Liz Cheney Speaks Out

Americans need to draft Liz Cheney to run for political office. Well-versed on foreign policy, she is spectacular at nailing President Obama as a foreign policy weakling, someone akin to Jimmy Carter.

Read from Red State:

“We have grave concerns about the path they’ve put us on.”

“Note from Erick: Thanks to Liz for sending this on. This is the full transcript of her remarks to the Redstate Gathering, as prepared for delivery.

It is such a pleasure to be here in Atlanta to join you at the first Redstate annual gathering. I wanted to come to thank you personally for everything you do. First, to Erick Erickson, a true trailblazer, who has been making this all possible for many years. And to all of you who make the conservative blogosphere such a vital tool in 21st century politics and policy, it’s an honor to be with you. You all do hugely important work educating the American people, and holding our elected leaders and the mainstream media accountable. We are living at a critical moment in the history of the nation. We need you now more than ever, so I am here to say thank you and to urge you on.

It has become somewhat fashionable today to talk about conservatives and conservatism as a movement in peril. In some quarters, we’re said to be near death. I am here today to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. All across the country, Americans are standing up to be heard at meetings like this, at tea parties, on blogs, at town hall meetings, and we see it in the polls — the message to the Obama Administration is clear — we have grave concerns about the path they’ve put us on.

As we meet today, six months into President Obama’s Administration, we have learned much. We have learned that President Obama will not govern from the center, that he does not believe in American exceptionalism, that he thinks there is a moral equivalence between America and our adversaries, that he wants to expand the federal government until it permeates every corner of this land, and every aspect of your life, that he will raise everyone’s taxes, and that he thinks bureaucrats should choose our doctors, prescribe our medical care, and ration it if need be. At his last press conference, we also learned that he doesn’t have much faith in policemen or pediatricians. This is not change we can believe in. It’s not the change the American people voted for.

As your congressmen and senators come home this month, I hope you’ll take the time to let them know how you feel about ideas like ‘Cap and Trade’ and the Democrats’ health care reform plans. I hope you’ll also take the time to register your concern about what this Administration is doing to dismantle policies that have kept us safe from terrorist attack since 9/11. Speak up about President Obama’s decision to cut defense spending in crucial areas like missile defense, and register your concern about his efforts to appease America’s enemies by rewriting history and perpetuating lies about us.

We remain, as we meet here today, a nation at war, and we need intelligence to win this war. President Obama’s actions in the time he has occupied the Oval Office have diminished our ability to gather that intelligence. Two months ago, President Obama decided, over the objection of his current and four former CIA directors, to release memos detailing the techniques we used to obtain valuable intelligence that prevented terrorist attacks and saved American lives. Next, he suggested he was open to the prosecution of Bush administration officials who were involved in the program that obtained this intelligence. Finally, he refused to release any information about the attacks that were prevented and the lives that were saved because of our interrogation program. When his own Director of National Intelligence referenced the effectiveness of the program in an internal memo, President Obama’s staff edited the reference out before releasing the document publicly.

Today, several months later, the President still will not let the American people judge for themselves whether the enhanced interrogation program worked. The Administration continues to refuse to release the documents Vice President Cheney requested. And, according to press reports yesterday, the Senate Intelligence Committee, noted in its budget report that the Obama Administration redacted all references to the interrogation program’s effectiveness from the legal memos they did release. Why don’t they want you to know the truth? Why won’t they release this information?

It is because they know the American people believe that enhanced interrogation is justified to save American lives. And because if the American people get to see the evidence that this program saved lives and prevented attacks, they will want to know how the President could have so cavalierly released the methods and techniques in this program publicly. How could he justify putting this information in the hands of the terrorists?

President Obama said he didn’t harm national security by releasing this information because he will never use these techniques again. Really? Never? He ought to be asked directly: Mr. President, in a ticking time bomb scenario, with American lives at stake, are you really unwilling to subject a terrorist to enhanced interrogation to get information to prevent the attack? Is it really your position that you would sacrifice American lives rather than use legal methods that we know work to get information that could save those lives? The American people deserve an answer. And the brave men and women at the CIA who carried out this program deserve our gratitude and our deep appreciation. They do not deserve to be the targets of a political prosecution carried out by the Obama Justice Department.

The American people also deserve to know what President Obama plans to do with the hardened terrorists currently incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Two days after taking office, without any plan, the President announced he was closing the detention center there. He initially suggested that a number of those terrorists would be brought to the United States, some released here. His Director of National Intelligence explained that we would have to use taxpayer money to put some of the detainees on a sort of special welfare – a terrorist re-entry program. Others, the worst of the worst, we are told can be held effectively in super-max prisons in the U.S.

Good stuff. But, it gets much better. Read it all.