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The guerrilla legal campaign against national security suffered a big defeat this week, and the good news deserves more attention. The victory for legal sanity came Monday when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court decision to toss out a suit brought by aspiring terrorist Jose Padilla against a slew of Bush Administration officials. Readers may remember that Padilla was arrested in 2002 for plotting to set off a dirty bomb on U.S. soil. He was detained as an enemy combatant, convicted in a Miami court and sentenced to 17 years in prison. But Padilla has been...

During this heated discussion Alan Colmes says, and has been saying for years, that Enhanced Interregation Techniques (EIT) yield nothing. He also states that Donald Rumsfeld confirms this. An hour later on Hannity, Rumsfeld says that just is not true.

Tsk Tsk. Sad

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee is intervening with a Pentagon investigator to influence the final wording of a report that exonerates George W. Bush-era officials who gave war briefings to retired military TV and radio commentators. Sen. Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat, has tried for three years to convince federal investigators that the briefing program violated government rules and that some of the retired officers turned analysts received preferential treatment for Pentagon contracts. Two previous government probes found no misconduct, and the Pentagon inspector general now has wrapped up a third investigation. A source close to the third...

Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, former gang member, and designated enemy combatant who was sentenced to 17 years in prison, is mounting an aggressive appeal. The oral arguments on October 26 in Richmond’s Fourth Circuit will strike at the heart of the Constitution. Padilla brought a lawsuit against former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials, alleging he was illegally detained and tortured in the military brig after his 2002 arrest. That suit, which has been described as “lawfare” or exacting personal and financial “flesh” from an opponent, was dismissed last February by a federal judge in Charleston,...

In an explosive interview with Al Jazeera’s English Washington bureau chief Abderrahim Foukara, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld blasted the journalist for “haranguing” and refused to answer his questions — accusing Foukara of having it in his “being” to be “disrespectful.” The heated exchange erupted when the topic came to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Foukara asked Rumsfeld whether he felt responsible for the deaths of “innocent Iraqis” because, according to Foukara, the Bush administration “didn’t secure the borders” of the country and sent in too few troops.

Herman Cain will add a heavyweight to his campaign staff on Monday. Taking over as campaign spokesman will be J.D. Gordon, who served as a Pentagon spokesman from 2005-2009 under Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates. Gordon is a retired Navy commander. He succeeds Ellen Carmichael, a 2009 graduate of Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College. So how did CNN report this story? From CNN: “Herman Cain communications director resigns.” No mention was made of J.D. Gordon, at all. Reporter Shannon Travis made it sound as if Team Cain was on the rocks: “It’s a very amicable departure,” Carmichael...

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says President Barack Obama has come to accept much of the Bush Doctrine out of necessity, despite what he campaigned on in 2008. Rumsfeld said that Obama needed to keep the Guantanamo Bay detention center open because of national security concerns, and it was the best solution among a host of bad options. “They ended up keeping Guantanamo open not because they like it — we didn’t like it either — but they couldn’t think of a better solution,” Rumsfeld told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren on Tuesday. Rumsfeld then listed a handful of other...

No one is immune to the probing hands of the TSA ... including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ... who got the pat-down at Chicago's O'Hare airport this afternoon ... and TMZ has the pics. (Photo at link) Sources at the airport tell TMZ ... Rummy was all smiles during the body sweep and was "very nice" throughout the procedure.

Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. special operations forces is a major success in our country’s war against al-Qaeda. As a result of the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program and the intelligence gained from detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a major fraction of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has been captured or killed since 2001.

There's no love lost between former colleagues Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. In a question and answer session for the New York Times Magazine, former Secretary of State Rice is breaking her silence about the criticisms former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld made about her in his new book, "Known and Unknown." Rice was asked to comment on Rumsfeld's assertion that she "almost never wanted" to dissent with President George W. Bush. She replied about Rumsfeld: "He doesn't know what he's talking about." "I don't think he was ever in the room with the president and me when I would follow the...

SPIEGEL: Mister Secretary, you are famous for your "Rumsfeld rules." Do you happen to have a rule that gives advice on foreign invasions? Rumsfeld: I do. When you begin an invasion, a rule is "the mission should determine the coalition, not the other way around." You should not first assemble a coalition with many different views and then try to determine the mission. That leads to a lack of clarity as to the mission. SPIEGEL: Is that the case with the current NATO invasion in Libya? Rumsfeld: I think you can make that case. The United States did not articulate,...

See interesting video HERE... VAN SUSTEREN: Well, it seemed so unbelievable at the time, and then just two years ago, not under -- not under your watch, but under the new administration in Scotland, releasing -- one of the killers of Pan Am 103 goes home, and he's embraced by Libya, a huge hero. He's still a hero now. And it's, like, the United States just -- on that particular incident, that we've looked the other way, and you know, we've done -- we almost rewarded him. RUMSFELD: There -- I mean, old phrase that, in fact, I talk about...

The Justice Department under President Barack Obama has quietly dropped its legal representation of more than a dozen Bush-era Pentagon and administration officials - including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and aide Paul Wolfowitz - in a lawsuit by Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla, who spent years behind bars without charges in conditions his lawyers compare to torture. Charles Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, confirmed Tuesday that the government has agreed to retain private lawyers for the officials, at a cost of up to $200 per hour. Miller said “conflicts concerns” prompted the decision. He did not elaborate. One private...

Rumsfeld blasts Obama's world image Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disputes the notion that President Barack Obama has made America more popular around the globe than it was under his former boss, President George W. Bush. Asked on CNN's "State of the Union" by host Candy Crowley whether the U.S. is looked at differently than under his tenure, Rumsfeld replied, “I don't think there's data that supports that.” "He has made a practice of trying to apologize for America," Rumsfeld said of Obama. "I personally am proud of America” Rumsfeld also downplayed Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. “He had not accomplished...

Dick Cheney just popped up here at CPAC to introduce his old pal and Bush administration colleague Donald Rumsfeld. Fans of Ron Paul turned what should have been a friendly moment before an audience of fellow conservatives into a screaming match and protest action that resembled what a Cheney-Rumsfeld hug at the Netroots Nation convention might look like. Rumsfeld is being given CPAC's "Defender Of The Constitution" award, a concept that apparently rankled Paul supporters in the crowd. Many of them got up and walked out en masse at the mention of Rumsfeld, though some stayed behind in the conference...

The US war effort in Iraq would have been a "disastrous defeat" if president George W. Bush had left Donald Rumsfeld in charge of the Defence Department, John McCain says. The former Republican presidential candidate hit back yesterday over unflattering comments made by Mr Rumsfeld in his new autobiography, Known and Unknown. Reviving a feud between the pair, Mr Rumsfeld describes Senator McCain in his book as "a man with a hair-trigger temper and a propensity to fashion and shift his positions to appeal to the media".

Long-awaited, from-the-hip memoir offers raw, unvarnished look at eight decades of history "If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much." So declares former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his news book 'KNOWN AND UNKNOWN'. In the book, which streets next week, Rumsfeld details his half-century career in and around the ring -- and West Wing. It is based not only on Rumsfeld's memory but also on hundreds of previously unreleased documents from throughout his career. Now only the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal: # Rumsfeld warned in 2001 of Afghan “swamp” and “not to make a career...

If there was any doubt that Donald Rumsfeld's book would be frank-and-candid narrative of what, in his telling, really happened, here are a few details about what promises to be a tell-all in the tradition of the Washington memoir. First, see above: The dust jacket depicts a fleece-wearing Rummy at his get-away in Taos, a signal that he's detached from the Beltway and has nothing to lose. Then there is the title, "Known and Unknown," a play on his famous formulation about "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns." That's shorthand for suggesting he's going to reveal more than a few...

Unlike Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been relatively quiet since he left office in 2006. But part of last night's speech got Rumsfeld hot under the collar: When I took office, we had just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan, compared to 160,000 in Iraq at the peak of the war. Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive. The ever-polite Rumsfeld sent out a press release calling that statement a big fat lie: