The Republicans are so devoid of leadership that they couldn't even offer up a sitting elected member of their party to go on Meet the Press, so they chose disgraced ex-House Leader Newt Gingrich to debate Sen. Dick Durbin on issues of what they consider national security.

David Gregory should look at his ratings one of these days. Gingrich is a washed up gasbag that FOX News has been using for years to smear the Democratic Party. I know he's a good smear merchant; he's quite the professional, but why is he on MTP in the middle of this discussion? Where is an active member of the GOP? I guess Limbaugh was too busy to come on today and represent like a good homey.

SEN. DURBIN: Just remember that President Bush called for the closing of Guantanamo; President Obama did the same, as did Senator McCain in the last campaign. And I also want to remind the former speaker that Major Matthew Alexander, who has actually interrogated al-Qaeda suspects in Iraq, attributes half of the deaths of Americans in Iraq to the detention abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Continuing Guantanamo, unfortunately, makes our troops less safe. The bottom line as I see it is Guantanamo should close in an orderly way. President Obama announced that last Thursday. We understand that at the end of the day there will be some of these people, I don't know the exact number, who will be too dangerous to be released, and President Obama said he would work with Congress and the courts to detain them in a humane, constitutional and legal way.

Gingrich immediately smears the military by saying that Durbin can always find a single troop member from the 550K that served in Iraq that would agree with your point of view.

REP. GINGRICH: Let me say, first of all, there were over 550,000 troops who served in Iraq. I'm sure you can find one to agree with you.

Does Gingrich believe that 550K troops were interrogating prisoners? Maj. Alexander is uniquely qualified to speak on such matters since, but Newt effortlessly smears him and then uses 9/11 to fudge the facts. After 9/11, we invaded Iraq which created thousands of more terrorists. There is no debate about this and the horrors at Gitmo and Abu-Ghraib fueled the fire and Gingrich knows it too.

Gregory had to ask Durbin for proof that Gitmo and Abu-Ghraib created more terrorists than ever before. Where has he been these last eight years? Curious that he didn't ask Cheney for proof for his assertions. Durbin has to reiterate the same point twice.

via MTP transcript:

MR. GREGORY: How long should Gitmo remain open?

REP. GINGRICH: Until the war is over.

MR. GREGORY: When is that?

REP. GINGRICH: We'll--when the terrorists disappear. I mean, you're faced with...

MR. GREGORY: Well, you're talking about a pretty long-term proposition here.

Gingrich wants these dungeons left open until the end of the war, my God.

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Matthew Alexander, a senior interrogator from Iraq actually analyzes Cheney's speech and rebukes most of what Cheney said.

Let me dissect former Vice President Dick Cheney's speech on National Security using this model and my interrogation skills.

First, VP Cheney said, "This recruitment-tool theory has become something of a mantra lately...it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do. He further stated, "It is much closer to the truth that terrorists hate this country precisely because of the values we profess and seek to live by, not by some alleged failure to do so." That is simply untrue. Anyone who served in Iraq, and veterans on both sides of the aisle have made this argument, knows that the foreign fighters did not come to Iraq en masse until after the revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. I heard this from captured foreign fighters day in and day out when I was supervising interrogations in Iraq. What the former Vice President didn't say is the fact that the dislike of our policies in the Middle East were not enough to make thousands of Muslim men pick up arms against us before these revelations. Torture and abuse became Al Qaida's number one recruiting tool and cost us American lives.

Secondly, the former Vice President, in saying that waterboarding is not torture, never mentions the fact that it was the United States and its Allies, during the Tokyo Trials, that helped convict a Japanese soldier for war crimes for waterboarding one of Jimmie Doolittle's Raiders. Have our morals and values changed in fifty years? He also did not mention that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both prohibited their troops from torturing prisoners of war. Washington specifically used the term "injure" -- no mention of severe mental or physical pain...read on