George Bush admits US waterboarded 9/11 mastermindFormer US president says Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded by US and he would do it again 'to save lives'Paul Owen and agencies guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 June 2010 07.36 BST Article history George Bush admitted the US waterboarded 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Photograph: AP  George Bush admitted yesterday that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded by the US, and said he would do it again "to save lives"."Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," the former president told a business audience in Grand Rapids, Michigan. "I'd do it again to save lives."Waterboarding is a simulated drowning technique that the Obama administration has said is torture. Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and is the most senior al-Qaida operative in US custody.In his speech, Bush also defended the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. He said ousting Saddam Hussein "was the right thing to do and the world is a better place without him".But he said he was not tempted to criticise Barack Obama. "You are not going to see me in the public square criticising the president."In February he said he was "trying to regain a sense of anonymity. I didn't like it when a certain former president made my life miserable." This was said to be a reference to Jimmy Carter, president from 1976 to 1980.Bush also talked about the role of religion in his life. "I prayed a lot. I really did. I prayed before every major speech. I prayed before debates. It was a very important experience."And he talked about the morning of 9/11, describing how he had learned that first one, then two planes had hit the World Trade Centre in New York. The third plane, which hit the Pentagon near Washington DC, was "a declaration of war on our country", he said.Bush's memoir Decision Points will be published in November.  

 Gov. Richardson Sends National Guard Troops to the BorderMonday, April 5, 2010  In response to the killing of Arizona Ranger Robert Frentz, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has ordered the National Guard to help patrol the border. Reports from New Mexico say that the troops will assist Border Patrol by setting up surveillance in the war against drug smugglers. Read Full Story   

Exposed: Dick Fuld, the man who brought the world to its kneesDick Fuld ran Lehman Brothers as if he were at war. He drove the bank hard and ignored the signs of collapse. Andrew Gowers, former editor of the Financial Times, who was working at the heart of the bank as it brought the global economy to the brink of disaster, reveals the inside story
The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees as the boss’s voice came on the speaker phone. “I don’t think we’re going bust this afternoon,” he said, “but I can’t be 100% sure about that. A lot of strange things are happening . . .” The four of us gathered in Lehman Brothers’ offices at Canary Wharf looked at each other, our eyes widening. We had just spent the day bashing the phones in a frantic effort to reassure journalists, investors, bankers, anyone who would listen. That was our job as members of Lehman’s communications team. The bank was fine, we kept saying. It was brimming with cash. Sure, the share price had dropped 48% in New York, but that was a panic reaction to another investment bank’s collapse and nothing to do with us. What’s more, the US authorities had indicated they would not allow another institution to fail. Yet here was one of Lehman’s top people admitting privately that even he could not be certain that a sudden, precipitous and contagious loss of market confidence would not sweep his firm, its 26,000-plus employees and its 158-year-old name into oblivion. It was only then that it fully dawned on me just how scarily unpredictable my world had become. The date was March 17, 2008, the day after Lehman’s smaller New York rival, Bear Stearns, had collapsed into the arms of one of the world’s largest banks, the mighty JP Morgan Chase, in a shotgun marriage that all but wiped out shareholders and cost thousands of highly paid traders their jobs. On Wall Street blind panic had ensued and its focus was Lehman Brothers. The market has a phrase for this sort of event: the death spiral. Creditors and trading partners take fright at a falling share price and threaten to cut off credit lines. Alarm is magnified by modern, instant communications. Fear feeds on itself and prophecies of doom become self-fulfilling. Our freewheeling, globally integrated financial markets turn out to be built on sand. The group of us sitting in Canary Wharf could see the scenario with terrifying clarity that day. The market, cruel and unforgiving, was asking whether Lehman, now the smallest and most vulnerable of the so-called “bulge bracket” of elite global investment banks, was next. It was. On September 15, Lehman Brothers Holdings filed in New York for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. An institution with total assets of $639 billion – more than the gross domestic product of Argentina and roughly 10 times the size of Enron when it filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2001…