terrorism

Despite Hasan’s reported contacts with an al-Qaeda-connected cleric in Yemen, the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division and FBI will handle the probe.

Jesselyn Radack at Daily Kos has a nice roundup of yesterday’s Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, called and led by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who opened the morning session with an announcement that the shootings of 13 soldiers on the U.S. Army base was a “terrorist” attack as opposed to a mass-murder. Never mind that [...]

The Washington Post reports that President Obama said yesterday that the U.S. detention facility will remain open past the January 2010 deadline for closure he set during his first days in office.

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 [...]

Politico reports that Republicans are labeling the Fort Hood tragedy an act of “terrorism,” and Rasmussen Reports is out with a poll backing up that CW:
Should the shooting incident be investigated by military authorities as a terrorist act or by civilian authorities as a criminal act?
60 percent – Military authorities as a terrorist act
27 percent [...]

Check out Rachel Maddow going hard on Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) for publicly revealing that the U.S. intelligence community is intercepting the communications of al-Qaeda-sympathetic cleric Anwar Aulaqi, a former U.S. preacher now in Yemen whom Fort Hood murder suspect Nidal Malik Hasan apparently contacted before the shooting.

Check out this New York Times piece about the Afghanistan debate’s latest shifts in the White House. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are now on board with a 30,000-troop increase*, as is Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president is said to be [...]

At this point, following investigators’ lead, it’s probably fair to conclude that the Fort Hood shooting suspect was motivated by religious extremism:
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 [...]

Fouad al Rabiah, a Kuwaiti Airways engineer accused of being an aide to Osama bin Laden who recently won his habeas corpus case in federal court, is a step closer to going home. McClatchy newspapers reports that the 50-year-old father of four was moved to the part of the Guantanamo detention center reserved for detainees [...]