recent history.’The CIA, he said, had ‘agents and people’ who ought to be on that case and worry about it, but now they would be busy hiring lawyers at their own expense in order to defend themselves.Mr Cheney said the Bush administration started the use of the Predator drones ‘very aggressively’ to target militants hiding in Fata and he was ‘very proud’ of such decisions.‘Marrying up the intelligence platform with weapons is something we started in August of 2001. It’s been enormously successful. And they were successful the other day in killing Baitullah Mehsud, which -- I think all of those are pluses.’President Barack Obama’s decision to investigate CIA agents who carried out those policies, however, would ‘seriously undermine the morale of our folks out at the agency,’ he added. ‘(It would set) a terrible, terrible precedent.’Asked when he was the vice-president, did he know that CIA agents were using mock executions, handguns and electric drills to interrogate the suspects and used waterboarding against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times, Mr Cheney said: ‘I knew about the waterboarding, not specifically in any one particular case but as a general policy that we had approved.’‘Do you think what they did was wrong?’ he was asked.‘My sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives, in preventing further attacks against the United States, in giving us the intelligence we needed to go find Al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed.’Such interrogations, he said, led to the arrest of nearly all Al Qaeda members now in US custody. ‘I think they were directly responsible for the fact that for eight years we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States.’‘It was good policy. It was properly carried out. It worked very, very well,’ he added.‘So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorisation, you’re OK with it?’ he was asked.’ I am,’ said the former vice-president.The US administration, he said, sometimes asks the CIA people to ‘do some very difficult things’ that put their own lives at risk and they ‘do so at the direction of the president.’If those people were subjected to investigation, ‘nobody’s going to sign up for those kinds of missions,’ Mr Cheney warned. ‘It’s a very, very devastating, I think, effect that it has on morale inside the intelligence community.’President Obama’s decision to investigate CIA agents, he said, was a political move with no rationale.Mr Cheney said that only a few months ago, President Obama had assured the CIA that there would not be ‘any look-back’ at those who were carrying out the policies of the previous administration.‘Now they get a little heat from the left wing of the Democratic Party and they’re reversing course on that.’Mr Cheney said that the other thing that ‘offends the hell out of me’, is the possibility that the Obama administration might want to investigate all those who, during the last eight years, were defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaeda.‘I think it’s an outrageous political act that will do great damage long term to our capacity to be able to have people take on difficult jobs, make difficult decisions without having to worry about what the next administration’s going to say about it,’ said Mr Cheney.