I’ve written about this before, but this is a good time to revisit the issue.  From today’s NYT: 1 in 7 Freed Detainees Rejoins Fight, Report Foun:
An unreleased Pentagon report provides new details concluding that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, [...]

From the NYT: Democrats in Senate Block Money to Close Guantánamo
Harry Reid argues, “However, this is neither the time nor the bill to deal with this. Democrats under no circumstances will move forward without a comprehensive, responsible plan from the president. We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.”
I often [...]

I really just don’t know what to say about these decisions:

Obama Reverses Promise to Release Abuse Photos
Obama Set to Revive Military Commissions: Changes Would Boost Detainee Rights

We simply need full disclosure on criminal conduct in the “war on terror” and Obama has become the single greatest impediment to that kind of disclosure.  Let’s be brutally [...]

Building on Josh Marshall’s similarly titled post….
He writes:
There’s a ‘tough enough to make the tough calls’ conceit behind almost all the pro-torture advocacy. Put in Dick Cheney terms, the courage to go to the dark side. But this conceit seems wholly belied by the unwillingness of the torture advocates to actually call it ‘torture’, as [...]

I just put up a short essay at Huffington Post. The hook is:
In politics, final victory occurs not when you gain power but when your opponents adopt your policies as their own. Let us make no mistake; the new defense budget unveiled earlier this month marks the final victory of the neoconservative worldview.
The full [...]

From the NYT: Obama Resisting Push for Interrogation Panel
President Obama is really trying hard to stay on the tightrope. I think he genuinely wants to try to achieve some sort of post-partisanship. And he realizes that a “Truth Commission” would be tremendously politically divisive. I mean, let’s not mince words. Bush, [...]

I have a new piece up at Small Wars Journal.
The essay will make four interrelated points. First, the attacks of 9/11 though spectacular in consequence, were simple in execution. Second, the IED networks that have proliferated in Afghanistan and Iraq are orders of magnitude more complex than the portion of al Qaeda that planned and [...]

Crossposted from:
And… We Still Don’t Get It… Or Do We?
The New York Times has been reporting about concerns about developments in Iraq focusing particularly on the current state of the Awakening Councils and Sons of Iraq (many of them former insurgents who switched sides) (Troops Arrest an Awakening Council Leader in Iraq, Setting Off Fighting) [...]