Dick Cheney Is A Liar

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Barely two weeks out of office and former Vice President Dick Cheney is already mongering fear.

Unsurprisingly, it’s about Guantanamo Bay, where he says that generic Democrats — he intimates that he means President Obama, but he’s too much of a coward to say the man’s name — 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.”

Get used to this sort of thing.

All this comes in an interview with Politico’s Mike Allen, John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, and for a good reason: they’re not going to challenge a single word Cheney says. For instance, take this paragraph:

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 “61 percent detainees on the battlefield” figure has been debunked by a widely-read Seton Hall University study. And just last week, Defense Secretary Bob Gates — who served with Cheney in the Bush administration, remember — said only “four or five percent” of released Guantanamo detainees have been involved in post-GTMO extremist activities. Three reporters on the Cheney interview and not so much as a single Google search among them.

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(I still believe that Cheney's greatest fear about Guantanamo closing is that more will be learned about the torture and other horrible treatment of these "disappeared" and it may put another nail in Cheney's "human rights abuse" coffin.)

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