Word: bush
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...endorsement of "Don't ask, don't tell" by the Administration marks the latest rightward tack by Obama. The President denounced many of George W. Bush's national-security policies during the campaign, but in office has adopted more conservative positions, including endorsing military commissions to try purported terrorists, and declining to release a second batch of photographs depicting alleged U.S. maltreatment of Iraqi detainees. His stance on "Don't ask, don't tell" may be more surprising, because Obama aides have made clear the President wants the ban lifted eventually. (Watch a gay marriage wedding video...
...fundamental notion underlying U.S. diplomacy with Pyongyang since the Clinton era--a hawkish detour under George W. Bush notwithstanding--is that the North can be bribed. Yet the country's rhetoric since Obama's Inauguration has been vitriolic. It is possible that its most recent nuclear test will finally convince diplomats that the North Korea they see is the one they get: that perhaps on the question of nukes, it simply can't be bribed...
Soufan, now an international-security consultant, has emerged as a powerful critic of the George W. Bush - era interrogation techniques; he has testified against them in congressional hearings and is an expert witness in cases against detainees. He has described the techniques as "borderline torture" and "un-American." His larger argument is that methods like waterboarding are wholly unnecessary - traditional interrogation methods, a combination of guile and graft, are the best way to break down even the most stubborn subjects. He told a recent hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee that it was these methods, not the harsh techniques, that...
...debate over the CIA's interrogation techniques and their effectiveness has intensified since President Barack Obama's decision to release Bush Administration memos authorizing the use of waterboarding and other harsh methods. Defenders of the Bush program, most notably Cheney, say the use of waterboarding produced actionable intelligence that helped the U.S. disrupt terrorist plots. But the experiences of officials like Soufan suggest that the utility of torture is limited at best and counterproductive at worst. Put simply, there's no definitive evidence that torture works...
...controversial methods, argue their defenders, were spawned by precisely that sense of urgency: in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, amid swirling rumors of further attacks to come - including the possibility of a "dirty" nuclear bomb - the Bush Administration had no choice but to authorize the use of whatever means necessary to extract information from suspected terrorists. "We had a lot of blind spots after the attacks on our country," former Vice President Cheney explained in a May 21 speech in Washington. "We didn't know about al-Qaeda's plans, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a few others did know...