Last week, extempers were given the treat of seeing President Barack Obama and former Vice-President Dick Cheney give speeches on national security. The Obama administration has continued to advocate that the Bush administration’s policies were negligent in winning international support and made hasty decisions concerning the treatment of detainees in the conflict. Not to take these allegations lying down, Cheney has fired back that Obama is trying to compromise with an enemy that will never compromise and is endangering America’s national security when he is releasing information about interrogation techniques and wanting to close Guantanamo Bay.
On top of this, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been under fire for accusing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of lying before Congress and for arguing that she was unaware that waterboarding techniques where being utilized on detainees. This has created yet another partisan, and some would say distracting, conflict on Capitol Hill that augurs ill for Obama’s promise of getting past the politics of division.
With NFL several weeks away, extempers need to brush up on their understanding of America’s national security debate. Even international extempers could face questions about how America’s image abroad is being impacted by the domestic debate we are seeing play out. Thus, this brief will provide a quick overview of the conflict between Republicans and Democrats on national security, the steps being implemented by President Obama to settle some of these national security issues and what the GOP is doing to attack Democratic opposition, and then provide some political impacts for the current national security debate.