UPDATE: Check out this article highlighting the exaggerations and omissions in Cheney's speech.
I just watched President Obama's national security speech and Dick Cheney's rebuttal of sorts. As usual, President Obama made a coherent and forceful presentation. He's taken some flack from civil libertarians over his proposed continued use of military commissions; but he's clearly turning the page on the abuses of the Bush Administration.
Dick Cheney is another story altogether. Zachary Roth at TPM did a good job of laying out some of the misinformation in his address, but I thought I'd add my two cents.
First, I just want to make one point I haven't seen made yet. Cheney and other conservatives are apoplectic about the prospect of hardened terrorists being brought on to American soil as a result of closing Gitmo--tried and put into prison. President Obama and others have responded forcefully that we already house plenty of convicted terrorists in our super-max prisons and nobody has ever escaped from these facilities.
There's one more thing: terrorism is pretty much by nature a collaborative exercise. It's hard to cause much major damage on one's own. This means that a single hardened terrorist locked up in an American prison or even let loose into a community is less of a danger than an escaped ax murderer or child molester. In order to ply his/her trade the terrorist would have to find and unite with at least a few other co-conspirators.
OK, now to Cheney's speech. First, about 10 minutes in, Cheney sets up his first huge false choice: because there have been no successful domestic terrorist attacks since 9/11, either one must conclude that our (i.e the Bush Administration's) approach was completely right, or that 9/11 was essentially a fluke. Gee, that seems to ignore lots of space in between--like there were some merits but also some excesses to the Bush approach; there may have been other approaches that take the threat from terrorists seriously but also seek to balance security with civil liberties.
Obama proposed precisely this approach in his speech, noting that neither those who would ignore the threat in the name of 100% transparency nor those who would pursue an "anything goes" approach have it right.
Cheney's glib reply: "In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground."
So, I guess it's "anything goes" or nothing for the ol' VP--very subtle thinking.
Next, Cheney rails against the use of euphamism to downgrade the "War on Terror"...and then refers to the torture of detainees as them being subjected to "unpleasant things." [BTW, Cheney seems not to have listened to President Obama's speech very carefully--he began by noting that we are at war with Al Queda.]
Finally, Cheney consistently conflates terrorists with potential terrorists. He scoffs at the idea that torture and Gitmo are recruitment tools for Al Queda, labeling them as more liberal "we brought it on ourselves" self-flaggelation. The terrorists hate our values, says Cheney, not our departure from them.
He completely ignores the fact that while this may be true of the hardest core, it may not be at all true of those poor, uneducated, and vulnerable souls who are often the footsoldiers for extremism. These potential terrorists may not hate America to the core--but may be convinced to hate us when confronted with stark evidence of our abuses.
It's not that our conduct justifies terrorism, Mr. Cheney. It's that certain conduct makes it notably easier for our enemies to construct a plausible narrative that recruits terrorists. There's a difference...if you have patience for subtlety.
