Cheney defends Bush's national security policies

WASHINGTON -- Former vice president Cheney presented a full-throated defense of the Bush administration's handling of terror suspects today, while bluntly arguing that President Obama's decisions have exposed the country to greater threat from attack.

Calling waterboarding and other controversial Bush-era interrogation methods "torture," as Obama has done, "is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims," Cheney said in a speech this morning at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

"What's more," Cheney added, "to completely rule out enhanced interrogation methods in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness, and it would make the American people less safe."

Cheney spoke moments after Obama concluded his own speech at the National Archives. The president reiterated that he had banned the harsh techniques as inconsistent with American values. Obama's speech was piped into the room where a crowd awaited Cheney.

In an address replete with barbs aimed at his critics, Cheney argued that the debate over "the tough questioning of killers," as he put it, was symptomatic of a broader misconception, among Democrats and others, "about the threats that still face our country."

Recent polls show Cheney is popular among Republicans but far less popular among independents and Democrats.

Terrorists hate the United States for what it is, not what it does, Cheney asserted, and "when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don't stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for — our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity."

Directly rebutting Obama assertion that the United States "lost its way" after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Cheney contended that the Bush administration will be vindicated by history for having done exactly what was required to keep the country safe.

"For all the partisan anger that still lingers, our administration will stand up well in history, not despite our actions after 9/11, but because of them," Cheney said, adding later, "For all that we've lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings."

The Bush administration kept al-Qaeda on the defensive, he said. "We focused on getting their secrets instead of sharing ours with them. And on our watch, they never hit this country again. It is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed."

Cheney starkly criticized Obama's decision to release Justice Department memos authorizing the now-banned interrogation techniques, calling it "flatly contrary to the national security interest of the United States."

He repeated earlier criticisms that, as he put it, "the public was given less than half the truth. The released memos were carefully redacted to leave out references to what our government learned through the methods in question. Other memos, laying out specific terrorist plots that were averted, apparently were not even considered for release. For reasons the administration has yet to explain, they believe the public has a right to know the method of the questions, but not the content of the answers.

Cheney reiterated his claim, repeated by other former Bush administration officials, that plots were foiled as a result of the tough interrogation methods.

"Every senior official who has been briefed on these classified matters knows of specific attacks that were in the planning stages and were stopped by the programs we put in place," he said.

And Cheney said that when Obama and others assert that the brutal interrogations were a "recruitment tool," "it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do. It's another version of the same old refrain from the left, 'we brought it on ourselves.'"

The former vice president also blasted Obama's decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, saying, "The administration has found that it's easy to receive applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo. But it's tricky to come up with an alternative that will serve the interests of justice and America's national security...I think the president will find, upon reflection, that to bring the worst of the worst terrorists inside the United States would be cause for great danger and regret for years to come."

In his speech, Obama criticized what he called the "two opposite and absolutist ends" of the terrorism debate: "those who make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism," and those whose view amounts to, "anything goes."

"The American people are not absolutist, and they don't elect us to impose a rigid ideology on our problems," the president said. "They know that we need not sacrifice our security for our values, nor sacrifice our values for our security, so long as we approach difficult questions with honesty, and care, and a dose of common sense."

Cheney, by contrast, does see a stark choice. "Here is the great dividing line in our current debate over national security," he said. "You can look at the facts and conclude that the (Bush administration's) strategy has worked, and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event — coordinated, devastating, but also unique and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort. Whichever conclusion you arrive at, it will shape your entire view of the last seven years, and of the policies necessary to protect America for years to come."