US vice presidents past and present traded blows on Sunday with Joe Biden, accusing his predecessor Dick Cheney of trying to “rewrite history” by painting US President Barack Obama’s administration as soft on terror.
Cheney, 69, portrayed Obama and the Democrats as alarmingly naive on national security and said Biden was “dead wrong” when he stated recently that another attack on the scale of Sept. 11 terror attacks was “unlikely.”
“I think they need to do everything they can to prevent it. 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,” Cheney told ABC television.
Biden countered that al-Qaeda was now “on the run” and said: “Dick Cheney’s 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 clashes, in tit-for-tat interviews with three TV networks that allowed each to see clips of the other, were a battle royal between long-time rivals bitterly opposed on foreign affairs and national security.
Cheney, the hawkish architect of former president George W. Bush’s counter-terrorism policy, said he still supported waterboarding and suggested it could have been used on Nigerian jet bomb suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
Employed during the Bush era to try to extract information from key al-Qaeda suspects after Sept. 11, waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques were outlawed by Obama who said they went against US ideals.
The Obama administration has repudiated Bush-Cheney tactics in the “war on terror,” with the president last March saying their treatment of prisoners had caused “incredible damage to our image and position in the world.”
Obama tried unsuccessfully to shut down Guantanamo in his first year in office as he navigated US foreign policy away from “axis of evil,” “war on terror” style politics toward a more engaged, less combative approach.
Biden said that the US authorities were getting “significant information” from Abdulmutallab and that he “continued to talk because we have handled him in a way that encouraged him to talk.”
US justice officials say the 23-year-old Nigerian, who has apparently confessed to being trained by al-Qaeda in Yemen to blow up a Detroit-bound passenger plane on Christmas Day, is cooperating well.
Biden denied Republican charges the Nigerian should have been handed over to the military and pointed out that British shoe bomber Richard Reid was treated exactly the same way as Abdulmutallab by the Bush administration in 2001.
Cheney, recalling a “major shootout” on such issues with the Justice Department when vice president, accused Obama of dangerously framing “terror attacks against the United States as criminal acts, as opposed to acts of war.”
“I think we have to treat it as a war. This is a strategic threat to the United States. I think that’s why we were successful for seven-and-a-half years in avoiding a further major attack against the United States,” he said.
Cheney defended the notorious US detention center at Guantanamo Bay and attacked Obama’s decision to try self-confessed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court in New York.
It’s “a big, big mistake,” Cheney said. “It gives him a huge platform to promulgate his particular brand of propaganda around the world. I think he ought to be tried at Guantanamo in front of a military commission.”
Cheney, who after Sept. 11 presided over expansions of executive power with little judicial oversight, is accused by some of seeking to defend systematic torture that fueled anti-US sentiment in the Muslim world.
Biden, a 67-year-old former head of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Cheney was either “misinformed” or deliberately “misinforming” the American people.
“I don’t know where Dick Cheney has been,” Biden said. “Look, it’s one thing, again, to criticize. It’s another thing to sort of rewrite history. What is he talking about?”
For all Cheney’s talk about military tribunals, Biden said the Bush administration had only tried three suspected terrorists that way, two of whom were now walking the streets, free men.
Tempting fate, Biden then went on to claim that Osama bin Laden’s followers were on the run and “not able to do anything remotely like they were in the past.”
“We’ve eliminated 12 of their top 20 people. We have taken out 100 of their associates,” Biden said. “We’ve sent them underground.”
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS