In My Time - Dick Cheney [277]
For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings. And when the moral reckoning turns to the men known as high-value terrorists, I can assure you they were neither innocent nor victims. As for those who asked them questions and got answers: they did the right thing, they made our country safer, and a lot of Americans are alive today because of them.
In my long political career I had seen politicians run for the hills when things got tough, trying to distance themselves from those on the ground when subpoenas started arriving. I had no intention of turning my back on honorable public servants. To the contrary, I counted it a privilege to speak in their defense.
Two years later, as I write in the spring of 2011, I am happy to note that for President Obama the “imperative” of closing Guantanamo has evolved into the necessity of keeping it open. The memos I asked for were eventually released. They are available on the Internet, and I used them in writing this book.
On May 1, 2011, President Obama announced that we had located and killed Osama bin Laden in a compound an hour or so outside Islamabad, Pakistan. Through years of hard work by our intelligence professionals and our military, we were able to track down the world’s most wanted terrorist. It was a moving day for all Americans, and President Obama deserves credit for making the call to send our special forces in to act on the intelligence. He should honor all the brave Americans who helped make this mission possible, including the men and women of the CIA interrogation program, who obtained some of the intelligence we relied on to find bin Laden. They do not deserve to be the targets of ongoing investigations and possible prosecution. They deserve to be decorated.
The exchange I had with the president in the spring of 2009 was an unexpected detour. There were plenty of younger Republican leaders to carry on in the cause, and I hardly aspired to be Barack Obama’s principal adversary. I also had a book to get moving on and a few other concerns that wouldn’t wait.
One of them was a new turn in some old health issues. I’d had an amazing run since my first heart attack in 1978. All along the way I had benefited from advances in medical research and technology—and fabulous doctors. After my fourth heart attack in 2000, my cardiologist, Dr. Jonathan Reiner of George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., advised that I have an implantable cardioverterdefibrillator, or ICD, placed in my chest. It’s a device that shocks the heart back to normal rhythm if necessary. Mine didn’t go off for the eight years I was in office, but around Christmas 2009, while I was backing my car out of the garage of our house in Wyoming, everything went blank. I had gone into ventricular fibrillation. Somebody else would likely be telling the story right now if the ICD hadn’t kicked in to do exactly what it’s supposed to do.
By the summer of 2010, I was rapidly descending into end-stage heart failure. Dr. Reiner recommended that I consider a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD, which is essentially a battery-operated pump that helps the heart push blood to the body. I entered Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Virginia, which has an outstanding LVAD program, on July 6 for surgery two days later, but declined so rapidly that the doctors decided they needed to go in right away. In long overnight surgery, the LVAD was implanted.
It was not easy surgery and I was in the intensive care unit for many weeks. I received wonderful medical attention and love and care from Lynne, Liz, and Mary. The mind is an amazing thing, and during the weeks I was unconscious, I had a prolonged dream, more vivid than any I’ve ever had, about a beautiful place in Italy. It was in the countryside, a little north of Rome, and it really seemed I was there. I can still describe the villa where I passed the time, the little