Bush vetoes ban on waterboarding; Wash. Post reports Iraq war to cost more than $3 trillion...

8 March :: US pres. George W. Bush has vetoed legislation that would have barred the CIA from using harsh interrogation techniques classed by critics as torture, such as "waterboarding", a form of simulated drowning; the New York Times reports the veto is affirmation of Bush's "legacy" as jealous defender of expanded executive power: "The veto deepens his battle with increasingly assertive Democrats in Congress over issues at the heart of his legacy. As his presidency winds down, he has made it clear he does not intend to bend in this or other confrontations on issues from the war in Iraq to contempt charges against his chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, and former counsel, Harriet E. Miers"; the veto is Mr. Bush's 9th since 2001, though 8 have come in the last 10 months, with the Democrats in control of Congress... Washington Post published for its Sunday edition a story detailing the $3 trillion cost of the Iraq war, drawing the sharp distinction between that bill and the estimated $60 billion budget touted by then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the months before the war began; though the death benefits paid to families of fallen soldiers amounts to $500,000, "far less than the typical amount paid by insurance companies for the death of a young person in a car accident", society as a whole, and the gov't, pay doubly, by all the revenues lost from that individual's future work and taxpaying; the strain to the system of public financing is more severe than what raw numbers of emergency appropriations would seem to indicate...