Transcript of Cheney Interview

ByABC News
November 29, 2001, 6:02 PM

Nov. 29 -- ABCNEWS' Diane Sawyer interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney about the hunt of Osama bin Laden, the war against terrorism and the authorization of military tribunals to try noncitizen terrorist suspects. Following is an unedited transcript of the interview.

ABCNEWS' DIANE SAWYER Do we have intelligence now that we really trust? In other words, do we have any intelligence that is taking us closer to bin Laden?

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY I think so. We're getting a lot of reports now, more than we got before. The volume has increased. And some of them conflict, but truly what's happened is we've narrowed the amount of space inside Afghanistan that he feels safe in.

SAWYER Do you believe he's in Tora Bora?

CHENEY I think he's still in Afghanistan. I think he's probably in that general area.

SAWYER Why do you think he's still there?

CHENEY Because I think he was equipped to go to ground there. He's got what he believes to be fairly secure facilities, caves underground. It's an area he's familiar with. He operated there back during the war against the Soviets in the '80s. He's got a large number of fighters with him probably, a fairly secure personal security force that he has some degree of confidence in, and he'll have to he may try to leave, that is, he may depart for other territory, but that's not quite as easy as it would have been a few months ago. Anybody who contemplates providing sanctuary for bin Laden at this point has to keep in mind what happened to the Taliban when they did that.

SAWYER Have we seen, those infrared sensors showed up a lot of people in any caves?

CHENEY We followed, with our various intelligence assets, some of it's human reporting, some of it comes from imagery and so forth. We're able to follow groups moving around inside Afghanistan to zero in on certain facilities, where we've had considerable success hitting particular facilities where we thought there were leaders of al Qaeda, and we've clearly been able to hit a number of them. But he doesn't travel around with certainly the big banners saying "I'm Osama bin Laden." This is a guy who has gotten very good at security, who's been through a lot over the years in terms of understanding our capability and our strengths, and so he works very hard at preserving his security, and so far he's been successful, although not fully successful because we've gotten so many facilities.

SAWYER We'll come back to that in a moment. Does he travel with enough people that they hole up inside the caves?

CHENEY I can't say that. Some of these caves are very deep, go back a very long way, some of them with fairly elaborate structures, and there are a lot of them, so and there have been times, I'm convinced, where he hasn't been in the caves, where he's stayed in homes. He's moved around, and but it's, you know, if we knew precisely where he was, we'd go get him. We've got a general idea, and I think, as I say, the volume of reporting has increased as his circumstances have become more difficult.

SAWYER Want to give us the square footage on the general idea?

CHENEY No, I can't do that really. I wouldn't want to be that precise and be misleading.

SAWYER Why not just go in and bomb the mouths of all the caves in that region?

CHENEY We have in fact done exactly that in many areas. We have had an active campaign under way to take out some of these underground facilities.

SAWYER You talked about intelligence being more refined now. What kinds of things have we learned that are new to us?

CHENEY I think we can think about intelligence in this conflict that's different. I think we've done a better job of tying together all of our platforms of the people on the ground. We clearly were very good in the Gulf War with certain precision-guided munitions, but now we have a much higher percentage of our weapons are precision-guided munitions. And to use those effectively, you have to have intelligence on the targets as to actually where they're located. We've done a much better job in terms of being able to fly the Predator, for example. This whole area, unmanned area of vehicles, that we can launch, keep up for hours, and have the capacity to intercept various kinds of signals as well as getting visual images of what's going on the ground and carry that by satellite back to remote locations clear outside the theater, and let us bring to bear assets, call in airstrikes. That kind of capability is much more impressive than ever before. This really goes to the area of tactical intelligence, battlefield intelligence, and let's us apply it effectively.

SAWYER And when you say we've gotten some of his key operatives, there was one report that we had an intelligence chief and a communications chief captured. True, not true?

CHENEY I haven't been able to confirm that yet. We do in fact have reporting of that, but I haven't been able to confirm it yet.

SAWYER And Sheik Rahman, known as the blind sheik, the man who is imprisoned here in this country and who is allegedly responsible for bombing attempts here, we have his son?

CHENEY His son. And again

SAWYER Yes?

CHENEY that report comes from the Northern Alliance. I think it's a credible report, but we don't have final absolute confirmation on our side yet, but I think it's probably fairly credible.

SAWYER Well, what will be done with him? Will we ask that he be

CHENEY Well, right now he's being held by the Northern Alliance. We have been involved. We've got people on the ground who are helping interrogate and screen these folks that are being held. We are obviously interested in people that are part of the al Qaeda network, people who may have knowledge of where bin Laden is, people who may in fact have knowledge of future terrorist attacks planned against the United States, but there are a lot of reasons why we want to know what they know. And so we've got a process under way and we've got teams actively involved in trying to find out as much as we can from the prisoners that are being captured, as well as, for example, going into these sites where we've found papers, laboratories, evidence of the kinds of activities that they've been engaged in. All of that intelligence is very valuable to us.

SAWYER But will you be pushing to bring him here?

CHENEY I'm not that concerned about bringing him here. I would like to know, obviously I think all of us would involved in the effort, like to know what he knows about the al Qaeda operation and especially, of course, we're interested in people who have knowledge about pending operations or plans for future operations. That's very important to us.

SAWYER Might he be the first of the military tribunals?

CHENEY The president will have to make that decision clearly. The tribunals have been established. We've got work under way in the Justice Department and in the Defense Department to write the rules and regulations that will cover them. The president will make a decision on each case, but clearly a high-ranking al Qaeda official captured in Afghanistan, who's been involved in the organization is exactly the kind of individual that the tribunals were established for.

SAWYER I think a lot of people who have watched you over the years and who know you have wondered and not to debate historically what happened with closed and secret tribunals, and not to debate its international consequence or anything else, but they simply wonder, as you watch this happening and I think just today there is a report that we're now going to use visa leverage in order to get people to give up information about people around them, which again causes another degree of at least watchfulness among civil rights group. Anything at all about this give you pause?

CHENEY Well, I think anybody, Diane, who has gone back and looked at history, and who understands the nature of the threat we face today and the kind of problem we're all of a sudden up against as of Sept. 11 would conclude, as the president did, as I have, as the attorney general has, this is a perfectly reasonable and responsible way to go. Military tribunals are well established in American history. They were used by Washington in the Revolution, they were used in the Mexican War, they were used during the Civil War by Lincoln and to try Lincoln's assassins, they were used by FDR during World War II.