Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been the highest profile member of the Bush administration to attack the Obama administration on national security issues, having done so nearly every month in the past year.
Often it's been on the Web site of Politico or Fox News. On Sunday, Cheney went over to ABC's This Week, where guest host Jonathan Karl challenged the former VP on some of his criticisms, citing examples where the Bush/Cheney team did exactly the same thing when it came to giving civilian criminal trials for those accused of terrorist acts.
Cheney did begrudgingly give Team Obama props on doing a couple of things right in the war on terrorism. But he wouldn't give an inch in his belief that he thinks they're dead wrong to prosecute terrorists as "common criminals", vs. "enemy combatants", even after Karl quoted what a Republican appointed Judge who ruled on the Richard Reid case said some seven years ago:
KARL: Now, I'd like to read you something that the sentencing judge reading the — giving him his life sentence read to Richard Reid at the time of that sentencing. Here it is. He said to Reid, "You are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier gives you far too much stature. We do not negotiate with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice."
The judge in that case was a Reagan appointee. Doesn't he make a good point?
CHENEY: Well, I don't think so, in a sense that it — if it — if you interpret that as taking you to the point where all of these people are going to be treated as though they're guilty of individual criminal acts.
I want to come back again to the basic point I tried to make at the outset, John. And up until 9/11, all terrorist attacks were criminal acts. After 9/11, we made the decision that these were acts of war, these were strategic threats to the United States.
Once you make that judgment, then you can use a much broader range of tools, in terms of going after your adversary. You go after those who provide them safe harbor and sanctuary. You go after those who finance and those who provide weapons for them and those who train them. And you treat them as unlawful enemy combatants.
There's a huge distinction here in terms of the kinds of policies you put in place going forward. And what I'm most concerned about isn't so much argument about all the stuff in the past, about what happened to Abdulmutallab or Richard Reid. I think the relevant point is: What are the policies going to be going forward?
This article appears in Feb 10-16, 2010.