'Liz Cheney, Showing the Way'

Rush Limbaugh had a very good segment, in transcript at his webpage, about how Liz Cheney, Dick's daughter, has been kicking butts and taking names all over the cable news shows on the enhanced interrogation techniques. Rush zeroes in on how she does it, which is basically to put facts up against cliches and ignorance. The entire segment is worth reading. Rush gave this example of Liz's encounter with Anderson Cooper in a discussion of waterboarding:

She often starts by refusing to debate their cliched, fallacious premises. Here's another example. One more before we go to the break. Anderson Cooper: "More than 100 people are known to have died in US custody, some that were ruled a homicide. If these were tightly controlled things, how come so many people are murdered in US custody?"

LIZ: Anderson, I think that your question is highly irresponsible.

COOPER: Why?

LIZ: Because you are contemplating things that aren't conflated. When somebody dies or is "murdered" in US custody then we are a great nation and we take the people who are responsible and we put them on trial as you've seen happen throughout the last eight years. That is not the enhanced interrogation program, and to somehow suggest that those two things are the same I think willfully conflates something and ends up in a situation where we aren't able to take a truthful look at the last eight years as we go forward, because we are muddying the waters about what really happened.

RUSH: Anderson Cooper's there saying, "What's my next question?" Yeah, he's trying to probably figure out what "conflate" means and so forth. But what she's talking about here, he asked this loaded question, a hundred people died in US custody. And what he's implying is it happened because we waterboarded them or we tortured them. She said, "No, no, no. Your question is fallacious. The premise is irresponsible -- and whenever these kinds of things happen we have prosecuted." All you've gotta... We even prosecute the innocent, thanks to Jack Murtha. The Marines in Haditha. Congratulations, Liz Cheney, showing the way.

I have a video from April of Liz taking on someone named Nora O'Donnell at MSNBC, on the subject of the interrogation memos, about which Ms. O'Donnell knew almost nothing. Notice how Liz just keeps taking O'Donnell's cliches away and re-sets the argument on a foundation of facts.

Watch the video and you can see Ms. Cheney was all primed and ready to respond when Ms. O’Donnell first whipped out the “torture” libel--which Ms. Cheney certainly knew was going to be the main weapon used.

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Cheney Says Country Is Now More Vulnerable

We hear from Dick Cheney again in The Washington Times ("Cheney hits Obama policy on terrorism):

The Obama administration has made the country more vulnerable to a
terrorist attack by changing interrogation and detention policies and combating
terrorism through law enforcement action rather than treating it like a war, former Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday in his first television interview since leaving office.

Citing "enhanced interrogation" techniques, government wiretapping and other Bush initiatives as instrumental in preventing terrorist attacks, Mr. Cheney said that rolling back those programs will undermine U.S. intelligence gathering.

"I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11," he said in an interview on CNN's "State of the Union."

"President Obama campaigned against it all across the country. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack," Mr. Cheney said.

Mr. Cheney said the plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is one of the Obama decisions that reflect a "law enforcement" as opposed to a "wartime" view of terrorism.

"We made a decision after 9/11 that I think was crucial. We said, 'This is a war - it's not a law enforcement problem,' " Mr. Cheney said. "Once you go into a wartime situation and it's a strategic threat, then you use all of your assets to go after the enemy ... you use your intelligence resources, your military resources, your financial resources, everything you can in order to shut down that terrorist threat against you.

When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which is what I sense they're doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth, they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required, and that concept of military threat that's essential if you're going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks," he said.

Read the rest of it here.