I worry that there’s a lack of understanding there of what this means from the perspective of the troops. You know, if you’re out there on the line day in and day out and putting your life at risk on a volunteer basis for the nation, and you see the Commander in Chief unable, to or appearing to be unable, to make a decision about the way forward here — you know that raises serious doubts. Nobody wants to think of volunteering to be participate in that kind of operation. [...]

It may in part be inexperience on Obama’s part. It may be that there’s confusion on the staff. But I’m not encouraged by it.

Listen here (beginning at 2:20):

Cheney really doesn’t have any more authority on this subject than Obama does. He neither served in the military, nor has he been Commander-in-Chief. As the New York Times noted in 2004:

Eventually, like 16 million other young men of that era, Mr. Cheney sought deferments. By the time he turned 26 in January 1967 and was no longer eligible for the draft, he had asked for and received five deferments, four because he was a student and one for being a new father.

Bush administration officials also seemed to think that they were soldiers in the military, with former White House press secretary Tony Snow saying that President Bush was on the “front lines” and “in the war every day.” In April 2007, First Lady Laura Bush said that “no one suffers more than their President and I do” during wartime, and Bush would speak on behalf of U.S. servicemembers to bolster his policy ideas. “The [military] families gathered here understand that our troops want to finish the job,” Bush said in 2007 during a speech opposing Iraq redeployment.

When she took the stage, Hutchison noted a Sunday cable show in which daughter Liz Cheney suggested her father might be a good presidential candidate in four years.

“I wasn’t sure when I saw Liz Cheney on TV Sunday, I thought this might be the start of Cheney 2012,” Hutchison said.

A member of the crowd shouted, “We need you, Dick.”

Cheney shook his head.

“No chance,” he said.

Watch it (Via Jason Embry):

LIZ CHENEY: You could also look at the comparison and think, Cheney 2012.

WALLACE: Really?! How far do you want to go with that?

KRISTOL: Let Liz make news. Cheney/Palin.

WALLACE: Or Palin/Cheney — don’t be sexist.

Watch it:

Liz Cheney and fellow Fox co-panelist Bill Kristol sit together on the board of Keep America Safe, an ostensibly partisan organization created for the purpose of crafting national security attack ads on Democrats. Fox, of course, never disclosed Cheney and Kristol’s common affiliation.

But many on the right have failed to mention the more substantive point, namely that Cheney and the Bush administration itself “dithered” on Afghanistan and diverted valuable resources to invade Iraq. But last night on Fox News, former Republican senator Rick Santorum stepped up to the plate:

SANTORUM: My sense is that we have an obligation to support our generals in the field, to give them the resources they need to accomplish the mission. That was not done by the prior administration. Let’s be very clear about that. They put their own political imprint on the Afghan strategy.

Watch it:

Of course, Santorum is right. In 2008, Gen. David McKiernan, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, asked the Bush administration for more troops, a request that was denied.

Indeed, as McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay — one of the few Washington journalists whose reporting matched the facts in the run-up to the Iraq war — asked of Cheney’s recent attacks: “Do we smell a campaign of historic revisionism by those widely seen as primarily responsible for the disaster in Afghanistan that has prompted Army Gen. Stanley A. McCrystal’s request for up to 80,000 more soldiers?”:

As late as December 2005, despite official warnings about the Taliban resurgence and a lack of U.S. resources for critical reconstruction programs, the Bush administration planned to reduce the 19,000 U.S. troops then in Afghanistan by 2,500 soldiers in order to bolster hard-pressed U.S. forces in Iraq.

And even after seven years of war _ and the deaths of 630 U.S. service members, more than 400 other coalition soldiers and thousands of Afghans _ the Bush administration lacked strategies for dealing with the al Qaida and Taliban safe haven in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where it backed a military dictatorship, or building Afghan security forces, according to the Government Accountability Office.

It’s nice to see Santorum recognize reality.

McCAIN: I think we should as much as possible say — and our message is, we want this strategy and we want to support the president and unite the country behind it. Let’s face it. The president, when he makes his decision — and again, I believe that he will– will have trouble with the base of his own party. And so the more united we can be behind him, I think the more the chances are of success and American public support.

“I don’t believe I heard you say whether you thought that was helpful or unhelpful,” Schieffer noted. “I don’t know. I would leave that to others to judge, really,” McCain again dodged. Watch it:

On ABC’s This Week, Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta said, “I think if Cheney is the voice of the opposition, that’s fine. I think he has the least credibility. Almost every strategic piece of advice he gave the president was wrong. I think President Bush stopped listening to him by the end of the administration. So if that’s what the Republican Party has decided — that they want to have him as their most outspoken critic of the administration — I think President Obama ought to welcome that.”

BROWN: Look, to listen to Dick Cheney who was the mastermind of the most failed decade of foreign policy that this country has had, at least in my political lifetime, perhaps my whole lifetime, perhaps my parents’ lifetime too. I mean to listen to him when he talked about dithering when their mistake was to attack Iraq and lose sight of Afghanistan as President Abdullah, sorry as Dr. Abdullah, presidential candidate Abdullah said that eight years of failure of Karzai implicitly is also eight years of failure of dithering by that administration, so just take Dick Cheney’s advice off the table.

Watch it:

As ThinkProgress has pointed out, in 2008, the Bush administration rejected the request for 30,000 more troops from Gen. David D. McKiernan, then the top U.S. commander in Kabul. “There was a saying when I got there: If you’re in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it,” McKiernan said in an interview after he was fired. “If you’re in Afghanistan and you need it, you figure out how to do without it.”

In today’s White House press briefing, Gibbs referenced McKiernan’s troop request to hit back on the emptiness of Cheney’s accusations:

GARRETT: So that was a specific reference to McKiernan’s request that said that specific troop request was not taken seriously.

GIBBS: It wasn’t — Whether it was taken seriously or not, it wasn’t filled. I assume since it wasn’t filled, it was not taken seriously. Maybe they filled unserious ones and didn’t fill serious ones. That’s a fabulous question for the Vice President, who seems to have forgotten his role in the last seven years of Afghanistan.

When Fox News reporter Major Garrett then asked whether it was “proof of unseriousness to not necessarily agree with a request for troops submitted by a commander in the field,” Gibbs replied:

GIBBS: No. I’m simply saying, I think it’s interesting what the Vice President is suggesting the President isn’t acting on is what the previous administration didn’t act on, right? [...]

Help me understand the rationale how one goes from half as many troops as are now in Afghanistan under his watch, to 68,000, to now wanting an additional 40 [thousand], when you didn’t want the additional troops that President Obama approved. I mean, how do you go from 68-plus, when you didn’t want 34-plus? How — Do you — It defies some modicum of logic to get “I didn’t want to go from 35,000 to 65,000, but I want to go from 65,000 to 100,000.” Fuzzy math.

Watch it:

Transcript:

GARRETT: Robert, is your point about the Bush-Cheney approach to Afghanistan that on the request for troops and the overall lack of focus, you would suggest there was a dereliction of duty to do with Afghanistan?

GIBBS: I’m just saying that the focus was not on Afghanistan.

GARRETT: To the detriment of our efforts there?

GIBBS: I don’t think it helped.

GARRETT: And when you said the nation has seen the consequences when a president doesn’t take that responsibility seriously, is that an allegation that you’re laying at the feet of President Bush: that he did not take troop deployment decisions seriously?

GIBBS: I don’t know what President Bush has said about this recently; I know what Vice President Cheney about this last night, and I was referring to that.

GARRETT: Which war?

GIBBS: Which —

GARRETT: Which troop effort are you talking about wasn’t taken seriously?

GIBBS: I think you were asking about my response on Afghanistan. Yeah.

GARRETT: So that was a specific reference to McKiernan’s request that said that specific troop request was not taken seriously.

GIBBS: It wasn’t — Whether it was taken seriously or not, it wasn’t filled. I assume since it wasn’t filled, it was not taken seriously. Maybe they filled unserious ones and didn’t fill serious ones. That’s a fabulous question for the Vice President, who seems to have forgotten his role in the last seven years of Afghanistan.

GARRETT: Is proof of unseriousness to not necessarily agree with a request for troops submitted by a commander in the field?

GIBBS: No. I’m simply saying, I think it’s interesting what the Vice President is suggesting the President isn’t acting on is what the previous administration didn’t act on, right? There were half as many troops in Afghanistan under — (CROSSTALK)

Help me understand the rationale how one goes from half as many troops as are now in Afghanistan under his watch, to 68,000, to now wanting an additional 40 [thousand], when you didn’t want the additional troops that President Obama approved. I mean, how do you go from 68-plus, when you didn’t want 34-plus? How — Do you — It defies some modicum of logic to get “I didn’t want to go from 35,000 to 65,000, but I want to go from 65,000 to 100,000.” Fuzzy math.

We should all be concerned as well with the direction of policy on Afghanistan. For quite a while, the cause of our military in that country went pretty much unquestioned, even on the left. The effort was routinely praised by way of contrast to Iraq, which many wrote off as a failure until the surge proved them wrong. Now suddenly – and despite our success in Iraq – we’re hearing a drumbeat of defeatism over Afghanistan. These criticisms carry the same air of hopelessness, they offer the same short-sighted arguments for walking away, and they should be summarily rejected for the same reasons of national security.

Watch the speech here:

With his criticisms, Cheney joins former White House adviser Karl Rove, who has been using his on-air and print outlets to blast Obama’s Afghanistan policies and rewrite history of President Bush’s legacy.

Many Americans — both on the left and commanders in the military — were critical of the Bush administration’s policies in Afghanistan. As early as 2005, the Center for American Progress called for a strategic redeployment from Iraq, urging more troops for Afghanistan where greater resources were “urgently needed to beat back the resurging Taliban forces and to maintain security throughout the country.” Additionally, in 2008, Gen. David D. McKiernan, then the top U.S. commander in Kabul, specifically asked the Bush administration for more troops for Afghanistan, but was rebuffed:

“There was a saying when I got there: If you’re in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it,” McKiernan said in his first interview since being fired. “If you’re in Afghanistan and you need it, you figure out how to do without it.” By late last summer, he decided to tell George W. Bush’s White House what he knew it did not want to hear: He needed 30,000 more troops. He wanted to send some to the country’s east to bolster other U.S. forces, and some to the south to assist overwhelmed British and Canadian units in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

The Bush administration opted not to act on McKiernan’s request and instead set out to persuade NATO allies to contribute more troops.

Cheney also claimed, “Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries. Waffling, while our troops on the ground face an emboldened enemy, endangers them and hurts our cause.” What endangered U.S. troops in Afghanistan was Bush and Cheney’s shift of focus to the Iraq war. Military officials have said that the Taliban was pretty much defeated in 2002, but regrouped when the Bush administration decided invade Iraq.

“We feel that by naming it the Cheney International Center, that the programs and UW can’t avoid being identified with that ideology and that approach to global politics that the Bush-Cheney administration championed,” [Suzanne] Pelican said Tuesday. […]

“Mr. Cheney is not the best example of demonstrating how nations should get along with each other,” said [Nancy] Sindelar, who is retired. “Putting his name on an international center is counterintuitive.”

Cheney and wife Lynne are expected to attend a dedication tomorrow of the new Cheney International Center (CIC) (we think that’s pronounced “sick”). The center is funded in part with $3.2 million the Cheneys donated to the university.

Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, nearly destroyed Britain’s efforts to bring the airline bomb plotters to justice, police and intelligence experts said today.

By ordering the early arrest of Rashid Rauf, the bombers’ link man in Pakistan, Washington forced British police to detain the suspects in the UK before all the evidence had been gathered, it was claimed.

Andy Hayman, who served as the Metropolitan Police’s Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations while the terror attacks were being planned, writes today of the Cheney-ordered arrest of Rauf, “[It] hampered our evidence-gathering and placed us in Britain under intolerable pressure.”

Human Rights Watch responded to the announcement by imploring Holder to go further and investigate those who “planned, authorized, and facilitated the use of abusive methods.” As constitutional attorney and blogger Glenn Greenwald has noted, Holder’s investigation would effectively immunize interrogators who complied with the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) interrogation memos, which authorized brutal torture, and ensure that White House officials who authorized torture “will never be held to account.”

In an appearance today on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) echoed the concerns of these advocates. He told Fox’s Megyn Kelly that Holder should not “limit the investigation” to field interrogators and that he should also investigate the people who gave the orders that resulted in abuse and torture, including former Vice President Cheney:

NADLER: Now, the law says very clearly that it is the obligation of the Attorney General to investigate, to see whether crimes were committed, any time there was torture under American jurisdiction. He must do that. If he didn’t do that, he’d be breaking the law. My criticism of the Attorney General is that he should not limit the investigation to people in the field who may have committed the torture, but to people who may have ordered it, such as the Vice President, for example.

Watch it:

Nadler has been one of the most vociferous critics of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and its record on civil liberties. In the past, he has said that Bush officials “clearly committed war crimes” and that the Obama administration would be “breaking the law” if it did not fully investigate the Bush administration’s complicity in torture. Most recently, he responded to Cheney’s comments opposing a torture probe by saying that his objections show that he “still fails to understand the law.”

I’m not entirely sure that Dick Cheney’s predictions on foreign policy have borne a whole lot of fruit over the last eight years in a way that have been either positive or, to the best of my recollection, very correct.

Watch it:

KERRY: I think there is a little bit of a tension between the White House itself and the lawyers in the Justice Department as they see the law and as what their obligation is. In a sense, that’s good. That’s appropriate, because it shows that we have an attorney general who is not pursuing a political agenda, but who is doing what he believes the law requires him to do. And we have an administration, on the other hand, that is balancing some of those other issues.

Watch it:

The only reason Cheney thinks the investigation is partisan is because he disagrees with it. Holder is doing what an attorney general is supposed to do — following the law, not political considerations.

Today on Fox News Sunday, Cheney said that he had no problem with these interrogation tactics — even though they went “beyond the specific legal authorization.” In fact, Cheney said these tactics were “absolutely essential” to keeping the United States safe:

WALLACE: Do you think what they did, now that you’ve heard about it, do you think what they did was wrong?

CHENEY: Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives, in preventing further attacks against the United States, in giving us the intelligence we needed to go find al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. … It was good policy. It was properly carried out. it worked very, very well.

WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re okay with it.

CHENEY: I am.

Watch it:

There have been no documents supporting Cheney’s claim that torture was essential to saving American lives. Even CIA memos from 2004 and 2005, which Cheney claimed would back him up, have been released and have no evidence linking torture to valuable intelligence. In fact, these memos show that “non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information.”

Transcript:

WALLACE: The inspector general’s report, which was just released, from 2004 details some specific interrogations. Mock executions. One of the detainees threatened with a handgun, with an electric drill. Waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times. First of all, did you know that was going on?

CHENEY: I knew about the waterboarding, not specifically in any one particular case, but as a general policy we had approved. The fact of the matter is the Justice Department reviewed all those allegations several years ago. They looked at this question of whether someone had an electric drill in an interrogation session. It was never used on the individual, or that they brought in a weapon, never used on the individual. The judgment was made then that there wasn’t anything there that was improper or illegal with respect to –

WALLACE: Do you think what they did, now that you’ve heard about it, do you think what they did was wrong?

CHENEY: Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives, in preventing further attacks against the United States, in giving us the intelligence we needed to go find al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. Those interrogations were involved in the arrest of nearly all of the al Qaeda members that we were able to bring to justice. I think they were directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States. It was good policy. It was properly carried out. it worked very, very well.

WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re okay with it.

CHENEY: I am.

Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

Despite the fact that they devoted heavy coverage to Cheney’s initial claims, major media outlets have largely buried these new facts. But as Greg Sargent notes, last night on CNN, even former Bush homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend had to admit that Cheney still hasn’t been vindicated:

It’s very difficult to draw a cause and effect, because it’s not clear when techniques were applied vs. when that information was received. It’s implicit. It seems, when you read the report, that we got the — the — the most critical information after techniques had been applied. But the report doesn’t say that.

Watch it:

Cheney, of course, refuses to back down from his initial claims. Earlier this week he put out a statement saying that “individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda.” However, there is still no evidence that the torture techniques were responsible and necessary for producing the intelligence.

HANNITY: And secondly, why is it important that those interrogations took place? I mean, the ones they were talking about were sleep deprivation, waterboarding, putting insects into small, confined areas and telling them they were deadly insects. [...]

CHENEY: It worked. It’s been enormously valuable in terms of saving lives, preventing another mass casualty attack against the United States. … And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.

Yesterday, the CIA released two of those memos from 2004 and 2005, which had been secret until now. As Spencer Ackerman notes, these memos do nothing to back up Cheney’s claims:

Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

This finding is big news. You’d think that since the media reported so much on Cheney’s claims about the documents, they would also rush to report that Cheney was wrong. Not so. Greg Sargent notes that in the major newspapers, this fact was “either not covered at all, buried deep in stories, or described in highly hedged language.”

ThinkProgress went through the coverage on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC and found that television outlets are performing as poorly as their print counterparts. Most of the networks’ reports omitted the Cheney angle. When they did address it, they tended to give Cheney the benefit of the doubt by saying that it was “not clear” from the heavily-redacted documents. The only individuals to note Cheney’s lie were guest commentators. Watch a few of the segments here:

Cheney has since put out a carefully worded statement saying that “individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda.” However, the fact remains that there is still no public evidence that those techniques actually saved lives.

“I wouldn’t expect anything less of the Bush administration,” Lackawanna Mayor Norman L. Polanski Jr. said in reacting to Cheney’s proposal to send in the troops. “The federal agents did their job and the Lackawanna police did their job. We didn’t need the military coming in. The community reacted cautiously, and nobody got out of hand or made outrageous statements.” [...]

“If you bring in the military, you create a panic,” Lackawanna Police Captain Ronald Miller said.

Bobby Green, a lifelong Lackawanna resident, said Cheney’s idea was “kind of crazy.” Andrew Sullivan writes, “What Cheney was doing here was making a point: that he believes that the president can impose the equivalent of martial law inside the country at any moment he feels it’s necessary, even if it isn’t.” (HT: Raw Story)

A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests has few precedents in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property.

The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

Cheney cited a DoJ memo co-authored by John Yoo which claimed that “the president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States.” Siding with Condoleezza Rice, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and others, Bush rejected Cheney’s advice and “ended up ordering the F.B.I. to make the arrests.”

Cheney’s persistence became nearly as big an issue as the pardon itself. “Cheney really got in the President’s face,” says a longtime Bush-family source. “He just wouldn’t give it up.” [...]

Bush would decide alone. In private, he was bothered by Libby’s lack of repentance. … A few days later, about a week before they would become private citizens, Bush pulled Cheney aside after a morning meeting and told him there would be no pardon. Cheney looked stricken. Most officials respond to a presidential rebuff with a polite thanks for considering the request in the first place. But Cheney, an observer says, “expressed his disappointment and disagreement with the decision … He didn’t take it well.”

Some Bush aides suspected there was “darker possibility” for his motives than simply wanting to save an old friend. As a former Bush senior aide explained, “I’m sure the President and [chief of staff] Josh [Bolten] and Fred had a concern that somewhere, deep in there, there was a cover-up.”

After Bush informed Cheney of his decision, Libby then asked to plead his case to Bush himself, but was directed to White House Counsel Fred Fielding. Three days before Bush’s presidency was to expire, Libby met with Fielding, who “kept listening for signs of remorse. But none came.” Bush finally met with his personal lawyer and trusted adviser Jim Sharp:

If the presidential staff were polled, the result would be 100 to 1 against a pardon, Bush joked. Then he turned to Sharp. “What’s the bottom line here? Did this guy lie or not?”

The lawyer, who had followed the case very closely, replied affirmatively. Bush indicated that he had already come to that conclusion too. “O.K., that’s it,” Bush said.

With just one day left in the Bush administration, Bush again informed Cheney that Libby would get no pardon. In an interview with the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes shortly after leaving office, Cheney expressed his dismay at the decision. “[Libby] was the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice,” Cheney complained, “and I strongly believe that he deserved a presidential pardon. Obviously, I disagree with President Bush’s decision.”

Following the revelation, congressional Democrats have called for an investigation into the hidden program, which the Wall Street Journal reports involved “an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives.” But on the Washington Times’ America’s Morning News radio show today, Cheney’s daughter, Liz, lashed back at his critics:

CHENEY: There’s this big piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning that says that it was a number of different concepts for ways that we could capture or kill al Qaeda leaders in the days after 9/11. I am really surprised that the Democrats decide that that’s what they want to fight over. I mean, if they want to go to the American people and say that they disagree with the notion that we ought to be capturing and killing al Qaeda leaders, I think it’s just going to prove to the American people one more time why they can’t trust the Democrats with our national security.

Cheney claimed that complaints by Democrats that the program was concealed from Congress are surfacing only because they are “very worried about Speaker Pelosi” and the attacks on her over her claim that the CIA misled her about the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding. Listen here:

Of course, Cheney is dodging the issue of whether Bush and Cheney fulfilled their obligations under the National Security Act of 1947, which says that congressional intelligence committees must be “kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.”

Cheney also responded to news that Attorney General Holder is considering appointing a special prosecutor to investigate “the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices,” calling it “shameful.” She added that her father is “very angry” about the development:

CHENEY: His reaction to the story that we may well be prosecuting folks, I’m happy to talk about that. … You know, he is very angry, as you’ve heard him say publicly. You know the notion that this administration is going to come into office and they’re going to prosecute the brave men and women who carried out this program that kept America safe. It is, it is un-American. It’s something that hasn’t happened before in this country, in terms of somebody taking office and then starting to prosecute people who carried out policies that they disagreed with, you know, in the previous administration. He’s been very public about that.

Cheney says that Holder would be investigating people “who carried this program out according to the Department of Justice opinions,” but Newsweek reports that Holder is more concerned about “startling indications that some interrogators had gone far beyond what had been authorized in the legal opinions.”