"Last night, you appeared on Fox News' Hannity show, calling for an "honest debate" on the benefits of the Bush Administration's "bold" interrogation programme. You seem unhappy with last week's publication of four new legal memos authorising torture, so you referred to reports that have not yet been declassified "that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity". You told Hannity:

"I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country."

"Of course, you have a terrific track record on the intelligence material that you have seen and read. I recall that, back in August 2002, you told a Nashville convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that 'There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.'

"Now, you seem keen that we should be able to see the reports you read showing all the benefits of interrogations to be made public. But why stop there? Let's have those reports. Let's also have the interrogation logs. Let's have the videos and audio tapes of the actual interrogations, assuming they haven't all been destroyed (in the meantime, you may want to take a quick peek at this, Christopher Hitchens writing in Vanity Fair, to see what waterboarding actually looks like in practice, and its effects on one of our more robust journalists. Why not call for the declassification of the waterboarding videos, so we can see for ourselves what information was gleaned in the moments and hours and days after the waterboarding was carried out?

"The United States has been regularly counting people, via the Census, since 1790. But the federal government didn’t start counting the dollars in people’s pockets, with any regularity, until 1983 when the Federal Reserve began conducting a “Survey of Consumer Finances.”

"This Fed survey, now conducted every three years, tallies just how much family wealth sits in the United States and who holds it. The Fed delivers all this info in a neat little summary report that makes comparing the wealth of America’s poor, average, and affluent families a relatively easy undertaking.

"To the rescue comes Arthur Kennickell, the chief of the Fed’s survey unit. Over recent years, Kennickell has been producing an analysis of the Survey of Consumer Finances data that isolates out the wealth of the top 1 percent, a group most all Americans would define as rich. His latest analysis has just become available online.

"In 2007, the year the new Survey of Consumer Finances data cover, a family needed to sport a net worth of at least $8.3 million to enter the nation’s richest 1 percent. Together, these top 1 percent families held a collective net worth of $21.9 trillion, $3.5 trillion more than the net worth of all the families in the nation’s bottom 90 percent combined. 

"The Fed’s numbers on income, curiously, show a quite different dynamic. Since the mid 1990s, the share of the nation’s family income going to America’s top 1 percent of wealth-holders has risen substantially, from 11.5 percent of total family income in 1994 to 16.4 percent in 2006.

"How can this be? How can the nation’s wealthiest be grabbing an ever greater share of America’s income and not show an ever greater share of America’s wealth? 

"Those huge incomes that go into rich people’s pockets aren’t translating into a greater share of the nation’s wealth, Frank postulates, because the rich have been busy spending massively on “McMansions, yachts, planes, Gucci bags, bottles of Mouton Rothschild, and $300,000 watches.”

"The rich, in other words, have been consuming, not investing, a huge chunk of their incomes. Now some of this consumption may add to a rich person’s net worth on paper. A yacht, for instance, can appreciate in value over time. But much of this consumption — a $2,632 ticket to a ballgame at the new Yankee Stadium, for instance — simply subtracts from a rich person’s net worth.

"But if the rich are frittering away their fortunes, they’re not creating wealth, they’re burning through it. And that, advises the Journal’s Frank, ought to be “a worrying sign for those who hope that the rich are sitting on the sidelines with loads of accumulated wealth, ready to lead us into recovery.”

"In 1493, the Vatican gave America to Spain and black Africa to Portugal “so that the barbaric nations can be reduced to the Catholic faith.” At the time, America had fifteen times more inhabitants than Spain, and black Africa 100 times the population of Portugal.

"Just as the Pope had ordered, the barbaric nations were reduced, to say the least."

"At the dawn of the eighteenth century, the first of the Bourbons of Spain, Philip V, inaugurated his new throne by signing a contract with his cousin the king of France that allowed the Guinea Company to sell blacks in America. Each king would receive a 25 percent cut of the profits. The names of some of the ships that carried this cargo: Voltaire, Rousseau, Jesus, Hope, Equality, and Friendship."

"The tallest monument of Argentina was erected in honor of General Roca, who exterminated the Indians of Patagonia in the nineteenth century.

"The largest avenue in Uruguay bears the name of General Rivera, who exterminated the last Charrua Indians in the nineteenth century."

"The concentration camp was born in Africa. The English pioneered the experiment and the Germans developed it further." 

Haider Rizvi write at IPS News that developing countries are urging the UN to take up financing for the development of poor countries since the IMF and World Bank have been failures.