Cheney: We Didn't Go Far Enough

Former Vice President Dick Cheney felt that the Bush Administration didn't go far enough in the policies it pursued and that had it not been saddled with a weak commander-in-chief, the policies could have been pushed much further.

"If he'd been equipped with a group of people as ideologically rigorous as he was, they'd have been able to push further," according to an unnamed associate who told the Washington Post that the Vice President expressed these sentiments during talks over a memoir he plans to publish in 2011.

The thwarted policies Cheney referred to included the administration's controversial warrantless surveillance program, its prisoner torture program and the CIA's rendition and secret prisons programs.

"What impressed me was his continuing zeal," a source told the Washington Post. "He hadn't stepped back a bit from the positions he took in office to a more relaxed, Olympian view. He was still very much in the fray. He's not going to soften anything or accommodate shifts of conscience. There was no sense in which he looked back and said, 'I wish I'd done something differently.'"

Cheney blamed President Bush for shackling him and told associates that the president had "gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney's advice," a source told the Post. "He'd showed an independence that Cheney didn't see coming. It was clear that Cheney's doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times -- never apologize, never explain -- and Bush moved toward the conciliatory."

Although Cheney has expressed contempt in the past for those who spilled secrets after leaving a government job, he appears to be intending to do just this in his book.

Robert Barnett, who negotiated Cheney's book contract, passed word to potential publishers that the memoir would be packed with news, and Cheney himself has said, without explanation, that "the statute of limitations has expired" on many of his secrets. "When the president made decisions that I didn't agree with, I still supported him and didn't go out and undercut him," Cheney said, according to Stephen Hayes, his authorized biographer. "Now we're talking about after we've left office. I have strong feelings about what happened. . . . And I don't have any reason not to forthrightly express those views."

Presumably, the secrets Cheney plans to spill won't include disclosing information Congress sought for years from his office -- such as presidential orders related to the domestic surveillance program, which Cheney's lawyer reportedly kept in his office safe, and e-mail communications that might have proved who was really responsible for the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA association had they not mysteriously disappeared.

Photo: AP

See also:

• Senate Democrats Warn Bush Admin Not to Destroy Records