The big “dueling speeches” event between President Barack Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney is over — an event that proved to be a study in contrasts:
Obama: saying the nation can and must eschew so called enhanced interrogation techniques (aka torture) for moral (it goes against all that America has stood for over the years) and practical reasons (it is not more effective). Cheney: saying Obama deserves an answer to his criticisms of the Bush administration, steadfastly defending the use of these tactics as not just necessarily during the Bush years but necessary today — if America wants to remain safe.
The younger politico saying the U.S. must move away from torture…The older saying it is a vital tool to defend the United States. Obama’s speech was more forward looking. Cheney’s: more defensive — seeking to justify the past.
What will it mean in political terms? The new and old media will have a field day with this one — an unprecedented spectacle: a sitting President delivering a major address and then having it officially answered by the former Vice President.
But in political terms the question becomes: who will “win” the domestic and international opinion war? Cheney’s speech seemed — once again — aimed largely at those who already supported the previous administration with the usual warnings about how dangerous not using these techniques will be. Obama’s seemed aimed at those in the United States and abroad who either have serious doubts about past policies and practices, or who already oppose them. In sheer numbers: Obama’s speech is likely to have more long term impact since his audience was more than an already convinced choir.
However, watch the speeches and judge entirely for yourself:
Here’s Obama’s speech:
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Here’s Cheney’s speech:
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You can read the text of Obama’s speech HERE.
You can read the text of Cheney’s speech HERE.
(SCROLL DOWN FOR UPDATED ROUNDUP)
A COMPREHENSIVE CROSS-SECTION OF NEW AND OLD MEDIA REACTION TO THE SPEECHES:
Cheney flailed and castigated, as always has been this demagogue’s wont, while Obama was sober and teacherly, as has been his. There were no surprises in either speech, but we can thank God that it is Obama who is in charge and not Cheney.
It’s the Obama-Cheney showdown this morning. I, for one, am gratified to see this White House forced to put national security on the front burner. If not for the forceful public defenses by Vice President Cheney of the aggressive, proactive measures the last administration took to keep us safe, the current commander-in-chief would be happily gabbling about solar panels and weatherization subsidies or somesuch.
National security is and always will be the Democrats’ soft spot. And they know it. Which is why Team Obama scrambled to preempt Cheney’s AEI speech. [EDITOR’s NOTE: Obama’s speech began more than 20 minutes late so it overlapped with the Cheney speech starting time.]
—Andrew Sullivan (INSERTED HIGHER UP):
A simple note having now read the former vice-president’s despicable and disgraceful speech. It confirms the very worst of him, and reveals just how callow, just how arrogant, and just how reckless and unrepentant this man is and has long been. There was not a whisper of regret or reflection; there was a series of lies and distortions, a reckless attack on a graceful successor, inheriting a world of intractable problems, and a reminder that while serious men and women will indeed move on, Cheney never will. He remains a threat to this country’s constitution as he remains a stain on its honor and moral standing. I never believed I would hear a vice-president of the United States not simply defend torture but insist on pride in it, insist on its honor. But that is what he said, with that sly grin insisting that fear always beats reason, that violence always beats dialogue, and that torture is always an American value…
…He has clearly learned nothing; and will remain a threat to this country’s ability to fight terror and defend its values. The president will remain above this, as he should, as Cheney seeks further to divide and destabilize this country in a futile attempt to rescue his reputation. But his reputation is unrescuable, his crimes a matter of record, and his character now indelibly written in history. Our job is to never let him forget it, to never let history be re-written and to remain resolute in bringing both him and those who attacked us to justice. And that is in the presidential oath of office.
–-Los Angeles Times Top of the Ticket blog:
It was being billed by the media as the heavyweight national security debate that the country was craving. But the verbal battle between President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney had a feel of deja vu.
It was more than the specifics, the charges and countercharges that both men have often used in recent weeks. It was the philosophical split that has marked politics for centuries: Does the end justify the means or are there ethical limits to all human actions.
I’m wondering how Cheney can continue to claim that a torture regime and a horrific facility like Gitmo “kept us safe” when, in fact, we’ve seen many times over — recently embodied in the brouhaha over the torture detainee photos’ release — the reality that it has made America less safe over the long haul, because it has inspired the recruitment of a fresh generation of America-hating terrorists. That 2006 National Intelligence Estimate made this point explicitly.
Yes, Dick Cheney and his wrecking crew may have effectively overcompensated for their manifest failures in counterterrorism on 9/11 by resorting to intelligence-gathering that destroyed America’s moral standing in the world, and it may have been enough to tamp things down while they were still in office (though the evidence of that is quite thin indeed).
But the ends do not justify the means. Especially not when the end is only a temporary safety, gained by measures that promise even worse attacks in the years to come.
—BBC:
President Obama’s speech was a clear rebuke to his fellow speech-maker, Dick Cheney – and to the Bush administration as a whole.
Mr Obama made a number of references to Republicans who disagree or have disagreed with the former vice-president’s approach to national security.
He referred (although not by name) to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and quoted two Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and John McCain.
And he emphasised that this had been a bipartisan rejection, by referring to the nomination by the American people of presidential candidates from both parties who wanted to turn the page on harsh interrogation techniques.
In a phrase that his political opponents are certain to seize on, Mr Obama said the techniques that were used were “not America”.
–Allison Kilkenny, writing on the Huffington Post:
Dick Cheney is a painful reminder of America’s sins to a population eager to make amends with the rest of humanity. It’s rare that Americans get to see such a Machiavellian creature in its essence, while it’s still alive. History books normally act as a buffer between citizens and the dark deeds of their leaders. They get to soothe themselves with retrospect and say, “Yeah, maybe Lincoln shouldn’t have suspended Habeas during the Civil War,” or “Roosevelt’s Japanese detention camps were a bit much.” But Dick is very much alive, free, and still trying to convince Americans that even as he violated their Constitution and spearheaded an illegal war, he was keeping them safe. And he’s still keeping them safe.
The most important part of the president’s speech was the framing of our national conversation around this issue. On Guantanamo, he reiterated that the prison has “set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world.” This is important, but it’s secondary to another point the president made, that the creation of Guantanamo was not an issue of security but of shielding suspected terrorists from our judicial system. He spoke of the argument that has raged over the past few weeks, perhaps referring specifically to Dick Cheney when he referred to arguments that “are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country.” He reframed his positions on national security, much as he does with all political issues, as standing between two “two opposite and absolutist ends,” those who would never “put national security over transparency” and those who believe the Nixonian dictum that “that the President should have blanket authority to do whatever he wants.”
I don’t buy this framing. The fact is that there is no middle ground when it comes to due process. With his soaring and sincere rhetoric, the president has done an incredible job of selling his kinder, gentler War on Terror, and ultimately, the American people will likely have his back, if only because they trust him. In a sense, Barack Obama may be far more dangerous than George W. Bush when it comes to violating our civil liberties; where the American people feared the excesses of Bush, they trust wholly in the sincerity of Barack Obama. At least for now.
—The Christian Science Monitor’s Jimmy Orr:
Well, if the Obama White House tried to run out the clock so the networks wouldn’t cover Dick Cheney’s speech, it didn’t work.
The networks waited. Cheney waited. And he delivered his speech.
And politics aside — support him or not — the vice president did what no other Republican has been able to do this year: break through the noise.
Cheney is clearly a Republican who doesn’t flinch — at a time when his party is filled with grandees who are apologizing, equivocating, and saying things like “we need to find ourselves.”
On dealing with terror suspects, Cheney couldn’t have been more clear: “In top secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program.”
In his speech on national security before the American Enterprise Institute today, Former Vice-President Dick Cheney made the rather surprising argument that debate over the treatment of detainees makes American look weak.
…I didn’t realize that devotion to American ideals such as free speech and democratic governance is something that makes America weak. Quite the contrary, it’s what makes America strong. Now, if Cheney wants to argue that it makes us “look weak”, what’s his solution–that we avoid debate?
I’m also more than a little surprised at his okay of the “just following orders” defense of the legal memos that supposedly “justified” torture.
I have much the same reaction to Obama’s speech this morning as Greenwald and dday. Actions, not words are what matter in this case. Unfortunately, the last administration lied so constantly and so blatantly in the name of national security that the new president has to make a much stronger case and demonstrate his commitments much more visibly before anyone will believe America has changed its policy. Just saying you believe in the constitution and that America should live up to its values isn’t really good enough. After all, Bush used to say the same thing.
…The real terrorists, I’m afraid, are the self-serving hawks who promise to explode a political dirty bomb in the halls of the capitol every time someone tries to be sensible about American foreign policy and national security. They are still running things. They have always run things. And the sorry fact is that their dominance is a decades long model of bipartisan comity.
—CNN:
President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney offered competing views on how to keep America safe in back-to-back speeches Thursday.
Obama said his administration is trying to clean up “a mess” left behind by the Bush administration. He defended his plan to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, his ban on torture, the release of Bush-era interrogation memos and his objection to the release of prisoner photos.
Cheney stood up for the Bush administration’s security record, arguing that Obama has weakened the country’s ability to combat al Qaeda and other extremists. He defended the use of enhanced interrogation techniques as a success that changed thousands of lives. He called the release of the Bush-era memos a reckless distraction and belittled Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo “with little deliberation and no plan.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s spokesman wrote off Cheney’s address as something more beneficial to Democrats than Republicans.
–The Week has this roundup.
—The Rhetorican:
Heard part of the speech, but the little I heard sounded like a bunch of excuses, justifications, and retroactive buck passing. All of that just to defend the president’s decision to close Gitmo? Little sensitive to criticism these days, isn’t he? What happened to the “I won” bravado he was exhuding in January? That was certainly a no show….
….I guess the politicization was supposed to end on the day of Obama’s inauguration. Sorry, Mr. President. That’s not how it works. What’s good against one administration is good against another. Ask Dick Cheney. He knows. Although I gotta admit: must be tough to defend closing Gitmo when you got Gitmo substitutes in the works.
—Just One Minute has a long post that needs to be read in full. A small part of it:
I have just flipped on the live coverage of The One’s speech on national security and my goodness – peevish Obama seems really irritated with us for expecting him to deal with these issues. As a good (and now abashed) citizen I almost want to send him some sort of apology note. Almost.
I will need to wait for a transcript but the line that struck me was something like ‘I have no interest in spending all of our time relitigating the policies of the past eight years.’ That sort of came with the job, though, didn’t it?
….CHENEY’S SPEECH: ..Visually, this is the expected mismatch. What bright light put Cheney in a death-black suit, or was that a deliberate Darth Vader tribute?
Cheney pounds the table for the release of the memos that marked the successes of the enhanced interrogation program, insisting we have only heard half the story. I see another Obama climbdown coming.
–-New York Times’ lively The Caucus Blog:
Rarely have two starkly different views of national security been on display in the way that they were this morning.
President Obama kicked off the debate with a far-reaching speech about the expanse and limits of the office of the presidency, defending decisions he’s already made that reverse his predecessor’s policies and also those upholding others. Addressing critics from the right and left, Mr. Obama didn’t back down from his plans to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center nor did he shrink from his refusal to release more photographs of abused prisoners.
…In line after line, Mr. Cheney drew upon the horrific imagery of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 as though they had occurred just yesterday. While commending Mr. Obama for a new Afghanistan war strategy, he accused the president of faulting and mischaracterizing Bush practices. Indeed, Mr. Cheney added as a prelude to his lengthy speech, so much so that Mr. Obama “deserved an answer.” Mr. Cheney continued to insist that the harsh interrogation methods now opposed by the president were successful in thwarting more assaults against the United States. And he argued that “seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until danger has passed.”
President Obama’s speech on national security this morning was probably the most important of his young presidency. He firmly framed his approach to combating terrorism in both American law and values. He didn’t seek to refight the presidential campaign or focus blame on the Bush administration. Instead, he outlined the problems as they exist and the challenges to solve them. Most important, he elevated the issues above the current debate.
By focusing on the future, Obama also made former Vice President Dick Cheney’s upcoming speech much less relevant. Very few Americans care about defending the previous administration’s policies right now. Even fewer care to hear Cheney refight internal battles he lost.
It was a truly excellent speech.
—Glenn Greenwald on Obama and Cheney:
Ultimately, what I find most harmful about his [Obama’s] embrace of things like preventive detention, concealment of torture evidence, opposition to investigations and the like is that these policies are now no longer just right-wing dogma but also the ideas that many defenders of his — Democrats, liberals, progressives — will defend as well. Even if it’s due to perceived political necessity, the more Obama embraces core Bush terrorism policies and assumptions — we’re fighting a “war on terror”; Presidents have the power to indefinitely and “preventatively” imprison people with no charges; we can create new due-process-abridging tribunals when it suits us; the “Battlefield” is everywhere; we should conceal evidence when it will make us look bad — the more those premises are transformed from right-wing dogma into the prongs of bipartisan consensus, no longer just advocated by Bush followers but by many Obama defenders as well.
…There’s very little worth saying about the speech Dick Cheney delivered after Obama’s. It’s just the same recycled, extremist neoconservative pablum that drove the U.S. into the deep ditch in which it currently finds itself. The central Cheneyite claim — they were right because they prevented another Terrorist attack on the Homeland — is so patently ludicrous, since (a) they presided over 9/11; (b) the post-9/11 anthrax attacks happened “on their watch”; (c) Clinton “kept the country safe” for almost 8 years after the first World Trade Center attack (and, therefore, by Cheney’s reasoning, Clinton’s terrorism approach must have been optimal); and (d) it assumes without demonstrating that we’re unable to defend ourselves unless we torture people, spy without warrants, and generally act like lawless, barbaric cretins.
The other lowlight comes when Obama explains why he released the torture memos but not the Abu Ghraib photos. Read it for yourself about three-quarters of the way down. In essence, he says that everyone already knew what interrogation techniques Bush had approved so there was no risk of inflaming anti-American outrage or disclosing any secrets to Al Qaeda. Really? I saw plenty of people in the media outraged upon learning from the memos that KSM has been waterboarded 183 times; presumably a few people overseas weren’t real thrilled about it either. As for disclosing secrets, what about that panel he ordered in January to investigate the CIA’s need for interrogation techniques that go beyond the Army Field Manual? Those aren’t going to be secret once they release their findings. And isn’t it equally true that everyone who’s seen the original Abu Ghraib photos has a pretty good idea of what’s in those photos he refuses to release — in which case, per his logic about the memos, shouldn’t they be released too? His spin here reminds me of Pelosi’s bobbing and weaving on waterboarding: The obvious truth is that he released the memos to appease his base and held back the photos to appease his righty critics, but he can’t say that so he has to come up with a, er, tortured explanation.
President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney engaged in a vigorous debate from separate corners over how to protect America from terrorists. In his speech at National Archives in Washington, Mr. Obama laid out his logic for opposing enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding and closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
It was a precise and reasoned articulation of his position, somewhat like an answer from Mr. Spock of Star Trek legend, a half-human, half-Vulcan commander of Starfleet who battles with his human side to be perfectly logical and impervious to emotion. (Mr. Obama has been compared to Spock, an outsider of mixed heritage and cool in the face of adversity.)
….While the definition of “torture” is at the center of the debate, the notion of the moral character of the U.S. is also in play. For Mr. Cheney, the means justify the ends–the U.S. has not been attacked since September 2001. “You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive 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,” he said.
Like Jack Bauer, the main character in the Fox television show “24,” Mr. Cheney believes that the enhanced interrogation methods that Mr. Obama considers torture, like waterboarding (which Mr. Cheney maintains is legal based on what many now believe are flawed legal rulings), save American lives. The success of the enhanced interrogation methods is an “inconvenient truth” that the Obama administration prefers to ignore, according to Mr. Cheney.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.