Back in Washington after a weekend in Afghanistan, new Florida Sen. George LeMieux says he'd encourage President Barack Obama to embrace Gen. Stanley McChrystal's call for more combat troops.

But LeMieux stopped short of criticizing Obama for not deciding faster -- vice president Dick Cheney last week accused the prez of "dithering" over the decision.

"I'm not going to be critical now, but if we're sitting here a month from now and a decision's not been made, I will be," LeMieux said, noting Obama faces "no greater decision" than to send additional troops to battle.

Obama at Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Fla., Monday defended his pace.

"I will never rush the decision of sending you into harm's way," Obama said at a rally with 3,500 service personnel. "I won't risk your lives unless it is absolutely necessary. And if it is necessary, we will back you up.''

The White House and former Vice President Dick Cheney are at war again – this time over the real war in Afghanistan.

The White House Thursday shot back at Cheney assertion that Obama is “dithering” while debating a quest for more troops in Afghanistan, countering that the Bush-Cheney administration sat on a similar request for 8 months without acting.

"What Vice President Cheney calls dithering, President Obama calls his solemn responsibility to the men and women in uniform and to the American public,” Gibbs said.

“I think we've all seen what happens when somebody doesn't take that responsibility seriously," he added in a veiled reference to the Bush administrations decision to go to war in Iraq on the false assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Moreover, Gibbs said, it was really Former President George W. Bush and Cheney who dithered, sitting on a request for more troops for more than 8 months without granting it.

"I think it's pretty safe to say that the vice president was for seven years not focused on Afghanistan, even more curious given the fact that an increase in troops sat on desks in this White House, including the vice president's, for more than eight months, a resource request filled by President Obama in March,” Gibbs said.

“I find it interesting that he's blaming us for something that he didn't see fit to do over, best I can tell, seven years of a war in Afghanistan," he added.

Gibbs was reacting to Cheney’s charge in a Wednesday night speech that Obama is dragging his feet in weighing a new strategy for Afghanistan.

"The White House must stop dithering while America's armed forces are in danger," Cheney said. “It's time for President Obama to do what it takes to win a war he has repeatedly and rightly called a war of necessity."

"Make no mistake. Signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries," Cheney said.

The former vice president also disputed the suggestion from Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel that the new administration had to start from scratch on Afghanistan policy. Cheney said the outgoing administration briefed the Obama team during the transition.

“They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt," Cheney said.

Gibbs noted that it was Obama, not Bush or Cheney, who ecided to send additional troops to Afghanistan. Obama ordered 21,000 more troops in March. Obama now is weighing a request for more troops.

A couple of weeks ago, just ahead of Dick Cheney's speech on national security, The New York Times ran a story saying that 14 percent of released Guantanamo detainees had returned to the fight. Interestingly, Cheney quoted the same statistic in his speech, which for some of us recalled the time when the Times published bogus "revelations" about Saddam Hussein's nuclear program, just in time for Cheney to quote the story on Meet the Press that very morning.

The problems with the Times's "returning" detainees story were evident right from the beginning. Here's Justin Elliott's early take on the matter from the day the story ran in print. The Times changed the story online but apparently saw no need for an in-print correction, according to this item from Michael Calderone at Politico.

But that was then. Today, this Editor's Note ran in the print edition, acknowledging that the original item had been deficient. Perhaps the editors were influenced by last Sunday's Frank Rich column, which pointed out there hadn't been a lot of skepticism about Cheney's national security presentation.

The Times tells Elliott today at Talking Points Memo that it wasn't spun, but the old saying still applies: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . .

One key question remains unknown: How many of these confirmed and suspected jihadis became such because of their experiences at Guantanamo and elsewhere? Here's what McClatchy reported: Did 'returning' terrorists become extremists in Guantanamo? Tom Lasseter's original report on the dangers of mixing innocents with hardened terrorists at Guantanamo is also instructive: Militants found recruits among Guantanamo's wrongly detained.

UPDATE: A more likely reason the Times acknowledged the deficiencies of its story: On Sunday, two days after the Editor's Note ran, Public Editor Clark Hoyt took the newsroom to task for the story. Read what he had to say.

Well this is interesting.

A new Gallup poll finds that former Vice President Dick Cheney is marginally more popular than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The survey found that 37 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Cheney, who has launched a high profile media blitz to defend the Bush-Cheney administration and rip the Obama administration.

That's a bit better than the 34 percent who have a favorable opinion of Pelosi, who's been caught in a mess trying to explain what she knew about harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, and why she didn't object.

But Cheney's edge is hardly a bragging point, as both have pretty low favorable ratings.

Moreover, Cheney also has a higher unfavorable rating, as 54 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of him while 50 percent have an unfavorable opinion of Pelosi.

The reason Cheney has more of both: he's better known and more people have an opinion of him than of Pelosi.

Overall, the net negative rating is similar - 17 percentage points and 16 for the Speaker.

Just hours after saying he would never prosecute CIA officers for harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, President Barack Obama opened the door Tuesday to prosecuting the Bush administration officials who OK’d the techniques.

Obama said it’s up to Attorney General Eric Holder – who works for him – to decide whether Bush administration lawyers should be charged with war crimes or any other offense for writing the memo’s approving of such techniques as water boarding.

"I do worry that this gets so politicized that it hampers our ability to function effectively," he said when asked about a possible independent investigation.

“If and when there needs to be a further accounting of what took place during this period,” he added about a possible Congressional inquiry, “it could be done in a bipartisan fashion outside of the typical process that would break down along party lines."

He stressed that “I’m not suggesting that it should be done." But he added that if there were an investigation, it would be "very important” for the American people to see it as an effort to find the truth and not political benefit for one party.

Obama spoke as the liberal group moveon.org launched a campaign to gather signatures on petitions urging Holder to appoint a special prosecutor.

“On Thursday, President Obama released memos that describe, in horrific detail, the torture techniques authorized by the Bush administration. The memos make clear that top Bush officials didn't just condone torture, they encouraged it,” the group said in an email to supporters.

“So far there's been no accountability for the architects of Bush's torture program — the top officials who justified keeping detainees awake for 11 days straight, water boarding them repeatedly, and forcing prisoners into coffin-like boxes with insects.

“We need real consequences for those responsible — it's the only way to keep this from happening again. Attorney General Holder can open an investigation into the torture program — but he most likely won't unless people everywhere speak up and demand it.”

On Monday, former Vice President Dick Cheney argued that the interrogations were productive and necessary to stop terrorist attacks. He urged the Obama administration to declassify and release additional memos that he said document the helpful information drawn out in the interrogations.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he’s asked the CIA to declassify more documents about the interrogation of suspected terrorists beyond those released by the Obama administration - documents he says will show the Bush administration did get results with its techniques.

"One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort," Cheney says in an interview with Fox News to be aired Monday evening.

"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney says in the interview, taped at his home in McLean, Virginia not far from CIA headquarters.

“I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

The interview will air on the Hannity program at 9 pm EDT.

The New York Review of Books has a new installment in Mark Danner's reports on the abuse of detainees held in secret CIA prisons after Sept. 11, 2001. As you recall, his previous article focused on what the International Committee of the Red Cross found in its interviews with 14 so-called high value detainees who were delivered from CIA limbo to Guantanamo in September 2006.

What should we do about those who tortured and, more importantly, those who authorized torture in the name of the United States is the theme of Danner's latest piece. The evidence of torture has become irrefutable. Danner writes:

The reports on American torture now fill a shelf next to my desk, beginning with the Taguba Report in 2004, still perhaps the best of them, and then going on to include the ICRC report on Abu Ghraib, the Schlesinger Report, the Fay/Jones Report, the Church Report, the Schmidt Report, and now the Armed Services Committee Report, the full text of which will soon break into the news in all its glory, telling us in much more conclusive detail a story the major outlines of which we already know. More revelations will come from this, and more news, particularly about the mechanics by which prominent senior officials approved use of the "alternative set of procedures" and closely monitored their day-to-day application. We will continue in an endless round-robin of revelation, in which we tell ourselves we are learning something new though in fact, when it comes to the central problem of torture—what we as a society should do about it and whether we will in fact do anything—we are in the end simply repeating to ourselves things, however increasingly detailed and awful, that we already know.

And yet there is one thing we don't really know: Did it do any good? We have Cheney's assertions, but every judicial proceeding that has come to light on Guantanamo seems to argue that little interrogators learned was of any real value. Danner says no one, not those who oppose torture, not those who favor it, really wants to find out the answer.

Aside from the article itself, the New York Review of Books has also reproduced the Red Cross report. It too is well worth the reading.