President Obama and Dick Cheney's War of Words Stirs National Debate

May 22, 2009— -- The dueling speeches by President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney rippled across the airwaves today as surrogates took up the heated debate about how to keep America safe.

Today, Cheney's daughter and former State Department official Liz Cheney defended her father's views on enhanced interrogation techniques and assailed the Obama administration for not releasing the classified intelligence memos her father requested.

The memos, the Cheneys say, show that techniques like waterboarding yielded valuable information from detainees.

Last month, the Department of Justice released memos showing the legal justification for waterboarding -- an interrogation tactic that simulates drowning -- written by Bush-era officials.

Releasing those memos gave "terrorists a new insert for their training manual," said Liz Cheney on "Good Morning America," echoing remarks her father made yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute. "It takes a tool out of the toolbox for every future president."

On the contrary, Lawrence O'Donnell, former Senate Democratic chief of staff, argued that policies of the Bush-Cheney administration actually made the country less safe.

"It is torture. This government has prosecuted people in the past for doing exactly this," O'Donnell said on "GMA." "He [Dick Cheney] can never acknowledge what waterboarding actually was as practiced by the Bush administration."

"If [it was] so effective, why did they use it only on three?" questioned O'Donnell. "Why didn't they use it on the 500 people the Bush-Cheney administration released from Guantanamo -- 75 of whom we know ... have gone back into the terrorism business."

The waterboard was used on three prime terror suspects held in Guantanamo Bay.