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In typical fashion, Bill Kristol is upset that the attempted air plane bomber is 'lawyered up'. I guess he thinks law enforcement would have a better case against him if they just hurried up and tortured the guy. That'll help get him convicted Bill! Idiot.

WALLACE: Well, obviously, we were just plain lucky that this guy's device, explosive device, didn't work.

But, Bill Kristol, what does the Christmas Day terror attack tell you about the continued efforts of our enemies to try to strike the U.S. homeland?

KRISTOL: Well, they are our enemies, and we have to understand that it's a war. And what most worries me -- what most worries me about the reaction to the attack is we're still treating it as a law enforcement matter. The FBI is investigating. He's been arrested. He's been read his rights. In the Washington Post late yesterday afternoon, after the news was already coming out about the Yemen connections and stuff, a law enforcement authority was quoted as saying authorities are operating on the theory that he acted alone.

We so desperately want not to believe that we have to deal with this as a global threat from Al Qaida and that we need to act against the key nexuses of Al Qaida, such as in Yemen, that we hope these guys are just acting alone. But he wasn't acting alone.

[...]

WALLACE: You know, it's interesting, Juan, because it does come out today -- we find out that he had a visa because he was a student in London. I guess the visa had lapsed.

He applied for a new visa in May because he said he was going to take a course. Somebody there checked out and said, "You know what? That course that you're talking about doesn't exist. It's a bogus course." They didn't give him a new visa. And somehow one wonders if that should have been in his file.

WILLIAMS: Well, I think it was in his file. It's how we know it. But I think that the big issue...

WALLACE: Well, I think they know it from the British authorities now.

WILLIAMS: Right, but I think that one of the -- the big issue here is that he went on this list in November, the same time that his father went to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria.

So the question is then at some point should he have been advanced to at least the no-screening list, which is about 14,000 people. And you know what? We don't know. It looks like they're going to ramp up a lot of this now. Sort of the horse is out of the barn, or however you say that phrase, to try to go after people at this level.

But to me, it doesn't seem fair to start, you know, all these political recriminations. Jennifer says the White House is very aware that that kind of criticism is coming. But it seems to me at this point it's a bunch of finger-pointing and a bunch of politics in Washington.

The real thing is we have hardened America as a target. And despite that, what we're seeing is an increase in these so-called -- and here I disagree with Bill Kristol -- lone wolves, people who are...

INGRAHAM: We don't know yet.

WILLIAMS: ... as a result of...

WALLACE: We don't know -- we don't know that.

WILLIAMS: No, I think we do know that.

WALLACE: How do we know that?

INGRAHAM: No, we don't.

WILLIAMS: I think what we know is...

WALLACE: We don't know if he was in Yemen or not. Where did he get...

WILLIAMS: No.

WALLACE: ... the PETN?

WILLIAMS: Clearly -- look.

WALLACE: We don't know any of that.

WILLIAMS: I think what we know at this point -- all that we know is that this guy had not spent any large amount of time with Al Qaida. He may have visited Yemen at...

INGRAHAM: We don't know that.

WILLIAMS: ... one point. That's about it. And he may have been given the PETN and a small amount...

INGRAHAM: Well...

KRISTOL: That's enough time to possibly...

WILLIAMS: OK.

KRISTOL: ... kill -- this is the problem. This is precisely the problem. This guy has been lawyered up. We don't know anything. One reason we don't know anything -- he's not being treated like an enemy combatant. He's not being interrogated. We're not finding out everything we could know about Awlaki.

This is an ongoing attack -- enemy attempt to attack the United States, and we're treating it as a one-off law enforcement case.

Transcript via Lexis Nexis.

ShortsandPants: Quote of the Day. Blue Gal explains how these lying hypocrites can make such outlandish claims with a straight face.

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Capital Eye: Watchdog groups detail political contributions in ways never before documented

Kevin Drum: The New Obstruction

Facing South: Health Bill Hypocrisy? *Republicans* led the push for Louisiana funding that wound up in the Senate bill

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Yoo still here?....'Beat Reporters'...Another reason TIME sux...More sources of B.S. gone...Nationalist narcissism...Murdoch & Microsoft....Pathological-Liar...The news about the internet...A new horizon for the news...Comedy Gold...Were these accidents?...NYT's notion of "pragmatism"...Feckless media...STFU... Modern Media...Less talk, more war...CNN will keep his seat warm...More Fox/wingnut bullsh*t...Inside the Dean Dome

We can certainly come to our own conclusions, since we're not hearing any official explanation. But it would be nice to know why the last administration (you remember, from the Party of Personal Responsibility?) covered this up - and why the Obama administration isn't doing anything about it:

WASHINGTON—The military lawyer that represents an Afghan youth who spent roughly seven years in U.S. custody says the Defense Department has repeatedly ignored his requests for a war crimes investigation into the detainee’s treatment.

Air Force Maj. David Frakt, the attorney for former detainee Mohammed Jawad, says over the past 16 months he sent multiple memos to Defense Department and military leaders asking them to account for what a military judge called “abusive conduct and cruel and inhuman treatment” of his client. Jawad, who was arrested when he says he was 12 years old for allegedly tossing a grenade at U.S. military, was moved from cell to cell 112 times during a 14-day period to disrupt his sleep patterns, according to military documents. Frakt said he believes the treatment constituted torture, violated the Geneva Convention, war crime laws and Defense Department regulations.

“Why has no one – no one has been held remotely accountable for this,” Frakt said in an interview with Raw Story. “This is a mandatory investigation. It’s not optional, you can’t just sweep it under the rug… but they did as far as I can tell.”

As first reported in The Washington Independent, Frakt wrote in memos to Defense Department officials: “Accordingly, I believe I have an affirmative obligation to report the incident to my chain of command,” listing military rules that mandate reporting possible war crimes to a superior.

Both a federal district court judge and a U.S. military commission judge have questioned the use of sleep deprivation, also called the “frequent flyer” program, on Jawad.

When military officials changed Jawad’s cell 112 times between May 7 and May 20, 2004, roughly once every three hours, military Judge Stephen Henley, a U.S. Army colonel ruled “the scheme was calculated to profoundly disrupt his mental senses.” Although officials were allowed to use such tactics during interrogation, Jawad’s attorney Frakt said he was not interrogated months before or months after the sleep deprivation occurred.

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September 08, 2009 News Corp

Dave N.: Bill O'Reilly sent out one of his ambush news crews, led by a young shaved-head punk named Dan Bank, to attack Nina Ginsberg, who is a legal counsel for the ACLU's John Adams Project, as she walked out of a drugstore.

She managed to ask him (without it being edited out) why he was confronting her while she was out doing her shopping. It's also clear that a substantial part of the conversation was cut, since it resumes when she is out at her car.

Mostly, she keeps pointing out that Bank's questions are based on factual falsehoods -- lies. Yet he keeps asking them anyway. Like a good Fox right-wing propaganda attack dog.

From The Onion:

In The Know panelists discuss the closing of the controversial detainee labyrinth and debate whether the Minotaur's sternum-stomping-by-hooves interrogation technique yielded valuable intelligence.

h/t C&L'er Stupid Git

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July 23, 2009 News Corp:

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed outrage to his combatant commanders after seeing some of the detainee abuse photos now under wraps by the Obama administration, according to a highly sensitive memo obtained Wednesday by FOX News.

In the July 10 memo to service chiefs and battlefield commanders, Mullen says he is "appalled by even the suggestion that someone in an American uniform would behave in such a way."

The photos depict clear instances of abuse -- though not torture -- that included beatings and in some cases deaths during battlefield detentions in Iraq from 2001-2006.

He is the first top military commander to admit that what were in those photos included what would be described as "abuse."

The photos Mullen viewed are among thousands now at the heart of an ACLU lawsuit against the administration. President Obama ordered the photos not be released after commanders, including Gen. Ray Odierno, argued that their release could jeopardize the lives of American soldiers serving in Iraq and elsewhere.

And last month, the Senate quietly passed a ban on the release of any detainee abuse photos, preventing Obama from signing an executive order classifying the photos, a move that would have surely inflamed the left after his campaign promises for more "sunlight" in Washington.

Shortly after Obama's May 13 decision not to release the photos, Mullen was shown the first batch of these classified pictures. A few weeks later he was shown another batch. This was a couple weeks prior to a meeting of combatant commanders at the Pentagon.

Aides say Mullen "stewed on it for a little while" and eventually decided to put something in writing to the commanders.

According to a description of the photos, Mullen saw badly beaten detainees and in some cases detainees who had been killed.

What he saw in the photos included signs of "heavy handed physical abuse, beating."

"Some were horrific. He was disgusted by what he saw," a Mullen spokesman said.

Unlike the now infamous photos from Abu Ghraib prison, all these photos were taken during battlefield interrogations before imprisonment. In the memo, Mullen demands his forces be trained so they understand this kind of thing should never happen again.

July 23, 2009 C-SPAN

Part 1

Part 2

Spencer was at a Senate hearing and this is very disturbing.

Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective. Asked by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) the politically difficult but entirely fair question about whether terrorism detainees acquitted in courts could be released in the United States, Johnson said that “as a matter of legal authority,” the administration’s powers to detain someone under the law of war don’t expire for a detainee after he’s acquitted in court. “If you have authority under the law of war to detain someone” under the Supreme Court’s Hamdi ruling, “that is true irrespective of what happens on the prosecution side.”

Martinez looked surprised. “So the prosecution is moot?” he asked.

“No, no, not in my judgment,” Johnson said. But the scenario he outlined strongly suggested it is. If an administration review panel “determines this person is a security threat” and “for some reason is not convicted of a lengthy prison sentence, I think we have the authority to continue to detain someone” under “law of war authority” as granted by the September 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, Johnson said. And beyond that source of authority “we have the authority in the first place.” I’m no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like Johnson is claiming inherent presidential authority from the Constitution to detain someone after he’s been acquitted in court if the president believes that person to be a security threat. [Update: I think I'm wrong about that. Johnson is claiming authority from the law-of-war construct for such detentions, and that doesn't stem from any constitutional interpretation of inherent power. Apologies.]

Oh, and Johnson also suggested that the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay might remain open after January 2010, since “you can’t prosecute some significant subset of 220 people before January.” He said the administration will continue to detain some of those Guantanamo detainees, “whether at Guantanamo or somewhere else.”

Glenn Greenwald has much more about the "Unjustice system."

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June 08, 2009 ABC News:

For 7½ years, Lakhdar Boumediene was known simply by a number: "10005."

These were the digits assigned to him when he arrived at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, swept up in a post-Sept. 11 dragnet and accused of plotting to blow up the U.S. and British Embassies in Sarajevo.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Boumediene said the interrogators at Gitmo never once asked him about this alleged plot, which he denied playing any part it.

"I'm a normal man," said Boumediene, who at the time of his arrest worked for the Red Crescent, providing help to orphans and others in need. "I'm not a terrorist."

The 43-year-old Algerian is now back with his wife and two daughters, a free man in France after a Republican judge found the evidence against Boumediene lacking. He is best known from the landmark Supreme Court case last year, Boumediene v. Bush, which said detainees have the right to challenge their detention in court.

That decision was a stunning rebuke of the Bush administration's policies on terror suspects. It set up a ruling by District Court Judge Richard Leon, a former counsel to Republicans in Congress appointed to the bench by Bush, that there was no credible evidence to keep Boumediene detained.

After what Boumediene described as a 7½ year nightmare, he is now a free man. Boumediene: "I don't think. I'm sure" about torture.

Continue reading at ABC News....