King: ..because of a tactic like waterboarding, or a black site. can you say with certainty that you stopped another attempt to something on that level
Cheney: John, I've seen a report that was written based on the intelligence we collected then, that itemized the specific attacks that were stopped by virtue of what we learned through those programs. It's still classified, I can't give you the details of it without violating classification, but I can say there were a great many them. The one that has been public is the one coming out of Heathrow...
The list of outrages in that "interview" is so long it is impossible to itemize them all, but the first that comes to mind is that we have the former Vice President of the United States freely admitting to war crimes on Sunday a Sunday morning news show. The so-called journalist facilitating Cheney's fear fest doesn't even acknowledge the gravity of the admission, King simply treats it as if it is business as usual. Which it was.
So Cheney has his Joseph McCarthy moment where he makes ominous predictions based on secret facts, but King doesn't bother to ask whether Cheney has acted on his secret information to prevent the next attack? If Cheney is so sure this is coming, it would be polite of him to share the details with the rest of us. Does Cheney even still get intelligence briefings?
The interview amounts to John King's Jim Cramer moment. Maybe there is a real journalist like Jon Stewart out there to call him, and CNN, on it.
On edit: I changed the title since it buried the real story.
Update: There is now a story about this interview posted by Jed Lewison on the front page.