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Who needs Fox when we've got the talking heads over at CBS doing their best to keep up with them. Here's what the viewers were treated to just after Bob Schieffer's pearl clutching over whether David Axelrod was willing to use the word lie (gasp!) when talking about Mitt Romney -- CBS News Covers For Romney Campaign's Tax Doublespeak:

CBS chief political correspondent John Dickerson disputed President Obama's description of Mitt Romney's tax plan as a "$5 trillion tax cut" because one of Romney's advisers suggested he would reduce the size of his proposed tax cuts if he could not pay for them. But Dickerson is ignoring the fact that Romney running mate Paul Ryan suggested last week that Romney would not reduce the size of his tax cuts because lowering taxes is his highest priority.

During a panel discussion on the presidential debate on Face The Nation, Dickerson said that it was unfair to accuse Romney of being dishonest about his tax plan. Dickerson explained that a top Romney economic adviser "said we have two goals here. One is deficit reduction, the other is reducing marginal rates. If those come in conflict our primary goal is deficit reduction and the marginal rates might not go down as much."

That stands in direct contrast to remarks by Paul Ryan, who was asked specifically if Mitt Romney would "scale back on the 20 percent tax cut for the wealthy" if the cuts could not be paid for and replied "No, no.".

Dickerson also did his best to play the "both sides" are equally terrible false equivalency game by attempting to equate Romney's constant lying on the campaign trail about anything and everything he's done to President Obama for not keeping a campaign pledge to cut the budget in half and not closing Gitmo. As Axelrod rightfully pointed out, the comparison is utterly ridiculous, considering he was at the mercy of Congress on accomplishing both.

Whether Axelrod is right about the lies catching up, who knows, but it seems CBS is more than willing to do their part to help Romney out and gloss over them.

Transcript below the fold.

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From Democracy Now -- WikiLeaks Documents Reveal U.S. Knowingly Imprisoned 150 Innocent Men at Guantánamo:

The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has begun releasing thousands of secret documents from the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay that reveal the Bush and Obama administrations knowingly imprisoned more than 150 innocent men for years without charge. In dozens of cases, senior U.S. commanders were said to have concluded that there was no reason for the men to have been transferred to Guantánamo. Among the innocent prisoners were an 89-year-old Afghan villager and a 14-year-old boy who had been kidnapped. Some men were imprisoned at Guantánamo simply because they wore a popular model of Casio watches, which had been used as timers by al-Qaeda. The documents also reveal that the journalist Sami al-Hajj was held at Guantánamo for six years partly in order to be interrogated about his employer, the Al Jazeera network. Al-Hajj’s file said he was sent to Guantánamo in order to "provide information on ... the Al-Jazeera news network’s training programme, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan." For more, we speak with journalist Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

Full transcript at Democracy Now's site.

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April 07, 2010 CBC The Hour

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From CNN's State of the Union, John Boehner with his daily dose of fear mongering on closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Heaven forbid we can't try them here because their friends might come and get us.

CROWLEY: One last question, and this is on terrorism. And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and civilian trials versus military tribunals. It appears that there may be a deal in the works which the president would reverse the Holder decision -- Attorney General Holder's decision to try these 9-11 suspects in a civilian court to perhaps a military tribunal in exchange for money to bring some of these prisoners they can't try and put them in a super-max wherever they decide. Is that acceptable to you?

BOEHNER: We'll have to see what the final pieces of this look like. But we have -- we have a world class facility at Guantanamo. And -- and--

(CROSSTALK)

CROWLEY: But they're going to close that. You know that? I mean--

BOEHNER: Well, no they're not. They -- they keep saying they are. But they want $500 million from this Congress to rehabilitate this prison in northwest Illinois. I want to see who the members are who are going to vote for this. I wouldn't vote for this if you put a gun to my head.

CROWLEY: But it's such a -- Guantanamo Bay has such a bad feel to it across the world. And that's one of the reasons given for -- fine -- it's a great facility. But it's one of the reasons that people in the world looked at America and thought they have really strayed from their value system.

So if you were to move -- which has been a very important Republican point on foreign policy. If you were to move these trials into a military tribunal, why not say, "Fine, bring them? Guantanamo Bay has a bad feel to it. Let's put them in a super max and be done with it."

BOEHNER: Well, I think we have a world class facility at Guantanamo. I think it's the appropriate -- appropriate place to hold these prisoners. And they can do the -- the tribunals right there at Guantanamo. There is no reason to bring these terrorists into the United States. No reason to increase the threat level here, because they're here. Their friends may want to come. It makes no sense to me. And I don't think the Congress will appropriate one dime to move those prisoners from Guantanamo to the United States.

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Bill-O with a bit of fear mongering on what the United States should be doing with terrorism suspects, which is trying them in civilian court and not military tribunals. I understand the objections to the trials being held in New York but there’s no reason they could not be moved to another court in the United States. Of course O’Reilly simplifies this to the point of fighting “bad guys” and claims that Gitmo hasn’t been a recruiting tool. His proof… they’d still hate us if we closed it.

Well, yeah since that’s not the only reason we’ve got a terrorism problem. Heaven forbid the likes of O’Reilly might recognize that our foreign policy in general and the extreme poverty of desperate people might just have something to do with people being willing to blow themselves up or kill themselves to make a political point.

The Obama administration is making a huge mistake with this decision and one result that’s already manifesting itself is giving this asshat this talking point when it didn’t have to happen.

O’Reilly: Politically speaking we can look at this two ways. On the positive side President Obama could reverse a bad policy and that is a good thing. On the negative side Holder’s civilian trial vision was so misguided it’s almost frightening. Apparently Holder thinks America is on trial here—that our anti-terrorism strategies need to be justified to the world. That is a dangerous point of view that would get Americans killed in the future.

If the Obama administration is going to back track and make themselves look like flip floppers while making deals with Lindsey Graham, I sure as hell hope they got something in return for it. Given their track record so far on how the health care debate went, I’m not optimistic about the prospect that they did. For now they’re giving Fox their talking points that the Attorney General hates America and that these military tribunals which don’t have good results are a better way to go than civilian trials. Bravo.

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March 01, 2010 FOX News

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Bill Kristol isn't happy that John Brennan accussed the Republicans of playing politics with national security so of course his response is to claim it's actually the Democrats playing politics and claim that the Repubicans would never do that. His proof, they support the president on Iraq and Afghanistan. If I had a dollar for every time the Republicans played the terrorist fear mongering card for political gain I'd be a rich person. As David noted they've been playing this game since 9-11 and don't like that they're finally being called out for it.

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January 12, 2010 BBC World

New to Facebook, Brandon Neely was searching the site for acquaintances in 2008 when he typed in the names of some of the detainees he had guarded during his tenure as a prison guard at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Neely, an army veteran who spent six months at the prison in 2002, sent messages to one of the freed men, Shafiq Rasul, and was astonished when Rasul replied. Their exchanges sparked a face-to-face meeting, arranged by the BBC.

Neely, who has served as the president of the Houston chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, says his time at Guantanamo now haunts him, and has granted confessional-style interviews about the abuses he says he witnessed there. In a message to Rasul, Neely apologized for his role in the imprisonment.

Gavin Lee, a BBC correspondent, learned about the Facebook messages from Rasul, who lives in Britain. Lee tracked down Neely — on Facebook — and asked, “would you consider meeting face to face?”

“He thought about it and he said, ‘I would love to,’ ” Lee recalled last week.

The BBC paid for Neely’s flight to London last month, where a camera crew filmed him meeting Rasul and a second ex- detainee, Ruhal Ahmed. From India Times

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When asked about our policy of releasing prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (DINO-CA) agrees with Rep. Pete Hoekstra that we should not be releasing anyone to a country with an al Qaeda presence.

SCHIEFFER: Dianne Feinstein , what about that, that we shouldn’t release anybody to a country where there’s an Al Qaida presence? Do you go along with that?

FEINSTEIN: Yes, I tend to agree with that, actually. And if you look at Yemen-- and we’re taking a good look at Yemen-- what you see is I think at least 24 or 28 are confirmed returns to the battlefield in Yemen. And there are a number of suspected.

If you combine the suspected and the confirmed, the number I have is 74 detainees have gone back into the fight. And I think that’s bad.

And here’s the reason. They come out of Gitmo and they are heroes in this world. This world is the only world that’s going to really be accepting of them. Therefore, the tendency is to go back. And I think the Gitmo experience is not one that leads itself to rehabilitation, candidly. I think it leads to....

SCHIEFFER: Let me -- let me ask, do you think that maybe we just ought to keep Gitmo open for a while and not release anybody that’s down there, or at least put them in some other place but not release them?

FEINSTEIN: Well, I agree with those that have said that Guantanamo has really been a recruiting tool for Al Qaida, that it has not been helpful to us. And I think that, you know, the Senate is now engaged in a huge study on the interrogation and detention of the some 33 high-value detainees. What happened to them, how were they treated? What success did the interrogation have? Were the laws followed? That kind of thing. And we should have the report completed within the next three months or so.

SCHIEFFER: All right.

FEINSTEIN: However, the problem is that this is very difficult. And I happen to know the prison system rather well, so I believe the safety of America is assured in the federal prison system. I don’t worry about the safety element.

SCHIEFFER: It sounds to me like what you’re saying here, Senator Feinstein, is that we ought to be very, very careful about releasing anybody right now. That seems to me your (inaudible).

FEINSTEIN: I think right now, until we sort this out, the answer is yes.

SCHIEFFER: All right. I want to thank both of you for being with us this morning. Very enlightening discussion.

Gee Senator, who would have ever thought torturing people would make them want to come back and kill us later? The Gitmo experience--isn't that lovely?

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Sen. Joe Lieberman believes that Guantanamo Bay's bad reputation isn't deserved. "You could not find a better, more humane facility for a detention center in the world," Lieberman told ABC's Terry Moran Sunday.

Lieberman thinks it's a mistake to close the detention center. "The president is in charge of what happens there now so some of the abuses of the past are not going to happen [in the future]," said Lieberman.

Heather: So this is Joe Lieberman's idea of humane?

Guantanamo: A Look Back at Six Years of Imprisonment, Torture and Suicide:

Over the past six years, Democracy Now! has closely followed the story of illegal detentions at Guantanamo Bay. We have interviewed former Guantanamo detainees and interrogators, dozens of attorneys, human rights activists and more. These are some their voices.

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Torture Continues at Guantánamo Bay:

The "Black Shirts" of Guantánamo routinely terrorize prisoners, breaking bones, gouging eyes, squeezing testicles, and "dousing" them with chemicals.

As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: "blows to [the] testicles;" "detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;" being "inoculated ... through injection with 'a disease for dog cysts;'" the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred "under the authority of American military personnel" and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.

More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.

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