Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently became the first Bush administration official to admit that high-level discussions of the use of torture had taken place in 2002 and 2003.
According to a written statement provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month and released on Wednesday by committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), officials were told that waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation measures" routinely used in a survival training program for US soldiers would not cause "significant" harm if used on prisoners.
Rice's statement is the first acknowledgment of those meetings by any of the officials involved. Rice did not name the other officials who were present, but reports last spring based on anonymous sources mentioned Vice President Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.



As first light reaches the scattered tents and animal pens of Ras al-Ahmar in the northern...
Dr Mazen Rantisi, a 71-year-old Palestinian physician popularly described as the “doctor of the poor”, says...
Israeli ministers and lawmakers led a march towards the Gaza Strip on Sunday, calling for the...
An estimated 26,000 children who entered the U.S. without parents or guardians are expected to be...





























