Ridge, Cheney Assail Holder's Decision to Investigate CIA Officials

Aug. 31, 2009— -- Officials from the Bush administration this week entered the debate over national security, although President Obama's administration was not the only one criticized.

While former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's new book, "The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege ... And How We Can Be Safe Again," raised questions about whether some national security decisions by various Bush administration officials were based on political, and not counterterrorism, concerns, former Vice President Dick Cheney took to the airwaves to assail Obama's commitment to making the nation safe.

On Sunday Cheney spoke in his preferred venue, Fox News, and said that Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to allow a preliminary review into whether any CIA officers crossed the line in their interrogations of detainees was "outrageous."

Ridge backed Cheney this morning on "Good Morning America," and told Diane Sawyer, "I think he's right, pure and simple. It's wrong, it's chilling, and it's inappropriate."

Even though Ridge said he believed waterboarding was wrong and that it "wasn't the appropriate way for America to be conducting itself," the former Pennsylvania governor said that "to suggest four or five years later what they [CIA officers] did was criminal -- I think that's criminal."

In his book, Ridge suggested that the Bush administration's warrantless-wiretapping program was unconstitutional, and he wrote of a time shortly before the 2004 election when some in the administration pushed for the terror-threat level to be raised. He said he wasn't sure whether their concerns were based on politics or national security.

After noting a Cornell University study indicating that Bush's approval rating between 2001 and 2004 "increased by nearly three percentage points each time the government issued a terror alert," Ridge recalled the Oct. 29, 2004, video message from Osama bin Laden, at a time when Bush led Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in the polls "by no more than two or three points."