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Cheney on Osama and Gitmo
![]() Cheney: "We've got a pretty good idea of the general area that [Osama's] in, but I -- you know, I don't have the street address." RELATEDYOUR E-MAIL ALERTSWASHINGTON (CNN) -- Vice President Dick Cheney sat down with CNN's Wolf Blizter on Thursday. Wolf asked the vice president about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the controversy over the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and the war on terror's impact on global opinion of the United States. Here's an excerpt of Wolf's exclusive interview with the vice president. WOLF BLITZER: Let's talk about Porter Goss, the CIA director. He says he has an "excellent idea" where Osama bin Laden is hiding out. Do you? DICK CHENEY: We've got a pretty good idea of the general area that he's in, but I -- you know, I don't have the street address. BLITZER: Well, what is the general area. In fact it's been widely reported to be ... CHENEY: I don't talk -- I don't -- I don't ... BLITZER: ... somewhere along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. CHENEY: I don't talk about intelligence matters. BLITZER: But it's not Iran.... CHENEY: I'm... BLITZER: The vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee... CHENEY: Wolf ... I don't talk about classified information. BLITZER: You don't want to get into that. CHENEY: Correct. BLITZER: But any assessment of if is he going to be caught soon, not so soon? Any idea when? CHENEY: What, do you expect me to say? Three weeks from next Tuesday? (Laughter.) I'm convinced eventually we'll get him. I know for a fact that we've made significant inroads in his organization. We have captured and killed many of his fellow travelers ... more recently a man named Abu Faraj al-Libbi, who was the new No. 3 man in the organization. We've been, I think, enormously successful against al Qaeda. We've still got a lot to do, because it's a tough, resilient organization, and they're still out there trying to find ways to attack us. BLITZER: A few other quick questions before we end this interview. Should Gitmo -- the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center -- be shut down, the detainees moved elsewhere? CHENEY: No. BLITZER: Because? CHENEY: Because it's a vital facility. The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb-makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of al Qaeda and the Taliban. We've screened everybody we had. We had some 800 people down there. We've screened them all, and we've let go those that we deemed not to be a continuing threat. But the 520-some that are there now are serious, deadly threats to the United States, for the most part. If you let them out, they'll go back to trying to kill Americans. BLITZER: Nobody said let them out, but move them to Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, or someplace like that. CHENEY: Why would you do that? BLITZER: Because of the reputation that ... CHENEY: The treatment they're getting -- they got a brand new facility down at Guantanamo. We spent a lot of money to build it. They're very well treated down there. They're living in the tropics. They're well fed. They've got everything they could possible want. There isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people. BLITZER: The Pew Charitable Trust has a poll that's coming out today that suggests that in much of the world, communist China has a more favorable image right now than the United States of America does. Should Americans care about that? CHENEY: I think we need to be guided by our principles. I think we need to make firm decisions about what we need to do and carry through and do those. I think we have in fact been successful at that. And I frankly don't spend a lot of time, Wolf, reading polls. I couldn't do my job if I spent as much time on polls as you do.
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