Seeking closure
May 21st 2009
From Economist.com
Barack Obama and Dick Cheney disagree about how best to ensure America's national security
THE contrast was stark: on the one hand Barack Obama, young, idealistic, wet-behind the ears, and on the other Dick Cheney, the former vice-president and the voice of experience, in his best growling form. Both gave speeches on Thursday May 21st: Mr Obama at the National Archives, home of the American constitution, and Mr Cheney at the American Enterprise Institute, the favourite nest of the now-rather-quiet neoconservatives. Mr Obama's voice boomed as it echoed around the walls that house America's revered founding documents; a wheezy Mr Cheney sipped from a water bottle.
Between them, the men represent the two poles of the national-security debate that is raging in Washington. Mr Obama has pledged to shut the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba, by January 2010, but even his own party disagrees with him. Democrats in Congress have rebelled and removed money for closing the prison camp, and possibly building another, from war-spending bills that are going through Congress. They will not be happy with the president’s proposal until he produces a thought-out plan that can convince them that wild-eyed jihadists are not about to be released into their neighbourhoods. Mr Obama made his speech to try to persuade them that he does, indeed, have such a plan.
Having admitted that the camp was “quite simply, a mess”, Mr Obama went through the categories of prisoners and how he intended to deal with them. The most dangerous of the 240 detainees would be sent to “super-max” federal prisons—from which, he reminded his audience, no one has ever escaped. Some trials would be held in federal court, where several terrorists have already been tried and sentenced. Military commissions were “appropriate” for those who had violated the laws of war, and he had not changed tack on them; he had always approved of them, he said, in a reformed shape. Detainees who were suitable for transfer abroad would be shifted there (although, as Mr Cheney pointed out, other countries are not lining up to take them). Those who had been ordered released would be released. As for those who could not be prosecuted but were still a threat, he had begun to “reshape” standards and construct a “legitimate legal framework” to deal with them. Details were lacking.
The great bulk of Mr Obama’s lawyerly speech, however—which repeated well-worn themes from his campaign and seemed unnecessarily lengthy—was devoted to moral principles. Unless America abided by its fundamental values, its people would never truly be safe. Guantánamo had “set back our moral authority”, and had become instead “a rallying cry for our enemies”. In the same way, “enhanced interrogation techniques”—as both he and Mr Cheney fastidiously referred to torture—had not advanced America’s principles, but undermined them. That was why he had released the Bush administration’s “torture memoranda”, to show the world what America was no longer prepared to do. Ending water-boarding (simulated drowning) and closing Guantánamo were further steps down the path of legality and morality.
Fine, unexceptionable words, delivered with the usual eloquence. But Mr Obama looked like a man whose closest brush with terror had been watching “Independence Day”. Mr Cheney, by contrast, had been there. He recalled the moment on September 11th 2001 when he had been bundled from his White House office into the presidential bunker. It had not made him a different man, he said, but it had focused all his thoughts on the safety of the country. Another attack might come at any time. So, mindful of that, the Bush administration had invoked Article two of the constitution: “all necessary and appropriate force” could be used to protect the American people. Mr Cheney, too, can bring on the Founding Fathers when he needs to.
Included in that appropriate force, Mr Cheney continued, were wiretapping and the extraction of information from terrorist suspects. It was “lawful, skilful” work, he said. The liberals’ bête noire, water-boarding, had been used on just three notable terrorists, including Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind behind the September 11th plot and beheading of a journalist, Daniel Pearl. When captured, Mr Mohammed demanded to speak to his lawyer in New York. The interrogation techniques had been reviewed by lawyers, said Mr Cheney, and the line between toughness and torture carefully followed. To reveal these techniques by releasing the memos had done a “serious injustice” to the officers concerned. In fact, rasped the old bulldog, Mr Obama’s people had whipped up “feigned outrage based on a false narrative”.
The Obama administration had released redacted versions of classified memos that revealed what had been done to extract information, but was silent on the usefulness of that information and the possible atrocities that had been averted. And as for the plan to close Guantánamo, that had been done without proper deliberation; the president might find, “on reflection”, that it was a bad idea to let hardened terrorists go. Mr Cheney was on a roll.
Time still remains for Congress to add Guantánamo funds to the spending bill, if it wants to. The president’s moral argument remains unimpeachable. But his vague and virtuous hopefulness rang a little hollow beside the straight talk of Mr Cheney whose action at the time of September 11th had seemed justified—to some senior Democrats, as well as Republicans—at the time.
