Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday criticized former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her handling of the Benghazi attack and President Obama on the way he approached the Osama bin Laden raid.
Cheney said that Clinton did not take responsibility for her role in the response to the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.
“No, she clearly wasn’t hands on, and now she doesn’t want to be hands on. And she’s doing everything she can to avoid responsibility for what clearly fell into her bailiwick,” Cheney told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “And what I always recall is her testimony saying what difference does it make? And the fact of the matter is it makes a huge difference. And we should have been able to protect those people or certainly go to their rescue.”
Cheney also criticized Obama for not taking better advantage of the intelligence he had on bin Laden.
“With bin Laden, [the White House was in] such a hurry to go out and announce victory, that I’m convinced that they probably did not get maximum damage out of the intel that they had captured,” Cheney said.
Cheney further said that Obama did not take a strong enough stance on Syria.
“And the whole Syrian episode, he drew a red line, then he didn’t pay any attention to it when they crossed the red line with respect to use of chemical weapons, and then he came back and said boy, we’re going to do something,” Cheney said.
“I think the incompetence of this administration in the way they’ve handled these kinds of affairs, especially in the Middle East, is one of the worst aspects of this presidency.”
