Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that the next terrorist attack on the US will be far worse than 9/11 during a nearly two-hour interview. He also took pride in the use of waterboarding and in giving the National Security Agency free reign.
The 73-year-old sat down with neoconservative political pundit Bill Kristol on Sunday for the Weekly Standard editor’s latest installment of Conversations with Bill Kristol. The two discussed Cheney’s time as secretary of defense; the Gulf War; the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations; 9/11; and the threats we face today.
“You’ve got to be a fool to believe isolation as a strategy is the way to go. We have no choice but to be involved in that part of the world, and if we’re not actively involved, there are some very bad things that are going to happen,” Cheney warned.
He believes that if the Iranians get nuclear weapons, it won’t be long before others in the region also have nuclear weapons, hinting that the deadly weapons could fall into the heads of the Islamic State or Syria.
“So we’re in a very dangerous period. I think it’s more threatening than the period before 9/11,” the former vice president explained. “I think 9/11 will turn out to be not nearly as bad as the next mass casualty attack against the United States, which if and when it comes will be something far more deadlier than airline tickets and box cutters.”
Doomsday predictions are nothing new for the man who served under three different presidential administrations.
“While headlines about the Islamic State terrorist group given Cheney new material to work with, he’s preached the need for American troops in the Middle East and predicted an eventual, epic U.S. attack for more than a decade,” Bloomberg Politics noted.
Even Cheney admitted to Kristol that he has often prognosticated on future threats.
“I gave an interview in the spring of ’01 where I talked about – I was asked about the biggest threat facing the country – and I talked about the possibility of a terrorist attack with terrorists using something deadlier, a weapon of mass destruction, for example,” he said. “That was in April.” When we got down to 9/11… we saw what they were able to do with that in terms of taking down the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and killing 3,000 of our people.”