Former Vice President Dick Cheney in his forthcoming book accuses former CIA Director George Tenet of being unfair to President George W. Bush by resigning in 2004 “when the going got tough.”
Cheney, in his new autobiography “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir” out next week, also goes after former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Charlie Savage reports in the New York Times:
He wrote that he believes that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell tried to undermine President Bush by privately expressing doubts about the Iraq war, and he confirms that he pushed to have Mr. Powell removed from the cabinet after the 2004 election. “It was as though he thought the proper way to express his views was by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government,” Mr. Cheney writes. His resignation “was for the best.”
Cheney also reveals that he urged Bush to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June 2007, according to the newspaper. Bush tried to use diplomatic pressure to make the Syrians stop the suspected secret program, but the Israelis ultimately bombed the location in September 2007.
Savage describes Cheney’s book as “pugnacious in tone” and that he “expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration.”
Here’s a clip of Cheney’s interview that aired on NBC’s Today show:
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