It only took 24 hours for the Washington Post to go from the sublime to the ridiculous. On Saturday morning, the newspaper described the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheik Muhammad (KSM), standing before “U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called ‘terrorist tutorials.’”
From the Archive: John Yoo, the author of one of the infamous Aug. 1, 2002, “torture” memos that formed the legal basis for so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques against high-level terrorist detainees, used a statute governing health benefits when he provided the White House with a legal opinion defining torture.
The commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan has delivered his long-awaited review of the war to his bosses in Brussels and the Pentagon.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal says success can be achieved, but with a revised strategy.
The call for a new strategy comes as US forces continue to suffer casualties, with August being the bloodiest [...]
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that former Vice President Dick Cheney has his facts wrong on the Obama administration’s policies for terror detainee interrogations.
The way I see it, President Obama has a couple of months to turn his failing administration around. The war in Afghanistan is going south, and within a couple of weeks, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s version of Lyndon Johnson’s General William Westmoreland, will be coming to him asking for more troops. Things are getting hairier in Iraq too.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Bart Stupak, Chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, sent letters to six health insurance companies requesting information about the practice of “purging” small businesses when their employees become ill and their health insurance claims increase.
Los Angeles attorney Robert A. Bailey, formerly a military JAG officer, and one of the lawyers in the Daniel King case, spoke to me a few weeks ago in some detail about the controversial King interrogation. Bailey described to me how the abusive interrogation King endured, and the betrayal of the military psychologist he thought would help him, led King to a suicidal breakdown.
Dick Cheney, in a defiant half-hour interview on Fox News Sunday, launched into a blistering attack on the Obama administration, saying the decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a federal prosecutor to conduct a “preliminary review” of about a dozen cases of torture “offends the hell out of me.”
The growing use of private armies not only subjects target populations to savage warfare but makes it easier for the government to subvert domestic public opinion and wage wars. Americans are less inclined to oppose a war that is being fought by hired foreign mercenaries, even when their own tax dollars are being squandered to fund it.
