Do You Want Cheney With That?

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We still don’t have a CIA IG report, but Greg Sargent reports that the release will come with special bonus features: two documents requested by former Vice President Dick Cheney that he claims prove torture’s “effectiveness.” Zack Roth has corroborated the report by pointing to CIA Director Leon Panetta’s memo to CIA employees today, which refers to the release of two documents from 2004-05 (presumably the same ones Cheney wanted).

As for Panetta’s memo itself: it’s what you might expect. The CIA director calls the story “old,” lionizes the agency’s intelligence-gathering during a time “when inside information on al-Qa’ida was in short supply,” and calls debate over the “methods used” “legitimate.” (Another way of saying that he thinks it’s possible to defend the agency’s treatment of detainees.) He also dredges up an old Bush excuse: “The Agency sought and received multiple written assurances that its methods were lawful.” And as you know, in Bushland, whatever John Yoo writes is legal and right is, in fact, legal and right. We create our own reality.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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