Dick Cheney, Terrorist?

Dick Cheney is horrible. While I am usually a pretty moderate, although admittedly oftentimes a left leaning moderate, Cheney continues to amaze me in the amount of heavy, deeply offensive and frankly anti-American rhetoric that he spews.

I saw this first on The Daily Show. I laughed. Then, I cried.

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Threatening and causing fear. Isn't that terrorism?

I read more about the interview on Politico. Here's the link:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/18390.html

I also read/watched some of the exit interviews he gave at the end of his term as Vice President.

In all of these interviews, like the Politico one that I am focusing on and quoting from here, Cheney was, unlike now former President Bush, unapologetic:

In the interview, Cheney revealed no doubts about his own course — and many about the new administration’s.

“If it hadn’t been for what we did — with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth — then we would have been attacked again,” he said. “Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S.”

Cheney said “the ultimate threat to the country” is “a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter – a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind” that is deployed in the middle of an American city.

“That’s the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against,” he said.

Dick Cheney is supremely confident that his course of action was the correct one, and perhaps some of his policies have worked. However, in this important moment in our country, is it really appropriate to assert that we are on the brink of "the ultimate threat to the country", toss out thoughts about nuclear weapons destroying American cities, and then imply that the current administration's actions of actually following the Geneva Conventions and not torturing its detainees at Guantanamo (not to mention reasserting habeas corpus) will lead to that catastrophe? After all, this is the guy who, along with his boss and the rest of the Bush national security team, overlooked the August 2001 memo titled "Bin Laden determined to attack in US."

This interview underlines just how out of touch the neoconservatives this country has become. It's fine to participate in a two way, civil debate, but I think irrational fear-mongering is bad. We have more important problems, after all.