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WASHINGTON, Aug. 25 (UPI) -- Recently released documents show harsh questioning of suspected terrorists provided significant information on al-Qaida, former Vice President Dick Cheney said. Cheney released a written statement on the documents that became public Monday, including a 2004 report from the CIA inspector general, CNN reported. “The documents released Monday clearly demonstrated the individuals subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al-Qaida,” Cheney said. “This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks.”

ABUJA, Nigeria, Aug. 25 (UPI) -- Nigeria’s latest peace effort has been called a sham by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, an umbrella organization for armed groups. Nigeria’s government amnesty program offers a pardon and a job to militants and their leaders who relinquish their weapons. MEND, however, said the drive is a charade and that the government was purchasing the weapons, CNN reported Tuesday. “In the midst of such sheer deceit, MEND will be compelled to resume with ferocious attacks on the oil industry at the end of our cease-fire on Sept. 15, 2009,” the...

NEW YORK, Aug. 25 (UPI) -- A 60-ton steel-beam fragment has been returned to the site of New York’s World Trade Center as part of a permanent exhibit, city officials said. The beam was the last to be removed from the site after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. While it stood, rescue and salvage workers covered it with commemorative messages and photos of those who died in the attack, The New York Times reported Tuesday. The 36-foot fragment, which had been stored in a hangar at Kennedy Airport, was returned Monday in advance of the opening of the National...

EXCLUSIVE: Gen. David H. Petraeus plans to open an in-house intelligence organization at U.S. Central Command this week that will train military officers, covert agents and analysts who agree to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan for up to a decade. The organization, to be called the Center for Afghanistan Pakistan Excellence, will be led by Derek Harvey, a retired colonel in the Defense Intelligence Agency who became one of the Gen. Petraeus’ most trusted analysts during the 2007-08 counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq. Mr. Harvey distinguished himself in Iraq by predicting that the Iraqi insurgency would spiral out of control, at...

NEW YORK, Aug. 24 (UPI) -- Organizers of a National Go-Topless Day rally in New York said dozens of women bared their breasts and marched in the streets for the right to go topless. Event organizer Sylvie Chabot, 54, of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, said dozens of women and male supporters gathered Sunday in Central Park to shed their tops and march on Central Park South to mark National Go-Topless Day, the New York Daily News reported Monday. A 1992 ruling by the state Supreme Court made New York the only state where it is legal for a woman to go...

Most Republicans likely already think Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Penn.) is a joke, and Thursday evening he proved it when he took the stage at a Pittsburgh comedy club. [...] some of the material was taken from a previous routine he had done at the Washington Improv in 2007, a joke which back then involved Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden now featured Sarah Palin, John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani (videos in two parts embedded below the fold, sexual content warning,

Chechen fighters are claiming they used an anti-tank grenade to cause a deadly disaster at a dam in Siberia, a letter on a Russian rebel website has said. “Glory to Allah,

Imagine if the Congress passed a law mandating that all school students in America be indoctrinated in socialism? Yeah, I know that is precisely the type of indoctrination that is already going on in many classrooms but the reaction to such a law actually spelling this out would cause demonstrations that would dwarf even those currently going on at the tea parties in opposition to ObamaCare. Well, this is precisely what is currently happening in Venezuela where the Hugo Chavez controlled National Assembly recently passed just such a law. As a result, many previously apathetic Venezuelans are pouring into the...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 (UPI) -- Former and current U.S. officials say a CIA report details the U.S. agency’s threatened use of a drill and gun in the interrogation of an al-Qaida suspect. The unidentified officials said the report, due for release to the public next week, details how captured al-Qaida commander Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was threatened with a power drill and a gun by CIA interrogators in an attempt to procure information, The Washington Post said Saturday. The anonymous officials said he gun and drill were not used on Nashiri but placed nearby in an attempt to instill fear in...

Maxim Lott at Foxnews.com reported Monday that NBC Universal isn’t just showing its love for Obama on the news airwaves: If you’re a fan of all things Obama, NBC Universal’s online store has no fewer than 29 options for your buying pleasure -- from a shirt with the president’s picture proclaiming “YES WE DID"...to both of his books...to a special inauguration DVD...to a refrigerator magnet of the first couple. And don’t forget the Barack Obama Action Figure -- yours for $15, plus tax. You can buy them online -- or at NBC Universal’s retail store in New York. The items...

A Macon man told police he was protecting his wife, three kids, and his home after he shot at an intruder. A Macon Police report says it happened at Hidden Lakes Apartment complex Sunday around 3 a.m. The man told officers he was asleep on his living room sofa, when he heard a noise. The man says he woke up to find a man coming through his window. He says he yelled at the intruder, but he kept coming through the window, according to the police report. The man says he sleeps with a gun, so he pulled it out...

President Obama, once considered as politically agile and deft as a gazelle, is now looking increasingly like a deer caught in the headlights. His poll numbers on everything from job approval to his handling of the economy, health care, taxes and bailouts are dropping faster than a cement shoe in the Hudson River. Perhaps even more worrisome, Rasmussen Reports shows that fewer Americans consider him “trustworthy.” His popular support is hemorrhaging because all of his major initiatives are either failing in execution or in the legislative process. According to a new USA Today/Gallup Poll, 57 percent of Americans say the...

President Obama is on the way to joining an exclusive club. It is the club of failed one-term presidents. During the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama sold himself as a pragmatic moderate. In fact, he is the very opposite. He is an internationalist socialist whose policies will lead to ruin at home and defeat abroad. They will also doom his re-election efforts. He is flirting with political disaster. Despite his many flaws, former President Bill Clinton established the model for successful Democratic administrations. Mr. Clinton governed as a liberal centrist. He realized that veering too far to the left early in...

New York Times book critic Dwight Garner on Wednesday enthused over a new biography of Friedrich Engels, cooing that Marxism is “back in vogue” and adding that the founding communist comes across as a “jovial man of outsize appetites” in Tristram Hunt’s new biography “Marx’s General.” Garner opened the review by insisting that decrying capitalism is now hip again: “Thanks to globalism’s discontents and the financial crisis that has spread across the planet, Karl Marx and his analysis of capitalism’s dark, wormy side are back in vogue.”

OKLAHOMA CITY, Aug. 19 (UPI) -- An Oklahoma judge struck down the state’s abortion law requiring ultrasounds, ruling it violated a requirement that legislation deal with a single subject. Oklahoma County District Judge Vicki Robertson ruled the 2008 abortion law was a compilation of five separate bills, but did not address other legal complaints on the law Tuesday, The Oklahoman reported Wednesday. The most controversial aspect of the law was a requirement that a doctor or medical technician performing an abortion give a pregnant woman an ultrasound before the procedure and display the images where the woman could see them,...

ARNOLD, Mo., Aug. 19 (UPI) -- A 79-year-old Missouri man who began keeping track of his miles at a church track in 2001 said he has logged 40,000 miles on the path. Bob Wery, 79, of Arnold, said he has walked a total 40,000 miles -- equal to more than 13 coast-to-coast U.S. trips -- on the indoor track and outdoor walking path at the First Baptist Church of Arnold since 2001, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Wednesday. Wery said none of the other walkers at the church have come close to his record. He said church volunteers keep track...

The popular photo sharing website Flickr has taken down the original version of the now famous Obama Joker poster that’s been sweeping the nation. Apparently, management is concerned about a copyright infringement issue due to the appearance of the Time magazine logo in Firas Alkhateeb’s parody that ended up being reprinted with the word “Socialism” at the bottom. Oddly, a quick search of Flickr identified a number of Bush parodies with Time’s logo present (vulgarity alert below the fold).

Numerous reasons to oppose the ludicrous Obama health care plan aside, Yael T. Abouhalkah of the Kansas City Star has cut through to the real reason for dissent - Americans are ignorant. While Abouhalkah will undoubtedly argue that the message was meant to apply merely to the aspect of health care knowledge, he is quite unsuccessful at holding back his overall disdain for the way American’s have responded to the plan. The title of his most recent blog post says it all. In referring to an NBC poll about the health care plan, one in which MSNBC titles Doubts About...

An Israeli official is linking President Obama’s actions with anti-Semitism. Science and Technology Minister Daniel Hershkowitz is especially critical of the president’s decision to award the Medal of Freedom to former U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson. Hershkowitz tells the Jerusalem Post: “I am disappointed in Obama’s policies. Some of the steps he has taken, like giving a medal to Mary Robinson, are borderline anti-Semitic... Relations with the U.S. are important, but relations must go both ways.” There is also said to be growing Israeli dissatisfaction with the president’s chief of staff. Rahm Emanuel is an observant Jew with deep...

Think last year’s $700 billion Wall Street rescue package was beaucoup bucks to spend bailing out the nation’s floundering financial system? That’s chump change compared to what the overall price tag could be, a government watchdog says. The inspector general in charge of overseeing the Treasury Department’s bank-bailout program says the massive endeavor could end up costing taxpayers almost $24 trillion in a worst-case scenario. That’s more than six times President Obama’s proposed $3.55 trillion budget for 2010. Much of the bailout’s attention has focused on the Treasury’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which Congress hurriedly passed...