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In an interesting development the House Armed Services Committee unanimously approved legislation that would block Gitmo, Illinois from coming to fruition. In fact, they’ve blocked any Gitmo terrorist from being transferred anywhere into the interior of the USA. This is a blow to Obama’s desires to shut Gitmo down and to bring terrorists to a prison near you. Wednesday the committee approved a defense bill for 2011 that includes language to prevent moving detainees into any US facility inside our borders and also blocked any funding to even study the possibility.-snip-Amusingly, the New York Times tried to spin this as...

WASHINGTON—Congressman Todd Akin (R-MO), ranking member of the House Armed Services Seapower and Expeditionary Forces Subcommittee today, sent a letter cosigned by 47 colleagues to President Obama urging a full and thorough investigation of the ACLU’s John Adams project which may have intentionally revealed the identity of covert CIA operatives to members of Al Qaeda currently held at Guantanamo Bay. The following is the list of cosigners on the letter to President Obama regarding the alleged outing of covert CIA agents by ACLU’s John Adam’s project: Todd Akin (R-MO), Robert Aderholt (R-AL), Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), Rob Bishop (R-UT), Marsha Blackburn...

The Bush White House knew that hundreds of early Gitmo detainees were innocent, but refused to release them because the admission would weaken support for the war in Iraq, according to a new document obtained by the Times of London. The charge, by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, was made in a declaration in support of a lawsuit for a Gitmo detainee. Wilkerson claims that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees had been picked up, not by the US military, but by Afghans and Pakistanis for...

Reality keeps intruding on Attorney General Eric Holder’s approach to terrorism. During recent testimony before the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice and Science Subcommittee, Holder had a heated exchange with Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas), over the rights of terrorists – specifically over whether a captured Osama bin Laden would need to be read his Miranda rights in accordance with the civilian prosecution model that Holder continues to advocate. Holder’s response: “Let’s deal with reality…we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden.  He will never appear in an American courtroom…He will be killed by us, or he will...

Megyn Kelly believes Holder is entitled to have civilian trials for GITMO detainees. This is flat WRONG. While those detained as enemy combatants are entitled to the writ of habeas corpus to contest their designation as "enemy combatants" in civilian courts per 5/4 SC vote in Boumediene v. Bush, they are to be tried under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, so long as the procedures are analogous to the rules applicable to courts-martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice per 5/3 vote in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (with CJ Roberts not participating).

CAMP TAJI - U.S. Forces assigned to the Camp Taji Theater Internment Facility Reconciliation Center here relinquished full control of the facility and its detainees to the Government of Iraq, March 15. By August, complete detainee operations handover to Iraq control is expected to be completed with the transfer of Camp Cropper, the last U.S.-ran internment facility in theater. "Approximately 3,000 detainees are being transferred to Iraq, that's roughly 60 percent of the U.S. controlled detainee population," said Lt. Col. Daniel D. Deadrich, Taji TIFRC commander and the 705th Military Police Battalion commander, based in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The handover...

The CIA and Justice Department are fighting over a secret investigation into a controversial program by legal supporters of Islamist terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay that involved photographing CIA interrogators and showing the pictures to prisoners, an effort CIA officials say threatens the officers' lives. The dispute prompted a meeting Tuesday at CIA headquarters between U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald and senior CIA counterintelligence officials. It is the latest battle between the agency and the department over detainees and interrogations of terrorists. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. angered many CIA officials and Republicans in Congress by reopening an investigation...

<p>Why is the national security community treating the "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010," introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday as a standard proposal, as a simple response to the administration's choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt? A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity. Read the bill here.</p>

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration is leaning toward trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other alleged plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in a military tribunal, reversing a Justice Department pledge to put them before a civilian court. Administration officials said moves by Congress as well as by local and state governments are all but foreclosing the civilian-court option. Members of Congress have moved to cut off funds for a civilian trial, while local governments have expressed reluctance to play host to such a trial.

Joe Lieberman is once again endorsing John McCain over Barack Obama – this time on a critical national security issue. Lieberman and McCain have introduced a bill that would deny Miranda rights to terrorist suspects and block them from the U.S. civil court system. The bill could interfere with the Obama administration’s efforts to cut a deal with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham to develop a comprehensive system to deal with detainees—an effort that would include some role for federal courts. Graham, a military lawyer and currently serves a colonel in the U.S. Air Force reserves, has been negotiating with White...

Top advisers to President Obama are close to a decision recommending that the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks be prosecuted in a military tribunal, The Washington Post reported Friday, citing unnamed administration officials. According to the report, the president's advisors have grown increasingly wary of bipartisan opposition to the planned civilian federal trial in New York City, mere blocks from where nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in the spectacular attack on the World Trade Center. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and prominent state Democrats, who initially embraced Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try Khalid Sheikh...

A day after a conservative group released a video condemning the Justice Department for refusing to identify seven lawyers who previously represented or advocated for terror suspects, Fox News has uncovered the identities of the seven lawyers. The names were confirmed by a Justice Department spokesman, who said "politics has overtaken facts and reality" in a tug-of-war over the lawyers' identities. "Department of Justice attorneys work around the clock to keep this country safe, and it is offensive that their patriotism is being questioned," said Justice Department Spokesman Matt Miller. The video by the group Keep America Safe, which dubbed...

What's Eric Holder trying to hide now! For an Attorney General of an administration that promised to be the most open and transparent in history the guy sure keeps a lot of secrets. Holder continues to ignore serious incidents of corruption that could impact the friends of the White House, and continues to stonewall inquiries into why he is not investigating those incidents.

ustice Department on So-called ”Al Qaeda Seven”: We Will Not Participate in An Attempt to Drag People’s Names Through the Mud March 03, 2010 4:19 PM For several weeks, Republican lawmakers and a conservative group have been attacking the Justice Department for refusing to reveal the names of nine officials who have in some way advocated for or represented detainees at Guantanamo Bay. "The administration has made many highly questionable decisions when it comes to national security, " Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a recent statement, arguing that the public has “a right to know who advises the Attorney...

SARGODHA, Pakistan – Prosecutors seeking to indict five Americans on terrorist charges submitted their case to a Pakistani judge Tuesday, accusing the men of waging war against Pakistan and plotting to attack the country. All young Muslims from the Washington, D.C., area, the five were arrested in December in Punjab province not long after reaching Pakistan. They were reported missing by their families in November ... A senior police officer said soon after the men's arrest that authorities were likely to deport them, but it now looks increasingly like they will face trial in Pakistan on charges that carry a...

FORT WORTH, Texas (Associated Press) -- An attorney says the Army psychiatrist charged in the worst mass shooting on a U.S. military base will soon be moved to a county jail near Fort Hood after four months in a military hospital. Defense attorney John Galligan says Maj. Nidal Hasan could be moved this week. Bell County Jail administrator Bob Patterson says Hasan will be housed in a cell at the medical unit. Patterson said Monday the facility is prepared to handle inmates with special medical needs.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — To American officers at Guantanamo Bay, Ahmed Zaid Salem Zuhair was inmate No. 669 — a hardcore, veteran Muslim terrorist suspected of having killed an American in Bosnia. But here in Saudi Arabia, he is a "beneficiary," a former religious deviant who, having learned the true meaning of Islam, has been rehabilitated. Repatriated from Guantanamo in mid-2009, Zuhair, 45, continued to proclaim his innocence in an interview, asserting that he had only been doing peaceful relief work in Bosnia and Pakistan prior to his arrest in 2002, when Pakistani officials robbed, tortured and "sold" him to...

Colleagues of Senator Lindsay Graham have leaked that he and the White House are negotiating over where and how to conduct the 9/11 trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-conspirators. In additional, President Barack Obama will apparently take a personal role in the negotiations and may overrule Attorney General Eric Holder's decisions to this point. We need a statute, a 'Rule of War Act', with no special date, sunset provisions, or naming it after some personage or group. It would be the civilian authority providing for the common defense, while informed by the governed. First, the entire negotiation...

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba -- It is the oddest of unintended airport stopovers -- a short stay at Guantanamo Bay. Helicopter flights for the ship I was trying to reach off the coast of Haiti had been canceled. So I slept in an Air Force tent at Camp Freedom, an arrow's shot from where 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed is imprisoned -- his stay now extended longer than the Obama administration would wish. "Guantanamo" has become a synonym for "prison." Actually, it is a 45-square-mile U.S. Navy base, complete with a McDonald's and a Subway. The Guantanamo Bay Children and Youth...

This fiasco disgusts Americans. A February 1 Rasmussen survey discovered that only 16 percent of likely voters want terrorists to enjoy the same legal rights as U.S. citizens, while 74 percent disagree. Meanwhile, HumanEvents.com (which often posts my columns) has gathered 126,665 signatures on its online petition demanding KSM and company’s ejection from civilian court. “These proceedings will make the O. J. Simpson trial look like a traffic-court hearing,” says Marc Thiessen, author of Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack , a new bestseller on the Obama administration’s soft-on-terror...