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| Monday, May 25, 2009 |
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Cheney Blasts Obama on Enhanced Interrogation
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Cheney Blasts Obama on Enhanced Interrogation
Friday, May 22, 2009
By Adam Brickley
Former Vice President Dick Cheney appears at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., May 21, 2009. (AP photo)
Washington (CNSNews.com) – In a strongly worded speech at the American Enterprise Institute Thursday, former Vice President Dick Cheney defended the Bush administration’s use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques on suspected al-Qaeda members and other suspected terrorists – and lambasted President Obama for his handling of the issue.
Unequivocally standing by his position, Cheney said that enhanced interrogations were “legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do.” He went on to blast Obama’s “selective release of documents relating to enhanced interrogations” – interrogations that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other liberals in Congress have labeled “torture.”
“Somehow, when the soul-searching was done and the veil was lifted on the policies of the Bush administration, the public was given less than half the truth,” Cheney said.
"The released memos were carefully redacted to leave out references to what our government learned through the methods in question," he said. "Other memos, laying out specific terrorist plots that were averted, apparently were not even considered for release.”
In April, Obama released four top-secret memos which gave the details about enhanced interrogation techniques – including “waterboarding” – that the CIA used to question suspected terrorists and enemy combatants.
Cheney said that what the U.S. learned from those interrogations helped prevent further terrorist attacks.
He went so far as to say that some critics are engaging in “nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative.”
“In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the methods applied to a few captured terrorists,” Cheney said.
“Some of (President Obama’s) defenders say the unseen memos are inconclusive,” Cheney said, “which only raises the question why they (the Obama administration) won’t let the American people decide for themselves. I saw that information as vice president, and I reviewed some of it again recently at the National Archives.”
Cheney noted that he has formally requested the declassification of the memos, and that his requests were rejected.
However, he noted that President Obama has the power to declassify documents, a power which was exercised in order to release the memos that have already been made public.
“President Obama has used his declassification power to reveal what happens in the interrogation of terrorists,” Cheney said, “Now let him use that same power to show Americans what did not happen, thanks to the good work of our intelligence officials.”
He also ripped interrogation critics on other subjects, such as the equivocation of enhanced interrogation with the events at Abu Ghraib prison. “It takes a deeply unfair cast of mind,” he said, “to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.”
Addressing the president’s proposal to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cheney said that the decision “came with little deliberation and no plan.”
“The administration has found out that it’s easy to receive applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo, but it’s tricky to come up with an alternative the will serve the interests of justice and America’s national security,” Cheney said.
President Obama, who decided to deliver his own address on these issues Thursday, defended his decision to close Gitmo and release the memos on enhanced interrogation – taking a dig at the previous administration.
"The decisions that were made over the last eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable -- a framework that failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions; that failed to use our values as a compass. And that is why I took several steps upon taking office to better protect the American people," Obama said.
But Cheney, whose speech at the conservative think-tank was booked weeks ago, was unbowed.
“For all that we’ve lost in this conflict,” he added, “the United States has never lost its moral bearings. And when the moral reckoning turns to the men known as high-value terrorists, I can assure you that they were neither innocent nor victims. As for those who asked them questions and got answers: they did the right thing, they made our country safer, and a lot of Americans are alive today because of them.” |
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