Remember that point in the vice presidential debate when Lieberman said, "Well, you've done pretty well over the last eight years"? And Cheney said, "Yeah, well, the government had nothing to do with it," and it got big applause. If Lieberman had only said, "Are you joking?" That was a point that made Cheney look good and Joe kind of wimped out. Because Halliburton is just awash in government contracts.
Cheney was not chosen [to be Halliburton's CEO] because he knew anything about the oil business; he was chosen because he'd been secretary of defense and got to know all those guys in the Middle East during the Gulf War. So the government had everything to do with Cheney. I mean, Halliburton owns Brown & Root. I've done a lot of USO tours in the last several years, and every year I've gone, I've gone to Kosovo, to Camp Bondsteel. Brown & Root, which is a Halliburton subsidiary, has been contracted by the Defense Department to build Camp Bondsteel ... the point is that a lot of Cheney's money came from the government.
There were a million places during the campaign where the election should have been won. But the biggest of them should have been, "Hey, look what we've done the last eight years." I mean, if [Gore's] going to get the schmutz from Clinton, he should also get credit for the good stuff.
What sort of material do you do on the USO tours? Is it political?
I do some. It depends on when I'm doing it. The last one I did was in October, about a month after 9/11, and we were just beginning to engage in Afghanistan. So I was doing a lot of very dark humor. I told this joke in Kosovo -- I asked the commander first if I could do the joke. I told him the joke, and he laughed and said, "Sure." The joke was this: "You know, we Americans back in America were all very concerned during the fighting here in Kosovo about taking casualties. And in a way I think it restricted what you guys could do. Now, fortunately, there were no combat casualties here in Kosovo. But you'll be happy to know that since 9/11, Americans are now willing to take casualties in Kosovo." And they just thought that was hilarious. And those guys were aware that the No. 1 rule had been: Don't get killed here. Now that had changed: If one of you guys gets killed, it's OK.
I was reading the transcript of your talk at the National Press Club in February in which, surprisingly, you come out in support of torture.
Yes. [Laughs.]
That's going to be a surprise to a lot of people.
It surprised some people. You know, I live in New York and I feel strongly about the World Trade Center. I do. And I think that there's an argument to be made that if you save a lot of lives, that it might be OK to torture someone. There's different ways to do it. One is to give them to another country.
Let someone else get their hands dirty?
Or tell them that we're doing that. That seems to be the acceptable way to do it -- which is psychological torture, I guess. Tell the person, "Well, we're giving you to the Israelis and they're going to interrogate you." And I think they're doing that with the top-ranking al-Qaida guy [now in custody]. They're telling him stuff that makes him think he's going to be tortured, as opposed to actually torturing him. But you know, [the remark at the National Press Club] was meant to be a provocative joke.
How did it go over?
It didn't go over so great, 'cause that was sort of a lefty crowd. It was the National Press Club, but a lot of the people who came to the luncheon were affiliated with the organization I was speaking on behalf of [the National Community Reinvestment Coalition]. I wanted to mix things up.
But I'm a little on the fence on it. I know we don't want to become the people we're torturing, but on the other hand you can definitely write a scenario in which anyone would torture somebody: They know when the nuclear bomb's going to go off. Where? In Manhattan. And you have to get the information in an hour.
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