ABC News reported tonight that President Bush’s most senior and trusted advisers met in “dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House” beginning in 2002 to approve the use of “combined” interrogation techniques (the joint use of harsh interrogation techniques). Those tactics included whether detainees “would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.”
Members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee — Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and John Ashcroft — approved the use of these techniques. “Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved.” According to ABC’s report, Ashcroft indicated he was troubled by the meetings:
According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”
Watch ABC’s report:
Bush’s former Secretary of Homeland Security — Tom Ridge — has said there is “no doubt” that waterboarding is torture.
New Jersey high school senior Matthew LaClair has exposed the American Government textbook, written by conservative ideologues James Q. Wilson and John DiIulio Jr., for promoting climate-denier myths. The Associated Press reports:
The edition of the textbook published in 2005, which is in high school classrooms now, states that “science doesn’t know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all.”
A newer edition published late last year was changed to say, “Science doesn’t know how bad the greenhouse effect is.”
The authors kept a phrase stating that global warming is “enmeshed in scientific uncertainty.”
The Wonk Room has more, including extended excerpts from American Government. Friendly Atheist discusses more of the book’s right-wing distortions and lies.
