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Incumbent U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (D-12) says that America needs to get the troops out of Iraq right now and develop more diplomatic ties, and that alternative energy sources must be found before it's too late. The former rocket scientist from Hopewell is currently campaigning to defend the seat that he won in the House of Representatives in 1998. According to Holt, the war in Iraq, and how the U.S. can carefully extricate itself from it, is the most pressing issue in the country at the moment. According to Holt, the country needs to immediately withdraw all troops from Iraq,...

At exactly 5 p.m. on March 13, 2007, just as I was preparing to leave my cubicle in Washington for the day, I got a phone call from the journalist Jonathan Landay of McClatchy Newspapers. To this day, I remember his exact words. 'One of your congressman’s constituents is being held in an Ethiopian intelligence service prison, and I think your former employer is neck-deep in this.' The congressman was Rush Holt, then a Democratic representative from New Jersey, for whom I worked for 10 years starting in 2004. The constituent was Amir Mohamed Meshal of Tinton Falls, N.J., who...

Who gave this jihadi chasing lawyer the a-ok to speak for the Gitmo terrorists? Scott Fenstermaker has been on a publicity tour acting as though he is authorized to speak for the terrorists scheduled to make an appearance in federal criminal court. Fifteen months ago, Fenstermaker lost privileges and was removed from the military commissions civilian defense counsel pool. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has the exclusive story with information from a Pentagon source including a copy of the letter Fenstermaker received from Steven David, the chief defense council of the collection of attorneys who represented detainees at Camp Delta...

There are always long-shot candidates in any political race, but Democrat Scott Fenstermaker may take it to a whole new level, and I’m not talking about in a “the rent is too damn high” kind of way. Fenstermaker, a criminal defense and tax litigation attorney, made recent comments about 9/11 in a “Humans of New York” profile that has the New York Daily News referring to him as “deranged.” In the profile piece, Fenstermaker argued that the U.S. “got what it deserved” on September 11. "I think the people in those towers died as representatives for the rest of us,...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – CIA Director John Brennan said on Wednesday he would resign if the next president ordered his agency to resume waterboarding suspected militants, an apparent reference to comments by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump embracing the banned interrogation method.”I can say that as long as I’m director of CIA, irrespective of what the president says, I’m not going to be the director of CIA that gives that order. They’ll have to find another director,” said Brennan, who did not mention Trump by name. Brennan, who has been director since 2013, tacked his comment to the end of his...

Russian Taliban Suspect Sues United States Created: 28.06.2005 18:10 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 18:10 MSK, 6 hours 31 minutes ago Alexandra Zaitseva Gazeta.ru A former Guantanamo prisoner who is a Russian national filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government. This Tatarstan resident, Airat Vakhitov, issued a statement Tuesday that is capable of sparking a new wave of anti-American protests in Muslim countries. In his lawsuit, which is being examined in a U.S. civil court, Vakhitov not only demands that the authorities admit to inhumane treatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo camp, but insists that they acknowledge that a majority of...

A Republican sends over this video of the State Department press briefing today, in which Assistant Secretary P.J. Crowley calls Gitmo detainees "refugees" at about the 24-minute mark. QUESTION: Talk to us a little bit about response and talks and any commitments that you may have gotten from our European and other friends in the international community about taking in Guantanamo detainees as the camp in Guantanamo is expected to close at some point in the near future. Have you gotten any commitments from our European friends and anybody else? CROWLEY: Ambassador Dan Fried continues his efforts to resettle, you...

Lots of good posts lately from the authors about the interrogation of Zubaydah, the latest being Word's post on the book The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack by Ronald Kessler. To add a few more cents Tom Maguire at Just One Minute has noticed an interesting discrepancy in the tall tale coming from Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent, in which he says: It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002,...

With the summer Olympics just a few weeks away in Brazil, a veteran Al Qaeda operative released from Guantanamo to Uruguay has gone missing and authorities in Latin America believe he sneaked into Brazil after being denied legal entry. The Islamic terrorist’s name is Jihad Ahmad Diyab an in late 2014 President Obama sent him to Uruguay along with five fellow Gitmo inmates as part of a misguided plan to shut down the U.S. military prison at the Naval base in southeast Cuba. Now officials from Uruguay, Brazil and the United States are scrambling to find Diyab, according to news...

President Obama on Thursday nominated a former CIA officer and longtime lawyer who examined missteps in U.S. intelligence to be the spy agency’s next inspector general, hoping to fill a position at the watchdog office that’s been vacant for more than a year. If confirmed by the Senate, Shirley Woodward would fill the role left empty since David Buckley stepped down from in January 2015, on the heels of a landmark determination that CIA officials had gained unauthorized access to Senate computer files. Lawmakers called the episode a potential violation of constitutional separation of powers, and the spat led to...

A lawyer who came to prominence for his full-throated defense of a subsequently convicted terrorist was quietly promoted to the No. 3 slot at the Department of Justice last month, a post that puts him in charge of the administration’s policy regarding Guantanamo Bay detainees.

ABC News' Rachel Martin reports: The US intelligence gathering program known as “extraordinary rendition” was essentially put on trial for the first time - in Italy - and this week the court rendered a guilty verdict. Italian Judge Oscar Magi convicted 23 Americans of the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric on a street in Milan, Italy. The cleric, known as Abu Omar, alleged that he was abducted by CIA operatives who then shuttled him between US bases in Europe and then moved him to Egypt where Omar says he was tortured. The Italian judge tried the Americans, all but...

A former CIA counterterrorism officer who is set to be extradited to Italy where she faces a four-year prison sentence in connection with the rendition of a suspected terrorist that took place in Milan in 2003 said Hillary Clinton is partially to blame for her ordeal. Sabrina De Sousa, two-dozen other CIA officers, and an Air Force colonel were convicted in absentia in 2009 in Italy on kidnapping and other charges in connection with the abduction of Osama Mustapha Hassan Nasr, better known as Abu Omar, a radical Egyptian cleric whose fiery anti-American speeches in the immediate aftermath of 9/11...

Goldsmith warns US on detainees By Joshua Rozenberg, Legal Editor (Filed: 18/09/2006) Terrorist suspects detained at Guantanamo Bay should not be subject to humiliating and degrading treatment, the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, warned the US government at the weekend. Speaking in Chicago, Lord Goldsmith told the Bush administration that it should not try to water down the standards in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. This provision, he said, "prohibits outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" of those detained in combat. It was "an international standard of very considerable importance and its content must be...

This is the first of two stories adapted from "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," to be published Tuesday by Penguin Press. EXCERPT: "The United States was at war with al-Qaeda, intelligence-gathering is inherent in war, and the Constitution appoints the president commander in chief. But they had not been asked to give their own written assessments of the legality of domestic espionage. They based their answer in part on the attorney general's certification of the "form and legality" of the president's orders. Yet neither man had been allowed to see the program's codeword-classified legal analyses [5], which were prepared by...

Liz Cheney said Sunday that some of the stories in print about her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, were "fantasies" cooked up by some of his old Bush administration rivals. Responding to a question about Dick Cheney's role in pushing for aggressive interrogations, Liz Cheney pointed to Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, for spreading inaccurate information about her father. Wilkerson "has made a cottage industry of fantasies about the vice president," she said on ABC's "This Week." "It's important to look at the source" of media reports, Cheney said. "Nobody talking about...

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Seven years after the release of shocking images of tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the Supreme Court has turned back the appeal of 26 inmates from that infamous facility who wanted to sue two military contractors for damages. The military's official investigation revealed "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" committed by military personnel and civilian contractors who provided support services at the prison. More than two dozen soldiers were reprimanded or court-martialed for their conduct. But those who were tortured want to sue two firms that hired the civilians who helped the military with...

A former Islamic State hostage revealed Sunday that ISIS held a group of Western hostages in a compound near Aleppo in northern Syria where its British militant "Jihadi John" staged mock executions to replicate the prison in Guantanamo, Cuba, for jihadist combatants. The ISIS terror group, also known as ISIL, held about 22 European, American and Latin American journalists and humanitarian workers in a village north of Aleppo and repeatedly subjected them to mock executions by three militant guards, former hostage Javier Espinosa, a Spanish journalist, wrote in El Mundo newspaper Sunday. The trio included "Jihadi John," who has appeared...

Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour has been wounded in a gunfight at a meeting of militants in the Pakistani city of Quetta, reports say.