Free Republic

In the 16 years since the federal death penalty was restored in 1994 — 16 years throughout which the United States has been ravaged by jihadist terror — the Justice Department has approved capital charges for exactly three defendants: Moussaoui and two of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombers. In each case, civilian juries rejected the death penalty. If Holder is saying there’s a better chance these savages will be executed if they are tried in the civilian system (and that is precisely what he’s implying), there is nothing to support that claim.

WASHINGTON, July 7, 2010 – A Sudanese man pleaded guilty in a military commission today to conspiracy and providing material support to al-Qaida in the five years leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States. Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi, 50, pleaded guilty at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to two charges for his support to al-Qaida and for conspiring to commit terrorism from August 1996 until his capture in December 2001. The conviction marks the first case prosecuted under the Obama administration and the Military Commissions Act of 2009, which the president signed in October....

More so than in any other administration, Friday nights have become a game in themselves for people to see what kind of embarrassing and politically damaging information the White House wants to hide in the virtual news blackout of Saturdays. Usually it involves policy and personnel changes that would tend to anger their base — and this week may be the granddaddy of Friday Night news dumps. The New York Times reports that sources within the administration have all but thrown in the towel on closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and now want to shift the blame to...

WASHINGTON — Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013. When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to overcome them. “There is a lot of inertia”...

The U.S. government plans to buy a state prison in rural Illinois even if Congress blocks President Obama's plan to use it for terror suspects, officials say. Assistant U.S. Attorney General Randy Welch told members of Congress from Illinois in a letter this week that the administration has a "commitment" to purchase the unused Thomson Prison, the Chicago Tribune reported Monday. He said the entire building will become an ordinary federal facility if it cannot be used to hold detainees now at Guantanamo Bay. Under the administration's plan, only a small part of the facility would be used for Guantanamo...

Twenty percent of ex-Guantanamo prisoners who graduated from Saudi Arabia's rehabilitation programme resumed contacts with Islamist militants, a senior Saudi counter-terror official said on Saturday. Twenty-five of the 120 former detainees at the US "war-on-terror" prison returned to radical Islamist activities after graduation from Riyadh's lauded rehab centre, Abdulrahman al-Hadlaq, who has the post of director of ideological security at the interior ministry, told reporters. "It's about a 9.5-percent relapse" for all 300 Saudi men, including militants arrested by Saudi authorities, who have passed through the "Care Centre," Hadlaq said. "But it's more than 20 (percent) among Guantanamo guys." Of...

I am addressing this post to my fellow citizens of MI-01, fellow activists across the country, and especially to Congressional Democrats and candidates currently serving in Congress. The word is out; Mike Allen at Politico.com had the story yesterday. This administration is going to push the Senate to pass a cap-and-trade bill this summer. Then, with the same arrogance we have seen before from this administration, they are planning on passing a final bill during the lame-duck session of Congress that follows November’s elections—elections where the people will have spoken and expressed their will regarding the type of government they...

""Welcome Aboard," the sign says. The cost of the marquee, along with a smaller sign positioned near the airfield: $188,000. Among other odd legacies from war-on-terror spending since 2001 for the troops at Guantanamo Bay: an abandoned volleyball court for $249,000, an unused go-kart track for $296,000 and $3.5 million for 27 playgrounds that are often vacant. The Pentagon also spent $683,000 to renovate a cafe that sells ice cream and Starbucks coffee, and $773,000 to remodel a cinder-block building to house a KFC/Taco Bell restaurant. The spending is part of at least $500 million that has transformed what was...

Note: Photo included. PHOTO CAPTION: "Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Othman Ahmed al Ghamdi, in a tape released by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula." SNIPPET: "A videotape released by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) earlier this week says that a former Guantanamo detainee is now a commander within the terrorist organization. The former detainee, Othman Ahmed al Ghamdi, has risen to the rank of operational commander within AQAP as other senior terrorists within the organization have been killed in recent strikes. The tape, which is titled “America and the Final Trap,” confirms that three AQAP leaders were killed...

Note: 3 page article. "Inside the Gitmo Task Force's Final Report" SNIPPET: "President Obama's own task force concluded that 95 percent of the Gitmo detainees had at least some connection to the terror network." SNIPPET: "On January 22, President Obama’s Guantanamo Review Task Force completed its final report, which outlined the administration’s plan for the remaining detainees held at Guantanamo. The Task Force was set up as part of the president’s effort to close Gitmo. THE WEEKLY STANDARD has obtained a copy of the report, as well as Attorney General Eric Holder’s transmittal memorandum. As explained below, the Task Force...

www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-assistant-president-homeland-security-and-counterterrorism-john-brennan-csi # Note: The following text is a quote: Home • Briefing Room • Statements & Releases The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release May 26, 2010 Remarks by Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan at CSIS “Securing the Homeland by Renewing American Strength, Resilience and Values” Thank you very much John, and I would like to take a moment to express my appreciation to CSIS for inviting me back. You invited me here a little after six months after I came into this administration and I greatly appreciate the invitation...

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...

RUSH: The New York Times is not happy today. A story written by Charlie Savage: "The House Armed Services Committee has dealt a blow to President Obama's hopes to shutter the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by unanimously..." U-nan-i-mous-ly! That means every Democrat voted to keep it open. "[U]nanimously approving legislation that would prohibit creating a detention center inside the United States." Now, what happened? What happened to this brilliant, job-creating idea to send the detainees to that prison not being used right now in Illinois? That was Dick Durbin's idea, and remember, "Oh, yeah, it's gonna create a...

In an interesting development the House Armed Services Committee unanimously approved of 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. The bill does, however, state that the Secretary...

President Barack Obama tried to avoid a high-profile ouster of his original White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, by coaxing him out of his job and into a federal judgeship, according to a new book. Craig declined Obama’s offer, and his forced removal — which he learned of while reading the morning paper — caused a backlash by Craig’s Washington loyalists, who felt he was being treated shabbily, and by many liberals, who believed he was being punished for trying to fulfill Obama’s failed campaign promise to shut the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The details on last...

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...

Mr. Meltzer played a leading role in the administration’s efforts to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and related policies affecting terrorism detainees. He was also the White House’s main contact with the Justice Department’s powerful Office of Legal Counsel, which evaluates whether proposed policies would be lawful.

The Pentagon has barred four reporters from further reporting of the military commission proceedings at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay because they published articles identifying a witness whose identity had been protected by the presiding judge even though it has been in the public domain since 2005. The American Civil Liberties Union has condemned the move as "absurd ... rash, draconian and unconstitutional." The announcement came at the conclusion of two weeks of pre-trial proceedings in the case of Omar Khadr, a Canadian detainee who has been held at the base since he was a teenager. The four journalists...

Covertly taken photos of CIA interrogators that were shown by defense attorneys to al Qaeda inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison represent a more serious security breach than the 2003 outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame, the agency's former general counsel said Wednesday. John Rizzo, who was the agency's top attorney until December, said in an interview that he initially requested the Justice Department and CIA investigation into the compromise of CIA interrogators' identities after photographs of the officers were found in the cell of one al Qaeda terrorist in Cuba. "Well I think this is far more serious than...

Strip searches debilitating: Guantanamo suspect 7:48pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - The only detainee sent to the United States to face trial in a civilian court from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was ordered to appear in court following his claim that prison strip searches debilitate him. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani to appear in court on Thursday to hear from him directly about the motion his lawyers filed for a change of Bureau of Prisons rules on how it conducts strip searches. Ghailani, a Tanzanian, is charged with conspiring in the 1998...