Free Republic

John Brennan is no Chuck Hagel. That much was clear from the confirmation hearings on Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA. Unlike Hagel, who stumbled and mumbled through his performance, Brennan demonstrated a deep knowledge of his brief and answered (or gamely parried) tough questions with great self-assurance and forcefulness. But several of Brennan’s answers before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were problematic. Indeed, his three and a half hours of testimony raised important questions on two issues central to his nomination: the politicization of intelligence and the Obama administration’s approach to fighting radical Islam. Brennan will face additional...

Four days ago Warblogging reported on the story of Maher (Mike) Hawash. Mr. Hawash's problems have now been the subject of an article in the New York Times. Mr. Hawash is a programmer, working at Intel, who was detained by the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force as a material witness. He has so far spent just about two weeks in jail without being charged with a crime and without being questioned or told why he is detained. He is being kept in solitary confinement. Mr. Hawash was detained by FBI agents wearing helments, body armor and carrying assault rifles...

Former FBI agent missing in Iran photographed in Guantánamo jumpsuit By Barney Henderson 8:44PM GMT 08 Jan 2013 The family of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing in Iran in 2007, have released pictures of him dressed in an orange jumpsuit like a Guantánamo Bay prisoner, as they continue to hold hope that he is still alive.

A federal judge in Manhattan refused on Wednesday to require the Justice Department to disclose a memorandum providing the legal justification for the targeted killing of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who died in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. “I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret,” she wrote. “The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not...

Set aside for now the troubling changes in the Obama administration’s position on whether former Bush officials should be prosecuted for suggesting tough interrogation tactics against terrorists. Set aside the manifest unfairness of prosecuting lawyers merely for doing their job of giving legal advice. Set aside the raft of other reasonable objections to the proposed prosecutions, including a justifiable aversion to witch-hunts. Instead, consider how flagrantly President Barack Obama violated his repeated promises that he would run a transparent and honorable administration. His administration’s selective and highly prejudicial release of only partial information about CIA interrogations clearly was designed to...

President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists. “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday. -snip- Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo...

The Mirror board said Morgan would be stepping down immediately Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan has been sacked after the newspaper conceded photos of British soldiers abusing an Iraqi were fake.

What on earth is Terry Waite doing campaigning for the release of the British prisoners at Guantanamo Bay? These are the same kind of people who kept the former church envoy chained to a radiator in Beirut for five years. I know Waite is one those who believes you should love your enemy. But you can take forgiveness too far. At long last the Americans have broken their silence and revealed details of exactly why four of the British detainees should not be freed. They all trained at al-Qa’ida camps in Afghanistan, learning bomb making, assassination and urban warfare. They...

The Mail on Sunday today reveals shocking new evidence of the full horrific impact of US drone attacks in Pakistan. A damning dossier assembled from exhaustive research into the strikes’ targets sets out in heartbreaking detail the deaths of teachers, students and Pakistani policemen. It also describes how bereaved relatives are forced to gather their loved ones’ dismembered body parts in the aftermath of strikes. The dossier has been assembled by human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who works for Pakistan’s Foundation for Fundamental Rights and the British human rights charity Reprieve. Filed in two separate court cases, it is set...

'CIA island jail' to be probed A UK parliamentary committee is to investigate allegations that US authorities held 'terrorist' suspects in secret prisons on an Indian Ocean island leased by the US from Britain, officials said. Reprieve, a British legal charity, says the CIA detained suspected al-Qaeda members at an airbase on the island of Diego Garcia. Reprieve says at least three al-Qaeda linked prisoners - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Hambali - were held on the island with the consent of British authorities. George Bush, the US president, admitted in 2006 the CIA had held the three and...

War on Terror Alleged al-Qaeda bomb instructor shows mangled hand to court in Guantanamo hearing By Ben Fox ASSOCIATED PRESS 4:41 p.m. April 26, 2006 GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – Holding up a scarred, mangled hand, an alleged al-Qaeda explosives instructor told a U.S. military court Wednesday his transfer to a maximum security unit has made his life in the Guantanamo Bay prison more difficult. [b]Sufyian Barhoumi, who lost four fingers and damaged his thumb in a land mine explosion in Afghanistan, said he struggles to use the sink[i] and toilet[/i] in the prison's Camp Five.[/b] He also said...

A former CIA officer was charged Monday with illegally leaking the identity of a covert officer and other classified information to journalists. John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and author who defended waterboarding, was charged by the Department of Justice with one count of illegally disclosing a covert officer’s identity and two counts of violating the Espionage Act for illegally leaking classified national defense information. He was also charged with making false statements for allegedly trying to trick the CIA’s Publications Review Board to let him use information in his 2010 book, The Reluctant Spy. The investigation led by U.S....

Not quite all of them — two cases involving the actual death of a detainee will still be pursued, which is as it should be — but more than 100 involving less significant incidents will be cashiered. This probe was one of the last vestiges of the original Obama counterterror agenda. He banned enhanced interrogation and gave the order to close Gitmo on day two of his administration; a few weeks later, he opened the door to prosecuting Bush-era CIA interrogators. Fast-forward two years and not only is Gitmo still open, he’s now the guy who sent SEALs to shoot...

In a new video message released on the internet Friday, American-born al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn calls on Muslims living in America to carry out deadly one-man terrorist acts using fully automatic weapons purchased at gun shows, and to target major institutions and public figures. "What are you waiting for?" asks Gadahn in English, and then adds that jihadis shouldn't worry about getting caught, since so many have been released. "Over these past few years, I've seen the release of many, many Mujahideen whom I had never even dreamed would regain their freedom." The two-part, two hour video appeared on...

Complete title: Judicial Watch Obtains Bush Defense Department Documents Detailing Terrorist Threat Posed by Guantanamo Detainees “There is substantial risk that detainees at Guantanamo, upon release, would set out to kill Americans or other innocent civilians around the world.” White House Spokesman Jay Carney on February 17, 2011: “The president remains committed to closing Guantanamo.” Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it received documents from the Department of Defense (DOD) detailing the policies of the Bush administration related to the detention of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay, as well as the...

A journalist working for Arabic TV news channel al-Jazeera has been arrested in Egypt for allegedly fabricating videos of police torturing suspects. Huweida Taha Metwalli was stopped on her way to Qatar and 50 video tapes were found in her luggage, the Egyptian interior ministry said. She is reportedly charged with "tarnishing Egypt's reputation and harming Egyptian national interests". Al-Jazeera said the tapes showed a "documentary reconstruction" by actors.

US Politicians Duped By The Brotherhood In the United States, one individual maintained a pretense of "moderation" which would later embarrass the left and the right. According to the testimony of Dr. Michael Waller to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Abdurahman Alamoudi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. A man born in Eritrea in 1951, he arrived in the US in 1979 and became a naturalized US citizen on May 23, 1996. From 1985 onwards he became involved in many Muslim groups. In 1990 he founded the Washington DC-based American Muslim Council (AMC), which Waller states "has...

LONDON — Tony Blair was accused yesterday of undermining decades of British campaigning for international human rights by using the war on terror to give a “green light” to torture. Amnesty International will today launch an unprecedented global campaign against the British government after ministers admitted that they would use information gained by torture to prevent attacks on the United Kingdom. Mike Gapes, Labour chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, reacted with anger after Ian Pearson, the Foreign Office minister responsible for human rights, said the government could not ignore evidence obtained under torture if it could prevent a...

<p>November 2, 2002 -- Remember those hysterical charges early this year claiming that America was "torturing" and otherwise violating the human rights of Taliban and al Qaeda detainees at Camp X-Ray?</p> <p>Well, four of those prisoners have now been released, and you can hear the truth about America's "brutality" straight from the horse's mouth.</p>

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The finding that the handling of prisoners detained and interrogated at Guantánamo amounted to torture came after a visit by a Red Cross inspection team that spent most of last June in Guantánamo. The team of humanitarian workers, which included experienced medical personnel, also asserted that some doctors and other medical workers at Guantánamo were participating in planning...