Axelrod Responds Harshly to Cheney

By MIKE ALLEN | Politico

David Axelrod, senior adviser to President Obama, said Sunday that recent comments by former Vice President Dick Cheney about the new administration were “irresponsible” and suggest that he is “having a hard time dealing with … the verdict of the American people.”

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” moderator David Gregory asked Axelrod about a Politico interview in which Cheney said he worried the Obama administration had a naïve mindset about battling terrorists, and asserts that the U.S. “needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected.”

Axelrod responded harshly to Cheney, but said former President George W. Bush had been cordial …

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Cheney Warns of New Attacks

Cheney’s dramatic language came while speaking in his office in a non-descript suburban office building in McLean.

By JOHN F. HARRIS & MIKE ALLEN & JIM VANDEHEI | Politico

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans—and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team—understand.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda 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,” Cheney said.

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

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.”

The 200 or so inmates still there, he claimed, are “the hard core” whose “recidivism rate would be much higher.” He called Guantanamo a “first-class program,” and “a necessary facility” that is operated legally and with better food and treatment than the jails in inmates native countries …

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Related News: Former USS Cole Commander Slams Obama on Guantanamo

UPDATE: Panetta Takes on Cheney at Hearing