CIA director targets Cheney

CIA director Leon Panetta says it’s almost as if former vice-president Dick Cheney would like to see another attack on the United States to prove he is right in criticising President Barack Obama for abandoning the “harsh interrogation” of terrorism suspects.

“I think he smells some blood in the water on the national security issue,” Panetta said in an interview published in The New Yorker magazine’s June 22 issue. “It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point.”

Cheney, who was a key advocate in the Bush administration of controversial interrogation methods such as waterboarding, has become a leading Republican critic of Obama’s ban on harsh interrogations and his plan to shut the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.