Remember these facts: Bush was briefed on September 18, 2002 by the CIA and was told at that time Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. That briefing directly contradicted the National Intelligence Estimate Congress relied upon during the debate about the Iraq War. Colin Powell also relied upon the National Intelligence Estimate to [...]

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once declared that individuals captured by the US military in the aftermath of 9/11 and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay prison facility represented the “worst of the worst.” “If you think of the people down there, these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield,” Rumsfeld [...]

Senior Bush administration officials, including former President George W. Bush himself, have been asked to give testimony before a British committee investigating the basis for the invasion of Iraq, according to a published report. Other officials contacted by the panel include former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of [...]

These torture guidelines were contained in a ream of internal government documents made public over the past year, including a legal review of Bush-era CIA interrogations by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility released late last month. Though public, the hundreds of pages of documents authorizing or later reviewing the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program” [...]

There are times when governments fight to keep documents secret to protect sensitive intelligence or other vital national security interests. And there are times when they are just trying to cover up incompetence, misbehavior or lawbreaking. Last week, when a British court released secret intelligence material relating to the torture allegations of a former Guantánamo [...]

The NYT story also buried the significance of the timeline in the torture case. As both blogger-investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler and blogger-psychologist-activist Stephen Soldz have pointed out in articles Wednesday, the use of CIA-style “enhanced interrogation” torture was directly “conducted by the United States authorities prior to 17 May 2002 as part of a new strategy designed [...]

Millions of voters believe the GOP line about Obama’s runaway spending. It’s up to him to set the record straight… So anyway, up jumps freshman Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. “You are soon to submit a new budget, Mr. President. Will that new budget, like your old budget, triple the national debt and continue to [...]

Obama’s political problems stem from a broader Democratic inability to counter the infernal GOP noise machine — a failure now two decades old. Republican rejectionism ought to have been clear to the White House from the moment they voted unanimously against the economic stimulus — cynically betting that recovery would come too late for the [...]

For the first time since the Great Depression, the United States experienced zero job growth in a decade. Zero. And zero is actually worse than it sounds since none of the preceding six decades registered job growth of less than 20 percent. By comparison, the 1970s, which are often bemoaned as a time of economic [...]

This is not where the Obama administration imagined it would be 11 months ago, when the president signed an executive order to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010. That day, the president set in motion an interagency task force to determine which detainees could be released and whether any could be prosecuted. [...]