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The Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would reaffirm and arguably expand the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed just three days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In addition, for the first time, the administration is formally threatening a veto over Congress's efforts to limit his authority to release Guantanamo prisoners and to transfer war-on-terror prisoners held by the U.S. military to the U.S. for any reason. There is a belated quality to the veto threat since Obama previously objected to but ulitmately signed a series of bills which had provisions effectively...

FIELD TRIPS AND BIRTHDAY PARTIES CAN’T BE FAR BEHIND Just because the Obama Regime finally realized that closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison was a much better symbolic campaign promise to Bill Maher and Rosie O’Donnell than it was a responsible, big-boy executive decision made in the best interests of the United States doesn’t mean that we can’t have a kinder, gentler GITMO. After all, as our internationalist president says, America is different. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama claimed that it was imperative for the United States to close GITMO because it was being used as a “recruiting tool”...

The Pentagon is considering allowing the families of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to visit them, an unprecedented step to ease the isolation of inmates who in some cases have been held at the U.S. facility for close to a decade, according to congressional aides. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which monitors conditions at the Guantanamo Bay military prison and facilitates videoconferences between detainees and their families, has been in serious discussions with the Pentagon about a visitation program, the aides said. Some Republicans, after hearing about the talks, appeared to balk at such access to the...

The Washington Post’s Outlook section just gave ex-jihadi Moazzem Begg a half-page this Sunday to lament the U.S. war on jihadis, and Begg repaid the Post by showcasing a photoshopped image of a dead President Barack Obama on his advocacy website. Washington Post editors did not return The Daily Caller’s phone calls. The Outlook section is edited by Carlos Lozada, who reports to Marcus Brauchli, the Post’s executive editor. The Investigative Project on Terrorism directed TheDC to the photo on Begg’s website. Begg’s action came just before Thursday, when shareholders are expected to protest financial losses by the newspaper’s parent...

Attorney General vows to close Guantanamo 2:30pm EDT PARIS (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday the United States would close the Guantanamo Bay facility holding terrorism suspects in Cuba, despite missing a previous deadline to do so. On an official visit to Paris, Holder stressed what he called unprecedented intelligence-sharing ties between France and the United States against a united enemy, al Qaeda, that he said still held the two countries and its allies in its sights. The recent killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was unlikely to affect the timing of the closure of...

There have been a number of pieces written about why the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has remained open. I believe Rush Limbaugh was alone in predicting it would not be closed by the Obama administration, and he maintained that even after the Exective Order issued by President Obama on January 22, 2009. Many analysts have expounded on why this was never accomplished. Basically, the thinking is that the Democrats cannot afford to be seen as being weak on Defense. What I find fascinating is HOW this was never accomplished. Did the military and political leaders say, "Just ignore...

Some liberals are trying to give all of the credit for the death of Osama bin Laden to Barack Obama and his enlightened leadership. But if we had fought the war on terrorism the way liberals wanted us to fight it, bin Laden would still be alive today and we wouldn’t have the first clue of how to find him. The New York Times and MSNBC have confirmed that the nom de guerre of a key courier for bin Laden, “Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti,” was obtained by interrogating detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. If we had listened to the liberals, Guantanamo...

Is anyone except me bothered by the fact that the President, Mr. Panetta, et al, have repeatedly broken one of the primary rules of intel - namely that professionals never reveal the sources and methods by which they obtain information. On one level, it was good to know that enhanced interrogation techniques (previously reviled by Liberals as only being used by horrible people) have netted usable informaiton, and that we are clever and patient enough to track down the courier that was servicing the OBL compound. But at a higher level, letting the world know how we obtained sufficient detail...

In an especially well-timed release this week, Richard Miniter’s MASTERMIND: The Many Faces of the 9/11 Architect, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed reveals Mohammed’s rise to the top of Al Qaeda and his planning of the jihadist attacks on America in 2001. More than that, though, Miniter’s book includes shocking new disclosures about how the US treats its detainees. Miniter tells Big Peace: I was stunned to learn while researching Mastermind that Guantanamo detainees succeeded in convincing prison officials to no longer raise the American flag anywhere they could see it. Each morning on every U.S. military base around the world, the...

RUSH: Now, let's review. Let's review, ladies and gentlemen, and let's do this with pure and total objectivity, exactly where we are today, just shortly after noon on the 3rd of May, 2011. An American president with admittedly incomplete intelligence, intelligence provided by people, techniques, and agencies reviled, ridiculed, and opposed by this American president, invades a foreign and supposedly friendly nation without its knowledge or consent, using information extracted from Guantanamo detainees, a place that the sitting president opposes, techniques to acquire this information opposed by this president and his regime. The information provided by waterboarding, it was said...

Obama in 2009: "Now- I know some have argued thatbrutal methods like waterboarding were necessary to keep this country safe... but I could not disagree more" who we ought to be thanking Fact 1: Waterboarding found Bin Laden Fact 2: The interrogation took place at Gitmo Fact 3: Obama banned waterboarding in 2009...   then issued an Executive Order to close Gitmo! Who in their right mind would give even one quark of credit for enabling the American intelligence services to succeed in dispatching Osama Bin Laden to this sanctimonious strategic moron Barack Obama? He's opposed almost everything that enabled the CIA/Pentagon to ever even get close to Bin...

Somewhere, Dick Cheney is smiling. An American president, with incomplete intelligence, invades a foreign — and friendly(!) —power, without its knowledge or consent. Using data gathered from Gitmo detainees subjected to “enhanced interrogation” the president gives the “kill order” for a target in a private residence, one where women and children are known to congregate. And after 22 foreign nationals are captured or killed at the hands of Navy SEALS — without any NATO or U.N. authorization — the president doesn’t apologize for it. He brags about it. Then it’s confirm that he ordered the SEALS to throw the target’s...

Years of intelligence gathering, including details gleaned from controversial interrogations of Al Qaeda members during the Bush administration, ultimately led the Navy SEALs who killed Usama bin Laden to his compound in Pakistan. The initial threads of intelligence began surfacing in 2003 and came in the form of information about a trusted bin Laden courier, a senior U.S. official told Fox News on condition of anonymity. Bin Laden had cut off all traditional lines of communication with his network by this time because the Al Qaeda leader knew the U.S. intelligence community was monitoring him. It was said that he...

DEVELOPING: Usama bin Laden was given a religious funeral prior to his burial at sea, senior military officials told Fox News. Religious rites were conducted on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier at about 1:10 a.m. Monday in the Persian Gulf. In accordance with Islamic practice, bin Laden was washed and wrapped in a white sheet before buried at sea at 2 p.m. local time, senior U.S. military and intelligence officials said.

Libs will be deeply disturbed to know that the intel leading our magnificent SEALS to the compound where Binny was kickin it in the ‘burbs for God knows how long came from a Gitmo detainee. We’ve listened to nearly a decade of liberal caterwauling about the sinister uselessness of the seaside resort known as Club Gitmo which wrongfully houses a bunch of harmless do gooders. Yet, their beloved president never did get around to shutting the place down. As in all things, liberals had it completely wrong.

Wikileaks has revealed a US report on Guantanamo terrorist prisoners called the “Matrix of Threat Indicators for Enemy Combatants.” You will see this document written up in dozens of articles in the media and the blogosphere over the next few days. We wanted to call attention to one list that has come out of that report: a list of foreign mosques and Islamic centers that are used to recruit and train Jihadis.

Chrystia Freeland has called the US prison system an "American Gulag Archipelago." The Global Editor-at-Large of Reuters made her comment during today's Dylan Ratigan show on MSNBC. The context was a discussion of the recent WikiLeaks document dump about Gitmo, but Freeland was clearly speaking of the domestic US prison system, not our military prisons. Ratigan picked up on her theme, saying we could cut our prison costs in half if marijuana were legalized. View video after the jump [with apologies for mediocre quality]. Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein#ixzz1KZr0yJV6

On Sept. 11, 2001, the core of al-Qaeda was concentrated in a single city: Karachi, Pakistan. At a hospital, the accused mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole was recovering from a tonsillectomy. Nearby, the alleged organizer of the 2002 bombing in Bali, Indonesia, was buying lab equipment for a biological weapons program. And in a safe house, the man who would later describe himself as the intellectual author of the Sept. 11 attacks was with other key al-Qaeda members watching the scenes from New York and Washington unfold on television.

Thousands of pages of previously secret military documents about detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison now put a name, a history and a face on hundreds of men in captivity there. The documents include details on 158 men on whom no information has ever been released. The hundreds of classified documents - marked "secret" and "noforn" meaning the information is not to be shared with representatives of other countries - are assessments, interviews and internal memos from the Pentagon's Joint Task Force at Guantanamo. The task force was supposed to determine who the detainees were, how they might be connected...

WASHINGTON, April 20, 2011 – The chief prosecutor of the Defense Department’s Office of Military Commissions has recommended that capital charges be brought against the alleged mastermind behind the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a Pentagon spokesman said today. The charges assert that Abd al Rahim Hussayn Muhammad al Nashiri was responsible for planning and preparing terrorists to attack the U.S. Navy warship in the Yemini port of Aden, Navy Capt. Darryn James said. The Cole was in the harbor for a routine fuel stop when a small watercraft approached the ship’s port side and exploded. The bombing...