VeepSpeak

Cheney Rips Obama on Terror

His choices “raise the risk…of another attack.”

Dick Cheney’s got a few things to share with America: The Bush administration was good, Obama’s putting the country at risk, and Scooter should have been pardoned. In his first televised interview since leaving office, the former veep told CNN’s John King that Bush’s harsh interrogation techniques were “absolutely essential” to preventing another 9/11. “President Obama campaigned against it all across the country, and now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack,” he said. A nugget on the economy: “Stuff happens, and an administration has to be able to respond to that and we did.” On Iraq: “We’ve accomplished nearly everything we set out to do.” And lastly, on his former chief of staff, Scooter Libby: “I believe firmly that Scooter was unjustly accused and prosecuted and deserved a pardon, and the president disagreed with that…I was clearly not happy that we, in effect, left Scooter sort of hanging in the wind.”