(CNN) - Liz Cheney is echoing her father's recent criticism of President Obama's response to the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day, saying Wednesday the president has not taken sufficient national security steps in the wake of the botched plane bombing.
Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and the founder of the nonprofit group Keep America Safe, released a statement calling on President Obama to reverse his decision to close the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, and to overrule the Justice Department's decision to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a civilian court in New York City.
Cheney also called on President Obama to classify the attempted Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, as an enemy combatant to be tried before a military tribunal.
(CNN) - Months after her father's prolonged campaign against President Obama's national security policies, Liz Cheney is spearheading a new organization aimed at organizing conservative opposition to the new administration's foreign policy approach.
The new group, Keep America Safe, says its aim is to provide a cogent and organized rebuttal to a series of recent moves that expressly divert from the more muscular policies of the Bush administration. The group plans to tackle hot-button issues like the way forward in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense spending, CIA interrogation techniques and the planned closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
"We have watched with concern and dismay as the Obama administration has cut defense spending, wavered on the war in Afghanistan, and launched investigations into Americans serving on the front lines of the war on terror, while at the same time expanding legal protections for the terrorists that plot to attack this country," Cheney, along with the group's two other founders, wrote on its Web site. "These policies, along with President Obama's abandonment of America's allies and attempts to appease our adversaries are weakening the nation."
Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol and Debra Burlingame, the sister of the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77 - the flight that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11 - are also heading up the new effort.
The new group says its goal is to focus media attention on continuing and emerging national security threats, and marshal grassroots opposition to the president's policies.
WASHINGTON (CNN) - Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and a former State Department official, said Monday that she is considering running for political office sometime in the future.
"It's something I may well may do down the road," Cheney said in an interview with the Washington Times. "I hope to have the opportunity at some point to have that make sense for my family and everything else that's going on."
Cheney has addressed this possibility before, telling Fox News in May that she wasn't thinking about running for office anytime soon because she was focused on raising her five kids and helping her father write his memoirs.
Cheney has made headlines in the past few months for defending her father and attacking the Obama administration's national security policy. She also said in the interview that recent reports that the former vice president ordered the CIA to withhold information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress are just political cover for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
"It gets more and more appalling everyday," she said. "I think they're very worried about Speaker Pelosi."
WASHINGTON (CNN) – Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and a former State Department official, said Tuesday that she isn't planning to run for public office anytime soon, but didn't rule out the possibility for the future.
Cheney, who has made headlines recently for an ambitious public campaign defending her father and attacking the Obama administration's national security strategy, said she is currently too busy at home to run for office.
"It's not something I'm focused on right now, I do have five little kids and I'm helping my dad to write his memoirs," Cheney said Tuesday in an interview on Fox News and posted on ThinkProgress.org.
"So I have a pretty full plate right now, but it's certainly something I could," she said before getting interrupted.
But Cheney's comments aren't the first time this possibility has come up. Former President Bush's top strategist Karl Rove was asked on Monday in an interview with Fox News if he thought that she should run for office. He responded, "she might."
(CNN) – Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, has increasingly taken a visible role to defend her father.
WASHINGTON (CNN) - Waterboarding was not used to produce intelligence that linked Iraq to al Qaeda in the run-up to the war in Iraq, former Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter said Sunday.
A former top State Department official, Lawrence Wilkerson, told CNN last week that finding a "smoking gun" linking Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network became the main purpose of the "alternative" interrogation program the Bush administration authorized in 2002 - a program critics say amounted to the torture of prisoners in American custody.
But Liz Cheney, who served in the State Department during the Bush administration, told ABC's "This Week" on Sunday that "Nobody who is talking about this in the press has any knowledge of specific detainee treatment."
"The people that claimed to have been waterboarded in these articles are not any of those people," she said.
Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff during the Bush administration's first term. Since leaving office, he has become an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq.
In an online essay Thursday, he wrote that al Qaeda captive Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was "waterboarded" by Egyptian intelligence until he told interrogators that Baghdad trained terrorists to use chemical and biological weapons - a key element in the Bush administration's case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
But Liz Cheney told ABC that Wilkerson "has made a cottage industry of out of fantasies about the vice president," and pointed out that al-Libi was not among the three al Qaeda figures the United States has admitted to subjecting to waterboarding.
And she said the former vice president - who has been publicly defending the interrogation program in recent weeks - "would not substitute his own judgment for the professionals at the CIA."
"I think that it's important for us to have all the facts out - and the first and more important fact is that the vice president has been absolutely clear that he supported this program, this was an important program," she said. "It saved American lives."
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(CNN) - Liz Cheney is picking up where her father left off when it comes to taking aim at the Obama administration, saying Tuesday the new commander-in-chief appears to be siding with terrorists.
In an interview on Fox News, the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney sharply criticized the new administration for agreeing to release photographs depicting alleged abuses at U.S. prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration.
"I think it is really appalling that the administration is taking this step," she said in the interview. "Clearly what they are doing is releasing images that show American military men and woman in a very negative light."
"I have heard from families of service members from families of 9/11 victims this question about when did it become so fashionable for us to side, really, with the terrorists," she continued. "You know, President Obama has a lot of rhetoric about support for American military families, support for our men and women who are fighting for us overseas. But if he really cares about them, then he wouldn't be making such an effort to release photos that show them in a negative light."
Late last month, Pentagon officials said the hundreds of photographs released are from more than 60 criminal investigations from 2001 to 2006, and show military personnel allegedly abusing detainees. But the officials rejected allegations by the American Civil Liberties Union that the photos show a systemic pattern of abuse by the military.
In her interview Monday, Cheney also echoed recent calls from her father for the Obama administration to release classified documents detailing information yielded from the aggressive interrogation techniques since denounced by the president.
"They seem only to be interested in releasing things that really paint American in a negative light and don't give the American people a full picture of what went on," she said.
(CNN) - Liz Cheney, former State Department official and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, defended her father's string of tough comments aimed at President Obama, telling an interviewer that the former VP believes the new president is taking the nation down a "dangerous" path and that he has an "obligation to stand up."
"I think he is concerned that some of the things that we have seen President Obama do, particularly on his overseas trip in terms of not taking the opportunity to stand up and defend America when Daniel Ortega delivers a 50-minute screed against the United States [during the Summit of the Americas]," she told MSNBC in an interview that aired Thursday.
"I think that there's a real concern. I mean, the message that we saw coming out of the last few foreign trips - I mean, forget Republican and Democrat, as an American it concerns me when I have a president that doesn't stand up and say, 'Wait a minute, you know, I'm going to defend the United States of America because we are a beacon of hope for people all around the world,'" she said. FULL POST
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