Free Republic

Dear Friend, Earlier this month I travelled to the Naval Air Station at Guantanamo Bay for the fourth time to visit the detention center there. This trip, and the briefings I received, strengthened my view that the prison must close. The current facility is state-of-the-art and the prisoners have habeas corpus rights, are assisted by legal teams and receive regular visits by the Red Cross; all at great expense to the American taxpayer. Yet most of the world still sees the prison as a harsh complex of chicken-wire cages deliberately established beyond the reach of the law. That black eye...

Top administration officials are getting nervous that they may not be able to proceed with one of their most controversial national-security moves: trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other accused 9/11 conspirators in federal court in New York City. Last November Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. portrayed the trial as a way to showcase the American justice system to the world and to accelerate President Obama's stalled plans to shut down the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay. But because of shifting political winds in Congress, the trial is now "potentially in jeopardy," a senior official, who did not want to...

Banner headline only.

Does his stubborn prosecution of Guantanamo imprisoned terrorists in New York City -- a mere few blocks from 9-11's Ground Zero -- speak volumes about his ignorance of the true nature of the threat of terrorism? Or is there a hidden agenda at work within his Justice Department? When asked about his motives for not allowing the military justice system to try Gitmo detainees, Holder and his supporters blame President George W. Bush's failure to try Gitmo terrorists in the so-called military tribunals. However, the real reason there were so few military trials was that lawyers were continuously working to...

New York (AP) - A lawyer asked a judge Monday to toss out charges against the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be brought to civilian courts, saying he was tortured for 14 hours over five days and denied trial for nearly five years. Attorney Peter Enrique Quijano told U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani's right to a speedy trial was violated when he was sent after his July 2004 arrest to a secret CIA-run interrogation camp abroad rather than to the U.S. for a civilian trial.

5. Ditch ObamaCare, PelosiCare and ReidCare: It’s not that we’re against health care reform but the current plans and shady backroom deals in the works are despotic. The proposed health care bills are clearly designed to pay back insurance companies, big pharmaceutical companies and others who have been overly generous to Obama and the Democratic Party. Tort reform and addressing litigation and damages aren’t on the table. Also missing: giving individuals the ability to opt out of “mandated benefits” and shop around for health care coverage. Polls show a lack of public support for the monopoly system. They show America’s...

A week from Friday is the deadline for emptying the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, a cutoff that the newly inaugurated President Obama established as one of his first acts in office. No one seriously expects his administration to meet the deadline, and Huffpo’s Nathan Harvey wails that it may take yet another year to figure it out. “By all accounts we are not going to make it. In fact, the Obama administration has asked for another full year to do so.” So just what is happening? Well, if you listen to the left, it’s the fear-mongering from the...

Here's another reason why al Qaeda terrorists don't belong in US civilian courts: the right to a speedy trial. The lawyer for embassy bomber Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to receive a civilian trial, this week claimed that his client's years in detention violated his right to a timely adjudication of the case. He's demanding Ghailani's release. Insane? You betcha. But it's the predictable consequence of Team Obama's efforts to shoehorn Islamist cutthroats into a justice system that was never designed for them. Consider: POWs -- uniformed soldiers of a belligerent state -- can be legally held...

So here's a question for Mr. Obama. Suppose that five, heavily armed Islamic terrorists wearing suicide vests had been waiting for our TSA Einstein to leave his post. What then?

The Founding Bloggers article shows how INEPT the State of Illinois is in receiving terrorists from Gitmo. Maybe Obama ought to re-think this? These two headlines, both currently on Chicago Breaking News, should strike fear in your heart – unless you are a Progressive Democrat, in which case it will inspire denial. State panel votes in favor of Illinois Gitmo planThree federal prisoners escape downstate facilityImpeach the Democrats at the polls in 2010 UPDATE: The map below [found here] effectively illustrates why people in these parts are a tad concerned about the unfathomably reckless decision Obama’s Progressive government is making....

Via JWF, the canary in the coal mine keels over. In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan also said the government failed to establish that 23 statements the detainee made to interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were untainted by the earlier coerced statements made while he was held under harsh conditions in Afghanistan. However, the judge said statements he made during two military administrative hearings at the U.S. detention center in Cuba, where he was assisted by a personal representative, were reliable and sufficient to justify holding the detainee… The logical inference from the record, said the judge,...

WASHINGTON -- On Wednesday, Nigerian would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was indicted by a Michigan grand jury for attempted murder and sundry other criminal charges. The previous day, the State Department announced that his visa had been revoked. The system worked. Well, it did for Abdulmutallab. What he lost in flying privileges he gained in Miranda rights. He was singing quite freely when seized after trying to bring down Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit. But the Obama administration decided to give him a lawyer and the right to remain silent. We are now forced to purchase information from this attempted...

WASHINGTON — A federal judge has tossed out most of the government’s evidence against a terrorism detainee on grounds his confessions were coerced, allegedly by U.S. forces, before he became a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

While reading Michael Isikoff's piece on the Newsweek blog regarding the Club G'tmo detainees, I discovered an ironic twist of rich, chocolatey sweet, goodness all the way down at the end of the article. Remember all of the whining, crying, protesting, and hand wringing about how the detainees at Club G'tmo were supposedly being mistreated in all sorts of ways? Yeah, it turns out that things are so bad there...the detainees want to stay.Now, in a classic curve ball type twist of fate, the "horribly abused, totally miserable" detainees at G'tmo are, according to their lawyers, preparing to fight their...

This is so ironic, teroritz throwing a curve to liberals. Via Weasel Zippers Buried in a blog item by Newsweek's ace reporter Michael Isikoff is a bombshell. Apparently lawyers for Guantanamo detainees want to keep their clients in Guantanamo, rather than transfer them to the Obama administration's proposed new prison in Illinois:

On Wednesday, Nigerian would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was indicted by a Michigan grand jury for attempted murder and sundry other criminal charges. The previous day, the State Department announced that his visa had been revoked. The system worked. Well, it did for Abdulmutallab. What he lost in flying privileges he gained in Miranda rights. He was singing quite freely when seized after trying to bring down Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit. But the Obama administration decided to give him a lawyer and the right to remain silent. We are now forced to purchase information from this attempted terrorist in...

Detainees: On the same day three inmates break out of an Illinois prison, a state legislative panel approves selling another Illinois prison to the feds to house former Gitmo detainees. What is wrong with this picture? Only two weeks after a failed al-Qaida attempt to bomb a plane bound for Detroit, an Illinois legislative commission voted Wednesday to support the sale of the abandoned Thomson Correctional Center in Thomson, Ill., to the federal government to house other terrorists who want to kill Americans. What caught our eye is that on the very same day, Illinois experienced a good old-fashioned jail...

Leaked out yesterday was information from a new classified Pentagon report saying more former detainees are returning to terrorist activity after being released to their home countries. Geoff Morrell, press secretary for Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, told reporters at a Pentagon briefing Wednesday that the number has gone up since last year and added, "I don't think that trend has reversed itself." But Morrell would not go into detail about how much of an increase has been seen, because the report is classified, but the number leaked out was 20%. The people released must be amongst the terrorists' best...

All the major leaders” of the Taliban opposition in Southern Afghanistan are former Guantanamo prisoners who have been released, U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) said Thursday. That is among the things the U.S. Naval Reserve Intelligence officer learned on his holiday deployment to Afghanistan, he told an audience at Chicago’s Union League Club Thursday. “What I hear is that the released Guantanamo prisoners are the toughest ones to crack, the most committed to jihad,” Kirk said. “So I am urging the administration not to release any more prisoners.” Kirk’s position as a congressman and a Naval Intelligence officer with security...

This article tells what President Obama does not. That’s the way I figured it, and my figuring is confirmed. As I noted on Jan. 22, 2009, President Obama had no plan at all -- let alone a workable one -- to close Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay. He won’t meet his self-imposed deadline, and now many think Gitmo may never be closed. Hat tip to Morrissey at Hot Air. The treatment and conditions terrorists at the Club Gitmo Resort and Spa receive is much better than locked-down conditions at federal Supermax sites, and possibly much better than state prisons across...