Two weeks ago, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), in the midst of negotiations with the White House over trading a military tribunal for 9/11 conspirator Khalid Shaikh Mohammed for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, floated a new proposal: “a new national security court” for terrorism detainees. Graham More…
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is trying to convince the White House that the only way to win congressional Republican support for closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay — or at least provide political cover to nervous Democrats — is to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a military commission. More…
When Attorney General Eric Holder announced earlier this month that the suspected plotters of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks would be tried in civilian court, he also promised to seek the death penalty for all of them. But the heated debate that followed over the supposed dangers of trying “the More…
Of all the talking points emerging from the conservative side about the 9/11 trials, the prospect of attack architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed getting set free in the U.S. is perhaps the most far-fetched, at least until the next round of trials are announced. I didn’t take it seriously enough to More…
This comes from September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a survivors’ group that has urged the Obama administration to shut down Guantanamo Bay:
We, the members of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, support the Attorney General’s decision to bring the trials of the five individuals currently accused of
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 More…
It’s not just former Vice President Dick Cheney who misrepresented what the CIA inspector general’s report says about the effectiveness of torture. Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard reports on a “GOP memo” he says is being circulated on the Hill that’s a laughable tissue of decontextualized bullet-pointed More…
There has been some confusion for years over what exactly “waterboarding” has meant in practice. Does it induce the sensation of drowning? Or does it actually replicate it? The differences between the two may seem academic, but the CIA inspector general report on torture says that the way the agency More…
Imagine what would happen if Mir Hussein Moussavi disappeared into Evin prison this afternoon and then a few days later Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerged to say that Moussavi, under the kind of harsh questioning necessary to protect the Islamic Republic from outside subversion, had confessed to being a paid agent of More…
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell assured reporters yesterday, “I see nothing to indicate that that date” — that is, the date to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, set by President Obama in a January executive order by year’s end — “is at all in jeopardy.” OK. The Democratic-controlled More…
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