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In a Dec. 5 op-ed, the president of California State University (CSU) claimed if you are “light skinned” you have “significant unearned privilege” and routinely think less of those who are different than yourself. In her piece, “Privilege at The Beach,”—referencing the Long Beach area where the school resides—Jane Close Conoley, a white woman herself, asserts that “light skin color and high income levels may attract significant unearned privilege.” Those who qualify for such privilege, often unknowingly exert distrust and “lower expectations of behavior” on those of another skin color. “Those who are less affluent with darker skin or from...

...The striking fact about the Agency’s alleged misrepresentations, as catalogued by the Senate committee, is that they relate almost entirely to collateral matters. As to the basics, it appears that what the Agency and the Bush and Obama administrations have been telling us for years was true. In particular, it has been said that only three men, all vicious, high-ranking terrorists, were waterboarded. As best I can glean from the report, that is correct. But the report displays an extraordinary solicitude for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, the two principal terrorists who were waterboarded. It goes on at almost...

The United States on Wednesday faced criticism from the United Nations as well as governments that Washington often reprimands for human rights violations over a Senate report on CIA torture techniques in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Some U.S. allies, who could face embarrassment or legal liability for any role in the CIA's "enhanced interrogations" during the George W. Bush administration, either condemned the CIA's methods or played down any involvement their governments might have had in them. "The CIA's practice of torture is gruesome," German Justice Minister Heiko Maas told German newspaper Bild. "Nothing justifies such methods....

Anyone skeptical about entrusting ambitious tasks to the government was not stunned by the dismal rollout of the Affordable Care Act. It featured technical snafus, cost overruns and false advertising ("If you like your plan, you'll be able to keep it."). Things got so bad that President Barack Obama apologized and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius resigned. This epic fail occurred even though the administration had more than three years to prepare for the launch and $840 million to spend developing the website. It was a textbook case of government bungling. Truth be told, a rocky start should...

Former Vice President Dick Cheney upgraded his assessment of the Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats’ report on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques from “hooey” to “crap.” “The report’s full of crap — excuse. I said hooey yesterday and let me use the real word,” Cheney said on Fox last night. “It’s OK, you can bleep it.” The veep said the report was “deeply flawed.” “They didn’t bother to interview key people involved in the program. And I think that it’s sort of a classic example which you see too often in Washington where a group of politicians get together and...

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knew the Obama White House’s Benghazi talking points BEFORE the White House even sent them around to administration officials. Hillary Clinton used the administration’s exact talking point blaming the attack on a YouTube video before Obama’s White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes drafted it to prepare Susan Rice for Sunday morning talk shows days later.

...In all countries, if someone commits murder, they are prosecuted and jailed. If they commit rape or armed robbery, they are prosecuted and jailed. If they order, enable or commit torture — recognized as a serious international crime — they cannot simply be granted impunity because of political expediency...

When the November election was still a long way off, Sacramento-area streets were already plastered with campaign signs for a little-noticed political race: candidates are running to serve on the board of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, better known as CalPERS. While not as high-profile as the statewide and congressional races, these seats are arguably of equal importance to Golden State taxpayers. CalPERS, the largest state pension fund in the country, not only manages more than $257 billion in assets, but also loves to use its political muscle to prod corporate America into “socially responsible” (read: leftist-friendly) investing. Sacramento,...

When the head of the CIA's torture unit decided to destroy videotapes of his team's horrific work, he unwittingly set in motion a series of events that led to the release this week of the most massive, detailed documentation of unlawful behavior by high-ranking government officials and intentional infliction of pain on noncombatants by the United States government since the Civil War era. Here is the backstory. One of the reasons repeatedly stated by President George W. Bush for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the maintenance of "torture rooms" by Saddam Hussein. While making this very argument,...

Recently, the House passed, by an overwhelming margin, a resolution to condemn the Russian Federation for actions considered hostile and aggressive within its sphere of influence, specifically with regard to the politically torn country of Ukraine. Ten Members voted “nay,” myself among them. I wish to explain why I took this unpopular position. Above all, while Vladimir Putin’s government may well have engaged in questionable behavior toward neighboring countries, Resolution 758 was nothing more than gratuitous, needlessly provocative and shortsighted. Moreover, reasonable observers the world over can see it as tantamount to a declaration that Russia is America’s enemy. The...

You’ll recall that in August the California Department of Managed Health Care issued a mandate requiring all insurance issuers to immediately add surgical and RU-486 abortion coverage to their plans, even those for nonprofit religious institutions and churches. This was a violation of the decade-old Weldon Amendment, one of several pro-life riders included in appropriations bills every year. The Weldon Amendment blocks government agencies receiving federal funds from discriminating against any health care entity for not covering abortions. The only recourse for victims seeking protection under the Weldon Amendment is to file a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights...

A group of former top-ranking CIA officials disputed a U.S. Senate committee's finding that the agency's interrogation techniques produced no valuable intelligence, saying such work had saved thousands of lives. Former CIA directors George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden, along with three ex-deputy directors, wrote in an op-ed article published on Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal that the Senate Intelligence Committee report also was wrong in saying the agency had been deceptive about its work following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

BEIJING (AFP) - China on Wednesday urged the United States to "correct its ways" after a damning US Senate report detailed use of torture by the CIA. "China has consistently opposed torture," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a regular briefing. "We believe the US side should reflect upon itself, correct its ways and earnestly respect and abide by the rules of international conventions." Rights groups say China's own justice system is riddled with abuses and that it is not uncommon for confessions to be extracted through torture. Beijing says it attaches great importance to human rights and that...

Washington (CNN) -- The New York officer involved in the death of Eric Garner should no longer be on the police force, Sen. Rand Paul argued Monday. The Kentucky Republican said Daniel Pantaleo lacked "discretion" when he placed Garner in a chokehold for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes.

After Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011, top CIA officials secretly told lawmakers that information gleaned from brutal interrogations played a key role in what was one of the spy agency's greatest successes. Then-CIA Director Leon Panetta repeated that assertion in public, and it found its way into a critically acclaimed movie about the operation, "Zero Dark Thirty," which depicts a detainee offering up the identity of bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, after being tortured at a secret CIA interrogation site. As it turned out, bin Laden was living in al-Kuwaiti's walled family compound,...

The release of the already discredited Senate “torture report” has left liberals in a state of gleeful pearl clutching as they pretended to be shocked by the shocking revelation that enhanced interrogation can mean sleep deprivation and assorted mind games.Meanwhile here’s a little reminder of what real torture looks like as perpetrated by the Taliban. I was one of the Taliban’s torturers: I crucified peopleInstead of just searching for criminals, the night patrols were instructed to seek out people watching videos, playing cards or, bizarrely, keeping caged birds. Men without long enough beards were to be arrested, as was any...

'Very Sober,' Not 'Political': Halperin and Peters Defend Feinstein CIA Report By Mark Finkelstein | December 10, 2014 | 8:23 AM EST VIDEO Who were those guys on Morning Joe today—two Feinstein staffers? Nope, they were Mark Halperin and Jeremy Peters, making like Dem aides in defending the report on the CIA that Dem Senator Dianne Feinstein released yesterday. Halperin, head of Bloomberg Politics, had the chutzpah to claim that the report was not "political." Peters of the New York Times then chimed in to say that in releasing the report, the Senate conducted itself in a "very sober" way....

ACLU calls for special prosecutor on torture How would prosecution of officials responsible for torture work? The ACLU is arguing that the justice department should appoint a special prosecutor: To ensure that the investigation of the torture program is comprehensive and insulated from political interference, Attorney General Eric Holder should appoint a special prosecutor from within the Justice Department and transfer to that special prosecutor all of his authority to investigate and prosecute crimes relating to the program. A special prosecutor would be able to make prosecutorial decisions without having to seek the attorney general’s permission. Lawyers for 9/11 suspects...

In the wake of the damning American Senate report on the CIA’s torture practices French far-right leader Marine Le Pen risked a backlash when in an interview she claimed there are times when torture can "be useful to make someone talk". The report uncovered the brutal CIA interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects in the years after 9/11 and sent shockwaves around Washington and the rest of the world. The UN and human rights groups are now even calling for the prosecution of the US officials involved but Marine Le Pen, leader of the right-wing Front National party, seems to have a...

The left ratcheted up its unceasing war on America and took it to a whole other level today. America’s fifth column. The release of the torture report was unnecessary and uneventful. Big yawn. The savages who attacked this country were more sleep-deprived than originally thought? Awww. Fed rectally? Awww. More than 3 were waterboarded? Awww. They lived when they should have faced a firing squad. On Tuesday, following the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogation techniques, supporters of the Islamic State and other terror groups took to Twitter to decry the United States with the hashtag...