Thursday, April 23, 2009

Romney bashes notion of torture/interrogation prosecutions

Mitt Romney on Hugh Hewitt's radio show today.

Hugh Hewitt: I want to start with the big news from yesterday, that President Obama has reopened the door, opened the door to the prosecution of former Bush administration officials in connection to the interrogation memos. What’s your reaction to that, Governor?

Mitt Romney: ....There’s nothing that could be more hostile than saying we’re going to go after the prior administration and see if we can make them all get lawyers and pay millions of dollars in legal fees, and drag them in for hearings, and see if we can really demonize the prior administration. That’s the lowest form of partisanship, and it’s something which I think the American people will recognize was very different than what they heard during the campaign.

(ea) Romney also has (even) more harsh words on Obama's foreign policy; in particular as it relates to Cuba.

Hugh Hewitt: Governor Romney, in your National Review piece yesterday.... you began by pointing out that when President Obama sort of apologized for our policy vis-à-vis Cuba for the last 40 years, he was selling down the river the memory of a lot of Americans whose blood was spilled in the effort launched by Jack Kennedy to free that island nation.

Mitt Romney: Yeah, I must admit, when I saw that Daniel Ortega took Barack Obama to task and attacked America in part for trying to free Cuba from Fidel Castro, to have Barack Obama unresponsive to that, and try and say well don’t blame me, I was just a little kid at the time, I found that to be, frankly, an enormous disappointment.

President Obama should have stood at the end of that diatribe, and he should have said there’s no nation in the history of the world that’s done more to promote freedom than the United States of America. The people of Cuba have been oppressed by Fidel Castro. They don’t have the right to vote, they don’t have the right of a free press. They don’t even have economic rights that the top government officials have in their country. And we stand for freedom, we stand for democracy, we will fight for it anywhere in the world, and we’ll fight for it in Cuba as we have in the past. And instead, he just tried to pass it off as something he wasn’t responsible for. It was an embarrassing response.

(ea) Full transcript here.

*I slashed the title "torture/interrogation" because I wanted to placate Shep Smith and Dick Cheney.

[Hat tip: Firedoglake]