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>By Edward Alden in Washington >Published: October 20 2005 00:00 | Last updated: October 20 2005 00:19 >> Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday. In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of...

Wray's task Wednesday was to convince the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will vote to send his nomination to the full Senate for approval, that he'd rather get fired than bend to political pressure. And he attempted to do just that. Here are four key takeaways from the hearing: 1) Trump could fire Wray, too. (Snip) 2) Wray said he'd probably resign first if things got really sticky Trump's firing of Comey because of “this Russia thing” spooked members of Congress. (Snip) 3) Wray and Trump are polar opposites on some big issues Trump thinks torture works; Wray thinks torture is “wrong”...

WASHINGTON - David Margolis, a lawyer at the Justice Department for 40 years, was named Friday to oversee a special prosecutor's investigation of who in the Bush administration disclosed the name of an undercover CIA officer. Margolis, whose title is associate deputy attorney general, is taking the place of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, whose last day of work was Friday. Comey will be Lockheed Martin's new general counsel. Comey made the designation of Margolis. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has stepped aside from the probe because he was White House counsel when Valerie Plame's name was leaked in 2003 and...

The allegations were first made by Amnesty International in a report published in July. Their report said dozens of suspected supporters of the terror group Boko Haram “were held incommunicado, tortured, and sometimes killed by Cameroonian security forces in facilities run by the military and intelligence services.” Amnesty alleges that Cameroon’s Rapid Intervention Battalion, an elite army unit, was one of the units that engaged in torture, doing so at the military base known as Salak, near the northern city of Maroua. ... Amnesty called on the US and the French government, which it says also used the base, “to...

The coauthor of the Washington Post’s bombshell story on the National Security Agency’s PRISM surveillance program is a long-time activist filmmaker who has railed against U.S. counterterrorism policies put into place after the Sept. 11 attacks. Filmmaker Laura Poitras, who shared the lead byline with former Post journalist Barton Gellman on the paper’s front-page NSA story, is not on the Post’s staff and is not a print reporter. Poitras has criticized the “illegal” Guantanamo Bay detention facility, described enhanced interrogation techniques as “legalized torture,” and criticized the intelligence community’s surveillance methods in her films and public comments. While traditional media...

Ottawa to offer Omar Khadr apology, $10-million in compensation Robert Fife OTTAWA BUREAU CHIEF — The Globe and Mail Published Monday, Jul. 03, 2017 10:00PM EDT Last updated Tuesday, Jul. 04, 2017 6:28PM EDT The Trudeau government is poised to offer an apology and a $10-million compensation package to former child soldier Omar Khadr for abuses he suffered while detained in the U.S. military prison for captured and suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 2010 that the actions of federal officials who participated in U.S. interrogations of Mr. Khadr had offended “the most basic Canadian...

... n unprecedented report from the corporate press claims U.S. forces have participated in extreme torture and abuse of detainees accused of affiliation with Al Qaeda in Yemen — including “the ‘grill,’ in which the victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire,” the Associated Press finds. A network of secretive prisons in southern Yemen provide the backdrop for the alleged barbaric acts allegedly carried out by forces from the U.S. and United Arab Emirates — many of those detention facilities remain hidden in plain sight. That some of the covert prisons...

Eric Schmidt, billionaire chair of Alphabet, Inc. the parent company of Google, led a massive fundraising drive in December for leftist analytics firm Civis Analytics, represented by a law firm that partnered with Justice Department special prosecutor Robert Mueller—raising questions about Mueller’s impartiality in his so-called “Russia probe” into President Donald J. Trump’s campaign. In March 2014, WilmerHale announced Mueller would join its firm as a partner. Mueller left his position in May after the DOJ appointed him as a special prosecutor to look into alleged “ties” between President Trump’s campaign and Russia. WilmerHale represented Civis Analytics during a $22...

Bad morning for Pelosi @ 9:53 am by Eric Zimmermann Two new developments in the "what did Pelosi know about waterboarding" series spell trouble for the Speaker. First, CNN reports that an aide told Pelosi in February 2003 that waterboarding had been used on Abu Zubaydah. This contradicts Pelosi's assertion that she only knew about the legal rationale for waterboarding, not that it had been used. Sheehy attended a briefing in which waterboarding was discussed in February 2003, with Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, who took over Pelosi's spot as the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. This source says...

Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about. Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.... Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page...

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email scandal didn’t stop the head of the CIA from using his own personal AOL account to stash work-related documents, according to a stoner high school student who claims to have hacked into them. CIA Director John Brennan’s private account held sensitive files — including his 47-page application for top-secret security clearance — until he recently learned that it had been infiltrated, the hacker told The Post. Other emails stored in Brennan’s non-government account contained the Social Security numbers and personal information of more than a dozen top American intelligence officials, as well as a government letter...

There are reports tonight that a radical left-wing organization is responsible for helping to free a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay named Abu Sufian bin Qumu. Bin Qumu has been cited by multiple sources at Fox News as at least being involved with, and possibly playing the lead role in the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Those attacks resulted in the deaths of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American diplomats. Michelle Malkin has revealed that the Center for Constitutional Rights represented Qumu and helped lead the charge in freeing him back in 2007. President Emeritus...

Thousands of pages of previously secret military documents about detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison now put a name, a history and a face on hundreds of men in captivity there. The documents include details on 158 men on whom no information has ever been released. The hundreds of classified documents - marked "secret" and "noforn" meaning the information is not to be shared with representatives of other countries - are assessments, interviews and internal memos from the Pentagon's Joint Task Force at Guantanamo. The task force was supposed to determine who the detainees were, how they might be connected...

The jailed architect of 9/11 revealed that al Qaeda's plan to kill the United States was not through military attacks but immigration and "outbreeding nonmuslims" who would use the legal system to install Sharia law, according to a blockbuster new book. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also predicted that intelligence officials using so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques such the waterboarding he experienced would eventually come under attack from weak-kneed U.S. politicians and media. In Enhanced Interrogation, CIA contractor James Mitchell tells for the first time about his role interrogating al Qaeda principles, many like KSM still jailed at Guantanamo Bay. He details accounts...

We've been deluged by requests to post favorite episodes of The Mark Steyn Show here at SteynOnline. So here's a first one - Mark's recent interview with the man who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: James E Mitchell. In an extended conversation about his new book Enhanced Interrogation, Dr Mitchell talks about getting to know some of the world's most high-value terrorists

A career civil servant with that kind of money ought to be surprising, especially in lieu of his subsequent outreach efforts to proven Muslim Brotherhood outfits. UPDATE: During the years when Republicans controlled the levers of power, Johnson worked for a law firm that represented the Guantanamo Bay detainees — very vigorously. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison attorneys went so far as to smuggle in materials to the detainees. “If I’d gotten caught passing war news to detainees,” one former DOD official said, “my security clearance would have been pulled.” This week has seen the release of many incriminating...

White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Wednesday that an alleged draft executive order titled “Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants” “is not a White House document.” “I have no idea where it came from,” stressed Spicer. Various mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times (NYT) and the Washington Post (WaPo), published the contents of this document, suggesting it was a legitimate draft from White House officials.

Americans Sentenced in Afghan Torture By STEPHEN GRAHAM Associated Press Writer Three Americans - led by a former Green Beret who boasted he had Pentagon support - were found guilty Wednesday of torturing Afghans in a private jail and were sentenced to prison. After a 7 1/2-hour session in a stuffy Kabul courtroom, the three-judge panel was unanimous in convicting the former soldier, Jonathan Idema, and his right-hand man, Brent Bennett, on charges of entering Afghanistan illegally, making illegal arrests, establishing a private jail and torturing their captives. They were sentenced to 10 years. Edward Caraballo, a cameraman who said...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz introduced a bill on Tuesday that would declassify information about the terrorist activities of detainees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba who have been released or transferred since Election Day. The move came after a report that the Obama administration recently struck a deal with Oman to transfer 10 detainees from Gitmo. The move brings the total number of detainees down to less than 50. Cruz and other Republicans have been heavily critical of Obama’s transfers and of his promise to close the facility before leaving office. Republicans point to a statistic that 30 percent...

The prevailing assumption is that the tapes were destroyed to conceal harsh CIA interrogation methods. Gerald Posner suggests another possible explanation: Re the breaking news that the CIA destroyed the videotapes of interrogations with 2 terror suspects, you might have seen that the tapes of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah were destroyed. You might also recall that in my 2003 NYT bestseller (reached #2), Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, my last chapter was titled, "The Interrogation." Based on two active US intelligence sources, I was the first to disclose Zubaydah's interrogation. To date, I am the only...