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The Left's battle against "Zero Dark Thirty" continues, but this time the Oscar-winning director of the film is being called far worse than an apologist for "torture." A trio of senators previously critiqued the minds behind the movie, detailing the hunt for Osama bin Laden, for daring to suggested enhanced interrogation tactics helped nab the terrorist leader. Now, progressive critic Naomi Wolf is comparing Bigelow to the Nazis' premier propagandist. In a time of darkness in America, you are being feted by Hollywood, and hailed by major media. But to me, the path your career has now taken reminds of...

It is an odd experience to enter a darkened room and, for more than two and a half hours, watch someone tell a story that you experienced intimately in your own life. But that is what happened recently as I sat in a movie theater near Times Square and watched “Zero Dark Thirty,” the new Hollywood blockbuster about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. When I was head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center from 2002 to 2004 and then director of the National Clandestine Service until late 2007, the campaign against al-Qaeda was my life and obsession. I must say,...

Life-giving substances shouldn’t be treated as pollutantsThe environmentalist movement has gone off the deep end. It’s bad enough that the courts have allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to declare carbon dioxide, one of the essential components of life on this planet, to be a pollutant. Now the same bureaucratic zealots are going after water itself. On Friday, Virginia Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II appeared in federal district court in Alexandria to contest the EPA’s use of the Clean Water Act to punish Virginia and Fairfax County for sending too much water into a watershed. “These regulations are expensive,...

Alaskan liberty goes up in smoke under new air regulationsNot-so-unintended consequences of overregulation are in the air. Newly adopted rules limiting airborne soot imposed by bureaucrats in Washington threaten to freeze the choices — and toes — of individuals living more than 4,000 miles away in subarctic Alaska. Thanks to authoritarian overreach, the freedom of America’s “last frontier” may not last much longer. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) waited until after President Obama’s re-election to announce drastic new restrictions on soot produced by industry smokestacks, diesel trucks and even ordinary sources like wood-burning stoves. The new standard for the great...

EPA: ‘Nothing to fear’ on climate regs By Andrew Restuccia - 04/26/11 10:43 AM ET Environmental Protection Administrator Lisa Jackson said Tuesday that the public has no reason to fear the agency’s pending climate regulations. “I believe there is nothing to fear from common-sense use of the Clean Air Act to begin to put this country in the direction of moving towards addressing our greenhouse gas emissions,” Jackson said during remarks at an energy conference in Washington. The EPA has begun phasing in greenhouse gas standards for new and modified power plants and refineries. The regulations have come under attack...

See also: Obama Administration Combats Racist Air United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson testified before Congress in September of 2011 that small-particle (2.5 microns or less) air pollution is lethal. "Particulate matter causes premature death. It's directly causal to dying sooner than you should." At the hearing, Representative Edward J. Markey (D-MA) asked, "How would you compare [the benefits of reducing airborne PM2.5] to the fight against cancer?" Ms. Jackson replied, "Yeah, I was briefed not long ago. If we could reduce particulate matter to healthy levels, it would have the same impact as finding a...

After experiments on humans were conducted that exposed them to airborne particulates considered to be lethal, a sound-science advocate has accused physician researchers working for the Environmental Protection Agency of misconduct and violations of the Hippocratic Oath. Steve Milloy , publisher of Junkscience.com and author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them , filed a complaint with the North Carolina Medical Board last week that accused three doctors in the state – two employed by EPA (Dr. Andrew Ghio and Dr. Wayne Cascio) and one by the University...

Hello All, I'm asking for a bit trying to track down something I seem to recall from 2007. In California, the EPA shut down a waterway, it claims, to protect a species of either bird or fish. The shutdown of the waterway killed many regional farms. Flashforward to the Obamacare vote - We were all watching with baited breath as one after the other, opposition fell. We saw opposition to the bill fall from bribes, threats, and promises to exclude. But I also recall that the water was turned back on (Mysteriously?) in return for a yes vote. I'm looking...

After accumulating evidence via the Freedom of Information Act that showed theEnvironmental Protection Agency conducted disturbing experiments that exposed humans to inhalable particulates the agency has said are deadly, sound science advocate Steven Milloy has sued the federal government. The trials, which were carried out at EPA’s Human Studies Facility at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, exposed subjects to fine particulate matter (called “PM2.5”) at extremely elevated levels for up to two hours at a time. EPA’s Web site on particulate matter and its 2009 “Summary of PM2.5 Risk Estimates,” stated, “an examination of cause-specific risk...

<p>The Obama administration's chief environmental watchdog, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, is stepping down after a nearly four-year tenure marked by high-profile brawls over global warming pollution, the Keystone XL oil pipeline, new controls on coal-fired plants and several other hot-button issues that affect the nation's economy and people's health.</p>

Lisa Jackson is an object lesson in the manifest dangers of Leviathanism. Ms. Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is resigning in the new year. She took the reputation of the long-thuggish EPA to new lows, foisting new, damaging and ideologically based regulations on the nation, often by dictatorial fiat, with little transparency (think of her secret email accounts) and with no basis in science. Jackson‘s mission never was to protect or to better the environment but to use environmental regulations to reorder...

From the Washington Times: A House committee has launched an investigation into whether EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used an email alias to try to hide correspondence from open-government requests and her agency’s own internal watchdog — something that Republican lawmakers said could run afoul of the law.The science committee has asked Ms. Jackson to turn over all information related to an email account under the name of “Richard Windsor,” which is one of the aliases identified by a researcher looking into the EPA.The committee has also asked the White House’s lawyer and EPA’s inspector general to look into the matter...

The odd-year gubernatorial election of what now feels like a solidly purple Virginia (…dagger) could potentially serve as a bellwether of which way the national attitude is trending after almost a year into President Obama’s second term, and conservative Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli will be facing former DNC chief Terry McAuliffe in what will likely be a pretty rough race.One of the items on which the Obama administration has already started moving “forward” in the more politically safe second-term-secured atmosphere is all of the regulations on which they were rather conspicuously holding back before the election, with the Environmental Protection...

The Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says no law empowers any judge to stop it from conducting illegal scientific experiments on seniors, children and the sick. That astounding assertion will be tested Friday, when a federal district court in Alexandria decides whether it has jurisdiction to hear claims made by the American Tradition Institute that EPA researchers are exposing unwary and genetically susceptible senior citizens to air pollutants the agency says can cause a variety of serious cardiac and respiratory problems, including sudden death. Although the lawsuit only addresses ongoing, purportedly illegal experimentation being carried out at an EPA laboratory...

This doesn't quite qualify as breaking news for those who tracked the extraordinary labyrinth of intelligence that emerged in the days following the 2011 Abbottabad raid, but the subject of US interrogation policy is again generating controversy in advance of the release of 'Zero Dark Thirty,' a film that dramatizes the bin Laden mission.  Writing in today's Washington Post, a former top CIA counter-terrorism officer sets the record straight on what measures were, and were not, employed to help bring down the world's most infamous terrorist.  Jose Rodriguez -- who made headlines last year when his book exposed Nancy Pelosi's...

How accurate and realistic is the portrayal of CIA interrogation in the film? The movie, after all, opens with a statement saying “based on firsthand accounts of actual events"; then goes on to show the fictionalized brutal abuse and torture of a fictional high value terrorist, including waterboarding. Well, one "firsthand account" not utilized as an expert consultant to the movie is Jose Rodriguez, former head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, author of Hard Measures, and unapologetic defender of the CIA's "torture" program.... When I reviewed Zero Dark Thirty, the focus of my review was on whether or not political...

I decided to go check out the movie for myself thanks to the ringing endorsement by Senators Feinstein, Levin, and McCain: “I thought it was terrible,” said Feinstein, one of a handful of lawmakers to see the film ahead of its limited release this week. “It is a combination of fact, fiction and Hollywood in a very dangerous combination.” Despite concerns on the right that the movie was serving as a political propaganda piece for Team Obama, in actuality, the movie is rather apolitical, playing it pretty much straight down the middle. The movie does its best to avoid political...

full title...CIA chief sends out extraordinary email to entire staff complaining about agency's portrayal in Zero Dark Thirty'I would not normally comment on a Hollywood film, but I think it's important to put Zero Dark Thirty which deals with one of the most significant achievements in our history, into some context,' Mike Morell began in his note to his staff on Friday.

President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists. “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday. -snip- Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo...

What if Hollywood made a high profile movie that carried an implicit message supporting George W. Bush's War on Terror policies and made Barack Obama look naïve? What if the movie were made by an acclaimed director, and was really, really good? Why, you'd have the amusing opportunity to read up on the critical reaction To Kathryn Bigelow's new blockbuster film, Zero Dark Thirty. I confess that when I learned that Hollywood was to enjoy very broad cooperation from the intelligence community for the production, I assumed that the Obama Administration would get a free pass, a semi-hagiographic treatment of...