The Senate blocked an attempt by 15 Democrats Wednesday to kill legislation that would overhaul domestic surveillance laws and supported a highly controversial measure to immunize telecommunications companies from civil suits for working in tandem with the White House by tapping into telephone and computer lines without first receiving a court order.
The bill is likely [...]
Editor’s Note: Chris Rodda, the author of this report, is employed as a researcher for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the watchdog organization cited in this article.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has sent the following letter to Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, urging that appropriate action be taken to halt [...]
The Armed Services Committee’s hearings last week on interrogation and torture gave us a startling look into how torture was taught at the Naval Prison at Guantanamo Bay. Most articles have not bothered to look deeply into what was discussed in meetings between officials of the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, program and [...]
Three years ago, US District Court Judge James Robertson sent a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., notifying him of his resignation from a secret intelligence court set up to monitor the federal government’s domestic surveillance activities.
Robertson’s abrupt departure came on the heels of a December 2005 report in The New York Times [...]
Since 2006, Democrats in both Houses have continuously approved hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq war funding despite being advised repeatedly by congressional investigators that the Pentagon has been unable to justify some of the increased spending, according to the most recent report issued by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).
Last week, a $162 [...]
Two of the architects of the Bush administration’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” policies will testify Thursday before a House subcommittee investigating the legal framework behind the brutal interrogation methods used against detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and John Yoo, a former deputy attorney general in [...]
In 2002, Scott Ritter, the former Chief United Nations Weapons Inspector In Iraq, publicly accused the Bush administration of lying to Congress and the public about assertions that Iraq was hiding a chemical and biological weapons arsenal.
By speaking out publicly, Ritter emerged as one of the most prominent whistleblowers since Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon [...]
Back in 2002, the White House developed a sophisticated system aimed at identifying alleged terrorists who lived in the United States.
The new intelligence program granted traditional law enforcement agencies as well as the FBI and the CIA the authority to conduct what was then called “suspicionless surveillance” of American citizens.
“Suspicionless Surveillance” was developed by the [...]
Something very odd occurred during the hearings last week of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on the use of torture against detainees. Something crucial was missed. But before we examine that, let’s first examine how the so-called responsible U.S. press covered the revelations oozing out of Washington.
When the New York Times’s Mark Mazzetti and [...]
If the United States does not act soon to address health-care costs, federal and state governments as well as American businesses could face a cascading fiscal crisis with devastating long-term consequences, says a new report by the Government Accountability Office.
In the report entitled, “Long Term Federal Fiscal Challenge Driven Primarily by Health Care,” the GAO, [...]
