Three Ugly Little Truths About the Federal Budget

Behind the Headlines
February 06, 2008

Three Ugly Little Truths About the Federal Budget
Public Agenda's own Jean Johnson and Scott Bittle, authors of Where Does the Money Go? Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis (HarperCollins) were recently invited to be guest bloggers for the Huffington Post. See their first blog entry here, where they take apart the federal budget to reveal some very "ugly" truths.


White House Defends Waterboarding
The White House today defended the use of waterboarding and said that it is legal, after CIA Director Michael Hayden acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the agency had used the technique of simulated drowning in its interrogation of three terror suspects in 2002 and 2003. The method has come under recent scrutiny regarding whether or not it violates the law, after Attorney General Michael Mukasey refused to define it as torture.

Eight in 10 Americans say it's wrong to use simulated drowning in interrogations, and majorities are opposed to most interrogation techniques in order to get information from prisoners, with the exception of sleep deprivation. In our Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index, 57 percent of the public say it's at least "somewhat justified" to say that the U.S. is "so concerned with its own security that it sometimes resorts to torture." And while half say the U.S. can fight terrorism without using torture, that's a decline of six percentage points since we first asked the question in 2005.



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