Dick Cheney says Iran is top foreign worry.

Construction
West-Press
Printing Mechanical
Komatsu Equipment Co
Resident Field Mechanic Sales and Marketing
Everready Glass
Sales Reps Trades/Construction
RANCHO RESORT
MAINTANANCE POSITION Health Care
Dependable Health Services
Physical Therapists Health Care
CENTRAL ARIZONA COLLEGE
DIRECTOR OF HEALTH INFORMATION MANAGEMENT Health Care
Sierra Tucson
Eating Disorders Program Coordinator

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday that he sees no reason for President Bush to apologize for not foreseeing the economic crisis.

"I don't think he needs to apologize. I think what he needed to do is take bold, aggressive action and he has," Cheney said.

"I don't think anybody saw it coming," he said.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Cheney also said that Bush has no need to pre-emptively pardon anyone at the CIA involved in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists. "I don't have any reason to believe that anybody in the agency did anything illegal," he said.

During the wide-ranging interview, Cheney also said Iran remains at the top of the list of foreign policy challenges that President-elect Barack Obama will face. He said an "irresponsible withdrawal" from Iraq now would be ill-advised. And he said he's confident that North Korea helped Syria build a reactor — a site that Israel suspected of being a nuclear installation and bombed in 2007.

After Obama takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, the 67-year-old Cheney plans to possibly write a book and spend time with his wife, Lynne, their two daughters and six grandchildren. He and his wife will split their time between their house in Virginia and their hometown of Casper, Wyo.

An avid angler, Cheney said the first river he wants to fish is the South Fork of the Snake River on the Wyoming-Idaho border.

Cheney is leaving the White House after a government career that spans four decades, including stints as defense secretary, President Gerald R. Ford's chief of staff and a longtime congressman from Wyoming.

The vice president often laughs off talk that he played his role as second-in-command to Bush like a wizard, controlling the levers of the presidency from behind the scenes. Still, Cheney will go down in history as one of, perhaps, the most influential vice presidents in U.S. history. During the interview, he strongly defended the administration's terrorist-fighting policies.

Maintaining a strong defense, Cheney said the administration rightly used programs to intercept communications of suspected terrorists and use tough methods to interrogate high-value detainees.

He also said he did not have any qualms about the reliability of intelligence obtained through waterboarding — an interrogation technique used on three top al-Qaida figures in 2002-03.