What a Dick!

Kurtz: Is That Fair to Agnew?

Lawrence O'Donnell calls Cheney's speech the sleaziest presentation by a Veep since Spiro back in the day.

Atrios: Great Minds

I was just about to make this same point: Bush and Cheney let a bunch of bad guys go who supposedly continued to be bad guys and this is somehow a good thing?

Also, they kept us safe, except for 9/11.

TPM Headline:

The Top Lies, Distortions, And Straw Men In Cheney's Speech

Marshall: Cheney Rolls out New Fib for 2009

One of the weirdest moments in Vice President Cheney's speech was when he claimed that "President Obama has reserved unto himself the right to order the use of enhanced interrogation should he deem it appropriate." We talked to various sources and no one even seemed to know what he was talking about since Obama and his CIA have explicitly ruled out the use of Cheney-era torture techniques.

As near as we can tell, Cheney bases this on an extremely flimsy statement made not by President Obama but by Sen. Kid Bond (R-MO).

It's always sort of an inherent difficult proposition to try to find the evidence that Cheney bases one of his claims on. But Zack Roth is doing his best over at TPMmuckraker in this post and this one.

FDL's Blue Texan: Dick Cheney: Nothing is More Consistent with American Values than Torture

From Dick Cheney's remarks at AEI this morning:

Critics of our policies are given to lecturing on the theme of being consistent with American values. But no moral value held dear by the American people obliges public servants ever to sacrifice innocent lives to spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things. And when an entire population is targeted by a terror network, nothing is more consistent with American values than to stop them.

Anything is permissible in defense of the Fatherland Homeland.

Harry Truman, 1950.

I know that it would be easier to catch and jail criminals if we did not have a Bill of Rights in our Federal and State constitutions. But I thank God every day that it is there, that that Bill of Rights is a fundamental law. That is what distinguishes us from the totalitarian powers.

This seems to be lost on the former Vice President.

Benen: A NOUN, A VERB, AND 9/11...

Now that it's over, Dick Cheney's speech on national security was clearly a mistake. It's been easy for the former vice president to show up on various news programs and attack the president, but today's appearance at a conservative think tank put Cheney in a position in which he had to present an actual vision. He would have been better off repeating talking point to Hannity and Limbaugh.

Note, for example, that Cheney referenced 9/11 25 times. It was enough to make Rudy Giuliani blush.

For that matter, the speech was striking in its lack of anything new or compelling. Even casual political observers probably could have sketched out the framework of the speech in advance, and been pretty close to the actual thing. Looking at counter-terrorism as a law-enforcement matter is a mistake; Obama, Democrats, and the New York Times are putting us at risk; except for all of the spectacular failures, Cheney's approach to national security was effective; torture is good, but releasing torture memos is bad; the rule of law is "an elaborate legal proceeding"; Obama is only worried about impressing Europe; and someday, historians will agree that Bush/Cheney was just terrific.

It's almost as if Cheney just grabbed a couple of copies of the Weekly Standard from January and pasted them together.

But one of the concerns that stood out for me, though, was Cheney's frequent references to about "euphemisms."

"Behind the overwrought reaction to enhanced interrogations is a broader misconception about the threats that still face our country. You can sense the problem in the emergence of euphemisms that strive to put an imaginary distance between the American people and the terrorist enemy.... In the category of euphemism, the prizewinning entry would be ... It's one thing to adopt the euphemisms that suggest ... "

Since when does Cheney find "euphemisms" so offensive? We are, after all, talking about the leader of an administration that came up with some doozies in euphemism department.

"Terrorist surveillance program" is euphemism for warrantless wiretaps. "Enhanced interrogation program" is a euphemism for torture. Indeed, the previous administration used euphemisms as the basis for a national-security strategy: "war on terror," "weapons of mass destruction," and "mushroom clouds" were standards for quite a while.

Cheney probably thought it would raise his stature to speak after the president on the same subject. The strategy was half-successful -- he got the media to characterize this as some kind of showdown between relative equals. But the other half was a humiliating failure -- Cheney came across as a small, petty man, trying a little too hard to undermine the nation's elected leadership while salvaging some shred of personal credibility.

He failed.

Think Progress: Cheney: Concern About Torture Is ‘Contrived Indignation And Phony Moralizing’

Today, Vice President Cheney gave a speech at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute in response to President Obama’s speech on human rights. Cheney launched an aggressive defense of the Bush administration’s torture program by saying that it was necessary after the 9/11 terrorist attacks:

In the years after 9/11, our government also understood that the safety of the country required collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists. And in a few cases, that information could be gained only through tough interrogations.

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. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do.

Cheney also criticized critics of the Bush administration’s program, calling it “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 interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.” He then claimed that these critics are attacking intelligence officers for trying to “avenge the dead of 9/11″ through torture:

I might add that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about “values.” Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11. … We sought, and we in fact obtained, specific information on terrorist plans.

Watch it:

Cheney has set up a straw man. Critics are not upset at intelligence officers for trying to “avenge the dead of 9/11″ by “rough[ing] up some terrorists.” People are upset at top Bush administration officials for authorizing human rights violations in order to pursue a political agenda.

As the 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report made clear, interrogators at Gitmo were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, even though they were ultimately unsuccesful. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link…there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results,” said former U.S. Army psychiatrist Maj. Charles Burney.

In his attempt to justify torture because of the constraints the Bush administration was facing after 2001, Cheney referenced 9/11 25 times. “Iraq” was mentioned just twice.

Bodenner: Cheney Hates Us For Our Freedom

Zachary Roth points out "the most radical argument" of Cheney's "extremely radical" speech. Cheney:

And when [our enemies] 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.

Rule of law and democratic debate, even years after the emergency of 9/11, are deemed weaknesses. Roth:

In other words, the very act of debating torture, or the process by which we try detainees, is encouraging terrorists to strike. The implication, of course, is that dissent of any kind is dangerous.

Except, of course, the dissent of a former vice president openly repudiating a sitting president's policies on the cable news circuit, claiming his policies will endanger American lives. That's being a "grownup" and "statesman," according to Kristol:

Obama's is the speech of a young senator who was once a part-time law professor--platitudinous and preachy, vague and pseudo-thoughtful in an abstract kind of way. This sentence was revealing: "On the other hand, I recently opposed the release of certain photographs that were taken of detainees by U.S. personnel between 2002 and 2004." "Opposed the release"? Doesn't he mean "decided not to permit the release"? He's president. He's not just a guy participating in a debate. But he's more comfortable as a debater, not as someone who takes responsibility for decisions.

(Unlike Dick "Stuff Happens" Cheney.) My translation of Cheney's speech: they hate us for our freedom, so let's just get rid of the freedom part and then we'll be safe.

Benen: REJOINING THE FIGHT....

It's easy to see how this story is going to be misused and misunderstood.

An unreleased Pentagon report concludes that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.

The conclusion could strengthen the arguments of critics who have warned against the transfer or release of any more detainees as part of President Obama's plan to shut down the prison by January.

There's ample room for skepticism on this. It's practically impossible to verify the Pentagon's numbers, since officials have "provided no way of authenticating" the recidivists, and "only a few of the 29 people identified by name can be independently verified as having engaged in terrorism since their release. Many of the 29 are simply described as associating with terrorists or training with terrorists, with almost no other details provided."

For that matter, if the number is accurate, a recidivism rate of about 14% is low by most incarceration standards. Seton Hall University School of Law professor Mark Denbeaux, who has raised credible doubts about these Pentagon reports, told the NYT, "We've never said there weren't some people who would return to the fight. It seems to be unavoidable. Nothing is perfect."

True, but it's also worth noting just how far from perfection the Gitmo system was under Bush/Cheney. Indeed, President Obama addressed this point directly in his speech this morning.

"We are currently in the process of reviewing each of the detainee cases at Guantanamo to determine the appropriate policy for dealing with them. As we do so, we are acutely aware that under the last administration, detainees were released only to return to the battlefield. That is why we are doing away with the poorly planned, haphazard approach that let those detainees go in the past. Instead, we are treating these cases with the care and attention that the law requires and our security demands."

Good thinking. In fact, the unstated truth from the NYT story is that the Bush/Cheney administration was truly awful in figuring out what to do with detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and it's another one of the inherited messes Obama is working to clean up.