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9/11 should be a time for every American to ponder the events of that fateful and horrific day in 2001. We had just suffered more casualties from a foreign enemy in an act of war than had ever been sustained by America on its own soil in its entire history - including the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the attack on Pearl Harbor. Most Americans were angry and demanded action. Fully 90% supported George Bush as he laid out his plans to respond to the attack. And that support was still above 70% when President Bush ordered the...

Note: The following text is a quote: Message from the Director: September 11th Statement to Employees by Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Leon E. Panetta on September 11th September 10, 2009 Tomorrow, our nation as a whole will remember those lost to us eight years ago. For the men and women of the CIA, September 11th is a constant, powerful incentive in the war against al-Qa’ida and its violent sympathizers. Our Agency is at the center of that fight. We have no higher priority or greater focus. Alone, and with partners in this country and overseas, the CIA has...

CIA Director Leon Panetta addressed agency staff in an e-mail today marking the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks tomorrow. With the CIA facing scrutiny over Bush-era torture of detainees and questions about how it should share responsibilities with the FBI and other federal agencies, Panetta used the opportunity to try to boost morale and rally employees. Panetta's full message is included below: Message from the Director: September 11th Tomorrow, our nation as a whole will remember those lost to us eight years ago. For the men and women of the CIA, September 11th is a constant, powerful incentive in...

Art Keller, a blond, blue-eyed CIA agent, sits inside a decrepit building deep inside al-Qaeda territory, staring at his computer screen. He is forbidden by his Pakistani minders from venturing out into the badlands of Waziristan to help to find and kill the world’s most wanted man. He is sick and exhausted, and suffering from food poisoning. Back home in the US his father is dying of cancer. The plumbing is basic, the heat intense — the generator has failed again. He pores over cables looking for any scrap of information — an intercepted phone call, an aerial photograph —...

Here is video of Factor Producer Dan Bank confronting "John Adams Project" lawyer Nina Ginsberg. O'Reilly explains "the John Adams Project is secretly photographing CIA agents and showing the pictures to terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay." Ginsberg said "CIA agents put a lot of people in danger, they put this country in danger, they put American Soldiers in danger." After trying to grab the microphone away from Bank's hands she said "You are making me feel threatened, get out of my face!" (Watch Video)

The Democrat-led Congress are battlers, nothing less than rabid war mongers. They have declared war, and have engaged in unrelenting battle upon battle against morality, the rule of law, the Constitution, individual rights, and national sovereignty since ascending to the leadership of Congress in 2006. Prior to the 2006 election, they issued threats and rattled their sabers, but all was for naught, as the adults were in charge of tempering their tantrums.

(CNN) -- Could George W. Bush or some of his top aides end up behind bars? It's extremely unlikely, but the Obama administration is taking its first steps along a path that could lead in that direction, with the investigation of Central Intelligence Agency interrogators involved in the war on terror. "You don't know where these things are going to end up," former CIA agent Peter Brookes told me. "They could go to very high levels in the government." The probe will focus on whether interrogators exceeded their instructions and broke the law when, for example, they choked a prisoner...

The tendency of Democrats to try to destroy the CIA is nothing new. On December 23, 1975 a wonderful man and classical scholar named Richard Welch, who was a year ahead of me in high school, and who was the Harvard-educated CIA station chief in Athens, Greece, was shot to death on his front steps shortly after being outed by Senator Kennedy and Senator Church (of the Church Committee). Here we go again with another war on the CIA by liberal Democrats.

Ralph Peters is spot-on in regards to the investigations into CIA operatives who kept our country safe during the Bush administration ("Punishing Patriots," PostOpinion, Sept. 1). It seems that President Obama & Co. care more about the rights of terrorists, violent criminals and sex offenders than they do about the safety of American citizens. Law-enforcement officers should use any reasonable interrogation method to ensure that sickos like Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Phillip Garrido are unable to cause any further harm to humanity. For some delusional reason, the left is in disagreement. M. Nugent Staten Island *** What will it take...

Besieged by leaks of several closely held secrets, the CIA has asked the Justice Department to examine what it regards as the criminal disclosure of a secret program to kill foreign terrorist leaders abroad, The Washington Times has learned. Two U.S. intelligence officials, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because of the sensitivity of the case, said the leak investigation involved a program that CIA Director Leon E. Panetta told Congress about in June and that surfaced in news reports just a month later. The vice chairman of the the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence declined...

On January 22, as one of his first official acts as president, Barack Obama signed an executive order mandating the closing of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay within one year. Liberals on two continents cheered. But what to do with the detainees? France agreed to take one prisoner; Ireland two. A few others have made “commitments” to take one or two miscreants off of our hands, after months of pleading from the Obama administration. For the most part, however, the Euro-states who did the most braying about Gitmo detainees have declined to accept them into their streets and...

It is a total of 30 minutes and real Conservatives like us take on all comers and pretenders. http://www.presstv.com/programs/detail.aspx?sectionid=3510502&id=105037#105037

The age of cyber-warfare has arrived. That, at any rate, is the message we are now hearing from a broad range of journalists, policy analysts, and government officials. Introducing a comprehensive White House report on cyber-security released at the end of May, President Obama called cyber-security “one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.” His words echo a flurry of gloomy think-tank reports. The Defense Science Board, a federal advisory group, recently warned that “cyber-warfare is here to stay,” and that it will “encompass not only military attacks but also civilian commercial systems.”...

This week, President Obama made two incredibly dangerous and arrogant decisions involving the war on terror. The creation of an interrogations unit to be supervised directly by the White House is a breathtaking power grab by Mr. Obama, who has already demonstrated his penchant for expanding executive control by appointing three dozen issue-specific "czars" who are accountable to no one but him. Mr. Obama now aims to run terrorist interrogations right from the Oval Office.

Ex-CIA operative: 'We're not going to go to prison for protecting this nation'

Washington Times: Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales on Tuesday defended the decision of his current successor, Eric H. Holder Jr., to investigate alleged prisoner abuse by CIA interrogators over President Obama's desire to look forward. "As chief prosecutor of the United States, he should make the decision on his own, based on the facts, then inform the White House," said Mr. Gonzales, who was appointed to the post by President George W. Bush in 2005 and resigned in 2007.

Oh, I’m sure some of you folks are laughing out loud at the idea that ex-vice president Dick Cheney considered by some to be an ideal candidate for president in 2012. But that’s only because you aren’t a rabid right-winger who thinks the only thing wrong with the Bush administration is that they didn’t torture enough Muslims. Believe me, they are out there: Craig Shirley, a longtime Republican strategist who often has his finger on the pulse of the party’s base, concurred while also noting that Cheney can galvanize conservatives in ways few other current figures can. “In 2009, there...

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to make public hundreds of pages of internal documents about the agency’s defunct detention and interrogation program, saying such disclosures would jeopardize national security by revealing classified intelligence sources and operations. The C.I.A.’s argument to withhold the material, laid out Monday in a declaration to a federal court in New York, comes a week after the Obama administration declassified documents about abuses in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons and the Justice Department began investigating the actions of C.I.A. operatives.

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I think it's time for the country to face reality. Our President is lost. There's not one major issue that we can reasonably say he has a good handle on. Instead, on every major issue, it appears as though there's a grand piano hanging over him being held up by a small string. What the president needs is to find some direction, and quickly.

Britain's release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi-- the Libyan terrorist whose bomb blew up a plane over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, killing 270 people-- is galling enough in itself. But it is even more profoundly troubling as a sign of a larger mood that has been growing in the Western democracies in our time. In ways large and small, domestically and internationally, the West is surrendering on the installment plan to Islamic extremists. The ostensible reason for releasing al-Megrahi was compassion for a man terminally ill. It is ironic that this was said in Scotland, for exactly 250 years ago another...

At 7 p.m. on Aug. 20, 2003, in a cell used for interrogations at Forward Operating Base Gunner outside Taji, Iraq, an Army lieutenant colonel, sitting in on a session, took out his 9mm pistol, placed it on his thigh so it pointed at an Iraqi detainee, and said he would kill the prisoner if he did not provide information filling out what an informant had said was a planned attack on the officer and his unit. Lt. Col. Allen B. West, a battalion commander, told Army investigators the next month that the Iraqi, a police officer from a nearby...

THE Obama administration's determination to hold witch-hunt "investigations" of CIA interrogators who did their patriotic best to keep us safe endangers us all. Castrate the CIA, and Americans will die. But the Obama White House wants vengeance against those who don't fit its ideology. Your family's safety comes a distant second. And let's get real: Attorney General Eric Holder (whose top career achievement was finessing the presidential pardon of a criminal Clinton donor) is not acting independently. Anyone who believes that Holder didn't pre-brief the president and get the nod prior to announcing his determination to crucify high-achieving CIA agents...

Congressman: Holder should expand prosecutor's inquiry to include Cheney By Michael O'Brien - 09/01/09 12:29 PM ET Attorney General Eric Holder should expand a special prosecutor's investigation into detainee abuse during the Bush administration to include high-ranking officials like Vice President Dick Cheney, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday. Nadler defended Holder's decision last week to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the abuse and potential torture conducted by CIA officials during the Bush administration. "My criticism of the attorney general is that he should not limit the investigation to people in the field who may have committed torture, but...

It is not a good sign when, more and more, political news in Washington (more than what we are doing overseas) drives the administration’s grade for national security. But, that’s what seems to be happening. Last week, attention focused on the decision of Attorney General of the United States to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate charging CIA investigators with the crime of torturing terrorist suspects. His announcement came on the heels of releasing a Bush-era CIA Inspector General report detailing alleged abuses by agency interrogators. The White House also announced that from now the investigation of “high-value” suspects would...

Rep. Peter T. King, New York Republican, who called last week's move by attorney general Holder moves a "declaration of war." Indeed it is. The move by Holder which undoubtedly is orchestrated by President Obama is just the latest blow in a war declared by the White House against the CIA and in the end, the American People Do not believe that the Holder offensive has anything to do with "morality or torture." In the Investigator General's report released at the same time as Holder's announcement of a special prosecutor, the evidence shows that every time there was a hint...

In the early days and weeks after September 11, 2001, a small cadre of men (and a few women) with vast amounts of intelligence experience reported to the Langley, Virginia headquarters of the CIA. These unsung heroes were then dispatched across the globe to run operations against the Al-Qaeda conspirators who leveled the World Trade Center and struck the nerve center of the US military. The FBI, a domestic law enforcement agency, did not have the ability or skills needed to track down and strike the attackers overseas. The Pentagon, with F22s, nuclear aircraft carriers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and battalions...

Law enforcement officers enforce all laws impartially. Stalinst thugs enforce selected laws selectively. The Wall Street Journal reported that Attorney General Eric Holder appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency for alleged abuses of captured terror suspects such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. ...We are sure that Mr. Holder agrees that a civilized country's laws must apply to all: high and low, rich and poor, Republican and Democrat alike. Enforcement of a country's laws against one segment of society but not another is characteristic of Third World dictatorships, banana republics, and military juntas that prosecute, purge, and even...

Andrew Sullivan, a writer for whom I once had great respect but whose work I long ago ceased following, throws his usual hit fit over my recent item on how the CIA is being reshackled in the war on terror. He claims that my reference to “aggressive interrogation of captured terrorists” is “The Latest Euphemism From the Torture Party” and challenges me to defend these interrogation practices in plain English.

In the Guardian (shock), Michael Tomasky approvingly quotes Andrew Sullivan’s analogizing CIA interrogators to the Gestapo. He writes; This reminds me of my larger theory, which I may get around to presenting to you sometime, that I believe that Nazi analogies should be more permissible in today's political discourse than they are. Not personal comparisons of Politician X to Hitler, because Hitler remains a unique monster; but analogies to Nazi ideology and tactics, when accurate and appropriate. Hmm. I seem to recall he had a rather different opinion when reviewing a book that pointed out that whole swaths of his...

Eleno Oviedo can tell you a thing or two about torture. Oviedo spent 26 years as a political prisoner in Cuba’s hellish prisons. As Oviedo recalled in an interview with this columnist, he and other Cuban prisoners of conscience suffered beatings, extreme temperatures and isolation with very little food or medical care. They received threats of violence. And the Cuban authorities constitute a credible threat. Beatings were routine, and Oviedo said he heard “more than 300 times prisoners being executed” by firing squad. Many of the prisoners cried “Viva Cristo Rey,” as a final act of defiance and profession of...

EARLY in 2002, Eric Holder, then a former deputy attorney general, said on CNN that the detainees being held at Guantánamo Bay were “not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention,” particularly “given the way in which they have conducted themselves.” Six years later, declaring

Trumpeting his own fanfare on Fox News Sunday, Dick Cheney is back. But it was the Obama administration itself that opened wide the gates for this self-vindicating return. With the release of the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report on torture, and Attorney General Eric Holder’s appointment of prosecutor John H. Durham to investigate CIA abuses of detainees, a crossroads was reached, and who was standing right in its middle but the former vice president. No sooner

Aug. 31: Lal Mohammad, a 40-year-old farmer, whose nose and ears were cut off by the Taliban on the Afghan presidential and provincial council election day, is seen in a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Morale has sagged at the CIA following the release of additional portions of an inspector general's review of the agency's interrogation program and the announcement that the Justice Department would investigate possible abuses by interrogators, according to former intelligence officials, especially those associated with the program. A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard, the third-ranking CIA official at the time of the use of harsh interrogation practices, said that although vigorous oversight is crucial, the public airing of once-classified internal assessments and the prospect of further investigation are damaging the agency. "Morale at the agency is down to minus 50," he said. At...

Republican Senator John McCain has denounced the use of torture on terrorism suspects during the administration of former president George W. Bush. "I think the interrogations were in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the convention against torture that we ratified under President Reagan," said McCain. In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, the Arizona senator said that the enhanced interrogation techniques also helped al Qaeda recruit additional members. "I think these interrogations, once publicized, helped al Qaeda recruit. I got that from an al Qaeda operative in a prison camp in Iraq,” said McCain, who added that he...

On a Saturday morning in late August, while country was away on summer vacation and those who closely watch politics were watching Ted Kennedy's funeral, the Washington Post quietly hung up the mainstream media's white flag on the CIA's harsh interrogation tactics. It turns out, they work — who knew? Fortunately, Steve Hayes has stayed on the case and, at the Standard's blog, he's got the story about the story — along with excerpts from the essential report by FDD's Tom Joscelyn (also in the Standard, here) relating the effectiveness of the CIA program and an important op-ed by FDD's...

There are several questions that continue to surround the latest revelations in the CIA's EIT program. First, are waterboarding and other EIT techniques in fact torture? Whether these techniques worked or not, was it worth it? Could we have gotten any information from some detainees without using them? Finally, did we get valuable intelligence following the use of these techniques? Most of these questions are tangential. In that, there is no objective way to look at it and so your answer likely depends on your political ideology. Most will continue to be debated long after the release of the lateste...

Less than two weeks ago, Tom Ridge launched his memoirs with the explosive allegation that Bush administration officials had pressured him to change terror-threat levels in order to boost George Bush’s re-election chances in the final days of the 2004 election. A day later, the New York Times pointed out that the book not only didn’t have any supporting evidence for that claim, it also had Ridge insisting that he hadn’t seen any political pressure on threat levels. Now Ridge himself has begun to backpedal from his publicity-seeking allegations:

During his interview with Chris Wallace today, former Vice President Dick Cheney was asked about the effect of Attorney General Holder's investigation of the CIA and enhanced interrorgation techniques: Well, you think, for example, in the intelligence arena. We ask those people to do some very difficult things. Sometimes, that put their own lives at risk. They do so at the direction of the president, and they do so with the -- in this case, we had specific legal authority from the Justice Department. And if they are now going to be subject to being investigated and prosecuted by the...

The Wall Street Jounral has a terrific editorial this morning on how valuable the CIA interrogation program was in uncovering life-saving intelligence. Though the Journal does not get into it, Binyam Mohammed was released outright by the Obama administration in February. He is now living freely in England. That's our new counterterrorism approach: Release the terrorist who planned mass-murder attacks against U.S. cities but investigate the CIA agents who prevented mass-murder attacks against U.S. cities. I suppose that's what happens when control of the Justice Department shifts from the lawyers who spent the last eight years going after the terrorists...

After pledging during last year's presidential campaign, and as recently as the spring, not to re-visit the past, the Obama administration, in the person of Attorney General Eric Holder, has named a special prosecutor to go after CIA interrogators who pried information from terrorist suspects, preventing more deadly assaults on the country. Before the hard Left assumed power, anyone engaged in protecting America by interrupting terrorist plans might have expected to receive a commendation. Now they could face jail time. And somewhere in a cave in Pakistan, Osama bin Laden rejoices. By any objective standard, releasing terrorists from prison and...

David Frum: Barack Obama's Lockerbie sleight of hand Muammar Qaddafi delivered President Obama a welcome gift this week — a gift made all the more valuable by the remarkable lack of curiosity of the U.S. press about what exactly was contained inside the box. The hero’s welcome given to the convicted Lockerbie bomber in Tripoli diverted media attention from embarrassing questions about the bomber’s release to the much easier issue of the bomber’s reception. Now the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy will drive the entire subject into the back pages and specialty blogs. President Obama is unlikely now to have...

<p>WALLACE: Mr. Vice President, welcome back to "FOX News Sunday."</p> <p>CHENEY: It's good to be back, Chris.</p> <p>WALLACE: This is your first interview since Attorney General Holder named a prosecutor to investigate possible CIA abuses of terror detainees. What do you think of that decision? CHENEY: I think it's a terrible decision. President Obama made the announcement some weeks ago that this would not happen, that his administration would not go back and look at or try to prosecute CIA personnel.</p>

Dick Cheney on FNS...

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator John McCain, a torture survivor from his days as a captive during the Vietnam War, says his private comments about harsh interrogation methods were misrepresented by the Bush Administration in a recently released legal document intended to justify a six-day-long course of sleep deprivation for one CIA detainee in November of 2007. The newly declassified memo by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel mentions a secret briefing McCain and other members of Congress received sometime before October 17, 2006. The memo says the lawmakers were told about six CIA interrogation techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation....

If you are wondering what Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are going to be spending the week talking about now that the Kennedy memorial is over, get over to Foxnews.com and watch former Vice President Dick Cheney’s blockbuster interview with Chris Wallace. In an extraordinarily blunt, straightforward—and witty—interview, the former Vice President gives his unvarnished, no-holds-barred opinion on the revelation this week that Attorney General Eric Holder was beginning a criminal probe of CIA interrogators, and the implications it has for national security. While Cheney is composed and relaxed throughout, there is little doubt that his outrage at...

Poor Leon Panetta. It's hard not to feel bad for the guy. If the Obama administration is like one big, elaborate stage production of "Chicago," Panetta is playing invisible Amos Hart - "Mr. Cellophane" - to sheer, translucent, forgettable perfection. In less than a year, Panetta's CIA has been reduced to irrelevance and Panetta himself has either been ignored or emasculated by the very folks who were supposed to be his biggest supporters. For taking on a thankless job that typically only gets attention when there's a massive failure, this is the thanks he gets? When he was asked by...

The Cheneys were out in force on the talk shows this morning. Liz was with George Stephanopoulos and her father was on Fox News Sunday. I thought Dick Cheney's interview was interesting. Chris Wallace probed the former Vice President on the release of the IG report on the CIA this week and about the appointment of a special prosecutor....The IG report was reviewed five years ago and put to rest. As Cheney points out, what this really means is that there will never be any end to the review process. Despite what Nancy Pelosi says, Congress was briefed. Everything, now...

CHRIS WALLACE, HOST: Mr. Vice President, welcome back to "FOX News Sunday." RICHARD CHENEY, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It's good to be back, Chris. WALLACE: This is your first interview since Attorney General Holder named a prosecutor to investigate possible CIA abuses of terror detainees. What do you think of that decision? CHENEY: I think it's a terrible decision. President Obama made the announcement some weeks ago that this would not happen, that his administration would not go back and look at or try to prosecute CIA personnel. And the effort now is based upon the inspector...