WASHINGTON - President Bush defended his administration's methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects on Friday, saying both are successful and lawful.
"When we find somebody who may have information regarding a potential attack on America, you bet we're going to detain them, and you bet we're going to question them," he said during a hastily called Oval Office appearance. "The American people expect us to find out information, actionable intelligence so we can help protect them. That's our job."
Bush volunteered his thoughts on a report on two secret 2005 memos that authorized extreme interrogation tactics against terror suspects. "This government does not torture people," the president said.
Meanwhile, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-MI, demanded a copy of a third Justice Department memo justifying military interrogations of terror suspects held outside the United States.
In a letter to Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey, Levin wrote that two years ago he requested — and was denied — the March 14, 2003, legal opinion. Levin asked if Mukasey would agree to release the opinion if the Senate confirms him as attorney general, and cited what he described as a history of the Justice Department stonewalling Congress.
"Such failures and the repeated refusal of DoJ to provide Congress with such documents has prevented the Congress from fulfilling its constitutional responsibilities to conduct oversight," Levin wrote.
The White House said Mukasey has not been cleared to read the classified documents Levin requested.
The two Justice Department legal opinions from 2005 were disclosed in Thursday's editions of The New York Times, which reported that the first opinion authorized the use of painful methods, such as head slaps, freezing temperatures and simulated drownings known as waterboarding, in combination.
That secret opinion came months after a December 2004 opinion in which the Justice Department publicly declared torture "abhorrent" and the administration seemed to back away from claiming authority for such practices, and after the withdrawal of a 2002 classified Justice opinion that had allowed certain aggressive interrogation practices so long as they stopped short of producing pain equivalent to experiencing organ failure or death.
king georgie says it's lawful, so it can't be torture or cruelty. they must be covering it up for some other reason. just trust them, senator. just trust them.
LONDON - Chinese medical officials agreed Friday not to transplant organs from prisoners or others in custody, except into members of their immediate families.
The agreement was reached at a meeting of the World Medical Association in Copenhagen.
China has previously acknowledged that kidneys, livers, corneas and other organs are routinely removed from prisoners sentenced to death row. But officials insist that this only happens when consent is provided.
Critics argue that death-row prisoners are not truly free to consent and may feel compelled to become donors, violating personal, religious or cultural beliefs.
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 5 — Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Friday that the use of force to put down peaceful protests in Myanmar was “abhorrent and unacceptable,” and that the country’s government must release those it had arrested and start a dialogue with political opponents.
BAGHDAD -- Here they were, hardened combat soldiers, grounded on a military base far from the palm groves, canals and marshes where they once prowled.
But at least for a moment this week, they were still the Painted Demons, the elite sniper unit that struck fear in the so-called triangle of death south of Baghdad. That couldn't be taken away: not by breaking them up, as the Army had done, and not even by the murder trials of three of their members at Camp Victory.
WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday ordered federal agents to ride with Blackwater USA escorts of US diplomatic convoys in Baghdad to tighten oversight after a shooting in which private guards are accused of killing 13 Iraqi civilians.
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