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The Supreme Court is leaving in place a decision that the alleged mastermind of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors should face a trial by a military commission. The court on Monday declined to take up the case of Saudi national Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri. Al-Nashiri had sought to challenge the authority of a military commission in Guantánamo Bay hearing his case. But an appeals court ruled last year that al-Nashiri’s challenge would have to wait until after his trial. …

The Pentagon posted a narrow win Wednesday as a House panel endorsed leaving the authority to prosecute rapes and other serious crimes with military commanders. In an emotionally charged debate, the House Armed Services Committee rejected a measure that would have stripped the long-standing authority to decide whether to pursue a case, especially those related to sexual assault, and hand the job to seasoned military lawyers. The vote was 34-28. …

WASHINGTON — As the United States restarts its effort to prosecute — and ultimately execute — five detainees accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks, it has fallen to Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins both to prove them guilty and to show the world that the tribunal system is now legitimate. “We’re going to have a fair trial,” General Martins, the chief prosecutor in the military commissions system, said in an interview this week. “There are a lot of people who come to this with preconceptions about unfairness, and I would just ask people to withhold judgment. The initial...

NEW YORK — The U.S. military tribunal that oversaw Omar Khadr’s war crimes case has refused his bid for clemency, issuing a statement Thursday that simply confirms the eight-year sentence he received in a plea deal. Under it, Khadr pleaded guilty last October to five war crimes, among them the murder of a U.S. serviceman during a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan, when the Toronto native was 15. He received a sentence of eight years, with one more to be served in Guantanamo, and seven in a Canadian prison. The Toronto native had, through his military lawyer, sought to have the...

SUPREME COURT TO FACE MECCAMay 12, 2010 Americans can thank the Supreme Court for the attempted car bombing of Times Square, as well as any future terrorist attacks that might be less "amateurish" and which our commander in chief will be unable to thwart unless the bomb fizzles. Over blistering dissents by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, five Supreme Court justices have repeatedly voted to treat jihadists like turnstile jumpers. (Thanks, Justice Kennedy!) That's worked so well that Obama's own attorney general is now talking about making massive exceptions to the Miranda warnings -- exceptions...

When I was a kid, we had a tough little dachshund. Then we got a poodle who was as arrogant as you'd expect a poodle to be. The poodle constantly attacked the dachshund, even though time after time the dachshund would have the poodle on her back with her teeth around the poodle's throat in about 2 seconds every time they got into it. That's sort of like Obama and Bush. With Obama being the poodle, and Bush (despite the fact that he doesn't bother to defend his policies in the media) being the dachshund. Renditions? Obama got his butt...

The Obama administration said Friday that a decision on where to prosecute Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks would not be made “for weeks,” following a flare-up in the debate about whether that trial should take place in civilian court or before a military commission. The White House sought to dampen speculation that a decision on where to hold a trial might be imminent. That speculation was fanned by a report Friday that aides to President Obama might recommend that he pull the prosecution out of civilian court and send it back to...

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration is leaning toward trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other alleged plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in a military tribunal, reversing a Justice Department pledge to put them before a civilian court. Administration officials said moves by Congress as well as by local and state governments are all but foreclosing the civilian-court option. Members of Congress have moved to cut off funds for a civilian trial, while local governments have expressed reluctance to play host to such a trial.

President Obama has stated all along that the decision to move the 9/11 terror trials of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and friends to a civilian court in New York City, has been Eric Holder's and Eric Holder's alone. It is very hard to comprehend that a politically explosive decision like that was made without the approval of the President. But placing the blame on Holder gives him cover for what apparently is coming next. Surprised by the continuing anger about moving the trials to a NY Civilian court WAPO is reporting that the trials may be moved back into the military...

WASHINGTON — Vice President Joe Biden says the administration has not ruled out a military trial for the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks even if a civilian trial would be preferable. Biden, in defending the Obama administration from critics of its approach to prosecuting accused terrorists, said in interviews aired today that it is not yet clear where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Sept. 11 suspects held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will be tried. However, Biden said he believes Mohammed will be found guilty regardless of the venue.

Churchill was right, history is written by the victors, and no one believes that more than than President Obama, which is ironic as one of the president's first moves was insulting our ally Great Britain, by refusing their gift of bust of Winston Churchill. The other night, our SCHMOTUS, Joe Biden, stunned audiences by claiming Iraq will go down as Obama's greatest achievements. Obama's opposed almost everything the the previous administration did to win the war including the Surge. Obama's only achievement in Iraq, is keeping with the plans left by the Bush administration, including the withdrawal plan. The same...

You ever notice that President Obama finds a way to blame others every time he screws up or makes a controversial decision? Like during the campaign he threw his grandma under the bus, or when his economic adviser went to Canada to reassure the government that the Senator's bravado about NAFTA was just for effect, Obama said the campaign worker was operating on his own. After his election the Obama blame-game continued. All the problems with the world could be blamed on President Bush, Rush Limbaugh,The Republican Party, Chrysler's evil investors, Wall Street, The Insurance Lobby, Fox News, Israel's Settlements...

Today, prosecutors in the Office of Military Commissions announced they intend to ask the convening authority to refer new charges under the recently-enacted Military Commissions Act of 2009 against Abd al-Rahim Hussein Muhammed Abdu al-Nashiri, in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, in October 2000. The bombing resulted in the deaths of 17 sailors and injuries to many more. This announcement follows the attorney general's determination on Nov. 13, 2009, that a military commission was the proper forum for prosecution of al-Nashiri. The prosecutors are reviewing this and other cases identified by...

An officer who served on the Guantánamo Bay military jury that convicted Salim Hamdan of providing material support for terrorism and sentenced to five months imprisonment on top of 61 months he has already spent in confinement at the military base awaiting trial tells The Wall Street Journal that the evidence against Osama bin Laden's former driver “simply didn't support prosecutors' depiction of a hard-core al Qaeda terrorist who hates America and its way of life” and that “along the spectrum” of terrorist activity, Hamdan fell on the “less significant end.”According to The Journal, this juror also insisted that the...

A Saudi national suspected of leading Al-Qaeda in the Gulf was Monday charged by the Pentagon with organizing some 40 attacks including the October 2000 attack on the US navy destroyer USS Cole. Abdel Rahim al-Nashiri, currently a prisoner at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is suspected of being behind the attacks in the 1990s. Arrested in October 2002 in the United Arab Emirates, he spent several years in secret CIA prisons.

Thursday's 5-4 decision awarding "unlawful combatants" at Gitmo --terrorists-- the "privilege of the writ of habeas corpus" has left millions of Americans stunned. What in the world is the majority of the Supreme Court thinking? Justice Scalia, writing in dissent, was blunt: America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. See National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United...

"The Nation will live to regret what the Court had done today," Justice Antonin Scalia writes at the end of his dissent in Boumediene v. Bush, the case in which a bare majority of the Supreme Court, for the first time ever, extended rights under the U.S. constitution to enemy combatants who have never set foot on U.S. soil. It's worth noting that the nation has lived to regret things the court has done in earlier wars. In Schenck v. U.S. (1919), the court upheld the conviction of a Socialist Party leader for distributing an anticonscription flier during World War...

9/11 Suspect: Artist Drew My Nose Too Big GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba, June 5, 2008 (CBS/AP) The confessed mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America said a courtroom artist at his arraignment Thursday made his nose look too big. No photographers were allowed inside the courtroom for the first appearance of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged coconspirators on war crimes charges. So it fell to artist Janet Hamlin to provide the world with the first image of the al Qaeda kingpin since his capture in Pakistan in 2003. Her rendering was reviewed to make sure it didn't...

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - An Afghan detainee was dragged from his cell to his first pretrial hearing at Guantanamo on Wednesday, then refused to participate, telling the judge he felt "helpless." ADVERTISEMENT Mohammed Kamin joined a growing detainee boycott of the war-crimes trials at the Guantanamo Bay Navy base in southeast Cuba. The military judge, Air Force Col. W. Thomas Cumbie, said Kamin tried to bite and spit on a guard on the way to the courtroom.

Hoover senior fellow Peter Berkowitz, chairman of Hoover's Koret-Taube Task Force on National Security, explains that the war against terror does indeed pose formidable challenges for the American legal system, in part because the United States is facing a threat "unlike any other in its history." Berkowitz states that, unlike previous enemies of the United States, this new enemy is "not part of a nation-state, does not fight in uniformed troops against other armies in uniformed troops, and does not limit itself to conventional armed conflict but instead targets civilians or operates in civilian areas, and its threat could continue...