Barack Obama Puts Cheney in His Place 60 Minutes.

Obama demolishes the argument which Dick Cheney has recently been touting around the news rooms telling everyone who will listen that Obama is, by threatening to close Guantanamo Bay and stopping torturing prisoners, making the US less safe. Obama takes him to task:

OBAMA: I fundamentally disagree with Dick Cheney. Not surprisingly. You know, I think that Vice President Cheney has been at the head of a movement whose notion is somehow that we can't reconcile our core values, our constitution, our belief that we don't torture, with our national security interests. I think he's drawing the wrong lesson from history. The facts don't bear him out. I think he is... that attitude, that philosophy has done incredible damage to our image and position in the world. I mean, the fact of the matter is, after all these years, how many convictions actually came out of Guantanamo? How many... how many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney? It hasn't made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment, which means that there is constant effective recruitment of Arab fighters and Muslim fighters against U.S. interests all around the world.

KROFT: Some of it being organized by a few people who were released from Guantanamo.

OBAMA: Well, there is no doubt that we have not done a particularly effective job in sorting rough who are truly dangerous individuals that we've got to make sure are not a threat to us, who are folks that we just swept up. The whole premise of Guantanamo promoted by Vice President Cheney was that, somehow, the American system of justice was not up to the task of dealing with these terrorists. I fundamentally disagree with that. Now, do these folks deserve miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not.

KROFT: What do you do with those people?

OBAMA: Well, I think we're going to have to figure out a mechanism to make sure that they are not released and do us harm, but do so in a way that is consistent with both our traditions, sense of due process, international law. But this... this is the legacy that's been left behind and, you know, I'm surprised that the vice president is eager to defend a legacy that was unsustainable. Let's assume that we didn't change these practices. How... how long are we going to go? Are we going to just keep on going until, you know, the entire Muslim world and Arab world despises us? Do we think that's really going to make us safer? I... I don't know a lot of thoughtful thinkers, liberal or conservative, who think that was the right approach.

He's right, the practices of the Bush/Cheney regime were simply unsustainable. Indeed, I'd go as far as to say that they didn't actually have a plan to deal with those that they had detained. They simply held them because they felt that they could and they dreaded releasing any of them in case the person released attacked the US and this reflected badly on themselves.

But there was no actual due process during which their theories regarding the persons guilt could be tested in any way which most of us would consider fair.

And Bush and Cheney, rather than come up with a way of processing these prisoners, simply passed the problem on to the next president, which is what makes Cheney's criticism's especially galling.

Obama is facing up to the problem that Bush and Cheney ducked.

Tags: Obama, Bush, Cheney, Guantanamo Bay, Torture