May 30, 2009

Corn on “Hardball”: Cheney vs. Levin on Torture Docs

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Ex-veep Dick Cheney has claimed that there are two classified documents showing that the enhanced interrogation techniques (a.k.a. torture) used on US-held detainees were effective and helped his administration prevent terrorist attacks. Senator Carl Levin, the Democratic chair of the Senate armed services committee, this past week said these documents do not support Cheney’s argument. On Hardball, conservative commentator Terry Jeffrey and I try to sort it out. Guess whose side Jeffrey was on. Guest host David Shuster was on fire, going after Jeffrey on the use of torture. But we did find consensus on a critical point: President Obama should declassify those two documents–and other material–so that the public can determine if Cheney is telling the truth or not. You can follow my postings and media appearances via Twitter by clicking here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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