Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

9/11, al Qaeda, Debra Burlingame, Eric Holder, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Lawfare

Stalking the CIA; Justice lawyers at daggers drawn with the ­intelligence community

by  • 

Following up on Monday’s op-ed, ‘Gitmo’s Indefensible Lawyers,’ Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn have more about Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and current Department of Justice Gitmo Task Force lawyer Jennifer Daskal today in The Weekly Standard. Here is an excerpt and the link:

President Bush “will go down in history as the torture president,” Daskal told the Associated Press in March 2008. “The Bush administration continues to insist that CIA and other nonmilitary interrogators are not bound by the military rules and has reportedly given CIA interrogators the green light to use a range of so-called ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, and exposure to extreme cold,” Daskal added.

Daskal’s anti-CIA activism was not limited to making hyperbolic statements to the press. Daskal and Human Rights Watch played a significant role in uncovering the CIA’s secret detention facilities in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan, where top terrorists were detained and interrogated.

On November 2, 2005, Dana Priest of the Washington Post reported that the “CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe.” The Post, citing the government’s security concerns, did not name the countries where the facilities were located. But just a few days later, on November 6, 2005, Human Rights Watch revealed the countries in a posting on its website. The organization said it had “collected information that CIA airplanes traveling from Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004 made direct flights to remote airfields in Poland and Romania.” The organization encouraged European officials to investigate further, and the Europeans did just that.

Next week, when Attorney General Eric Holder appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I hope they ask him if Daskal has had direct access to the CIA’s agreements with the countries that assisted America, the transportation assets, and what intelligence Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other high-value al Qaeda detainees provided. I mean, it seems like a good place to start.

9/11, Barack Obama, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Military Commissions

No deal done on 9/11 trial; Obama and Graham hoping to win back votes for closing Gitmo

by  • 

The Washington Post (and many others) is reporting that Obama advisers will recommend that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow conspirators be tried by military commission for the 9/11 attacks:

The president’s advisers feel increasingly hemmed in by bipartisan opposition to a federal trial in New York and demands, mainly from Republicans, that Mohammed and his accused co-conspirators remain under military jurisdiction, officials said. While Obama has favored trying some terrorism suspects in civilian courts as a symbol of U.S. commitment to the rule of law, critics have said military tribunals are the appropriate venue for those accused of attacking the United States.

If Obama accepts the likely recommendation of his advisers, the White House may be able to secure from Congress the funding and legal authority it needs to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and replace it with a facility within the United States. The administration has failed to meet a self-imposed one-year deadline to close Guantanamo.

As Andy McCarthy puts it, “Hold the Champagne on Military Commissions – It’s a Head Fake.” And it is. As early as last summer, there were signs that Senator Lindsey Graham was negotiating with the White House over making changes to the Military Commissions Act and closing the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay. (That is also why the White House no longer hosts conference calls with the families of the victims of terror before significant announcements. More about that in a moment). McCarthy explains:

The real agenda here is to close Gitmo. That’s the ball to keep your eye on. The Post is trying to soften the opposition to shuttering the detention camp by portraying beleaguered, reasonable Obama as making a great compromise that will exasperate the Left. The idea is to strengthen Sen. Lindsey Graham’s hand in seeking reciprocal compromise from our side.

This, however, is a matter of national security, not horse-trading over a highway bill. You don’t agree to do a stupid thing that endangers the country just because your opposition has magnanimously come off its insistence that you do two stupid things that endanger the country.

If a deal to grant military commissions in exchange for closing Gitmo happens, it is a major win for the Obama Left and an enormous loss for public safety.

We were headed inexorably toward military commissions for the 9/11 plotters. We don’t need to cut a bad deal to get it. Congress was not going to approve funding to transport trained terrorists to the U.S., nor to hold civilian trials. As I said, we’ve already got military commissions for some enemy combatants, and if we play this out, we are likely to get them for most if not all of the combatant war crimes trials. And we are likely to get them at Gitmo — the best place to have them, and the place on which the public has expended hundreds of millions of dollars to construct a safe, humane, fastidiously Islamo-friendly prison with state of the art trial facilities. … READ THE REST

Last June was the last time the White House hosted a conference call with family members of the victims of 9/11 and the Cole bombing. During that call, the briefer said Senator Patrick Leahy would propose changes in the Military Commission Act, using the “Warner-McCain-Graham bill of 2006.”

Only, no such bill ever existed. Yet it did reveal that Senator Graham was already secretly negotiating with the White House. The actual bill was one by Senator John Warner, with no co-sponsors, that four Republicans voted in committee to allow to be brought to the Senate floor as a substitute amendment for the Military Commissions Act. When the substitute was put forward, even Warner voted against it (as did Graham) and both McCain and Snowe did not vote.

We have been conned before by this White House so do not believe everything you read in the newspaper. We need to soon hear from Senator Graham the details of what he is proposing.

Update: I neglected to mention Thomson prison is “still on the table” and the wrong place for detainees. Thankfully, Michelle Malkin reminded us, “So, even as they pull back from civilian trials in NYC, Obama is still trying to bring the Gitmolympics home to Illinois.”