Professional Soldiers ® - CIA director: Cheney wishing U.S. would be attacked again

Sir,

The new Yorker article can be found here:
The Political Scene
The Secret History
Can Leon Panetta move the C.I.A. forward without confronting its past?
by Jane Mayer

Quote:

Leon Panetta, the C.I.A.’s new director—and the man who bears much of the responsibility for keeping the country safe—learned the details of Cheney’s speech when he arrived in his office, on the seventh floor of the agency’s headquarters. An hour earlier, he had been standing at the side of President Barack Obama, who was giving a speech at the National Archives, in which he argued that America could “fight terrorism while abiding by the rule of law.” In January, the Obama Administration banned the “enhanced” techniques that the Bush Administration had approved for the agency, including waterboarding and depriving prisoners of sleep for up to eleven days. Panetta, pouring a cup of coffee, responded to Cheney’s speech with surprising candor. “I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue,” he told me. “It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.”

Quote:

June 15, 2009
Cheney Fires Back at CIA Director

Former Vice President Dick Cheney responded to a comment CIA Director Leon Panetta made in an interview with The New Yorker for its June 22 issue by saying he hopes his “old friend Leon was misquoted.”

Panetta said Cheney’s criticism of the Obama administration’s method of fighting terrorism almost suggests that Cheney is “wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point.”

Panetta says the former vice president “smells some blood in the water” on national security issues.

Cheney tells Fox that he hopes Panetta was misquoted and that “the important thing is whether or not the Obama Administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the last eight years."

Since leaving office, the former vice president has been the most vocal senior Bush administration official.

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