(Credit: AP)

President Obama on Monday defended the actions he and the rest of the Executive Branch took in the days and weeks after the assault that took the lives of four Americans, directly questioning those who claim that he orchestrated a cover-up.

But on Fox News last night, Cheney attacked Obama’s response, claiming (without evidence) that the Obama administration “lied” about Benghazi:

CHENEY: I watched the Benghazi thing with great interest, Sean [Hannity]. I think it’s one of the worst incidences, frankly, that I can recall in my career. It put the whole capability claiming the terrorist problem solved once we got Bin Laden, that Al Qaeda was over with. If they told the truth about Benghazi, that it was a terrorist attack by an al-Qaeda-affiliated group, it would destroy the confidence that was the basis of his campaign for re-election.

They lied. They claimed it was because of a demonstration video, that they wouldn’t have to admit it was really all about their incompetence. They ignored repeated warnings from the CIA about the threat. They ignored messages from their own people on the ground that they need more security. They reduced what was already there.

Cheney’s choice of words is interesting, given the numerous security lapses and misleading narratives that took place during his multiple periods in power in Washington. One would think that the former vice president would regard the 9/11 attacks as the “worst incident” that he could recall. Or perhaps the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, in which he and other members of the administration repeatedly misled the American people about Iraq’s WMDs and the war’s difficulty and costs. Or the Abu Gharib prison scandal, in which Iraqis were tortured under the watchful eyes of American soldiers and prompted more and greater attacks on U.S. forces. Or perhaps the thirteen attacks on U.S. diplomatic compounds that occurred during the Bush administration’s two terms, in which nearly a dozen Americans died.

“Well, they tried to cover it up by constructing a false story, claiming there was confusion about what happened in the Benghazi compound,” Cheney went on to tell Hannity, joining the chorus of those who believe a conspiracy took place to hide the truth about the attack. “The cover up included several officials up to and including President Obama and the cover up is still ongoing.”

Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, co-chair of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board report on Benghazi, referred to claims that a cover-up occurred as “Pulitzer Prize fiction.” Likewise, the CIA’s original draft of the infamous talking points, which Republicans, including Cheney, point to as evidence of a conspiracy, mentioned that the attacks “were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo,” with the next draft showing the intelligence community’s belief that a demonstration had occurred prior to the attacks.

It’s also worth noting that during his time as a Congressman from Wyoming, Cheney was the ranking member of the panel investigating the Iran-Contra scandal, during which an actual cover-up occurred. At the time, Cheney viewed the Congressional investigation as being an overreach into executive prerogative. Apparently the Iran-Contra scandal doesn’t fall under “one of the worst incidences” that he can recall.

Dick Cheney

Of course the reclusive communist regime has been doing a lot of saber rattling in recent weeks and that does indeed pose challenges for the United States. But as interesting as it is to report a comparison of the situation on the Korean peninsula to dog droppings, what’s really news here is not what Cheney said, it’s who he said it to, the Hill reports:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney discussed tensions on the Korean peninsula with Republican leaders in Congress in a closed-door meeting Tuesday, warning them that the United States was in danger. [...]

The former vice president spoke to GOP lawmakers, at the invitation of Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (Calif.).

Top House Republicans turning to the former vice president — behind closed doors — to give foreign policy advice to the GOP caucus sounds a lot like what Mitt Romney had to do during last year’s campaign: solicit Cheney’s wisdom and money, but don’t let too many people know about it. And there’s good reason: the American people don’t like him, mainly because his ideas and policies are unpopular and have been completely discredited.

But the crowd loved it. “We appreciate the vice president for sharing his insight and experience on the matter,” a McCarthy aid said. Rep. Steve Southerland (R-FL) said Cheney — who was apparently also wearing a cowboy hat — “looked really good, spoke really clearly, lucidly.”

Cheney reportedly tried to shed some light on what North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is up to by harking back to his days of dealing with (but really not actually knowing anything about) Saddam Hussein, noting “you never know what they’re thinking.” Indeed. (Apparently Cheney bringing up his history with Saddam Hussein didn’t set off red flags with this particular group of Republicans.)

Back in 2002, then-Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) had said on numerous occasions that he did not think the Bush administration had made a strong enough case for the U.S. to invade Iraq. The White House needed Armey or, it was thought, the war authorization from Congress would fall apart. So before the vote, Cheney reportedly met privately with Armey and told him that he had sound intelligence he couldn’t discuss publicly because it was so horrifying: that Hussein had direct ties to al Qaeda and that Iraq was making progress toward a miniature nuclear weapon that it could one day hand off to the terror group. Armey then supported the resolution and Cheney, of course, turned out to be wildly wrong. “I deserved better than to be bullshitted by the vice president,” Armey told Cheney biographer Barton Gellman.

And Cheney continues to this day to maintain that torturing al-Qaeda suspects was the right thing to do.

This is the person the Republican Party is still listening to on foreign policy. And considering that much of its rebranding efforts are turning out to be miserable failures, it’s not surprise then that the GOP — much like Mitt Romney during last year’s presidential campaign — just can’t quit Dick Cheney and the neocons.

As for North Korea, is the U.S. really in “deep doo doo”? Korea expert Andrei Lankov wrote in today’s New York Times that “it does not make sense to credulously take their fake belligerence at face value and give them the attention they want now. It would be better if people in Washington and New York took a lesson from the people of Seoul” and ignore it.

Republican Joe Scarborough is tired of his party’s mistreatment of Defense Secretary-nominee Chuck Hagel and its continuing, all-consuming focus on Benghazi.

The focus of Scarborough’s ire this morning on his MSNBC show Morning Joe was Sen. Lindsey Graham’s announcement on Sunday that he will place a hold on not only Hagel, but also CIA Director-nominee John Brennan until he gets further action from the White House on Benghazi.

Scarborough lashed out at Graham and his neoconservative cohorts, unable to believe how misguided their attacks on the Obama administration have been:

SCARBOROUGH: If you’ve got a working class guy who has voted Republican every four years and he turns on the Sunday shows and he’s flipping around the channels and he sees Republicans in February still talking about Benghazi, saying they’re going to hold up the picks for secretary of defense and CIA director for something that happened back in the fall, and they are continuing on this…to hold up this and talk about it on Sunday morning, it’s a colossal mistake.

Watch the takedown here:

Graham has been seeking out “the truth” on the attack in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans dead for months now, despite an ample amount of facts already having been uncovered. A Cabinet nominee has never been filibustered by the Senate, leaving Graham’s threat in a position to make history.

Also at issue on Morning Joe today was former Vice President Dick Cheney at a speech in Wyoming referring to Obama’s second term national security team as being “second-rate.” Scarborough was unsurprised by Cheny’s statements, given his neoconservative stances. “You’d expect him to not like Chuck Hagel, for the same reasons I want a guy like Chuck Hagel in, because he’s more of a realist, and we’ll pull back a little from this neocon position,” Scarborough said.

Republicans have been lining up their kitchen-sink method of obstruction, full of procedural and “substantive” methods to block Hagel’s nomination from coming to a vote. That vote is currently delayed as Senate Armed Services Committee chair Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) has yet to set a date. That is expected to be short-lived, though, as Levin has said GOP demands regarding Hagel “far exceed” that of past nominees and promised a vote soon.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R) recently appointed retired General Tommy Franks, who was responsible for some of the greatest failures in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, to be a top military adviser. That’s par for the course for the Romney campaign, which is littered with planners, organizers, and boosters of the Iraq war.

Romney’s support from the Iraq war’s lead planners reaches to the top. Most of the war’s key players who aren’t advising Romney have strongly come out in support him, lending the imprimatur of their foreign policy instincts to his campaign. Here are some of the key endorsements of Romney or his foreign policy:

DICK CHENEY

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “When I think about the kind of individual I want in the Oval Office in that moment of crisis, who has to make those key decisions, some of them life-and-death decisions, decisions as the commander in chief, who has the responsibility for sending our young men and women in harm’s way – that man’s Mitt Romney.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ : “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

DOUGLAS FEITH

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “The Obama administration has gone out of its way to try to deemphasize the ideological part of the problem, and to define the conflict as a conflict that the United States has with an organization and its affiliates, rather than an international movement tied together by an ideology. I think Romney did a pretty good job in making it clear that the problem is broader than Al Qaeda.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “What we did after 9/11 was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11.”

DONALD RUMSFELD

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “Terrific, comprehensive speech by Gov. Romney at [the Virginia Military Institute]. He knows America’s role in the world should be as a leader not as a spectator.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

WHAT SHE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “Our military capability and technological advantage will be safe in Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s hands.”

WHAT SHE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

GEORGE W. BUSH

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “I’m for Mitt Romney.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “Mission accomplished.”

On the eve of the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Obama of taking “sole credit” for the killing of Osama bin Laden and ignoring his presidential daily intelligence briefings. “If President Obama were participating in his intelligence briefings on a regular basis then perhaps he would understand why people are so offended at his efforts to take sole credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden,” Cheney told the Daily Caller on Monday night, quoting a report by former Bush administration official Marc Thiessen that “charged that Obama had attended fewer than half of the presidential daily briefs since taking office.”

But by parroting the claims of Birther-led “Swift Boater” groups, who argue that Obama has overstated his role in the bin Laden raid, Cheney ignores Obama’s repeated efforts to credit the intelligence community and the Bush administration for playing a part in the successful mission to kill the perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks. As Obama explained earlier this year:

[L]ast year, when we delivered justice to Osama bin Laden, I made it clear that our success was due to many people in many organizations working together over many years — across two administrations. That’s why my first call once American forces were safely out of harm’s way was to President Bush. Because protecting our country is neither the work of one person, nor the task of one period of time, it’s an ongoing obligation that we all share.

Obama also continues to receive intelligence information on a daily basis, even if he prefers to read the analyses himself rather than have it read told to him. As National Security Council spokesperson Tommy Vietor told Politico, Obama “receives and reads his [Presidential Daily Brief] every day, and most days when he’s at the White House receives a briefing in person. When necessary he probes the arguments, requests more information or seeks alternate analysis. Sometimes that’s via a written assessment and other times it’s in person…Marc basically wrote a story culled from our public schedule that shows how Marc’s old boss, President Bush, structured his day differently than President Obama.”

Yesterday on C-Span’s Newsmakers, House Armed Services Committee ranking member Adam Smith (D-WA) reiterated his concern that Mitt Romney will carry over the Bush administration’s foreign policy should he win the White House this November. Given the number of Bush-Cheney foreign policy alumni advising Romney’s campaign, Smith said it’s a “legitimate question” to wonder whether his foreign policy as president will model George W. Bush’s:

SMITH: I think it’s the overwillingness to use the military. The over-willingness to use military action in the sort of belligerent, go it alone, no allies, no negotiations approach that I think is not well suited to our current national security needs. [...]

But what you get too much out of the Romney campaign — and certainly from Dick Cheney — is whenever there is a problem, we have to step in militarily. … Step after step after step, you have to wonder that if you have another Republican administration, how many more wars are we going to have to go through? And I think that’s a very legitimate question and I think they are too willing to use military action instead of looking at the other tools that are in our national security arsenal.

Q: So you think that Mitt Romney would be a carry over of George W. Bush when it comes to foreign policy?

SMITH: I think that’s a risk. Certainly. … He has relied a great deal on the Bush-Cheney administration national security leadership so I think it’s a worthy concern.

Watch the clip:

It’s not only concerning that many of Romney’s foreign policy advisers are holdovers from the Bush-Cheney-era but also, it appears that the so-called Cheney-ites on his team have the former Massachusetts governor’s ear. Moreover, Romney and Cheney actually share views on a number of foreign policy issues. And it appears that Romney is concerned about this perception as his campaign did not allow the media to photograph the two men together at a recent fundraiser.

Photo: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

Cheney, 71, said defense spending is “not a spigot you can turn on and turn off, that you need to keep money flowing in a predictable way so you can plan for the next war,” Graham said after the Senate Republicans’ weekly luncheon. They heard from the former vice president, who was President George H.W. Bush’s defense secretary from 1989 to 1993.

There’s absolutely no evidence that suggests the U.S. won’t be able to plan for or fight any wars should the military spending cuts sequester take effect. As the CBO reported this week, cutting military spending by $500 billion over the next ten years, as the sequester mandates, will still allow the Pentagon to spend as much money as it did in 2006. And at the time, the United States spent more on its military than any country in the world many times over and was engaged in two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that Cheney is worried about the U.S. not being able to fight/start a war. It’s also a bit concerning that he’s openly predicting a “next” one. Indeed, he lobbied hard in the waning days of the Bush administration for an attack on Iran and presumably he thinks he’ll get another shot at it should Mitt Romney win the White House.