Rand Paul Blasts Dick Cheney: 'Someone Should Have Been Removed From Office' For Pre-9/11 Failures

6/18/13 - Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) appeared on CNN's The Situation Room on Tuesday evening where he was asked to respond to former Vice President Dick Cheney who told Fox News Channel's Chris Wallace that the junior Kentucky senator was wrong when he criticized the NSA's surveillance programs. Paul tore into the Bush administration's role in the establishment of the post-9/11 security regime, noting that he thinks it is possible to catch terrorists using methods consistent with the Constitution.

Cheney told the Fox News Sunday host that Paul was incorrect in his criticisms of the NSA's communications monitoring programs. The former vice president said that Congress authorized the post-9/11 counterterror programs and there is nothing illegal about them.

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"What I would ask is who did they fire after 9/11?" Paul asked. "Not one person was fired."

"Do you remember the '20th hijacker'?" he continued. "[Zacarias] Moussaoui, captured a month in advance? The FBI agent wrote 70 letters asking, 'let's look at this guy's computer.' In the FBI, they turned him down."

"It wasn't that they couldn't get a warrant, nobody asked for a warrant," Paul added. "To me, that was really, really bad intelligence -- really bad police work -- and, really, someone should have been removed from office for that."

"Instead they said, 'Oh, we need to look at the records of all the innocent Americans' phone calls," he observed. "I think you can catch terrorists and have protections of our freedoms at the same time."