National Security

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 [...]

I just spoke to Kevin Bankston, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s senior attorney specializing in free speech and privacy law, about his reaction to today’s Senate Judiciary Committee markup session on the Patriot Act, which resulted in passage of the Leahy-Feinstein bill, with a few amendments. Bankston, who’s been following this debate closely, was not pleased.
“We’re [...]

Most of the senators on the Judiciary Committee today seem to be bending over backwards to give the FBI and Justice Department every benefit of the doubt when it comes to the tools they say they need to fight terrorism. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) just warned of all the people out there “that are trying [...]

Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) are set to roll out long-awaited climate legislation this morning. The two senators, who chair the Senate’s Environment and Public Works and Foreign Relations committees, respectively, are releasing their cap-and-trade bill more than three months after its House counterpart passed in June.
All indications are that the bill [...]

Ahmed al Darbi, the brother-in-law of one of the 9/11 hijackers, supposedly plotted a never-realized 2001-2002 attack on an unnamed ship in the Strait of Hormuz. He also allegedly met Osama bin Laden and trained at an al-Qaeda camp. And he’s been imprisoned by the U.S. military since 2003 waiting to be tried on [...]

Although the Obama administration’s much-anticipated new policy on the use of the so-called “state secrets” privilege, announced this morning, has drawn some praise, civil liberties lawyers and other critics of the use of the privilege don’t think it solves the problem.

Just in case he wasn’t familiar with it, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) decided to read the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution to David Kris, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, who was testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee today to urge reauthorization of expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act.
Franken, who [...]

Eight years after it was passed, the USA Patriot Act remains among the most controversial pieces of counterterrorism legislation in the so-called “war on terror.”

Switzerland sent officials last month to visit the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay to collect information about four detainees it’s considering accepting for resettlement, The Associated Press reports.
The men being considered are reportedly two Chinese Muslim Uighurs, an Uzbek and a Palestinian. The men the United States has been trying to relocate have all been [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union today asked a Washington, D.C., federal court to require the federal government to release the transcripts of 14 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in which they describe abuse and torture suffered in CIA custody.
The transcripts come from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which the military set up to determine whether suspects [...]