al qaeda

Adam Serwer has an absolutely sterling post about the dangers of assigning collective guilt to American Muslims for the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan:
In the past few months, we’ve seen a number of shootings performed by white men with right-wing fringe beliefs–but while an attempt to assign the responsibility for the murder of George [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union has just released a video of interviews with five former Guantanamo detainees, talking about their experiences of abuse in U.S. custody. It’s not easy to watch, but it’s certainly worthwhile.
Although the video (after the jump) doesn’t give any sense of why these men in particular were seized and detained by [...]

Depending on who you ask, the sentencing yesterday of Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri to eight years in prison is either evidence that the civilian federal judicial system can successfully handle terror cases, or evidence that it’s a dismal failure.
Yesterday, Jonathan Hafetz, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represented Al-Marri in his challenge to military [...]

This post has been corrected. Previously, the post was incorrectly based on an earlier version of the bill.
The Military Commissions Act amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 (H.R. 2647) were approved in Congress yesterday and are en route to the President for his signature. The full text of the bill [...]

The possibility prompts fervent opposition from Republicans, who say the 9/11 terrorists should never be allowed anywhere on U.S. soil, let alone in a civilian U.S. court.

There’s a big coordinated attack underway in Lahore, the cultural capital of Pakistan, far from the tribal areas where the Pakistani military is about to launch an offensive. Dawn reports that three locations, each housing elements of the security services, were struck, an attack reminiscent of the weekend’s assault on the military’s General Headquarters in [...]

Intellectually, it makes sense, since the only reason anyone in the U.S. cares about the Taliban is because the Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda ahead of 9/11, and the continuing relationship between elements of the Taliban and al-Qaeda provides al-Qaeda in Pakistan with a degree of strategic depth in Afghanistan. Yet it’s still noteworthy that the administration [...]

Are there really any “lone wolves” engaging in dangerous terrorist liaisons? That’s what some opponents of section 6001(b) of the USA PATRIOT Act are asking.
Lots of Democrats now concede that Congress overreacted a bit after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to give sweeping authority to the FBI to conduct various kinds of sneaky searching and snooping [...]

This is a very big deal. The Obama administration has been pressing Pakistan to expand its military successes against the Taliban in the Swat Valley for months. Now, it’s about to go down.
And look at what The New York Times credits as a major reason why:
Now there is a sense within the military establishment that [...]

Last week, a federal judge ruled that the government had failed to justify the detention for the last seven years of a 50-year-old Kuwaiti engineer who worked for Kuwait Airlines and had gone to Afghanistan to do charitable work. He was seized by the Northern Alliance, turned over to U.S. authorities, and shipped to Guantanamo [...]