A senior adviser to former US President George W Bush has defended tough interrogation techniques, saying their use helped prevent terrorist attacks.

In a BBC interview, Karl Rove, who was known as "Bush's brain", said he "was proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists".

He said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, should not be considered torture.

By David J. Hudson

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a "a dunk in the water." But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced interrogation" practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney's description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

A group of 19 prominent Bush administration officials and other lawyers launched an offensive Monday, attacking Liz Cheney for a recent ad by her group, Keep America Safe, that questioned the loyalties of Department of Justice lawyers that had represented Guantanamo detainees.

In a statement signed by nine former Bush officials and 10 other lawyers, critics condemned the ads as a "shameful series of attacks...both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications."

Some critics are lambasting President Obama for record deficits. This is not a productive line of attack, largely because it puts the focus on the wrong variable. America's fiscal problem is excessive government spending, and deficits are merely a symptom of that underlying disease. Moreover, if deficits are perceived as the problem, that means both spending restraint and higher taxes are solutions. The political class, needless to say, will choose the latter approach 99 percent of the time. A higher tax burden, however, simply means that debt-financed spending is replaced by tax-financed spending, which is akin to jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, or vice-versa.

Rove, often described as Bush's brain, defended the former president against claims that he lied to the Americans in order to invade Iraq. "Would the Iraq War have occurred without WMD? I doubt it," he wrote.

For weeks, the news media have been obsessed with the question of whether congressional Democrats would use a legislative mechanism known as "reconciliation" to pass changes to the health care reform legislation that passed the Senate in late December.

Unfortunately, that obsession has not actually resulted in reporters consistently getting the story right. Basic facts that should be central to the debate over the propriety of reconciliation have gotten lost in the mix. First, nobody is talking about passing the entire health care reform package via reconciliation -- the Senate has already passed its bill, and did so by overcoming a filibuster. Reconciliation would, instead, be used to pass a much smaller package of changes to that legislation via majority vote. Second, there is nothing hasty or debate-stifling about using reconciliation in this case: Congress has been considering health care reform for more than a year. Finally, reconciliation isn't all that unusual, having been used in connection with some of the highest-profile legislation in recent decades, including President Bush's tax cuts and the welfare reform bill President Clinton signed. Those are facts, and they are not in dispute.

WASHINGTON — As President Obama begins making final decisions on a broad new nuclear strategy for the United States, senior aides say he will permanently reduce America's arsenal by thousands of weapons.

For some time, former Vice President Dick Cheney has insisted that the declassification of various CIA memos will prove once and for all that the Bush administration's torture regime was successful at keeping America safe.

Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, hasn't exactly been helpful to the far-right cause of late.

...while Mr.

Citizens for Tax Justice point out what I was saying just the other day: We only hear all this crying and moaning about the deficit when it's something for regular working people, and not a powerful lobby. And of course, the Republican'ts are right out there in front of the Hypocrisy Parade:

What led to this "great recession".

The Bush I administration reacted to the disaster of democracy by shifting aid from the democratically elected government to what are called "democratic forces": the wealthy elites and the business sectors, who, along with the murderers and torturers of the military and paramilit …

It was the irrepressible Robert Heinlein, one of Science Fiction's most celebrated authors, who popularized the distillation of the essence of economics down to a single nonsense word. TANSTAAFL (pronounced TAN-staff-ul) stands for "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." Heinlein featured the phrase in what many regard as his most important work, the tale of space-revolution turned Libertarian manifesto entitled "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress," which he published in 1966. Everything, Heinlein argued, has a cost, and those that would attempt to tell you otherwise are probably cheating you... or worse.

In Heinlein's novel the citizens of Luna - a prison labor colony established on the moon and tasked with providing foodstuffs to Earth - demand payment for the services they previously provided for free and the resulting political fallout is the substance of the work. While Heinlein casts government in the roll of villain, however, the lessons learned in his writing might be applied even to that least Libertarian of institutions: taxation.

The ever snarky Griper Blade's latest post is a headlined, amusingly, "Republican Principles are as Solid and Immutable as Jello." It, like Rachel Maddow's much-praised segment on GOP opposition to the stimulus bill, highlights the seeming political nihilism of the Republican Party in the Obama Era. The GOP seems not to know what it is for, but it certainly knows what it's against: anything the Democrats want.

Here's something you won't hear from the liberal media: that whole "birther" conspiracy movement? Yeah, that was started by a couple of Democrats, and neither is named Orly Taitz.

The director of national intelligence affirmed rather bluntly today that the U.S. intelligence community has authority to target American citizens for assassination if they present a direct terrorist threat to the United States.

The deficit numbers — a projected $1.3 trillion in fiscal 2011 alone — are breathtaking. What is even more breathtaking is the Republicans' cynical refusal to acknowledge that the country would never have gotten into so deep a hole if President George W. Bush and the Republican-led Congress had not spent years slashing taxes — mainly on the wealthy — and spending with far too little restraint. Unfortunately, the problem does not stop there.

Here we go again. Whenever the subject of taxes comes up—and it's come up in the debate over the Obama administration's decision to let many of the Bush-era tax cuts expire this year—we're treated to a chorus of complaints that people who make $250,000 a year aren't really rich. Raising taxes on these people, we're told, would be raising taxes on the middle class. Media Matters has assembled a few choice quotes on the topic.

Despite that, read the official policy of the Reagan Administration when it came to treating Terrorists, as articulated by the top Reagan State Department official in charge of Terrorism policies, L. Paul Bremer, in a speech he entitled "Counter-Terrorism: Strategies and Tactics:"

Another important measure we have developed in our overall strategy is applying the rule of law to terrorists. Terrorists are criminals. They commit criminal actions like murder, kidnapping, and arson, and countries have laws to punish criminals. So a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are -- criminals -- and to use democracy's most potent tool, the rule of law against them.

A report concludes that Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of the former president had business linkages with Nazi Germany.

A $1.3 trillion deficit for this fiscal year would equal about 9.2 percent of gross domestic product. Last year's $1.4 trillion deficit was nearly 10 percent of gross domestic product, making it the largest since World War II measured against the size of the economy.

But the budget office said that additional stimulus spending and tax cuts, which the White House and Congress currently are considering for families, small businesses, the unemployed and hard-hit states, could well result in a deficit for this year that exceeds last year's. At the same time, it said, the stimulus measures to date have "helped moderate the severity of the recession and shorten its duration."

International arrest warrants have been requested for George W. Bush, Richard (Dick) Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condoleeza Rice and Alberto Gonzales at the International Criminal Court, The Hague, Netherlands.

BREAKING NEWS
The demise of America

Imperfect Models
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Professor of Law Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois College of Law in Champain, United States of America, has issued a Complaint with the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court against the above-mentioned for their practice of "extraordinary rendition" (forced disappearance of persons and subsequent torture) in Iraq and for criminal policy which constitutes Crimes against Humanity in violation of the Rome Statute which set up the ICC.

"I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles," he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. "I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on."

LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown confirmed on Friday he would appear at a public inquiry into the Iraq War before this year's election, a move which could damage the ruling Labor party at the ballot box.The inquiry, led by former civil servant John Chilcot,  …

HOW far away it seems, that bitingly cold, crystal-clear morning when almost 2m people filled the Mall from Capitol Hill to the Washington Monument to hear the new president talk of the victory of hope over fear, of unity of purpose over conflict and discord. Recalling the dark days of the war of independence, he pledged, like George Washington, that in the face of common danger Americans under his leadership would come forth to meet it. One year on, how well has he done?

When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to "restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great." Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo "shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order." Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama's young administration with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

The FBI violated the law in collecting thousands of U.S. telephone records during the Bush administration, The Washington Post reported Monday.

Citing internal memos and interviews, the Post said the FBI invoked nonexistent terrorism emergencies or persuaded phone companies to provide information as it illegally gathered more than 2,000 records between 2002 and 2006.

Of all the claims Rove made, one in particular caught my eye for its sheer audacity and shamelessness -- that congressional Democrats "will run up more debt by October than Bush did in eight years."

So, let's review a little history:

The day the Bush administration took over from President Bill Clinton in 2001, America enjoyed a $236 billion budget surplus -- with a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. When the Bush administration left office, it handed President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit -- and projected shortfalls of $8 trillion for the next decade. During eight years in office, the Bush administration passed two major tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest Americans, enacted a costly Medicare prescription-drug benefit and waged two wars, without paying for any of it.

To put the breathtaking scope of this irresponsibility in perspective, the Bush administration's swing from surpluses to deficits added more debt in its eight years than all the previous administrations in the history of our republic combined. And its spending spree is the unwelcome gift that keeps on giving: Going forward, these unpaid-for policies will continue to add trillions to our deficit.

The infamous Inter Services Intelligence has launched a full psych-ops against the United States and NATO and is calling American leaders the worst terrorists. Unfortunately, the war in Iraq makes it sound as if the I.S.I. is right.

Strong stuff-- I wonder if this will cause him to lose viewers?

Republicans are criticizing President Obama for his decision to try failed terrorist Umar Farouq Abdulmuttalab in criminal court instead of a military commission; former Vice President Cheney, for example, in his comments to Politico, said that the president "seems to think if  …

The nation's top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government's intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change.

It is a shame. Saudis believe it is okay to marry off a girl when she is one year old.

Barack Obama has received considerable criticism for waiting three days to address the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Flight 253. In the holiday spirit of giving, I would like to offer Obama ...

Eight years ago, a terrorist bomber's attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner was thwarted by a group of passengers, an incident that revealed some gaping holes in airline security just a few months after the attacks of September 11.

WASHINGTON — President Obama declared on Tuesday that "no information may remain classified indefinitely" as part of a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch's system for protecting classified national security information.

We have allowed corruption and greed to take over our government and it's time that the people take it back by voting all politicians regardless of party out of office. If you have voted in favor of bailouts or anything favoring corporations, you should be voted out of office.

The New York Times has a piece up today discussing the hyper-partisanship we've seen in the US Senate since the Democrats aquired their supposed super-majority in 2008. This column has commented on the falacy of that supermajority in the past - Democratic party discipline is almost non-existant and Joe Liberman isn't even "almost" a Democrat - but a supermajority ought not be really necessary in order to move forward with the nation's business.

INTRODUCTION There has been substantial and continuing opposition to the "Bush Doctrine" for years. For many, it has come to symbolize the invasion of Iraq.

With change meaning so much more these days, we list and lurch in an Obama world worth a B+ according to the commander-in-chief himself. When the voters elected Obama, they had no idea that "Change" meant such small Change.

It's difficult to see how the Bush tax cuts could provide us with two and a half times the benefits of health care reform. In 2010, when all the Bush tax cuts are finally phased in, a staggering 52.5 percent of the benefits will go to the richest 5 percent of taxpayers.

By David J. Hudson

Standing in front of the Supreme Court this morning, a group of Republican lawmakers railed against the court system run out of the building behind them. A sign affixed to the plexiglas podium each spoke at in turn spelled out the reasons for their fears.

By David J. Hudson

Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent Socialist of Vermont, announced today that he has put an official "hold" on the re-nomination of Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Benjamin Bernanke.

Since the results of the 2008 election became clear, the 43rd President of the United States has behaved in a way that brings honor to him, his family, his office, and his country.

The federal Preventive Services Task Force, the group that created a political firestorm this week with its recommendation that women get less-frequent mammograms, was created to be insulated from politics.

Not all of Barofsky's testimony will be critical. He will note that while most banks claimed to not tracking "TARP fund usage on a dollar-for-dollar basis," many were able to "provide insights into their actual or planned future use of TARP funds."

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say they've discovered a way to circumvent the networking technology used by law enforcement to tap phone lines in the U.S.

One of the Americans convicted in absentia by an Italian court for her part in the 2003 abduction of a Muslim cleric by CIA operatives has acknowledged they "broke the law" and complained she was given insufficient protection by her superiors in Washington.

Sabrina deSousa, employed in the US consulate offices in Milan at the time of the abduction, made clear in an interview with ABC News that she was disgruntled that she and the other 22 Americans who were convicted by a Milan court on Wednesday had been left to fend for themselves by their country.

There's been talk that George W. Bush was so inept that he should trademark the phrase "Worst President Ever," though some historians would bestow that title on pre-Civil War President James Buchanan. Still, a case could be made for putting Ronald Reagan in the competition...

"On October 18, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows and, in the process of answering questions about Barack Obama's strategy on Afghanistan, accused the Bush administration of failing to ask the most basic questions about that country …

Here's a somewhat surprising result from the new Fox News poll. Asked which president is "more responsible for the current state of the economy," only 18 percent say President Obama. Fifty-eight percent say former President George W. Bush. Nine percent blame both of them. Republicans are the only subgroup of voters who blame Obama, and only by a six-point margin of 35 percent to 29 percent.

If you were in Ft. Worth yesterday, for a mere $4.95, you could've gotten MOTIVATED! by the Commander Guy.Former President George W.

Missile defense will be strategically useless against the nuclear threats from Iran -- or anywhere else. Barack Obama's administration has characterized its new missile defense plan as a more judicious alternative to George W.

Former President George W. Bush has signed up to be the "special guest speaker" for one of those traveling arena-size motivational speaker extravaganzas

Dick Cheney is running. Consider this: instead of returning to Wyoming to spend time with his family as he repeatedly said he would, Cheney has remained in the DC area. Secure in his free-pass from the Obama Administration over torture, providing aid-and-comfort to enemies of the United States for outing Valerie Plame and thus her entire undercover operation, failing to comply with the law to keep records for the national archives, and a potential host of other abuses of power and illegalities, Cheney is in town keeping his fingers in the pie, letting his network know that he is there.

Both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats can agree on one thing: When Larry Klayman calls, start sweating.

HANNITY: [Yasser Arafat] got the Nobel peace prize. Excuse me, a terrorist got the Nobel peace prize. Some people deservedly so. You know who else deserved it? Ronald Reagan. And frankly, I would've given it to George Bush.

President Barack Obama will visit New Orleans on Thursday to survey for himself the progress of recovery from 2005's Hurricane Katrina - but there are apparently no plans by the White House for a presidential stop in Mississippi for the same purpose.

TD Ameritrade announced today that former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush will appear together at the TD Ameritrade Institutional 2010 National Conference in Orlando, FL next year.

MSNBC's Richard Langer interviews a Taliban commander

"Fall Of The Republic" Exposes Obama as the latest puppet in the "Left/ Right" paradigm that is destroying America.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the nation's highest civil award, and is given to individuals who have contributed to: 1) the security or national interests of the United States, 2) world peace, or 3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.

In the debate over the PATRIOT Act, the Bush White House insisted it needed the authority to search people's homes without their permission or knowledge so that terrorists wouldn't be tipped off that they're under investigation.

Now that the authority is law, how has the Department of Justice used the new power? To go after drug dealers.

Only three of the 763 "sneak-and-peek" requests in fiscal year 2008 involved terrorism cases, according to a July 2009 report from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Sixty-five percent were drug cases.

The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted a U.S-drafted resolution Thursday morning that affirms many of the steps President Obama plans to pursue as part of his vision for an eventual "world without nuclear weapons." More Articles

Only three of the 763 "sneak-and-peek" requests in fiscal year 2008 involved terrorism cases, according to a July 2009 report from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Sixty-five percent were drug cases.

In a nation full of bluster, serious crimes are being ignored while those that choose to ignore them unabashedly lean on a document whose authors would have never tolerated them.

The cheers of crowds in the US and the ROW ("Rest of the World") upon hearing the news of the election of the first black US president are still ringing in my ears. How happy, no, how elated all those folks were! Their joy knew no bounds.

Yesterday, I posted on how a group of senators sent the White House a letter expressing concern over a multitude of presidential appointments -- which they label "czars" -- and how they "raise serious issues of accountability, transparency, and oversight." At length, I pointed ou …

The Iraqi television reporter jailed for throwing his shoes at George W Bush was finally freed today and said that he had been subjected to electric shocks and even waterboarding while in custody.

A bipartisan task force recommended Tuesday that the Obama administration simplify and reset the U.S. government's iconic color-coded terrorism warning system to the lowest of three new levels, if it keeps using levels at all.

Here, then, are 10 Lessons for Tea Baggers:

1. President Obama Cut Your Taxes
2. The Stimulus is Working
3. First Ronald Reagan Tripled the National Debt...
4. ...Then George W. Bush Doubled It Again
5. Republican States Have the Worst Health Care
6. Medicare is a Government Program
7. Barack Obama is Not a Muslim
8. Barack Obama was Born in the United States
9. 70,000 Does Not Equal 2,000,000
10. The Economy Almost Always Does Better Under Democrats

Details on each of those lessons after the jump...

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell, said in response to an interviewer's question Thursday that he believes Cheney has gone a bit farther than too far.

The Arlington Independent School District in Texas decided not to show President Obama's address to students live yesterday because it reportedly didn't want to interrupt its regularly scheduled lesson plans. However, the district has now decided to bus its students off-campus on Sept. 21 to hear President Bush speak:

"Since I had a front-row seat between 2003 and 2008 at anti-Bush protests in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I saw literally THOUSANDS of Bush/Hitler comparisons and swastikas, I thought perhaps it would be useful to compile here in one place a small sampling of them — to pro …

" US President Barack Obama hosted a White House iftar to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan, but while he used the event to praise US Muslims' contributions to the society, the absence of community leaders was sorely noted,

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said he might refuse to speak with a prosecutor investigating suspected CIA prisoner abuses, a probe he branded as political and bad for national security...

The Washington Post's intelligence and national security reporting team make the case that, in the case of 9/11 planner KSM, enhanced interrogation techniques -- EITs --or torture -- facilitated his cooperation with the CIA.

Just over two weeks ago, FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds was finally allowed to speak about much of what the Bush Administration spent years trying to keep her from discussing publicly on the record. Twice gagged by the Bush Dept. of Justice's invocation of the so-called "State Secrets Privilege," Edmonds has been attempting to tell her story, about the crimes she became aware of while working for the FBI, for years.

The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they vomit; (f) putting them in diapers, dousing them with cold water, and leaving them on a concrete floor to induce hypothermia; and (g) beating them with the butt of a rifle -- all things that we have always condemend as "torture" and which our laws explicitly criminalize as felonies ("torture means. . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering . . .") -- reveals better than all the words in the world could how degraded, barbaric and depraved a society becomes when it lifts the taboo on torturing captives.

Those documents were obtained today by The Washington Independent and are available here.  Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney's claims that the "enhanced interrogation" program run by the CIA provided valuable information.

The Justice Department's ethics office has recommended reversing the Bush administration and reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, potentially exposing Central Intelligence Agency employees and contractors to prosecution for brutal treatment of terrorism suspects, according to a person officially briefed on the matter.

Even before former Homeland Security Secretary Tommy Ridge charged that he was pressured into raising the "terror alert" level from "yellow" to "orange" prior to the 2004 elections, there was talk of a need for a new system.

The world has not seen such a global recession in a long time. It seems to have been around for ages without an end in sight.

For me, it's most certainly 'No'.

What it establishes is that Ridge had the same suspicions as many liberals and libertarians. And Ridge, having access to most of the intelligence, had sound reasons to object. "Gut hatred" is way too strong a term -- it's the wrong term -- to describe why liberals doubted the fundamental capacity of the White House to be honest about anything. It was ideological and based on their intepretation of a pattern of facts that, in retrospect, seems much more reasonable than it did. The media's skepticism was warranted; our derision wasn't and mine isn't. Quite frankly, I don't think the triumphalism is any more attractive, either.

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.