VIDEO: Obama 60 Minutes Interview 3/22/09

Video of President Barack Obama's interview on 60 minutes, featuring a hard hitting response to Dick Cheney.

VIDEO: Obama 60 Minutes Interview 3/22/09
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President Obama is reprising some of his most familiar campaign rhetoric to criticize Dick Cheney, saying in an interview that the former vice president has no room to criticize him on national security.

“How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney?” Obama asked on “60 Minutes,” according to excerpts released by CBS ahead of its Sunday airing. “It hasn't made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment.”

Obama’s volley comes a week after Cheney said the new president was taking steps to “raise the risk to the American people of another attack.”

Cheney, in an interview with CNN’s John King last Sunday, singled out Obama’s intent to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, where many terrorism suspects are held, arguing that the administration was returning to a law enforcement rather than a full-scale military approach to terrorism.

Obama's tough words for Cheney represent the latest Salvo in what has become a shooting war between the new administration and the forner vice president.

While President Bush said in his first public appearance this week that he would not criticize his successor, Cheney has not been shy about going after Obama since leaving office. Top administration officials, happy to have the unpopulr Cheney as the face of the GOP, have been happy to engage him. Earlier this week, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs compared Cheney to conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, and said they both were members of the same right-wing "cabal."

Reminded by CBS’s Steve Kroft in the interview that some of the detainees at the facility had rejoined terrorist groups, Obama said that U.S. officials had to determine which individuals truly posed a danger to national security.

“There is no doubt that we have not done a particularly effective job in sorting through who are truly dangerous individuals…to make sure [they] are not a threat to us,” Obama said. But he called the Bush administration’s Gitmo policy of prolonged detention with no trials “unsustainable.”

VIDEO: Obama 60 Minutes Interview 3/22/09