Stephen Colbert To Give $800,000 To South Carolina Schools

According to The Associated Press, Stephen Colbert surprised teachers in his native South Carolina recently by announcing that he would fund every single classroom project listed by teachers from the state on the crowdfunding website DonorsChoose.org.

It is a gift valued in excess of $800,000.

According to avclub.com, funds for the donation will come from the sale of The Colbert Report’s desk and fireplace, which were raffled off online late last year. Matching funds will come from ScanSource and The Morgridge Family Foundation’s Share Fair Nation.

Colbert, who is a member of the DonorsChoose.org board, made the announcement on a live video feed to the students of Alexander Elementary School in Greenville, South Carolina on May 7th.

http://www.avclub.com/article/stephen-colbert-offers-fund-800000-worth-projects–219105

Is Bill O’Reilly ‘Bending A Little?’

Bill O’Reilly played “Devil’s advocate” recently and said that based on the recent DOJ report on Ferguson police, they were very specifically “targeting blacks,” according to MediaITE.

St. Louis radio talk show host McGraw Milhaven disputed some of the statistics, but O’Reilly didn’t buy into it.

O’Reilly said, “You don’t have to give a ticket to somebody who’s not crossing the street properly. They’re targeting it. They’re doing it for money, they want the money, and it’s an easy play.”

When Milhaven said “they’re targeting blacks and whites,” that set off O’Reilly again.  O’Reilly said they were clearly targeting blacks and it’s flat-out wrong.

More on The U.S. Attorney General’s report:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/04/us-usa-ferguson-justice-idUSKBN0LZ2CT20150304

Updated post

Strange: New Republican Chair Of Senate Intelligence Committee Wants Torture Report Returned

In a bizarre attempt to rewrite history, the new chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, wrote to President Obama with an odd request: He wants the Dianne Feinstein Senate Intelligence Committee torture report back.

“Mr. Burr sent a letter last week to the White House saying that his Democratic predecessor, Senator Dianne Feinstein, should never have transmitted the entire 6,700-page report to numerous departments and agencies within the executive branch — and requested that all copies of the report be ‘returned immediately,’ according to people who have seen the letter.

“The Intelligence Committee publicly released only the report’s executive summary. But Congress has since changed hands, and the committee is now controlled by Republican lawmakers like Mr. Burr who have long opposed the committee’s detention investigation, which they said was a partisan effort to discredit the C.I.A. and the Bush administration.

It is a bizarre episode in which the right-wing senator is attempting to rewrite history by asking for the torture reports back to supposedly “bury” them.

New York Times:

“Mr. Burr’s unusual letter to Mr. Obama might have been written with an eye toward future Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

“Congress is not subject to such requests, and any success he has in getting the Obama administration to return all copies of the Senate report to the Intelligence Committee could hinder attempts to someday have the report declassified and released publicly.

The Times stated, “A spokeswoman for Mr. Burr did not return a request seeking comment on the letter. A White House spokesman declined to comment on how the Obama administration planned to respond.”

According to the New York Times, the director of the Federation of American Scientists project on government secrecy, Steven Aftergood, said he could recall no analogous case of the Senate’s trying to get the executive branch to return a document.

O’Reilly Downplays The Impact Of Increasing The Minimum Wage

Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly downplayed the impact of raising the minimum wage on his show recently, claiming only an “infinitesimal” number of people would be impacted.  He ignored the 27.8 million Americans that would benefit from a raise in the minimum wage.

During the January 20 State of the Union address, President Obama urged members of Congress to raise the minimum wage, saying those “to who still refuse to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it.”

On the January 21 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly and network contributor Eric Shawn tried to undermine President Obama’s minimum wage initiative, and diminished the number of Americans that would be impacted by raising the minimum wage.

O’Reilly asserted that only “a very low number” of people make  “minimum wage anyways,” claiming that the number of people who would be impacted by the change would be “infinitesimal” and saying Obama has been “misleading everybody” by insisting a raise would have a big effect:

However, according to the Economic Policy Institute, raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour by 2016 would “raise the wages of 27.8 million workers.”

According to a Congressional Budget Office report, the “ripple effect” of raising the minimum wage would benefit 16.5 million workers, and would lift nearly one million people out of poverty.

More

War Crimes Case Filed in Germany Against Architects Of Torture Program

Democracy Now

A human rights group in Berlin, Germany, has filed a criminal complaint against the architects of the George W. Bush administration’s torture program. The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has accused former Bush administration officials, including CIA Director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, of war crimes, and called for an immediate investigation by a German prosecutor.

Washington Post Seems To Endorse Torture

On January 5th, the Washington Post published an article titled “Democrats Lose The Torture Debate,” which was written by Marc A. Thiessen.

Thiessen writes, “As we begin 2015, we can take solace that the ‘torture’ debate is finally behind us. But before we close the book on six sordid years of Democratic demagoguery and investigations, let the record show that the opponents of the CIA interrogation program were completely and utterly defeated.

“Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, launched a six-year, 6,000-page, $40 million investigation into the CIA interrogation program, with the goal of convincing Americans that a) the program did not work and that b) enhanced interrogations were wrong and should never again be permitted.

Thiessen then claims: “She failed on all counts.”

The Post then justifies it’s stance on torture with its own internal poll.

He states that the poll shows that “The vast majority agree with the CIA that these techniques were necessary and justified. A majority think that Feinstein should never have released her report. And — most importantly — 76 percent said they would do it again to protect the country.”

Thiessen explains that Americans were asked, “Looking ahead, do you feel that torture of suspected terrorists can often be justified, sometimes justified, rarely justified or never justified?”

He then claims that the word “torture” is a “loaded word” and therefore claims that such techniques as waterboarding, “rectal feeding,” and “rectal rehydration” do not constitute torture. Thiessen would likely prefer the CIA-sanctioned term “EIT,” or “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.”

According to the WaPo poll, 17 percent replied they would support using the techniques “often,” 40 percent “sometimes” and 19 percent “rarely.” Only 20 percent said the techniques should “never” be justified.

Jimmy Dore: Torture Commentary

Commentary on Enhanced Interrogation Techniques by Jimmy Dore.

(humor)

TYT video.

New York Times Calls For Dick Cheney Torture Investigation

According to Yahoo News, in response to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s blistering report on the CIA’s brutal handling of prisoners after 9/11, the New York Times is calling for a criminal investigation of former Vice President Dick Cheney and other members of the Bush administration for conspiring to commit torture and other crimes prohibited by federal and international laws.

“Americans have known about many of these acts for years,” the Times editorial board stated on Monday.

“But the 524-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality.”

In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Cheney refused to call some of the CIA’s actions with prisoners – including involuntary rectal feeding – torture.

In its editorial, the Times said the “sadistic” techniques outlined in the committee’s report “are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, which defines torture as the intentional infliction of ‘severe physical or mental pain or suffering.’

“They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of torture.”

“It is no wonder that today’s blinkered apologists are desperate to call these acts anything but torture, which they clearly were,” the Times continued. “As the report reveals, these claims fail for a simple reason: C.I.A. officials admitted at the time that what they intended to do was illegal.”

The paper criticized the president for failing “to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects.”

The Times: “No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report. Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held accountable. At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and independent criminal investigation.”

The Times’ editorial board is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate Cheney, David Addington, Cheney’s former chief of staff, former CIA Director George Tenet, as well as John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the lawyers “who drafted what became known as the torture memos”; Jose Rodriguez Jr., the CIA official “who ordered the destruction of the videotapes”, the psychologists who devised the torture regimen, and any CIA employees who carried it out.

Greenwald: Why Aren’t Torture Victims Interviewed?

Ever since the torture report was released last week, U.S. television outlets have endlessly featured American torturers and torture proponents. But there is one group that we have not seen much of – the torture victims.

Secular Talk video.

Bin Laden Expert Accused Of CIA Deception On ‘Torture’ Program

A top al Qaeda expert who remains in a senior position at the CIA was a key architect of the agency’s defense of its detention and “enhanced interrogation” program for suspected terrorists, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report released last week. Supposedly, the person had developed talking points that misrepresented and overstated its effectiveness.

The report singles out the female expert as a key proponent for the program, stating that she repeatedly told her superiors and others — including members of Congress — that the “torture” was working and producing useful intelligence, when it was not.  She wrote the “template on which future justifications for the CIA program and the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques were based,” it said.

According to NBC News, the expert also participated in “enhanced interrogations” of self-professed 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, witnessed the waterboarding of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah and ordered the detention of a suspected terrorist who turned out to be unconnected to al Qaeda, according to the report.

The expert was criticized after 9/11 terrorist attacks for supporting a subordinate’s refusal to share the names of two of the hijackers with the FBI prior to the terror attacks.

Instead of being sanctioned, she was promoted.

The expert was not identified by name in the unclassified 528-page summary of the report, but U.S. officials confirmed that her name was redacted at least three dozen times in an effort to avoid publicly identifying her.

NBC News is withholding her name at the request of the CIA, which cited a climate of fear and retaliation in the wake of the release of the Senate report.

While the two psychologists who developed the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Dr. James Mitchell and Dr. Bruce Jessen, quickly became well-known in media as a result of the report, scathing criticism of the expert’s role in defending the program went nearly unmentioned.

The expert — one of several female CIA employees on whom “Maya,” the lead character in the movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” was based — has previously been identified in the media as a CIA officer involved in the rendition program.

The Senate report offers the first detailed account of the depth of her involvement.  It quotes from emails, memos and congressional testimony, to document her unique role in what it says were misrepresentations about the effectiveness of the CIA’s program, which President Barack Obama has said included torture. The report does not give any motive for the alleged misrepresentations.

In one instance recounted in the report, CIA Director Michael Hayden brought the expert with him on Feb. 14, 2007, to brief members of the Senate intelligence oversight committee on the interrogation program.  The expert forcefully defended the program in the classified hearing.