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Meanwhile: Obama STILL has not released the memos Cheney claims show how waterboarding THREE terrorists saved American lives!Like other Democrats, Senator Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently claimed that former Vice President Cheney is lying about proof that the waterboarding of the three worst terrorists, including the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, yielded information that saved American lives. Obama could the settle the matter and release those memos with a stroke of the pen. The methods and techniques have already been fully disclosed by Obama's prior release of similar classified memos. There is no valid...

For the first time in his presidency, Americans are getting a glimpse of Barack Obama on the defensive. Over the past few weeks, Obama has been back on his heels over torture and terror, issues on which he surely thought he had the upper hand. And he spent Thursday battling charges from a man he surely thought he had vanquished in November, former Vice President Dick Cheney. It took some worried calls from Capitol Hill Democrats, congressional aides said, to convince him otherwise – that he needed to give a speech defending his plan for closing the terror prison at...

I was right to torture terror suspects - it saved lives, claims unrepentant George Bush By DAVID GARDNER 29th May 2009 George Bush has defended his decision to allow the use of torture on terror suspects in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The former president broke his silence on the scandal to insist that controversial interrogation methods like waterboarding and sleep deprivation helped save lives. Mr Bush was echoing claims made by his former Vice President Dick Cheney that the harsh interrogation techniques vilified by the Obama administration gained valuable intelligence. The ex-president was careful to avoid words...

Plus: Obama tells the big lie in Annapolis speech. Promises America will be safe if only we follow his lead!The big news story of last week was the contest of dueling speeches between President Obama and Vice President Cheney. Video and text highlights of Cheney's speech are found here.I've already pointed out how Obama hastily announced his speech at the National Archives standing in front of a copy of the U.S. Constitution at the same time as Cheney's long planned address at the American Enterprise Institute. In the wake of Democrats in Congress refusing to grant Obama a blank check...

Senior Republicans have rallied to support former Vice President Dick Cheney in the wake of his vehement attacks on Barack Obama. His fierce criticism has made him the principal voice opposing the new president and won him praise from figures. Republican leaders have cast aside doubts about Mr Cheney reminding voters of the unpopular Bush administration, and concluded that his critique is valuable. Mitt Romney, viewed by many Republicans as the front-runner for the party's 2012 presidential nomination, weighed in behind the former vice-president after he accused Mr Obama of practicing "recklessness cloaked as righteousness". The former Massachusetts governor described...

WASHINGTON – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday she won't talk any more about her charge that the CIA lied in 2002 about using waterboarding on terrorism suspects. "I have made the statement that I'm going to make on this," she told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference. "I don't have anything more to say about it. I stand by my comment." But Republicans aren't letting this one slide. Ken Spain, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, issued a statement after the news conference calling Pelosi a political liability to the Democratic party.

Watch Pelosi LIVE news conference Click Here

The spectacle of two duelling speeches with a mile of each other in downtown Washington was extraordinary. I was at the Cheney event and watched Obama's address on a big screen beside the empty lectern that the former veep stepped behind barely two minutes after his adversary had finished. So who won the fight? (it's hard to use anothing other than a martial or pugilistic metaphor). Well, most people are on either one side or the other of this issue and I doubt today will have prompted many to switch sides. But the very fact that Obama chose to schedule...

Hotline has the transcript, but be warned that it’s a long slog through many swamps — Gitmo, interrogation, the torture memos, the unreleased Abu Ghraib photos, and on and on. You’re better off with Maguire’s witty recap. In a nutshell: We must look forward while also remembering that everything is Bush’s fault, and we must not abandon our core ideals unless doing so would make things too difficult for The One. My favorite part:************************** We are going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this...

President Obama on Thursday defended some of his most controversial national security decisions since assuming the Oval Office while legitimizing former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has emerged as one of his harshest critics. Obama, speaking at the National Archives and surrounded by the nation's most prized documents, slammed the Bush administration for an "anything goes" policy on legal terrorism matters and reminded his critics that it is he, as commander in chief, who bears the responsibility of keeping the country safe. "As commander in chief, I see the intelligence. I bear responsibility for keeping this country safe, and I...

Let's face it, this is shaping up as George W. Bush's best month in years. The last time the 43rd president enjoyed this kind of vindication was when a bedraggled Saddam Hussein was pulled from a hole in the ground by American soldiers in 2003. All of Barack Obama's efforts to cast the Bush administration as an immoral stain on American history have not merely collapsed, but collapsed on the heads of Bush's most public and vocal critics. Here's a non-stammering Nancy Pelosi talking about Bush last July: "God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States --...

Will the last activist who hopes the antiwar cause will re-emerge as a central tenet of the Democratic Party please turn out the lights on the way out the door? Little evidence exists that any antiwar movement is alive, well and influencing policy in this country. Certainly no voice for it is coming from Barack Obama's White House. In fact, Obama has been pretty consistent in

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi argued at a news conference Thursday that Republicans are focusing on how much she knew about CIA enhanced interrogation techniques in 2002 and 2003 as a "diversionary tactic to take the spotlight off those who conceived, developed and implemented these policies, which all of us long opposed." Yet Pelosi's failure to protest what she alternately calls "enhanced interrogation methods" and "torture" - depending on whether the controversy threatens to make her look bad or the Bush administration - goes to the very heart of whether or not the "truth commission" she supports is anything more than...

A CNN news clip from May 22, 2002, shows Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was not as out-of-the-loop as she now claims on interrogations. William Jacobson provided a little more evidence that Pelosi was not the clueless babe in the woods in 2002 that she now says she was. Pelsoi, after all, was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. No one in Congress would know more than she. Jacobson dug out this from an old CNN clip: CNN.com, May 22, 2002: Last Monday night, the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force–a round-the-clock operation at the New...

Sen. Patrick Leahy wants an independent commission to investigate them. Rep. John Conyers wants the Obama Justice Department to prosecute them. Liberal lawyers want to disbar them, and the media maligns them. What did the Justice Department attorneys at George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) -- John Yoo and Jay Bybee -- do to garner such scorn? They analyzed a 1994 criminal statute prohibiting torture when the CIA asked for legal guidance on interrogation techniques for a high-level al Qaeda detainee (Abu Zubaydah). In the mid-1980s, when I supervised the legality of apprehending terrorists to stand trial, I...

WASHINGTON – Democrats just can't seem to get on the same page on national security — and it could cost them dearly on an issue Republicans have dominated for decades. Increasingly, President Barack Obama and Democrats who run Congress are being pulled between the competing interests of party liberals and the rest of the country on Bush-era wartime matters of torture, detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists. The Democratic Party's struggle over how to position itself on these issues is threatening to overshadow Obama's ambitious plans for energy, education and health care. It's also keeping the country looking backward on...

Strangely absent from the recent coverage of Pelosi's past knowledge of U.S. torture policies is any acknowledgement that this story is old news. Really old news. Way back in December, 2007, the Washington Post ran a piece headlined, "Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002." It hit Pelosi with the exact same allegations that have been so breathlessly reported as of late: In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group,...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has backed down slightly in her fight with the CIA, saying that she really meant only to criticize the Bush administration rather than career officials. "My criticism of the manner in which the Bush Administration did not appropriately inform Congress is separate from my respect for those in the intelligence community who work to keep our country safe," Pelosi said in a statement. Pelosi caused an uproar Thursday when she accused the CIA of lying to her about its use of waterboarding – which she considers torture – on terrorism suspects. Her comment came after President...

WASHINGTON -- Earlier this month, I wrote a column outlining two exceptions to the no-torture rule: the ticking time bomb scenario and its less extreme variant in which a high-value terrorist refuses to divulge crucial information that could save innocent lives. The column elicited protest and opposition that were, shall we say, spirited. And occasionally stupid. Dan Froomkin, writing for washingtonpost.com and echoing a common meme among my critics, asserted that "the ticking time bomb scenario only exists in two places: On TV and in the dark fantasies of power-crazed and morally deficient authoritarians." (He later helpfully suggested that my...

Republicans in the House are keeping up the pressure on Pelosi by pushing for answers about what she knew and when she knew it, emailing this report from Rick Klein (whose made it his job to jam up Pelosi on her continued backpedaling): Pelosi told reporters today that she won’t answer questions on the matter until her weekly press conference tomorrow -- keeping the story alive for a full week after ABC News first reported on the intelligence report.... As we wait for answers, Pelosi has found relatively few allies among her fellow Democrats. Pressed by reporters yesterday, House Majority...