Cheney Rips Obama Policies, Biden Says Cheney Is 'Rewriting History'

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and Vice President Joseph Biden dueled across the airwaves Sunday, with Cheney renewing his assault on the Obama administration's "mindset" towards fighting terrorism and Biden firing back: "It's almost like Dick is trying to rewrite history."
Cheney, in particular, zeroed in on President Obama's initial statements after the failed bombing attempt of a U.S. airliner on Christmas day and the administration's decision not to charge Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an "enemy combatant," given his training and direction by an al-Qaeda offshoot. He said that reflected a failure to grasp how events had changed since the attacks of Sept. 11.

"It's the mindset that concerns me ... it's very important to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as criminal acts, which was the way we did before 9/11, and then looking at 9/11 and saying, 'This is not a criminal act,' not when you destroy 16 acres of Manhattan, kill 3,000 Americans, blow a big hole in the Pentagon. That's an act of war," Cheney said on ABC's This Week. "And what the administration was slow to do was to come to that -- that recognition that we are at war, not dealing with criminal acts."
He said his charge that Obama "was trying to avoid treating this (terrorism) as a war" was prompted by Obama's initial description of Abdulmutallab as "an isolated extremist" in his first public comments on the bombing.
Cheney took sharp issue with a statement by Biden that the Obama administration's handling of Iraq, and the U.S. efforts to disengage from that country, "could be one of the great achievements of this administration."
Noting that Obama and Biden had vigorously campaigned against the Bush administration's Iraq policy, Cheney said, "If they had had their way, if we'd followed the policies they'd pursued from the outset or advocated from the outset, Saddam Hussein would still be in power in Baghdad today. So if they're going to take credit for it, fair enough ...but it ought to go with a healthy dose of 'Thank you, George Bush.' "
Read the full transcripts of former Vice President Dick Cheney's interview on ABC's "This Week" and Vice President Joseph Biden on NBC's "Meet the Press"
Asked about Cheney's past and present criticism of the administration, Biden said on NBC's Meet the Press, "Let me choose my words carefully here. Dick Cheney is a fine fellow. He's entitled to his own opinion. He's not entitled to rewrite history. He's not entitled to his own facts. The Christmas Day bomber was treated the exact way that he suggested the shoe bomber was treated."
Biden was referring to Richard Reid who pleaded guilty in federal court for trying to bring down a U.S.-bound plane in December 2001 by igniting explosives in his shoe. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Cheney said on NBC the federal courts handled the case because, so shortly after Sept. 11, "We were not yet operational with the military commissions."
"I don't think the former Vice President Dick Cheney listens," Biden said. "The president of the United States said in the State of the Union that we're at war with al-Qaeda and ... we are pursuing that war with a vigor like it's never been seen before. We have eliminated 12 of their top 20 people. We have taken out a hundred of their associates we ...have sent them underground. they are in fact not able to do anything remotely like they were in the past. They are on the run. I don't know where Dick Cheney has been."
Biden said, "It's one thing to be outspoken. It's another thing to be outspoken in a way that misrepresents the facts. It's almost like Dick is trying to rewrite history. I can understand why that would be an impulse and maybe he isn't, literally -- I'm not being facetious -- maybe he has not been informed of what's going on. It's simply not true that the president of the United States is not prosecuting the war against al-Qaeda with a vigor that's never been seen before."
Cheney and Biden also clashed over Biden's statement in a recent interview with Larry King in which he said "The idea of there being a massive attack in the United States like 9/11 is unlikely" and that groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were moving more "direction of much more small-bore but devastatingly frightening attacks" like the attempted Christmas Day bombing.
Cheney called Biden "dead wrong," saying, " 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 Qaida is out there even as we meet trying to figure out how to do that."
Asked on CBS' Face the Nation if he was underestimating the al-Qaeda threat as Cheney charged, Biden said, "No. But I always underestimate the way Dick Cheney approaches things. The reason it's unlikely is because we have been relentless, absolutely relentless in isolating al Qaeda."
On ABC, Cheney also criticized the administration for doing away with the enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that had been used on suspected terrorism during the Bush years.
"I think you ought to have all of those capabilities on the table," Cheney said. "Now, President Obama has taken them off the table. He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army manual, which doesn't include those techniques. I think that's a mistake."
"I was a big supporter of waterboarding," Cheney said
Asked whether he thought waterboarding should have been an option with Abdulmutallab, Cheney said "I think the the professionals need to make that judgment...They are the ones that you ought to turn somebody like Abdulmutallab over to, let them be the judge of whether or not he's prepared to cooperate and how they can best achieve his cooperation."
During the interview, Cheney revealed divisions that had occurred in the Bush administration such as release of detainees, some of whom returned to terrorist organizations, which he said he had opposed but that "the State Department was under enormous pressure to do so" by other countries. He also said he had clashed with the Justice Department over the issue of criminal trials, which the Justice Department favored, versus military trials for terror suspects.
"I can remember a meeting in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House where we had a major shootout over how this was going to be handled between the Justice Department, that advocated that approach, and many of the rest of us, who wanted to treat it as an intelligence matter, as an act of war with military commissions," Cheney said.
Asked about the move by the Obama administration and top military brass to end the don't-ask-don't-tell policy, Cheney said, "I think the society has moved on. I think it's partly a generational question. I say, I'm reluctant to second-guess the military in this regard...When the chiefs come forward and say, ;We think we can do it,' then it strikes me that it's -- it's time to reconsider the policy. And I think Admiral (Mike) Mullen said that."

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