National Security

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 [...]

A bipartisan group of more than 120 judges, prosecutors, diplomats, former members of Congress and high-level military and government officials yesterday released a proposed plan for closing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and trying all suspected terrorists in civilian federal court.
“Some have opposed the closing of Guantanamo because they believe there is no viable alternative [...]

Breaking news from Reuters:
An Italian judge sentenced 23 former CIA agents to up to eight years in prison on Wednesday for the abduction of a Muslim cleric in a landmark ruling against the “rendition” flights used by the former U.S. government.
The Americans were tried in absentia for the 2003 kidnapping, in a case that garnered [...]

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 [...]

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals just dismissed a landmark lawsuit filed by a Canadian victim of “extraordinary rendition” against former U.S. officials, ruling that torture victims have no right to compensation from the U.S. government, even if U.S. officials were complicit in their treatment.
Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen who was seized in 2002 [...]

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 seems almost too weird to be true, but Wired reports that on Oct. 1, federal agents seized the computers, manuscripts and pickaxes of an anarchist social worker in Queens, N.Y., claiming he violating anti-rioting laws on Twitter.

A few more points worth noting about the new Military Commissions Act amendments passed by Congress yesterday: Just as the House bill circulating earlier did, the amendments passed would still allow some coerced testimony to be used in court if the military judge decides it’s reliable and it wasn’t obtained using “cruel, inhuman, or degrading [...]

R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Billy Bragg and David Byrne don’t like to think of music as torture, or part of any “enhanced interrogation techniques.” But declassified government documents show that at least some music — notably, Metallica, Britney Spears and some unidentified rap music, according to a 2004 Defense Department report — were used to “create [...]

The donation of an anthology of post-9/11 commentary by Professor Noam Chomsky has been rejected from the library at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, reports The Miami Herald.
While the prison offers inmates books and videos on Harry Potter and the World Cup, which are among the more than 16,000 items it holds, leftist intellectual commentary [...]