EVENTS
Keeping America Safe
An Address by Former Vice President Dick Cheney
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Date:
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Thursday, May 21, 2009
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Time:
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10:30 AM -- 11:30 AM
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Location:
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Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
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Former vice president Richard Cheney
speaks at AEI. Photo by Peter Holden
Photography / AEI | | |
WASHINGTON, MAY 21, 2009--Today, President Barack Obama and former vice president Dick Cheney presented competing views of how America was kept secure after 9/11--and how to proceed in the future. Mr. Cheney, who has rejoined the AEI Board of Trustees since leaving government in January, gave a widely covered speech at AEI just minutes after President Obama spoke. The president defended his ban on enhanced interrogation techniques and his plans to close the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.
Mr. Cheney first documented the threats the nation faced in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and how the Bush administration shaped the nation's response. The post-9/11 "comprehensive strategy" has "required the commitment of many thousands of troops in two theaters of war, with high points and some low points in both Iraq and Afghanistan--and at every turn, the people of our military carried the heaviest burden," he said. "Well over seven years into the effort, one thing we know is that the enemy has spent most of this time on the defensive--and every attempt to strike inside the United States has failed."
Key to the successful post-9/11 strategy, Mr. Cheney said, was "accurate intelligence"--including that received through enhanced interrogation. "The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed," he explained. "They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do. . . . [T]o completely rule out enhanced interrogation methods in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness, and would make the American people less safe."
President Obama's decisions on enhanced interrogation and Guantanamo Bay are expressions of a belief that the War on Terror is not actually a war, the former vice president said. But, so that Americans can decide for themselves about whether the extraordinary measures of the past seven years were and remain justified, Mr. Cheney argued that the Obama administration should declassify memos that explain what was learned from the interrogations. "For all that we've lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings," Mr. Cheney concluded. "And when the moral reckoning turns to the men known as high-value terrorists, I can assure you they were neither innocent nor victims. As for those who asked them questions and got answers: they did the right thing, they made our country safer, and a lot of Americans are alive today because of them."
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(1)
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Saturday, November 21, 2009
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