Olbermann: Cheney doing the work of terrorists

Keith Olbermann Anchor, 'Countdown' • Profile

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on former Vice President Cheney's remarks about the prospects of future terrorist attacks in this country. Flatly, it may be time for Mr. Cheney to leave this country.

The partisanship, divisiveness and naiveté to which he ascribed every single criticism of his and President Bush's delusional policies of the last eight years, have now roared forth in a destructive and uninformed diatribe from Mr. Cheney, that can only serve to undermine the nation's new president, undermine the nation's effort to thwart terrorism, and undermine the nation itself.

Mr. Cheney's remarks were posted yesterday at Politico.com. They are a reiteration of all the manias of his vice presidency. Only they now come without the authority of office. They insist, he insists, on the imminence of attack, of the maintenance of Gitmo, of the necessity of waterboarding, of the efficacy of torture.

Time does not stale nor custom wither your infinite variety, Mr. Cheney. You will say it, and be wrong and you will still say it anew. You will say it, and undercut a President 17 days on the job and you will still say it anew. You will say it, and help terrorists and you will still say it anew.

"The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I'm not at all sure that that's what the Obama administration believes."

The first glimmer, in years, of sanity in any your remarks, Sir. That's not at all what the Obama administration appears to believe. It seems to be ready to use all avenues and all emotions, seeking love, respect, fear, diplomacy, shared experience, education, principle, and, yes, even rational thought. This President, unlike yours, seems intent on living in the real world rather than trying to re-shape an imaginary one, by force.

"When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an al-Qaida terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry."

More concerned, Mr. Cheney? What delusion of grandeur makes you think you have the right to say anything like that? Because a president, or an ordinary American, demands that we act as Americans and not as bullies; demands that we play by our rules; that we preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States; you believe we have chosen the one and not the other? We can be Americans, or we can be what you call "safe" — but not both?

"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. 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."

Mr. Cheney, you are lying. As the cloud of fear you deliberately fostered in this good-hearted and courageous nation finally begins to dissipate, the nonsense that you and Mr. Bush presented as "evidence" of this childish claim, this perverse example of wishful-nightmare-thinking, has become apparent, and it should shame you.

The "major-casualty attacks" on the U.S. you think you stopped, involved would-be hijackers who were under constant surveillance and had neither passports nor plane tickets. They involved feeble-minded braggarts so clueless as to even the most obvious steps of organization that they believed they could enter Fort Dix in New Jersey disguised as delivery men, and kill hordes of Americans, and get out alive, even though Fort Dix teems with soldiers who have an almost inexhaustible supply of weapons.

They involved embittered ex-Airport-employees so uninformed about where they used to work, that they thought dropping a match in a fuel supply line thirty miles away would cause the airport to explode. These are the plots that by your own proud, strutting, crazy admissions, were the ones you "got us through."

You and Mr. Bush, sir—you are the old men who cried wolf. The Politico story continues:

"Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the Bush administration - "that's about 11 or 12 percent" - have "gone back into the business of being terrorists."

Mr. Cheney, you made this statistic up. Perhaps not you personally, but your people made this statistic up! As the new reality-based administration has discovered, there are not enough records of detainees still at Gitmo to suggest that there is any reliable database on those released.  That McCarthy-esque number, Sir, is also as fluid as the infamous Senator's was.

As Professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall University noted on this network last month:

"The government has given its 43rd attempt to describe the number of people who have left Guantanamo and returned to the battlefield. Forty-one times they have done it orally as they have this last time. And their numbers have changed from 20 to 12 to seven to more than five to two to a couple to a few - 25, 29, 12 to 24. Every time, the number has been different. In fact, every time they give a number, they don't identify a date, a place, a time, a name or an incident to support their claim."

Mr. Cheney, which orifice are you pulling these numbers from? Y'know, in the movie "The Manchurian Candidate," the character based loosely on Joe McCarthy had trouble remembering all the different numbers. His Lady Macbeth-like-wife pointed out to him that the reason she kept changing the number of purported communists in the state department, was so that people would no longer be asking "are there communists in the state department?" but would begin only asking "how many communists are there?"