CIA's Panetta Is Right: Cheney Does Want Another Terrorist Attack

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

You know, CIA director Leon Panetta is right! I've been watching former Vice President Dick Cheney's media parade of the last few weeks and wondering, "What is he up to?" It's unseemly for a former president, much less a vice president, to dissect and criticize the policies of a subsequent administration, especially so soon after that vice president has left office. And yet Cheney has said publicly President Obama's abandonment of waterboarding as an interrogation technique is, "unwise in the extreme."

In an interview in an upcoming edition of the New Yorker Panetta said Cheney seems so anxious to justify the Bush administration's interrogation/torture policies, it almost seems as if he'd appreciate another terrorist attack on U.S. soil:

"I think he smells some blood in the water on the national security issue," Panetta said in an interview published in The New Yorker magazine's June 22 issue.

"It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point."

Cheney, who was a key advocate in the Bush administration of controversial interrogation methods such as waterboarding, has become as a leading Republican critic of Obama's ban on harsh interrogations and his plan to shut the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

And another thing. Why has Cheney been out there campaigning and defending Bush administration policies? Is he running for something? And why is former President Bush playing golf and enjoying retirement while Cheney hogs the media circuit? One wag noted, "It's just more evidence of who was really in charge during the Bush administration."

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