Vice presidents at war on terror

Cheney, 69, portrayed President Barack Obama and the Democrats as alarmingly naive on national security and said Biden was "dead wrong".

WASHINGTON, February 15, 2010 (AFP) - Vice presidents past and present traded blows Sunday with Joe Biden, accusing his predecessor Dick Cheney of trying to "rewrite history" by painting the Obama administration as soft on terror.

Cheney, 69, portrayed President Barack Obama and the Democrats as alarmingly naive on national security and said Biden was "dead wrong" when he stated recently that another attack on the scale of September 11, 2001 was "unlikely."

"I think they need to do everything they can to prevent it. And if the mindset is 'it's not likely', then it's difficult to mobilize the resources and get people to give it the kind of priority that it deserves," Cheney told ABC television.

Biden countered that Al-Qaeda was now "on the run" and said: "Dick Cheney's a fine fellow. He's entitled to his own opinion. He's not entitled to rewrite history. He's not entitled to his own facts."

The clashes, in tit-for-tat interviews with three television networks that allowed each to see clips of the other, were a battle royal between long-time rivals bitterly opposed on foreign affairs and national security.

Cheney, the hawkish architect of former president George W. Bush's counter-terrorism policy, said he still supported waterboarding and suggested it could have been used on Nigerian jet bomb suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Employed during the Bush era to try to extract information from key Al-Qaeda suspects after 9/11, waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques were outlawed by Obama who said they went against US ideals.

The Obama administration has repudiated Bush-Cheney tactics in the "war on terror", with the president last March saying their treatment of prisoners had caused "incredible damage to our image and position in the world."

Obama tried unsuccessfully to shut down Guantanamo in his first year in office as he navigated US foreign policy away from "axis of evil", "war on terror" style politics towards a more engaged, less combative approach.

Biden said Sunday that the US authorities were getting "significant information" from Abdulmutallab and that he "continued to talk because we have handled him in a way that encouraged him to talk."

US justice officials say the 23-year-old Nigerian, who has apparently confessed to being trained by Al-Qaeda in Yemen to blow up a Detroit-bound passenger plane on Christmas Day, is cooperating well.

Biden denied Republican charges the Nigerian should have been handed over to the military and pointed out that British shoe bomber Richard Reid was treated exactly the same way as Abdulmutallab by the Bush administration in 2001.

Cheney, recalling a "major shootout" on such issues with the Justice Department when vice president, accused Obama of dangerously framing "terror attacks against the United States as criminal acts, as opposed to acts of war.

"I think we have to treat it as a war. This is a strategic threat to the United States. I think that's why we were successful for seven-and-a-half years in avoiding a further major attack against the United States."

Cheney defended the notorious US detention center at Guantanamo Bay and attacked the president's decision to try self-confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court in New York.

It's "a big, big mistake," Cheney argued. "It gives him a huge platform to promulgate his particular brand of propaganda around the world. I think he ought to be tried at Guantanamo in front of a military commission."

Cheney, who after 9/11 presided over expansions of executive power with little judicial oversight, is accused by some of seeking to defend systematic torture that fueled anti-US sentiment in the Muslim world.

Biden, a 67-year-old former head of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Cheney was either "misinformed" or deliberately "misinforming" the American people.

"I don't know where Dick Cheney has been," Biden continued. "Look, it's one thing, again, to criticize. It's another thing to sort of rewrite history. What is he talking about?"

For all Cheney's talk about military tribunals, Biden said the Bush administration had only tried three suspected terrorists that way, two of whom were now walking the streets, free men.

Tempting fate, Biden then went on to claim that Osama bin Laden's followers were on the run and "not able to do anything remotely like they were in the past."

"We've eliminated 12 of their top 20 people. We have taken out 100 of their associates," Biden said. "We've sent them underground."