Among the most disturbing legacies of the horrific Al Qaeda attacks on the United States 8 years ago has been the appropriation of September 11 by Republicans as just another arrow in their quiver of partisan warfare. Former New York Governor George Pataki used the anniversary to attack the Justice Department's limited probe of CIA […]

As the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor predictably devolved into mindless Republican regurgitation about wise Latinas, empathy, judicial activism and New Haven firefighters, one revealing exchange about the impact of the September 11 attacks was largely overlooked. The 9/11 tragedy, Sotomayor insisted, "doesn't change" the Constitution. As it turns out, her claim […]

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's acknowledgement yesterday that there was "never any evidence" that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks on the United States was doubly surprising. The first shock was that for one of the few times during his legacy reclamation project, Cheney told the truth. And second, the leading members of Team […]

Much has been made of Condoleezza Rice's use Monday of the bogus Nixon tautology in defense of torture. Falling back on Tricky Dick's infamous statement that "when the President does it, that means it's not illegal," Rice told a group of students that "by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not […]

Coming just days after the Obama administration released the OLC memos which justified the Bush administration's regime of detainee torture, a 200 page Senate Armed Services Committee report is producing a new wave of shocking revelations. As it turns out, intelligence and military officials were preparing the brutal interrogation program eight months before its approval […]

Despite the Obama administration's 4% increase in the Pentagon budget, Republican leaders and their conservative echo chamber are predictably issuing dire warnings about draconian cuts in defense spending and "disarming America." Of course, critics of Secretary Gates' strategic shift of resources to boost the nation's ability to fight current wars and future counterinsurgencies neglect to […]

The past 48 hours have not been kind to the architects of the Bush administration's regime of detainee torture. In the UK, British police are investigating whether its MI5 intelligence service was complicit in the torture of former Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohammed. Meanhile, a Spanish court is poised to launch a criminal probe of Alberto […]

On the eve of the sixth anniversary of the Iraq war, Condoleezza Rice joined the long list of Bush White House figures taking to the airwaves to rewrite their boss' tragic legacy. "No one," she told Charlie Rose last night, "was arguing that Saddam Hussein somehow had something to do with 9/11." Of course, Rice […]

Just days after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pooh-poohed the escalating chaos in the streets of Baghdad, saying with a shrug, "stuff happens." Now six years later, former Vice President Dick Cheney has elevated Rumsfeld's flip response to the level of theory in defending the Bush administration's eight-year record of failure. […]

Within minutes of President Obama's reversal of George W. Bush's strict limits on federal support for embryonic stem cell research, the Republican noise machine was reliably regurgitating its "distracted president" talking point. But while House Minority Whip Eric Cantor's sound bite was faithfully repeated by Time's Mark Halperin, apparently lost in the phony debate which […]