The Nation: "Bond Determined To Finish Career With Partisan Flourish"

The liberal Nation magazine targets Sen. Kit Bond for opposing an investigation by the Attorney General into interrogation practices under the Bush administration.

"Bond, in particular, has made it his mission to thwart anything akin to a real investigation," writes The Nation's John Nichols.

"Taking the lead in the campaign to block an investigation of officials who initiated, authorized and encouraged the use of torture, Bond has shown no qualms about using his position as the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee to protect partisan allies and prevent checking and balancing of executive excess. He has little to lose; after an undistinguished Senate tenure, the man who was once boomed as a Republican presidential or vice presidential prospect is a lame duck senator who will leave the Capitol after the next election. But Bond is determined to finish his career with a partisan flourish. And he is in a position to do so," Nichols goes on.

"As a senior Republican senator with close ties to key players within the intelligence establishment -- both at the CIA and among independent contractors associated with the agency, Bond was the key signer of a last-minute missive urging Attorney General Eric Holder to drop plans to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the use of torture during the Bush-Cheney years," he writes.

Read the entire article HERE.

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Meanwhile, in Kansas City Tuesday, KMBC reports that Sen. Claire McCaskill thinks the investigation should go forward. "I think it is very important that the people who made the decisions are the ones who are held accountable. Not the people who carry out the decisions, but the ones who made the decisions," she said.

Bond: "We Do Not Torture"

Sen. Kit Bond disputed an Senate Armed Services Committee report that says interrogations of detainees at Guantanamo Bay were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

Bond, the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, said none of the interrogations he was aware of had anything to do with the sort.

"To my knowledge, none of those had anything in establishing a link. The whole purpose was to gain cooperation to find out who the leaders of Al Qaeda were and about planned attacks on the United States," Bond said appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews.

Bond later said that the United States was not guilty of torture for using the waterboarding technique on military detainees.

"We do not torture," he said. "The thing that has hurt our country is the statements like the Senate Armed Services Committee report," he went on.

The Armed Services report quotes an army psychiatrist saying "a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq."

Bond promised a "thorough investigation in our committee of how these methods were used and what information they got."

But Bond already began making the case that the techniques were lawful and yielded good intelligence.

"We use that same technique on over 100,000 volunteers for the Marines, the Seals and pilots," Bond said of waterboarding. "They look very carefully at it. It is a very unpleasant tactic. I have offered legislation to ban it. But it did produce, according to what we've heard, information that kept America safe," Bond said.

"We've heard from previous directors of Central Intelligence and the current director of National Intelligence that these tactics provided valuable information and ever our 2006 work in the Intelligence Committee, unanimously approved by all members, Republican and Democrat said this is a good program, we want to know more about it, but this has been very effective," Bond said.