Gitmo

TWI legal reporter Daphne Eviatar appeared earlier today on MSNBC’s “Morning Meeting” alongside NBC terrorism analyst Evan Kohlmann and former Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) to discuss the proposal to transfer Guantanamo Bay detainees to a prison in Thomson, Ill. Video after the jump.

As Josh Kraushaar points out, that domain name has been snapped up by Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), the GOP’s likely 2010 U.S. Senate nominee, to politick against any transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees to Illinois prisons. Punch in the domain and it points to Kirk’s Website and a statement warning that “our state and the [...]

David Keene of the American Conservative Union, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, and former congressman/Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr are backing a proposal to send Guantanamo Bay detainees to a prison in Illinois, as well as President Obama’s plan to try terrorism suspects in federal courts. The three conservatives have long been members [...]

The Associated Press reports that White House Counsel Greg Craig is stepping down:
The White House’s top lawyer is returning to private practice and being replaced by a longtime adviser to Barack Obama.
White House counsel Greg Craig, who’s leaving in early January, has been the subject of questions about his future since late summer. Those questions [...]

This looks incredible. Steve Coll introduces us to a collection of scholarly essays called ‘Decoding The New Taliban’.
Coll:
In an essay entitled “Reading the Taliban,” Joanna Nathan of the International Crisis Group updates some of her work on Taliban propaganda and communications strategies. Her analysis of the repetitious themes in Taliban magazines and DVDs—the recapitulation of [...]

The influential Center for American Progress, which has close ties to the Obama administration, is now calling on President Obama to push back the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention center to July. That’s despite the president’s day-two directive to close the notorious prison by January. Closure has been impeded by the inability to send [...]

As former Vice President Dick Cheney and some Republican lawmakers continue to debate whether torture works and was a legitimate interrogation technique during the Bush administration, it’s almost jaw-dropping to read some of the memos that were written by the real experts on interrogation techniques in the U.S. government, warning the Defense Department all the [...]

An Amherst Special Town Meeting approved a resolution last night welcoming one or two cleared Guantanamo Bay detainees to Amherst, Mass. — once Congress agrees to lift the latest bans on their transfer. The town of 30,000 residents says it’s the first municipality in the nation to officially welcome the detainees.
I reported earlier that Amherst [...]

Nick Baumann at Mother Jones reminds us that the Obama administration promised earlier this month to do its best to review about 224 more documents that might be responsive to the American Civil Liberties Union’s Freedom of Information Act longstanding requests for documents relating to the torture, abuse and death of detainees in U.S. custody.
Somehow, [...]

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog points out that the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case of 17 Chinese Muslim Uighur detainees who a judge ordered released into the United States will likely also force the Justices to consider the constitutionality of two bills President Obama signed yesterday.
The issue in Kiyemba v. Obama is whether the [...]