Dick Cheney is the former vice-president whose national security expertise was central to his appeal in 2000 as Bush's running mate. Yet within nine months, Cheney presided over the worst attack on American soil in US history, failed to capture its perpetrators, failed to bring any of its plotters to justice, made convicting them much harder because he secretly and illegally authorized their brutal torture, and recruited a new and young wave of Jihadists by the exposure of the barbarism at Gitmo, Bagram, Camp Cropper, Camp Nama and the various black torture sites he helped set up across the globe. For good measure, Cheney also lost the war in Afghanistan and his closest confidant Don Rumsfeld lost the war in Iraq (the success of the subsequent "surge" will be tested this year as troops withdraw). Under Cheney, for good measure, both Iran and North Korea made huge strides toward getting nukes.

Not only did Cheney allow bin Laden to escape in Tora Bora, he also helped radicalize many actually innocent prisoners (three quarters of those thrown into the torture camp at Gitmo were innocent of any charges), and then set many of these radicalized new Jihadists free to wreak further terror on the US and the world.

In fact, an Obama administration official has asserted that all the former Gitmo prisoners who have become Jihadists upon release were set free by Bush and Cheney. Just as Cheney had bin Laden in his grasp and allowed his fathomless incompetence to lose him, he has actually helped create and then unleash Jihadists across the world.

How this utter failure gets to pontificate on terror after his disastrous record is beyond me. But then, Mike Allen would have fewer pageviews, wouldn't he?

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