Questions between the lines in the news

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Reading between the lines of news stories sometimes turns up interesting and provocative questions.

Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee delivered an indignant condemnation of the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques. As former FBI Director Louis Freeh noted in a Wall Street Journal article, the committee’s leadership was regularly briefed about the CIA’s work years ago while the controversial measures were in use. He asked, “Will the committee now declassify and release all such notes so that Americans will know exactly what the senators were told and the practices they approved?”

In other words, what did Chairman Diane Feinstein and other Democrats on the panel know about the harsh techniques and when did they know it?

One of the three terrorists water boarded was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, identified by the 9/11 Commission as the principal architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He was captured in 2003, but more than a decade later he has yet to be tried and brought to justice by either the Bush or Obama administrations.

Will that job be passed onto the next president? And what does it say to our enemies that the U.S. government can’t get its act together and punish — execution would be my vote — the terrorist responsible for 3,000 American deaths?

In the waning days of the lame-duck Congress, House Speaker John Boehner pushed through a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill chock full of who-knows-what with little time for any member of Congress to read it.

Will that be the template for the new Republican-controlled Congress: More complex, thousand-page-long bills loaded with special interest goodies that, as his predecessor Democrat Nancy Pelosi once asserted, you have to pass in order to learn what’s in them?

CONTINUE READING AT SUNTIMES.COM.

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