Some excerpts from Politico interview with form VP Dick Cheney:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.
“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said. Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”
But he said he worried that “instead of sitting down and carefully evaluating the policies,” Obama officials are unwisely following “campaign rhetoric” and preparing to release terrorism suspects or afford them legal protections granted to more conventional defendants in crime cases.
The choice, he alleged, reflects a naive mindset among the new team in Washington: “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes.”
Listen to the full interview here.
It occurred to me while reading Politico's interview with Dick Cheney, that the GOP's plan to regain political viability in the short term rests on two disaster scenarios: the failure of the financial rescue efforts (stimulus, TARP, and other bailouts) to stave off complete economic collapse and a new mass casualty terrorist attack -- both of which they are positioning themselves to blame Obama for.
ReplyDeleteWithout one of those two, they have to figure it's going to be a long time wandering in the political wilderness. Now think about the curdling effect, the blight on the soul that comes with rooting for such disasters to befall your country. The rot is now eating at the party's very core.
Once again we see the Republican party using fear and terror to try to divide Americans against the threats we face. he is a thug and a war criminal and it will be justice serviced when he is being bars.
Let's leave aside the fact that if Dick Cheney and his alleged boss had been more vigilant--if they had listened to the Clinton appointees like Sandy Berger who warned about Al Qaeda, if they had paid attention to their own intelligence reports (notably the one on August 6, 2001)--the September 11 attacks might never have happened. It is sleazy in the extreme for Cheney to predict another terrorist attack. For several reasons:
ReplyDelete1. Some sort of terrorist attack is likely, eventually, no matter who is President.
2. Cheney has done here what the Bush Administration did throughout: he has politicized terror. If another attack happens, it's Obama's fault. Disgraceful... and ungrateful, since it's only Obama's mercy that stands between Cheney and a really serious war crimes investigation. Which leads to...
3. The means that Cheney has supported to combat terror in the past, especially "enhanced" interogation techniques, are quite probably illegal. He is criticizing the Obama administration for not being willing to defy international law.
4. Cheney's track record of mismanagement in Iraq and Afghanistan--his sponsorship of Donald Rumsfeld, the worst Secretary of Defense in US history-- disqualifies him from having any credible say on the security policies of his successor.
This is a man who should either be (a) scorned or (b) ignored.