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Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan consulted the White House before directing agency personnel to sift through a walled-off computer drive being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to construct its investigation of the agency’s torture program, according to a recently released report by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General. The Inspector General’s report, which was completed in July but only released by the agency on Wednesday, reveals that Brennan spoke with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough before ordering CIA employees to “use whatever means necessary” to determine how certain sensitive internal documents had wound up in...

WOULD WE HAVE WON WWII WITH TODAY'S PC CULTURE? 1/4/2015 0 Comments Watching the media and liberals go crazy over the "Torture Report" makes me wonder what would have happened if they lived and reported during World War II. First, since FDR was President, they may have been fine since it was one of their own making the rules. Anyone who has researched WWII knows that part of the war meant civilians were going to be killed. In order to win a war you cannot handcuff your military on rules of engagement. In Europe we had strategic bombings in the...

When asked to explain my belief that Obama’s presidency was a construction created from approximately 10 years of pre-thought exquisitely planned detail, many people are puzzled by my reasoning. If you peel back the layers to the Milli Vanilli roadshow – what you will notice is the strategy of putting specific ideologies into the legal affairs offices of all the “non-political” constructs. The Pentagon office of legal counsel, for example, can handcuff the activity of the Pentagon with legal opinion in opposition to the traditional goals of the organization (See Jeh Johnson). Likewise the CIA office of legal counsel, can...

Once a Constitutional Republic famed for its pragmatism, the United States has lately become a country notorious for its inconstancy, no longer recognizing that actions have finite and foreseeable consequences. In this space, for example, I recently argued that the release of the “torture report” by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence came perilously close to the constitutional definition of treason by “giving Aid and Comfort” to America’s enemies. Admittedly, that was a tough assessment. But barely a week after the report’s release, the Huffington Post published an article linking those revelations with their most immediate effects on our allies....

Waterboarding is not designed to kill anyone.  None of the other enhanced interrogation techniques that liberals are screaming about are designed to cause lasting damage or death. The reality is that the “torture” that liberals are getting upset about would be called torture only in the First World; in the rest of the world, it would be considered a mild first step. That doesn’t mean that enhanced interrogation techniques are acceptable or moral, but it does mean that they are a far cry from what most of the world thinks of when they hear the word “torture.” On the...

As some lawmakers purport to be stunned over the new CIA “torture report” the fact is Congress knew for years that enhanced interrogation techniques were being used on terrorists and in fact dozens of members were repeatedly briefed on the subject, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Back in 2010 Judicial Watch obtained government documents—once marked “Top Secret”—that reveal between 2001 and 2007, the CIA briefed at least 68 members of Congress on its interrogation program. This included so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The dates of all congressional briefings and, in some cases, the members of Congress in attendance as well...

Live CIA Director Brennan delivers remarks on Senate report

Somebody has to be the good guy. So says Peggy Noonan this week in the wake of the torture report, a 14 million page accounting of mostly standard, typical, usual, unremarkable methods of forcibly extracting information from an enemy. And isn’t that a word we seem to have forgotten: enemy. The concept of an enemy is one of the most basic, primitive understandings possible. It is obvious, and should require no explanation. And yet here we are. Because we don’t have them, anymore. There is no evil empire. The modern sensibility, informed heavily by pseudo-leftist pop culture and leftover hippie...

For a long time I resisted the word “torture” when discussing the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used against high-value captives in the War on Terror. I don’t think I can do that anymore. The report put out by Dianne Feinstein and her fellow Democrats may be partisan, one-sided, tendentious, and “full of crap,” as Dick Cheney put it the other night on Special Report with Bret Baier. But even the selective use and misuse of facts doesn’t change their status as facts. What some of these detainees went through pretty obviously amounted to torture. You can call it “psychological torture” or...

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Wednesday called the latest Senate report on torture “full of crap.” “The report’s full of crap, excuse me,” Cheney said in an interview with Fox News after calling the report a “terrible piece of work” and “deeply flawed.” Cheney cited the report’s lack of first-hand accounts from CIA officials as one reason he was dismissing its findings.