Cheney demands apology from Obama for telling the truth about the Bush-Cheney reaction to 9/11

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As The Hill is reporting, Dick Cheney said yesterday on CNN that "President Obama now owed the Bush administration an apology for claiming they "overreacted to 9/11":

Speaking on CNN's State of the Union on Sunday, Cheney said Obama was inconsistent for criticizing the former administration's approach to terrorism while also using "some of the same techniques the Bush administration did."

Well, he's right on one thing, Obama has indeed kept in place a good deal of the Bush-Cheney national security state. As for an apology, though, I'd tell him to go fuck himself -- though of course it would be rather more diplomatic just to ignore him.

I would say that invading Iraq (and lying about Saddam's capacities and intentions for justification), turning America into a torture state, and pushing away most of America's closest allies (and otherwise destroying America's credibility and moral standing in the world) is nothing if not an overreaction, to put it mildly.

But if we're going to talk about reaction, shouldn't we ask Dick why the administration in which he was the most dominant figure (other than the president himself, perhaps) underreacted to explicit warnings prior to 9/11 about an impending terrorist attack?