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.
In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.
And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.
“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.”
Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the Bush administration — “that’s about 11 or 12 percent” — have “gone back into the business of being terrorists.”
The 200 or so inmates still there, he claimed, are “the hard core” whose “recidivism rate would be much higher.” (Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees have strongly disputed the recidivism figures, asserting that the Pentagon data have inconsistencies and omissions.) Cheney called Guantanamo a “first-class program,” and “a necessary facility” that is operated legally and with better food and treatment than the jails in inmates' native countries.
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.”
Now I do not take credibility in whatever Dick Cheney says--he is like the crotchety old asshole that yells at the kids to get off his lawn [My apologies for the coarse language]. I seriously wonder whether Dick Cheney is evil, misguided, or just an angry man that has plunged into the depths of senility. Regardless of the speculation, Dick Cheney is pissed that the American voters have decided to elect a terrorist-loving Barack Obama into the White House, and he had to deliver a final, insulting, angry shot at both the Obama administration, and the American people. It was more fear-mongering coming from a man who now fears America, and its laws and freedoms. To be honest, I think the best way to respond to Cheney's rantings is simply to ignore him.
But the story came up on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. The original news story came up on Tuesday, where MSNBC's David Shuster questioned how unhinged Cheney has become after leaving office. Here is the original Countdown story:
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And last night, Keith Olbermann couldn't resist delivering his own special comment on Dick Cheney's rantings. Here is Olbermann's Special Comment:
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You can read the transcript here.
I will not go through the entire transcript of Olbermann's comment, aside from saying that Olbermann destroys much of Cheney's arguments and lies from the Politico interview. But what is really important in Olbermann's comment is that Cheney doesn't even realize that the Obama administration, and hopefully the American people, are moving away from the lies and fear-mongering that was prevalent in the Bush/Cheney administration, towards a government that has returned to ruling by laws and rational thought. From Olbermann:
"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."
The first glimmer, in years, of sanity in any your remarks, Sir. That's not at all what the Obama administration appears to believe. It seems to be ready to use all avenues and all emotions, seeking love, respect, fear, diplomacy, shared experience, education, principle, and, yes, even rational thought. This President, unlike yours, seems intent on living in the real world rather than trying to re-shape an imaginary one, by force.
[....]
Of course, none of that mattered to Mr. Cheney, just as none of this matters to Mr. Cheney. Because, at heart, Mr. Cheney is not interested foremost in protecting this country. He is interested foremost in protecting Mr. Cheney. And the business of being Dick Cheney, of rationalizing one's own existence after one of the most reprehensible, myopic, unprincipled, and even un-American careers in the history of our government, depends on continuing to convince the gullible of us to live in abject fear and not with vigilance and common sense and principles.
We, sir, will most completely assure our security not by maintaining the endless, demoralizing, draining, life-denying blind fear and blind hatred which you so thoroughly embody. We will most easily purchase our safety by repudiating the "Bush System." We will reserve the violence for which you are so eager, Sir, for any battlefield to which we truly must take, and not for unconscionable wars which people like you goad and scare and lie us into.
You, Mr. Cheney, you terrified more Americans than did any terrorist in the last seven years, and now it is time for you to desist, or to be made to desist. With damnable words like these, Sir, you help no American, you protect no American, you serve no American — you only aid and abet those who would destroy this nation from within or without. More than 400 years ago, when a British Parliament attempted to govern after its term had expired, it was dispersed by the actions, and words, of Oliver Cromwell.
"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately," he told them — exactly as, Mr. Cheney, exactly as a nation now tells you: "Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.
"In the name of God… go!"
Let us hope that this is the last we will ever hear from Dick Cheney.
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