Cheney: Obama compromises U.S. security

WASHINGTON, May 21 (UPI) -- Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney attacked President Barack Obama's terrorism policy Thursday and defended Bush administration interrogation methods.

"To the very end of our administration ... we focused on getting (al-Qaida) secrets instead of sharing ours with them -- and on our watch, they never hit this country again," Cheney told the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank, minutes after Obama defended his terrorism approach in a speech at the U.S. National Archives building.

Cheney said the Obama administration gave "less than half the truth" when it released information about Bush administration tactics -- tactics that Cheney said were approved by members of Congress, including current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

"The released memos were carefully redacted to leave out references to what our government learned through the methods in question," Cheney said. "Other memos, laying out specific terrorist plots that were averted, apparently were not even considered for release. For reasons the administration has yet to explain, they believe the public has a right to know the method of the questions, but not the content of the answers."

To call "enhanced interrogation" techniques to extract information from captured accused terrorists "a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims," Cheney said.

"What's more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future is unwise in the extreme," he said. "It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness, and would make the American people less safe."

He described the Obama administration as priding itself "on searching for some kind of middle ground in policies addressing terrorism."

"But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed," he said. "You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States; you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States."