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WASHINGTON

Cheney said the Bush White House had been justified in expanding executive authority across a broad range of policy, including the war in Iraq, treatment of suspected terrorists and the home wiretapping program.

And he declared the president “doesn’familiarily have to check with anybody”

The vice president also keenly criticized Vice President-elect Joseph Biden, offering a pointed response when asked about Biden’s plans to operate differently from him as vice president and about Biden’s note during the vice-presidential debate that Cheney had been “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had in American account.”

“If he wants to grow the act of worship of vice president, that’s obviously his call,” Cheney reported of Biden in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

He added that President-elect Obama “will decide what he wants in a defect president. And apparently, from the way they’re talking about it, he does not expect him to have as consequential a role as I have had during my time.”

It was the second meeting the normally media-averse vice president granted in a week.

When asked about another make comments Biden made during the vice-presidential debate, Cheney reported the vice president-elect “can’t keep straight which article of the Constitution provides for the legislature, which provides for the executive.”

There is ample historical precedent, Cheney said, for the Bush direction’s policies.

“If you think from one place to another what Abraham Lincoln did for the time of the Civil War, the kind of FDR did for the time of World War II. They went far beyond anything we’ve done in a global war on terror,” the vice president related. “But we have exercised, I think, the legitimate authority of the president under Article II of the Constitution as commander in chief in order to put in fortress policies and programs that have successfully defended the community.”

Cheney also said the Supreme Court was “tort” to be superior to the Bush administration’s initial wit of detaining suspected terrorists without granting them access to the protections of the Geneva Convention or granting them the right to challenge their detention.

And he reported he forcibly disagreed with Bush’s firmness to fire Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary, saying, “he did a good work at jobs for us.”

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008547515_cheney22.html?syndication=rss