Scott Fenstermaker, a lawyer defending one of the men, told The Associated Press that they won’t deny their role, but will use the opportunity to “explain what happened and why they did it,” and they will provide “their assessment of foreign policy.” Fenstermaker reportedly met with his client, Ammar al Baluchi, a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), at the Guantanamo Bay prison last week. Baluchi told him the men had discussed the trial among themselves.

Critics of the trial have complained, among other things, that KSM — who has boasted that he was the lead planner behind the 9/11 attacks, as well as many others — will use the opportunity to grandstand and spread terrorist propaganda. The alternative, however, would be to not allow them to speak at their own trial, which would hardly showcase the American principles of open government and fair trials that the attorney general presumably wants to highlight.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd told the AP on Sunday that he’s not worried that the men will dominate the trial or be able to use it as a vehicle to win new recruits. “We have full confidence in the ability of the courts and in particular the federal judge who may preside over the trial to ensure that the proceeding is conducted appropriately and with minimal disruption, as federal courts have done in the past,” he said.

The Southern District of New York, where the Justice Department wants to hold the trial, is the most experienced of all U.S. federal courts in handling major international terrorism cases.

Here’s Radack’s take on how Lieberman is using the incident to scare the American populace into suspecting more Muslims are home-grown terrorists.

What struck me about the hearing yesterday was how often Lieberman and others kept calling Nidal Hassan a “lone wolf” terrorist, suggesting not so subtly that the controversial “lone wolf” provision of the USA Patriot Act ought to be re-authorized. A recent House markup of the bill removed that provision, which allows the FBI to eavesdrop and otherwise target so-called “lone wolves” who allegedly plan all on their own, without any help from known foreign terrorist organizations, to launch a terrorist attack on the United States. One reason the provision was removed is because it’s never actually been used, and the Justice Department has had a hard time making the case that it’s actually necessary and not prone to abuse.

Judging from the comments at the Lieberman-led hearing yesterday, you would have thought that the Hasan case now offers the perfect argument for why that piece of the law is needed. What none of the senators mentioned, however, was that the “lone wolf” provision of the Patriot Act wouldn’t actually apply to Hasan.

For one thing, the government’s already said that Hasan did have communications with a foreign al-Qaeda operative, and so it could have already been monitoring him under other legal authorities. The second point overlooked at the hearing is that Hasan is a U.S. citizen, and the “lone wolf” provision only applies to a “non-U.S. person.”

It will be interesting to see how the “lone wolf” idea fares at the next Senate markup session of the bill.

During Mr. Obama’s Situation Room briefings on his alternatives, those advocating a minimal commitment of new troops in Afghanistan have argued that the United States needs only enough forces to keep Al Qaeda “bottled up” in the mountainous tribal areas of Pakistan.

“You could argue that even under the status quo, we don’t see Al Qaeda coming into Afghanistan,” said one official sympathetic to this view. “And so an additional commitment of forces isn’t going to apply more pressure on our main target.”

Divorce that, for a moment, from the troop-escalation question, and this quote throws into relief a conflation of endgames that the Obama administration has committed from the start. If al-Qaeda isn’t coming back into Afghanistan under these current favorable circumstances, then it’s fair to take this official’s point that the strategy being pursued is, at least, taking a rather indirect and circuitous route to dealing al-Qaeda a strategic failure. But what it is designed for is the stabilization of Afghanistan. (No guarantee that it’ll be achieved, but still.) Here’s Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on ‘Meet The Press’ yesterday:

We want to get Al Qaeda. We want to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat those who attacked us. And we want to be able to give the Afghans the tools that they need to be able to defend themselves. We’re not interested in staying in Afghanistan.

As the anonymous official’s quote suggests, these are two different goals entirely. If the goal is to get al-Qaeda — well, it’ll be nice to give Afghanistan the tools to defend itself, but it’s besides the point. If, on the other hand, the goal is to give Afghanistan the tools to defend itself so that the United States can extract itself from Afghanistan, then it’s nice if we disrupt, dismantle, and defeat those who attacked us, but it’s besides the point. Since the day Obama announced his strategy in March, I’ve been making this point. Obama’s currently reviewing that strategy to see if it makes sense. Perhaps he could disentangle this confusion about when the United States will be done in Afghanistan.

Concerns about the loyalty of Muslim-Americans have little basis. U.S. Muslims are even happier with America than the average American. In fact, 71% of American Muslims believe they “can get ahead with hard work” — an important sign of faith and investment in the American system — compared with only 64% of Americans overall. Similarly, 38% are satisfied with the state of the United States, true of only 32% of the general U.S. population. Encouragingly, that number rises to 45% among foreign-born Muslims, who are more optimistic than their native-born counterparts on every measure. (Native-born African-Americans, one fifth of U.S. Muslims, poll more pessimistically because they are, like the general African-American population they come from, on average poorer. Their population has no ties abroad and is not receptive to influence by foreign militants.) U.S. Muslims, unlike the anti-globalist extremists elsewhere, are devout capitalists: they are 13% more likely to be self-employed or small-business owners than the general population. Muslims, sometimes misunderstood as hyper-religious, are not unusually so for America. Gallup polled 80% of U.S. Muslims as calling religion important to them, compared to 76% of U.S. Protestants. Both groups are equally observant: 41% say they attend their place of worship weekly or more.

[snip]

America’s free and prosperous Muslim population remains our most effective deterrent against Islamic terrorism. Al-Qaeda can recruit among the angry and desperately poor Muslims of Spain, or it can incite violence against the hijab-banning French, but it has difficulty convincing comfortably middle-class small-business owners to declare jihad on America.

I reported and wrote something similar in late 2005 for The New Republic and it’s good to see — both as a citizen and as a journalist — that the piece has aged well.

[O]fficials and observers here differ over whether the inversion of the groups’ traditional power dynamic has led to better or worse relations. Indeed, it may be bringing al-Qaeda closer to certain Taliban factions — most notably, forces loyal to former Taliban cabinet minister Jalaluddin Haqqani — and driving it apart from others, including leader Mohammad Omar’s Pakistan-based group. The shifting alliances, analysts say, could have significant bearing on where the U.S. military chooses to focus its firepower.

That appears to track with the Obama administration’s desired goal of splitting the Taliban coalition and encouraging reconciliation with the Afghan government. Which in turn means either the intelligence is reflecting fanciful administration thinking or the administration has a solid intelligence grounding for its approach.

I also like this cheeky tweak at the counterinsurgency community:

This year, Omar’s military committee published a rule book for followers, calling on them to protect the population and avoid civilian casualties — much like U.S. counterinsurgency principles. He has railed against the corruption of President Hamid Karzai’s government, an issue that resonates with Afghans. He has also solicited support from other Muslim countries. But al-Qaeda’s agenda of global holy war and taste for mass-casualty attacks, no matter how many Muslim civilians are killed, complicate that goal.

To say the least!

Students of Hoekstra know that this kind of recklessness is nothing new. In 2006, when he chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the man actually wrote in The Wall Street Journal that unnamed members of the U.S. intelligence community were “perhaps” leaking classified information to the press to “help al Qaeda.” I confronted him about it back then, and here’s how that went:

I asked Hoekstra about his charge that certain members of the intelligence community seek to “help Al Qaeda,” he stood by it. But, curiously, he couldn’t finger any specific Al Qaeda sympathizers in the CIA. “If I were aware of anyone by name or by position that I believe at this point in time was there because their intent was to help those who might attack us, they wouldn’t be there,” he assured.

Then why make the claim?

“You have to hold that out as a possibility,” Hoekstra explained. “I mean, every day–not every day, but on occasion, and more frequently than what we would like–we find out that the intelligence community has been penetrated, not necessarily by Al Qaeda, but by other nations or organizations that we are spying on. And so to rule out the possibility that there are people in the intelligence community that are doing this to help Al Qaeda, I think, would be naive.”

Hmm. So then it’s naive to rule out the possibility that Hoekstra, now in the business of leaking classified information to the press about al-Qaeda sympathizers being surveilled, is “doing this to help al-Qaeda.” Good to know.

In the Situation Room meetings and other sessions, some officials have expressed deep reservations about President Hamid Karzai, who emerged the victor of a disputed Afghan election. They said there was no evidence that Mr. Karzai would carry through on promises to crack down on corruption or the drug trade or that his government was capable of training enough reliable Afghan troops and police officers for Mr. Obama to describe a credible exit strategy.

Officials said that although the president had no doubt about what large numbers of United States troops could achieve on their own in Afghanistan, he repeatedly asked questions during recent meetings on Afghanistan about whether a sizable American force might undercut the urgency of the preparations of the Afghan forces who are learning to stand up on their own.

“He’s simply not convinced yet that you can do a lasting counterinsurgency strategy if there is no one to hand it off to,” one participant said.

Blink and you’ll miss the implicit premise of the Obama administration’s strategy. Obama has described a long-term commitment to Pakistan and Afghanistan, something both countries arguably require for reassurance before doing all these things we want. But he also doesn’t want an open-ended war — all of which is ostensibly designed to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al-Qaeda. But what gets the United States from fighting in Afghanistan to a long-term commitment to Afghanistan without fighting? Capable Afghan security forces. OK, then.

But notice what that strategy doesn’t do. It doesn’t, on its own terms, have anything to do with al-Qaeda. The presumption is that a stable Afghanistan won’t be a place that provides strategic depth for al-Qaeda in Pakistan. And that might be right. But it’s not an offensive strategy against al-Qaeda. For all the strategy presumes, al-Qaeda could do absolutely nothing for the next few years while the U.S. trains Afghan soldiers and police. And then once the security handoff occurs, the U.S. could have a plausible transition to a peacetime relationship with Afghanistan — assume for a moment that’s realistic — with al-Qaeda still intact in Pakistan. What then?

On the one hand, a strategy that cares for the needs of an at-risk population — for security, for justice, for economic opportunity, for cultural expression — is one that probably provides a more durable obstacle to al-Qaeda, since it handles the “demand side” of why al-Qaeda attracts the passive support necessary for its survival. But on the other hand, that’s a very long term and indirect strategy on its own, akin to stopping the nutrient flow in the soil in order to kill a tree. The United States’ offensive tools against al-Qaeda in neighboring Pakistan are either direct CIA drone strikes or indirect attacks by the Pakistani military. If both countries shift to a posture of U.S. support over the next few years, then we’re looking at the real contours of Obama’s endgame in Afghanistan: containment. It might work, it might not. But no one’s describing it in these terms.

*Right, about that 30,000-troop number. Notice The Times doesn’t specify whether it includes any support troops, which will tick the number upward. As I wrote in my piece on Monday:

It is possible that support and logistical units could increase any troop number that the administration cites as the total estimate, as happened when President Bush announced a troop surge to Iraq of about 20,000 troops in January 2007 but about 28,000 new troops actually deployed.

[T]he federal authorities dropped an inquiry into the matter after deciding that the messages from the psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, did not suggest any threat of violence and concluding that no further action was warranted, government officials said Monday.

Major Hasan’s 10 to 20 messages to Anwar al-Awlaki, once a spiritual leader at a mosque in suburban Virginia where Major Hasan worshiped, indicate that the troubled military psychiatrist came to the attention of the authorities long before last Thursday’s shooting rampage at Fort Hood, but that the authorities left him in his post.

The Times quotes an FBI statement:

“At this point, there is no information to indicate Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had any co-conspirators or was part of a broader terrorist plot.” The statement concluded that “because the content of the communications was explainable by his research and nothing else was found,” investigators decided “that Major Hasan was not involved in terrorist activities or terrorist planning.”

Bring on the congressional inquiry.

Now is the time for a professional and legal backlash against the Muslim community and their leaders. Muslims know what materials are being taught in their mosques and they know many of the materials instruct young Muslims to kill innocent people who do not adhere to Sharia law. If Muslims do not want a backlash, then I would recommend a “house cleaning.” Stack every Saudi, al Qaeda, Pakistani, Taliban, Hamas, and Muslim Brotherhood piece of material from their mosque and have a bonfire. Tell the American, Jewish, and Muslim community this hatred will no longer be allowed in their mosques.

It was only nine short years ago when conservatives believed Muslims could become part of an enduring GOP coalition…

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.

It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures, the officials said.

The story sidesteps the question of whether Hasan actually made contact with al-Qaeda. The reporting so far indicates investigators believe he was acting alone. I think here I should go easier on Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), though the concerns about how his investigation may proceed still stand.

How could U.S. intelligence have not communicated this information to the Army? On the presumption that the intel side did not — which is not proven in the piece — I guess an explanation would be that the intel people were gathering information for future use, but that’s divorced from any actual evidence I possess. Still, there is an extensive apparatus for surveilling people in this country with minimal-to-no judicial oversight precisely for the warning signs of their connections to extremist organizations. How’s that working out for us?