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Much of what you’ve been told (or seen in movies) about George W. Bush’s supposedly effective torture program is false and overhyped. At least, that’s one of the conclusions of the 6,000-page review of the program the Senate Intelligence Committee completed last year.

Yet, right now, President Obama is preventing you from learning any of this, by keeping the report classified.

Before the end of the Bush Administration, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)—then the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee—started investigating the torture program. When Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) took over as Chair of the Committee in 2009, she intensified the investigation and negotiated with the CIA to get access to its files. After almost four more years of work and reviewing 6 million pages of documents, the Committee voted out the report in December on a mostly party line vote.

As you may recall from the debate around the film “Zero Dark Thirty debate,” Senators Feinstein, Carl Levin (D-MI), and John McCain (R-AZ) have said the report shows thattorture didn’t produce the intelligence that led us to finding Osama bin Laden. According to reports, it shows that torture didn’t produce much useful information. While discussing the report, Jay Rockefeller described the torture program this way:

[T]he people who ran it were ignorant of the topic, [it was] executed by personnel without relevant experience, managed incompetently by senior officials who did not pay attention to crucial details, and corrupted by personnel and pecuniary conflicts of interest. It was sold to the policymakers and lawyers of the White House, the Department of Justice, and Congress, with grossly-inflated claims of professionalism and effectiveness, so-called lives saved.

In short, the report rebuts claims that torture worked—and specifically the claim made by torture boosters from Dick Cheney to former Counterterrorism Center head Jose Rodriguez that it helped to find Osama bin Laden.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) was in the media spotlight over the weekend as they held their national convention. One message emerging from the conference was to gear up for the 2014 elections, which the NRA sees as pivotal for gun rights.

It was the first national gathering for an organization that has been in the spotlight since the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut and Aurora, Colorado. But stepping into that spotlight hasn’t forced the NRA to curb some of its nutty tendencies. Here are 5 crazy moments that occurred at the convention.

1. Armed Children 

The NRA wants to appeal to….children! The New York Daily News reported that at the convention, “two 10-year-olds took aim with air pistols, an 11-year-old gawked at a semiautomatic weapon and a 3-year-old soaked up applause for being the youngest member.”

That wasn’t the only instance of children attending the NRA convention. The Daily Mail Online notes that Will Marshall, a 12-year-old from Florida, “has been a member of the NRA for 11 years and owns four guns.” In other words, he joined when he was one.

The presence of young kids at the NRA comes as the problem of children holding guns has been tragically highlighted. One April week saw four people shot by toddlers. And in early May, a five-year-old boy in Kentucky accidentally killed his two-year-old sister with a small rifle.

2. A Bleeding Target That Looks Like Obama

For two days, a vendor at the NRA convention hawked a gun target that had an image that looked like President Obama bleeding on it. The vendor, Zombie Industries, was asked to take the product down because it looked too much like the president. Zombie Industries sells life-sized targets for gun owners to shoot at.

Asked by a BuzzFeed reporter whether the Obama likeness was intentional, a Zombie Industries worker replied: “Let's just say I gave my Republican father one for Christmas.”

3. Guns and the Boston Marathon Bombing

There’s plenty to parse in NRA Executive Vice President Wayne …read more

Source: ALTERNET