This is unbelievably rich. Check out this exchange from Dick Cheney’s appearance on the ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday:
DICK CHENEY: I think, in fact, the situation with respect to al Qaeda, to say that, you know, that was a big attack we had on 9/11, but it’s not likely again, I just think that’s dead wrong. I think the biggest strategic threat the United States faces today is the possibility of another 9/11 with a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind. And I think al Qaeda is out there even as we meet, trying to figure out how to do that.
JONATHAN KARL, ABC NEWS: And do you think that the Obama administration is taking the necessary steps to prevent that?
CHENEY: I think they need to do everything they can to prevent, and if the mindset is it’s not likely, then it’s difficult to mobilize the resources and get people to give it the kind of priority that it deserves.
Every time Dick Cheney claims or infers that the Obama administration isn’t fighting al Qaeda as hard as the Bush administration supposedly did, repeat after me: Remember the Iraq War? If the Bush administration was as focused on al Qaeda as Dick Cheney misremembers, would we have gone into Iraq?
It’s even more astounding that Republicans are so desparate to criticize the administration on national security that they’re now claiming that the Obama administration is being too harsh. You read that correctly. Here’s Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee:
Over a year after taking office, the administration has still failed to answer the hard questions about what to do if we have the opportunity to capture and detain a terrorist overseas, which has made our terror-fighters reluctant to capture and left our allies confused. If given a choice between killing or capturing, we would probably kill.
If Senator Bond will take the flowers out of his hair for a second, he might remember an exchange with CIA Director Leon Panetta as Panetta revealed the cancellation of a legally questionable CIA program to kill al Qaeda operatives. Bond seemed far more in favor of killing AQ members back in July when he asked the director:
Why would you cancel [the program to kill AQ operatives]? If the CIA weren’t trying to do something like this, we’d be asking ‘Why not?’ “
I guess he was for it before he was against it.
Keep in mind that none of the Republican attacks on national security are working anyway, as evidenced by the latest polls.
