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The UK tolerated "inexcusable" treatment of US detainees after the 9/11 attacks, MPs have found. The Intelligence and Security Committee said British agencies continued to supply intelligence to allies despite knowing or suspecting abuse in more than 200 cases. Committee chairman Dominic Grieve said agencies knew of incidents that were "plainly unlawful". The findings have sparked fresh calls for an independent, judge-led inquiry. The two parliamentary reports, published following a three-year investigation, examine how far Britain's intelligence agencies were aware of the mistreatment of terrorism suspects. The ISC said it was "beyond doubt" that the UK knew how the US...

European judges have ruled that Lithuania and Romania violated the rights of two al-Qaeda terror suspects by allowing the CIA to torture them. The US captured Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri after the September 2001 attacks in the US and they are now at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. The CIA operated secret prisons, including in Lithuania and Romania. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said both countries had violated the European prohibition of torture. The ECHR issued a similar ruling against Poland in 2014. Lithuania and Romania were ordered to pay €100,000 (£88,000; $117,000) in damages...

The ballgame is over on Gina Haspel’s confirmation battle. She’s President Trump’s nominee for CIA director. She will be the first female director in the agency’s history. Nevertheless, the process has been a mini-war on women, with dedicated left-wingers pushing the usual talking point: ‘yeah, she’s a woman, but she’s not a real woman.' Translation: only liberal women can be true feminists and only liberal women can benefit from feminism. Oh, and if you’re nominated by a Republican, especially Trump, you’re Satan, or something. Yet, she’s been able to clinch some Democrats, as Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Rand Paul (R-KY)...

Many debates over politics and policy begin with a battle over language. Before all sides can hash out their differences, there must be an understanding of what their words mean. From the months following 9/11 right up to the current CIA confirmation hearings for Gina Haspel, the misuse of a vital term has hindered clarity and progress on a key issue. On the first day of her answers before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the word even impeded what should be a clear path to the title she seeks. The word, of course, is “torture.” Since our nation began undertaking special...

Former Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox Business Thursday that he thinks the CIA should restart and improve on post 9/11-era enhanced interrogation programs. “If it were my call, I would not discontinue those programs. I'd have them active and ready to go,” he said. “And I'd go back and study them and learn." Cheney commented on the matter following a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday in which Trump’s nominee for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, said she would not have the CIA return to such programs. "Having served in that tumultuous time,” Haspel said of the post-9/11 techniques. “I can...

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...

Terror expert and author Marc Thiessen told Bill O’Reilly tonight that Obama eliminated the enhanced interrogation tool from our counter-terrorism arsenal his second day in office. So the tool that got us the information that led us to Osama Bin Laden is no longer in use. The US has not cpatured and detained and tinterrogated a single high level detainee since Barack Obama moved into office.

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...

A Senate Judiciary Subcmte. looks into the legal conduct of Justice Dept. lawyers who approved harsh interrogation techniques. One of the witnesses, fmr. FBI agent Ali Soufan, interrogated Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, psychologist and U.S. Air Force veteran Dr. James Mitchell was called back to national service. Along with a partner, Bruce Jessen, he was tasked with developing the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs. Designed to elicit time-sensitive intelligence from hardened al Qaeda leaders, the EITs later became immersed in controversy. In 2014, Senate Democrats released a report accusing Mitchell of torturing suspects with EITs and producing no results. In his new book, Enhanced Interrogation, Mitchell offers his own testimony on the EITs. He argues that the techniques were critical in saving the lives...

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - Accused Chinatown gangster Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow has refused to sign on to a protective order that will allow defense attorneys to receive evidence from federal prosecutors, including audio recordings and video surveillance, from a five-year undercover investigation that led to his arrest, and the arrest of 26 others in March. Attorneys for the federal government on Thursday filed a motion to compel Chow to cooperate, noting that nearly all the other defendants have signed on, and only one other defendant has not signed because of a likely substitution of counsel in the near future. According...

A new poll from the Pew Research Center is the first to gauge reactions to last week's big CIA report on "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- what agency critics call torture. And the reaction is pretty muted. The poll shows people says 51-29 percent than the CIA's methods were justified and 56-28 percent that the information gleaned helped prevent terror attacks.

Obviously as a reward for committing theft of classified documents for the democrats, Barack Obama has named Alissa Starzak to the legal department at the Pentagon. It’s a position she has never achieved on her own and is a large promotion over her previous jobs. But why put someone with a history of stealing classified secrets to a job where she could steal the country’s most guarded secrets? It’s a reward. Republicans in both houses of congress have accused her of making copies of documents and carrying them out of the Pentagon for use by Diane Feinstein and her committee...

If you live in L.A. and didn't die in a terrorist attack, you may owe it to the CIA's use of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that are currently under fire from the Obama administration and the left-wing fringe. In a compelling Op-Ed in Tuesday's Washington Post, Marc A. Thiessen disproves Barack Obama's hollow claim that such techniques "did not make us safer." Rather than following the MSM lead and merely parroting the Obamatons' talking points after the release of previously-classified memos this week, Thiessen actually examined the documents. Thiessen concludes that Obama's contention is "patently false. The proof is in...

While reading some of my Twitter email yesterday I saw a story on how the FBI used 'torture' against anti civil rights people back in the sixties. That got me thinking on the hypotheticals the talking heads keep yapping about. You know - what if you have a terrorist that knows where a nuke is going to explode in D.C. or NYC, what would you do to get the information from said terrorist. Than I thought of something else that I will use against a Progressive if they bring this subject up in conversation. Hypothetical - someone kidnaps the family...

December 20, 2014 Diane Feinstein, the Iron Maiden By Deana Chadwell Language, that contract that we make with the members of our society, holds our society together; without it we can accomplish nothing. Nor can we function without the protection of good and selfless people who step forward to face the evil that always threatens successful nations. Diane Feinstein’s release of the enhanced interrogation technique documents is, on both national and linguistic fronts, an act of treason. To attack the language by which we carry on our national dialogue and the methods we use to protect our right to have...

After days of brow-furrowed, self-righteousness analysis from much of the national media over Senate Democrats' tendentious and dishonest "torture report," poll after poll has shown that the American people aren't eager to join the anti-CIA mob. The latest, from NBC/WSJ: Fewer than three in ten Americans are willing to second-guess the intelligence community's use of harsh techniques in questioning captured terrorists in the wake of 9/11's deadly attacks.  Most people's memories of the fear and chaos of that time are fresh enough to give the CIA the benefit of the doubt.  Plus, Dianne Feinstein's squad did themselves no favors by refusing to interview a single person...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is joining the debate over the Senate's torture report by saying it's hard to rule out the use of extreme measures to extract information if millions of lives were threatened. Scalia told a Swiss broadcast network that American and European liberals who say such tactics may never be used are being self-righteous. The 78-year-old justice said he doesn't "think it's so clear at all," especially if interrogators were trying to find a ticking nuclear bomb. Scalia has made similar comments in the past, but he renewed his remarks on Wednesday in an...

It is a pack of lies and misrepresentations. It is dishonest to the core and makes little effort to seem otherwise. It discredits heroes who have sacrificed to keep our nation safe. It is, to quote the best Vice President of my lifetime, “full of crap.” To give it a fitting title, it is the Smear Report Solely From The Side of A Committee That Cannot Handle What It Takes To Fight Terrorists. News reports have referred to it fraudulently as a “Senate report” as if it were a collaborative effort of both parties. It is the exclusive handiwork...

Toward the end of last month, WaPo and other newspapers reported how the Department of Justice, after re-investigating 101 cases, found only 2 CIA-custody deaths that are still possibly worth pursuing as criminal cases. The Agency is relieved but still unsettled over the stress of criminal investigations being conducted (yet again) when they had tread carefully to insure that everything they were doing in the EIT program was legally covered. “It’s good that he’s narrowed things down to two cases,” the former CIA official said. “On the other hand, he’s been looking at these cases for two years and...