Former Vice President Dick Cheney weighed in on Benghazi last night, saying the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya was “one of the worst incidences” he could recall.

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.

A report aired on 60 Minutes on Sunday shed light on the under-reported threat combat soldiers faced when sent back out into the theater with a concussion, a decision that has had long-lasting repercussions on American veterans.

For years, concussions have been an invisible and therefore neglected injury within the armed services. At the height of the Iraq War, the standard operating procedure was to have soldiers who had sustained head injuries from the explosion of IEDs or other trauma to go back out into the field soon thereafter. In doing so, these soldiers — suffering from symptoms including severe aches, double vision, and nausea — were put at risk of suffering a second concussion before the first had healed, an event that heightens the chance of permanent brain damage.

Maj. Ben Richards, a retired Army veteran, was one of the soldiers sent back out after a concussion who has now been diagnosed with brain injury. “If I could trade traumatic brain injury for a single-leg amputation, I’d probably do that in a second,” he told 60 Minutes, underscoring the difference between visible injuries and those hidden inside the brain. Before his new diagnosis, Richards was told he instead had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). “If you have PTSD and you are not improving through counseling, then it’s your fault,” Richards said of the stigma that still accompanies such a diagnosis. “It was my fault that I wasn’t getting better.”

Watch the full segment here:

Dr. David Hovda, head of UCLA’s Brain Injury Research Center, tried to explain the severity of even mild concussions on soldiers to the Pentagon in 2008. Instead, he was told it was “bad medicine” to keep soldiers out of the field to rest after a concussion, with an assembled team of Army doctors claiming that, because of the stigma that would entail, allowing for rest before being sent back out would make soldiers worse. Gen. Peter Chiarrelli — then the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, now an advocate for mental health in the military — chose to side with Dr. Hovda in 2009 anyway, issuing an order saying that all forces who suffered concussions would be pulled from combat until their recovery.

Despite Chiarrelli’s decision, the numbers still aren’t good for veterans. 357,000 veterans — or about 20 percent of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan — have experienced a traumatic brain injury as of January 2009. Despite that, only 46 percent of those who experienced a mild traumatic brain injury were screened for a concussion. At its peak in 2011, the Department of Defense reported 16 new concussions were inflicted per day.

Last year, the NFL donated $30 million to study concussions, in partnership with the U.S. military. Efforts are also under way to raise some $90 million to construct more brain injury centers along the lines of the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, the military’s most advanced brain injury evaluation center. Nine additional centers would enable the military to care for 9,000 brain injuries per year, the amount of new injuries officials expect as the war in Afghanistan winds down.

Tensions within the Republican Party on foreign policy reemerged on Thursday with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) taking a broad shot at the vision of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and his allies.

At an event at the Center for New American Security (CNAS), McCain took several not so subtle swipes at Paul’s recent attempts to take on the GOP’s foreign policy orthodoxy and singled out the anti-drone filibuster Paul led in March as an example of Republicans yielding to political pressure to back something easy rather than asking tough questions about foreign policy:

McCAIN: Last month, most Republican senators joined a filibuster to protest the President’s policies on the use of armed drones. Rather than debating the very real issues associated with targeted killings, my colleagues chose to focus instead on the theoretical possibility that the President would use a drone to kill Americans on U.S. soil, even if they’re not engaged in hostilities. As misguided as this exercise was, the political pressures on Republicans were significant and many ultimately did — including many who know better.

While he did not name names, among the more senior Republicans who joined in the filibuster were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX). McCain in the immediate aftermath of the drones filibuster referred to Paul and co-filibuster leader Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) as “wacko birds,” a phrase he later apologized for using.

McCain admitted that the GOP needs to change its positions on counter-terrorism and other policies, listing several measures he would be putting forward in the coming weeks and months, including an update to the the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force, which his fellow Republicans are likely to embrace. Others, like revisions to U.S. foreign aid strategy towards Egypt and reining in Defense Department spending on costly and underperforming projects will likely earn him more enmity from various blocs within his party.

The Iraq War debacle and much of the Bush administration’s counter-terror policies led Americans to realize that Republicans were selling junk national security policy. Yet at the same time, the neocon stranglehold on the GOP remains alive and well (a sticking point Mitt Romney was faced with during last year’s presidential election).

Since the election, the Party’s soul-searching on foreign policy has broken into the public as struggles for the future of the party on foreign affairs have been frequent. Various sides have been loosely led by Paul, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and McCain and none seems ready to yield. And at present, it appears that the fight can only be overcome by adhering to a very slim set of neocon-esque foreign policy principles, or, as Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel discovered during his nomination battle, face accusations of apostasy and risk internal isolation.

So far, McCain is fine with having the debate, but appears to be wondering whether there is room for his views in the GOP. “Right now the far left and far right in America are coming together in favor of pulling us back from the world,” McCain warned at CNAS. “The President and I have had our differences, many of those differences will persist. But there are times these days when I feel I have more in common on foreign policy with President Obama than I do with some in my own party.”

A handful of media outlets are reporting news that Dick Cheney is now warning that the United States is in “deep doo doo” regarding its relations with North Korea.

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.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will ultimately cost the United States anywhere between $4 and $6 trillion, when the total cost, including long-term care for the war’s veterans, is calculated, says a new report from a top Harvard researcher that was released on Thursday.

The study’s lead author, Professor Linda Blimes, says that the two wars are “the most expensive” in U.S. history and “the largest portion of the bill is yet to be paid.”

“The large sums borrowed to finance operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will also impose substantial long-term debt servicing costs,” the report says. “As a consequence of these wartime spending choices, the United States will face constraints in funding investments in personnel and diplomacy, research and development and new military initiatives. The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.”

Another study released earlier this month by Brown University found that that total cost of the Iraq war alone would be around $2.2 trillion and that long term costs would stretch that total to near $4 trillion.

“What did we buy for $4 trillion?” the report asks. The Los Angeles Times reports today that the U.S. probably bought more Iranian influence in Iraq and in the region. But, the report continues: “[I]t could have been hoped that the ending of the wars would provide a peace dividend. … Instead, the legacy of decisions made during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts will impose significant long-term costs on the federal government, and in particular, on the consolidated national security budget.”

“In short,” the report concludes “there will be no peace dividend, and the legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan wars will be costs that persist for decades.”

Former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo is most famous for his legal memoranda defending torture and virtually unlimited presidential power in the realm of national security. On the Iraq War’s 10th anniversary, however, Yoo has decided to defend another one of his former boss’ unlawful actions, going so far as to argue that Bush administration had made up for harm done to Iraqis by spending money on them.

Yoo, who once said “I was never certain whether the Iraq war made sense as a matter of strategy,” now maintains that “invading Iraq was the best option in light of the information we had then,” and claims that if it weren’t, those who oppose the decision should want to “restore Saddam Hussein’s family and the Baath Party to power in Iraq.” Forced by 200,000 deaths to confront the fact that an extraordinary number of Iraqis were killed, injured, or driven from their homes by our invasion, Yoo suggests that the United States made up for all that by giving the Iraqis money:

Even though the benefits outweighed the costs, that does not mean we simply leave Iraq once we depose the Husseins. The legal system in such situations might still require a benefiting party to compensate a harmed party. In other words, we allow one harm to occur in society because there is a greater good achieved — but then the legal system can intervene afterward to require sharing of the benefits between the plaintiff and defendant.

And isn’t that what we did in Iraq? We spent billions of dollars in Iraq as damages. We did so not because the war was wrong, but because it was right — and we shared the benefits of the war with the Iraqi people by transferring some of it in the form of reconstruction funds.

Yoo fails to note that much of the damage done to Iraqis was a consequence of the Bush administration’s approach to said reconstruction, which Iraq War veteran Jason Fritz calls “a tidal wave of arrogance and stupidity.”

Several other former Bush administration officials share Yoo’s perspective — former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for example, tweeted that “10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.”

According to Yoo’s post, he is currently “finishing a book on war in the 21st century, where I make the case for preemptive and preventive war.” We’re anxiously awaiting its publication.

One of the most outspoken advocates for the war in Iraq said on NPR on Wednesday that asking whether the war was worth fighting is an “unreasonable question.”

During an interview with Richard Perle — who was chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee during the run-up to the war — NPR host Renee Montagne noted some of the war’s more grim results: hundreds of thousands of Americans and Iraqis dead or wounded and asked Perle whether it was all worth it:

Q: There’s no question you were a great proponent of going into Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Ten years later, nearly 5,000 American troops dead, thousands more with wounds, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or wounded. When you think about this, was it worth it?

PERLE: I’ve got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done in the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t, a decade later, go back and say, “Well we shouldn’t have done that.”

Listen to the clip:

Perle has tried hard over the years to either justify the war or even wipe his fingerprints from it altogether. He once even tried to say he, and the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had “no influence” on the decision and just yesterday, he said it didn’t matter whether Saddam Hussein had WMD, the U.S. should have invaded anyway (he actually had previously said the U.S. wouldn’t have invaded if the U.S. new he had no WMD).

But as far as whether the war was worth it, CAP’s Matt Duss has a pretty good take: “The end of former Iraq President Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a consider- able global good, and a nascent democratic Iraqi republic partnered with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future,” he writes in the Iraq War Ledger, A Look at the War’s Human, Financial, and Strategic Costs, “But when weighing those possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy. The war was intended to show the extent of America’s power. It succeeded only in showing its limits.”