Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday lashed out at President Barack Obama’s administration for a “failure of leadership” over an attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans on Sept. 11 of last year, saying that the Bush administration was “always ready on 9/11” — at least, the anniversaries.

At an event to celebrate the launch of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s new book about leadership, Cheney told the Daily Mail‘s David Martosko that the Obama administration “should have been ready before anything ever happened.”

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“I mean, it’s North Africa – Libya, where they’ve already had major problems,” he observed. “You know that Al-Qaeda is operating there, and you have some of the other Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups there like Ansar al-Sharia and others.”

“When we were there, on our watch, we were always ready on 9/11, on the anniversary,” the former vice president added, not mentioning that nearly 3,000 people had died during the original 2001 attacks. “We always anticipated they were coming for us, especially in that part of the world.”

On Wednesday, several witnesses were expected to tell a Republican-controlled House committee that more could have been done to protect Americans in Benghazi.

Cheney predicted that the hearing would be “damned interesting.”

The Daily Banter’s Bob Cesca pointed out on Wednesday that there had been 13 attacks on State Department facilities overseas that resulted in dozens of deaths during Cheney’s watch.

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Martosko joined the Daily Mail earlier this year after leaving his job as editor of the Daily Caller amid reports that the publication had manufactured a story about Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) paying two women for sex in the Dominican Republic.