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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – CIA officials briefed at least 68 U.S. lawmakers between 2001 and 2007 on enhanced interrogation methods like simulated drowning that were being considered or used against captured al Qaeda members, .. The once-secret CIA papers, obtained in a lawsuit by the conservative legal foundation Judicial Watch, shed new light on which lawmakers knew the details of the controversial interrogation program and when. ... The declassified memos show the program began after the capture of al Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born Palestinian .. In a statement to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence dated April 12, 2007,...

Pelosi Renews Dispute With CIA Over Interrogation Techniques Prodded by the release of dozens of declassified CIA documents, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi renewed her long-running dispute with the Central Intelligence Agency about the use of harsh interrogation practices. Prodded by the release of dozens of declassified CIA documents, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi renewed her long-running dispute with the Central Intelligence Agency about the use of harsh interrogation practices. "I have never been briefed by the CIA or anyone else on the subject of those interrogations, to the extent that they were being used," the California Democrat told reporters Tuesday. "We...

John Yoo and Jay Baybee, the two Justice Department officials most responsible for the memos that guided the Bush Administration's policy on harsh interrogations, were cleared by the Obama/Holder Justice Department of professional misconduct. It also cleared Stephen Bradbury, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel. The conclusion resulted from a decision by top career Justice Department executive David Margolis to reverse a recommendation of investigators that found the two lawyers' legal memos did constitute professional misconduct. That tentative conclusion, which was overruled by Margolis, said the lawyers should be referred to their state bar associations for potential disbarment. But...

WASHINGTON – Justice Department lawyers showed "poor judgment" but did not commit professional misconduct when they authorized CIA interrogators to use waterboarding and other harsh tactics at the height of the U.S. war on terrorism, an internal review released Friday found. The decision closes the book on one of the major lingering investigations into the counterterrorism policies of George W. Bush's administration. President Barack Obama campaigned on abolishing the simulated drowning technique of waterboarding and other tactics that he called torture, but he left open the question of whether anyone would be punished for authorizing such methods. An initial review...

“Now, President Obama has taken them off the table. He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army Manual which doesn’t include those techniques. I think that’s a mistake.”

Holder's decision to Mirandize the Christmas bomber was bad enough. Telling the world he was talking again waseven worse Security: The administration says the Christmas bomber is now cooperating with authorities. We thought they got all the information he had in a 50-minute chat. So just why are we letting our enemies know he's talking? In any war, it's vitally important that you know what your enemy is planning and doing, just as it's important that your actions and plans remain secret. And when you know about your enemy's plans it's important they don't know that you know. We were...

So why wasn't I surprised to read in an article that Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told members of the House Intelligence Committee yesterday he is tasking an elite U.S. interrogation unit -- an interagency group of top interrogators dubbed the "High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group" -- with conducting "scientific research" to find better ways of questioning top suspected terrorists when one already exists? Because Director Blair is either being kept in the dark about the existence of this non-polygraph technology or he's part of what appears to be a coordinated effort by individuals within the federal government to prevent...

Here is video of Charles Krauthammer on with Bill O'Reilly where he said one year after abolishing the Bush methods of interrogating terror detainees, the Obama Administration has not really made sure there is anything to take it's place. The Obama Administration created a "High Value Target Interrogation Group" to fill the vacuum, but one year later, Krauthammer says they are "still looking for office space," and are not functioning. He said they were not functioning when the attempted attack took place on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. Krauthammer said if you are going to "ostentatiously" replace what...

Almost 6 Months ago President Obama announced a new set of rules for the interrogation of terrorists. The President has approved new recommendations for the interrogation and transfer of suspected terrorists, which were created by a task force he set up shortly after taking office. The big headline is the creation of an interagency team of interrogators, which will be known as the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG). It will be placed administratively within the FBI, but the National Security Council (NSC) will provide what senior officials described as "strategic policy guidance." Although the officials were at some pains to...

<p>FEARS that Islamist terrorists plan to hijack an Indian passenger jet and crash it into a British city helped to prompt this weekend's heightened terror alert.</p> <p>MI5 was told by the Indian authorities early last week about a suspected plot by militants linked to Al-Qaeda in Pakistan to hijack an Air India or Indian Airlines flight from Mumbai or Delhi.</p>

The attack was treated nearly entirely as a criminal matter!Shocking information came from Wednesday's Senate hearings with the Administration's top intelligence and homeland security officials. At the top of that list was the admission that Nigerian would be bomber Abdulmutallab had been interrogated with an eye towards criminal prosecution by local FBI officials. He was not interrogated by intelligence specialists with an eye towards collecting key information that could prevent future attacks. And after Abdulmutallab was given his Miranda rights, he stopped talking altogether. Just who it was at the Dept. of Justice who made these decisions is not clear....

The Christmas airline bombing suspect should have been treated as a terror detainee and been questioned by special interrogators, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told a Senate panel Wednesday. Blair and other top officials said they were not consulted: Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that he was not consulted on whether (Umar Farouk) Abdulmutallab should be questioned by the recently created High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG. "That unit was created exactly for this purpose," Blair said. "We did not invoke the HIG in this case. We should have."

A young Nigerian charged with trying to blow up a US airliner boasted during his interrogation that some 20 others were being trained to carry out similar attacks, CBS reported on Friday. British intelligence officials said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, had "boasted that close to 20 other young Muslim men were being prepared in Yemen to use the same technique to blow up airliners," AFP reported from a CBS report. Abdulmutallab earlier pleaded not guilty to six charges arising out of the botched Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown says a Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a U.S. airliner should be treated as an enemy combatant, transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and interrogated by any legal means...

That's what voters say, according to today's (Rasmussen survey:)Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 30% oppose the use of such techniques, and another 12% are not sure. There's this, too: Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters think the attempt by the Nigerian Muslim to blow up the airliner as it landed in Detroit should be investigated by military authorities as a terrorist act. Only 22%...

EXCLUSIVE: CIA Secret 'Torture' Prison Found at Fancy Horseback Riding Academy ABC News Finds the Location of a "Black Site" for Alleged Terrorists in Lithuania By BRIAN ROSS and MATTHEW COLE Nov. 18, 2009 — The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week. Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda...

These new reports, dated June 1, 2005 and July 12, 2005, contain some different information than the previously released report, dated June 3, 2005. Notably, the June 1, 2005 report concludes that "Detainee reporting accounts for more than half of all HUMINT reporting on al-Qa'ida since the program began..." This fact is missing from the other two later reports..... .....n March 31, 2009, Vice President Cheney personally issued a request to the National Archives Presidential Libraries section for declassification review of the June 1, 2005 and another detainee program report. The Archives then passed on the request to the CIA...

Vindication of the effectiveness of Warfare over Lawfare, and a triumph for the Terrorist Surveillance Program.The ambivelent news is that The UK recently managed to convict a group of three terrorists for attempted terrorism: Airline terror trial: The bomb plot to kill 10,000 people Three British Muslims have been convicted of planning a series of co-ordinated suicide bomb attacks on transatlantic airliners, which could have killed up to 10,000 people. By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent Telegraph.co.ukThe al-Qaeda cell plotted to cause mass murder by detonating home-made liquid explosives on board at least seven passenger flights bound for the US and...

(CNN) -- Could George W. Bush or some of his top aides end up behind bars? It's extremely unlikely, but the Obama administration is taking its first steps along a path that could lead in that direction, with the investigation of Central Intelligence Agency interrogators involved in the war on terror. "You don't know where these things are going to end up," former CIA agent Peter Brookes told me. "They could go to very high levels in the government." The probe will focus on whether interrogators exceeded their instructions and broke the law when, for example, they choked a prisoner...

Here is video of Laura Ingraham in for Bill O'Reilly talking with Democratic Strategist Keith Watters about a new DNC ad that attacks Dick Cheney and "enhanced interrogation techniques." When asked about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and what is "permissible" to do with him if interrogation is not, Watters said "if someone has broken the law, they should be held accountable" as if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is just a common criminal. Ingraham pointed out that he was not just a common criminal but had a key part in the attacks of Sept. 11 and asked Watters "you didn't consider that an...