As Wells noted on Tuesday, the D.C. Circuit granted the government’s petition for rehearing en banc in Al-Bahlul v. United States. This is a very important development, as the full appeals court will now determine whether military commissions may … Read more »
The lawyers’ reason is twofold, apparently: first, a possible lapse in the security of computer networks operated by military commission defense counsel; and second, the disclosure of privileged defense emails to prosecutors by court security personnel.
James Connell III, an … Read more »
Wednesday on the Senate floor, three senators spoke about the Obama administration’s decision to prosecute, in a federal court, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and Al Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. Republican Senators Kelly Ayotte and Lindsey Graham unsurprisingly opposed this … Read more »
As Wells noted, the Guantánamo Military Commission Convening Authority has declined to adopt Chief Prosecutor Brig. Gen. Mark Martins’s recommendation to withdraw the conspiracy charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 defendants. Withdrawal, which can be done … Read more »
Reported on Friday by the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg: defense attorneys in United States v. Al-Nashiri filed a renewed motion to dismiss the conspiracy charge against their client. At the same time, the lawyers reactivated an earlier request to throw … Read more »
In this special episode of the Lawfare Podcast, Military Commission Chief Prosecutor Brigadier General Mark Martins discusses his decision to recommend dropping conspiracy charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 defendants. Martins announced yesterday that in light … Read more »
Done with security review: four recent orders from the military judge, James Pohl, in United States v. Mohammed et al.
The first, AE60A, rejects a defense bid to uncover more information about Judge Pohl’s detailing of himself to the … Read more »
I agree entirely with Ken that DOD General Counsel Jeh Johnson’s speech on the end-of-conflict with al Qaeda “makes a serious attempt to grapple with the conditions defining the endgame” and is “a significant articulation of the US government’s view … Read more »
At this hour, Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson is giving the following speech at the Oxford Union in England:
“The Conflict Against Al Qaeda and its Affiliates: How Will It End?”
Jeh Charles Johnson
General Counsel of the U.S. Department
Apropos of the amendment proposed by Senator Feinstein and others, and tonight’s NDAA discussion in the Senate, here’s a quick review of S. 3254, the NDAA 2013 bill that the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously approved earlier this year.… Read more »
Writing at the New York Times web site, Eric Lewis of Lewis Baach, describes a human rights agenda for the Obama administration’s second term:
First, he must release certain Guantánamo detainees, who have never been charged or tried. Of
The New York Times has the story here about this new Human Rights Watch report concerning the handling of Libyan detainees transferred to Libyan custody after 2004. I haven’t read the report yet–by Laura Pitter–and, in general, my interest level … Read more »
The motions hearing that begins tomorrow in the 9/11 military commissions case is far too sprawling to preview motion by motion. Instead, we’ve broken it up thematically. Nearly all of the 25 motions on which Military Judge James Pohl will … Read more »
Speaking of national security issues that seemed to have dropped off of the public’s radar screen, this headline beckons the reader to an article in The Atlantic, written by Andrew Cohen and posted over the weekend:
Why not
James Connell III, a lawyer for 9/11 accused Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, has released this statement regarding residual issues related to torture and coercion. In particular, he says that he and other lawyers expect to raise, at one or more … Read more »
The Department of Defense has unsealed Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s response to Judge Pohl’s show cause order – in which the commission had asked the government to explain why the 9/11 defendants should not be tried separately. (At the moment, the … Read more »
Now available: the 9/11 defendants’ joint reply to the “Government’s Response to Motion to Cease Psychological Dislocation Techniques And Denial of Detainees’ Right to Dress in the Clothes of Their Own Choosing.” Recall that various accused allegedly had been denied … Read more »
You’ll recall that three 9/11 defendants earlier responded to Judge Pohl’s inquiry regarding separate trials for each of the five accused.
Of this group, only Ammar al-Baluchi (aka Ali Abdul Aziz Ali) had opposed a joint trial. His written opposition … Read more »
Not quite pret-a-porter?
Various media are reporting on the recently released motion by the 9/11 defendants, who desire to wear the clothing of their choice during commission proceedings. In particular, KSM wishes to don a camouflage field jacket … Read more »
Ben Weiser of the New York Times wrote in today, and reminded me that the 9/11 case is obviously not first to confront the issue of secretly-recorded conversations between the defendant and other Guantanamo detainees.
The question came up in … Read more »
The Associated Press, via Fox News, has another intriguing excerpt from Dan Klaidman’s Kill or Capture: The War On Terror And The Soul Of The Obama Presidency. The book is shaping up to be a must-read for the Lawfare … Read more »
According to the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg, only three of the 9/11 defendants weighed in on the question, put to the prosecution by Judge James Pohl, of why the men should not be tried separately.
Rosenberg reports that only … Read more »
We reported last Friday on an order in United States v. Mohammed et al, in which Judge James Pohl instructed the prosecution to explain why the cases should not be tried separately. That order has completed a security review, and … Read more »
Just in from the Congressional Research Service, this report compares the rights of defendants tried in military commissions to those tried in federal criminal court. Presumably because of the commencement of the military commission case against the five alleged plotters … Read more »
Wells and I will be at Fort Meade for the KSM arraignment Saturday morning. In the meantime, I have written an oped in the Washington Post setting the stage and discussing the pivotal importance of this trial to the military … Read more »
I could pick factual nits with today’s New York Times editorial on the referral of charges in the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed case. If I were in that sort of mood, I’d start with the first sentence, which reads: “The … Read more »
An interesting development in the military commission case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four alleged September 11 co-conspirators: The government has added charges of intentionally causing serious bodily injury (10 U.S.C. §950t).
The charges in the case were initially … Read more »
The Defense Department today announced that military commission charges have been sworn against Majid Khan, a Pakistani detainee at Guantanamo who used to live in the United States:
DOD Announces Charges Sworn Against Detainee Majid Shoukat Khan
The Defense Department
William Shawcross’s widely-noticed new book, Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, asks the following: how does a civilized society bring justice to mass murderers, al Qaeda and its adherents, when it has … Read more »
The Defense Department announced today that Brigadier General Mark Martins, the commander of the Rule of Law Field Force-Afghanistan, will be the Chief Prosecutor in the Office of Military Commissions, beginning around October 1. This presumably means that Martins will … Read more »
DOD has just announced that charges have now been sworn by military commission prosecutors in the case against KSM and four others linked to the 9/11 attacks. From DOD’s press release:
Earlier today I noted a couple of scenarios in which the US government might want detention authority yet face obstacles in relying on the original AUMF should we have withdrawn in the interim from Afghanistan, as part of my ongoing … Read more »
The debate regarding AUMF renewal via section 1034 of the NDAA FY12 is about much more than detention authority, but of course it does impact detention authority in various ways. As to that issue, Deborah Pearlstein frames the issue nicely … Read more »
…that, as I speculated this morning, the original leads for what became the Bin Laden operation developed in the CIA’s secret prison’s program. The report reads:
WASHINGTON — Officials say CIA interrogators in secret overseas prisons developed the
Two quick comments on today’s New York Times editorial:
First, the Times begins with a remarkable normative assertion: “In bringing justice to those accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, it will never be possible to have military trials … Read more »
I don’t disagree with Eric Holder’s complaint regarding the role Congress has played in tying the Executive Branch’s hands with respect to bringing the 9/11 conspirators to trial. In fact, I strongly agree with him. It’s a grossly inappropriate interference … Read more »
We’ve seen several reports that the Obama Administration is poised to announce, at a 2 P.M. press conference today, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be tried by a military commission.
There is also a House Judiciary Committee hearing scheduled for … Read more »
In a column today in the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen suggests that it’s time for Obama to revitalize Guantanamo:
In fact, Obama administration is quietly beginning to ramp up operations at Guantanamo. While White House officials continue to assert that
That is Attorney General Eric Holder, on March 15, 2010, explaining to the House Judiciary Committee how long it would take the Obama administration to decide where to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Nearly eleven months later, still … Read more »
The Washington Post today reports today on a new investigation by Georgetown faculty and students and the Center for Public Integrity about the murder of Daniel Pearl. The investigation produced a lengthy report concluding, among other things, that Khalid Sheikh … Read more »
[Update: Josh Gerstein at Politico reports that the White House has now expressed its opposition at least to section 1116, raising a question as to whether this will sail through easily after all.]
Jack notes below that the chances that … Read more »
This is how the always-entertaining British journalist, Andy Worthington describes critics of federal court trials, including–it seems–Jack and Bobby and me, which is kind of funny considering that we are not really critics of federal court trials at all. Worthington … Read more »
The Washington Post is reporting this morning that the administration’s solution to the problem of how to try KSM and his buddies may be, well, not to bother:
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,
That is the title of an oped of mine in the Washington Post, which distills the argument made in this recent post on Lawfare. The oped begins:
Here’s a simple proposal to break the impasse over how to proceed
Habeas lawyer David Remes sent in the following in response to my response to Gabor Rona–who in turn was responding to this post. I am going to let David have the last word here:
Ben’s response to Gabor
I intended this post as a challenge to the political Right, not the human rights community, on military commissions. I was, therefore, a little surprised to receive this note from Gabor Rona, international legal director of Human Rights First, in … Read more »
This is a trial balloon. I’m not 100 percent certain that what I am suggesting is wise, politically astute, or even that it would work legally. I have not thought through all of the implications of what I am going … Read more »
Everyone seems to have very strong views about where to try KSM. I don’t. I think there’s a defensible case for trying him in a military commission. I think there’s a defensible case for trying him in a civilian court. … Read more »
I disagree with a great deal in this oped and don’t mean to pick every nit I could find in it. But it is worth answering some of Marc Thiessen’s major points, as they have a way of distilling and … Read more »
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
In one of the strangest stories I’ve come across in a long time—and there have been many—news reports say an FBI agent shot and killed an Orlando man with ties to deceased Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Ibragim Todashev was not suspected of playing a role in the bombings, but, during questioning, confessed nevertheless to playing a role in a triple homicide in the Boston area. After his confession, Todashev allegedly… Read more »
