WAR ON TERRORISM NEWSLETTER #10

OMNI NEWSLETTER #10 ON US “WAR ON TERRORISM,” #10,  January 16,  2014.    Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace.  (#4 Jan. 19, 2012; #5 May 29, 2012; #6 July 19, 2012; #7 Sept. 27, 2012; #8 May 28, 2013; #9 July 19, 2013).

The multifarious methods of oppression employed by an oppressor state would fill an encyclopedia.  Here are two.

Leaders often call attention to external enemies as a device to distract their own subjects from their criticism of their own leaders and to allow them to blow off steam.  

Another powerful method of controlling the populace is the control of language, of rhetorical devices.  A specific figure is euphemism, an effective way of hiding folly and depravity.  For example, our government has rebranded US state assassination as “high value targeting.”

Another:  torture.  Another:  assassination.  Another: training indigenous police and soldiers.

Urgently needed: Encyclopedia of US Imperial Complex, of which the War on Terror is a part.

 

“Politicians and economists are blurring the whole picture…A small group of historically aggressive nations is still ruling the world. The economic system which it promotes has nothing to do with humanism, with solidarity, compassion, willingness to share. We have billions of people rotting in gutters all over the world; hundreds of millions of people dying from curable or at least controllable diseases. The rich world is still plundering the rest of the planet; stealing raw materials, employing people for a pittance.... If poor nations resist, the rich world stages coups or something worse.... And it is all legitimized through the United Nations, which was sidelined, made truly impotent...”   Andre Vitchek, quoted by Ron Ridenour.

"I refuse to live in a country like this, and I'm not leaving"
Michael Moore

 

Here is the link to all OMNI newsletters:
http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/   Here is the link to the Index:  http://www.omnicenter.org/omni-newsletter-general-index/

 Related Newsletters:  Afghanistan, Air War,  Allende’s Overthrow (9-11), Bases, Bush, CIA, Domestic Repression, Drones, Fear, Guantanamo, Homeland Security, Imperialism, Indefinite Detention, Iraq, Lawlessness (USA),  McCarthyism (domestic and foreign), Militarism, National Security State, 9-11, Obama, Pakistan,  Pentagon,  Secrecy, State Terrorism,  Surveillance, Terrorism,  Torture , War Crimes, Wars, and more.

My blog:
War Department/Peace Department

http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/

See:  9/11 Newsletters

“Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.  War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. . . .”   James Madison, “Political Observations,”  April 20, 1795.

“Number of private U.S. citizens killed in terrorist attacks in 2010: 15.  Number killed by falling televisions: 16.”  (“Harper’s Index,” August 2012, p. 9).   Yet our warrior leaders and their war-monger supporters have produced two full-scale “anti-terror” wars (and three small-scale invasions) to defend “America” and “freedom” at the price of trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of innocent people.  In my 9 newsletters on the “War on Terror” plenty of evidence supports the idea of a War on Falling Televisions!

Or seriously, INSTEAD OF A WAR ON TERRORISM LET’S DECLARE WAR ON IGNORANCE, WAR ON HATRED, WAR ON KILLING

Petition for Peace:

I just signed the petition "The US President and US Congress: End wars and the attack on our civil liberties here in the US" on Change.org.

It's important. Will you sign it too? Here's the link:

http://www.change.org/petitions/the-us-president-and-us-congress-end-wars-and-the-attack-on-our-civil-liberties-here-in-the-us?share_id=fGatKXIWJr&utm_campaign=signature_receipt&utm_medium=email&utm_source=share_petition

Thanks!  Dick

Contents of #4, #5, #6, #7 at end.

Contents #8  May 28, 2013

Sirota, “Terrorism” Is Retaliation for US Terrorism

PBS Frontline,  Dana Priest and William Arkin’s “Top Secret America” Notes by Dick

Dick Bennett, Puritan Roots of US Permanent War, Connecting Fulbright’s The Arrogance of Power

Boston Murderers Are Terrorists But US Not State Terrorist?  3 Essays

   Greenwald, Scheer, Ackerman

Bello, Permanent Prisoners, No Charge, No Trial, the Wars Fought for “Freedom”?!

Honigsberg, Human Consequences of War on Terror: Mass Killing, Maiming, Exile

Brooks and Manza, Public Opinion Toward War on Terror, Fear Justifies Mass Slaughter

Film on Canada’s “War on ‘Terror’”:  “The Secret Trial 5”:  US  Infecting Other Nations

Tharoor, Canada’s Terror Plot

Singham, FBI Sets Up “Terrorists’ for Permanent Fear

Greenwald on Andrew Sullivan

Aronson, War on Terror a US Creation

Sibel Edmonds, CIA Whistleblower Gagged 

Looking Back

Sirota, Draft Ended 40 Years Ago June 30, 1973.  Did it ensure Permanent War for the Warmongers?

Woodworth, Reviewing Evidence of 9/11

Looking Ahead

Bob Baskin, Peace Alliance:   President Obama’s Speech to Decrease War on Terror

More to be checked.

Contents #9

OMNI Book Forum July 17

Support Cong. Lee’s Bill to Repeal AUMF/Authorization for Use of Military Force

Gibson, Repeal the “Patriot Act”

President Obama’s Speech on Counter-Terrorism

Noam Chomsky, US War of Terror

Ellen Ray, 2 books

Aaronson, FBI’s Construction of Terror War

Mayer, The Dark Side, Rev. Bettie Lu Lancaster

Herman, Taking Liberties

Contents #10

TomGram and Nick Turse

Greenwald Film, Unmanned

Scahill, Perpetual War

Filkins, Rise of Taliban, Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq

Chatterjee, CIA Bungled War on Terror (War OF Terror)

Mazzetti, CIA and Drones, How CIA Became Mossad

Engelhardt,  CIA Kidnapping Case in Italy

UN Special Rapporteur Report on Extra-Judicial Killing

Davies, War on Terrorism Good for Business

Neumeister, Ghailani Appeals

Johnsen, Al-Qaeda in Yemen

January 16, 2013 Tomgram: Nick Turse, Secret Wars and Black Ops Blowback [Note for TomDispatch Readers in or around New York City: OnFriday, January 17th at 7 pm, Nick Turse will be discussing his bestselling book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (just out in paperback), with TomDispatch regular Chase Madar at a favorite independent bookstore of mine -- Brooklyn's Book Court. For more details, click here. Tom]  These days, when I check out the latest news on Washington’s global war-making, I regularly find at least one story that fits a new category in my mind that I call: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?  Take last Saturday's Washington Post report by Craig Whitlock on the stationing of less than two dozen U.S. “military advisers” in war-torn Somalia. They’ve been there for months, it turns out, and their job is “to advise and coordinate operations with African troops fighting to wrest control of the country from the al-Shabab militia.” If you leave aside the paramilitarized CIA (which has long had a secret base and prison in that country), those advisers represent the first U.S. military boots on the ground there since the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident of 1993. As soon as I read the piece, I automatically thought: Given the history of the U.S. in Somalia, including the encouragement of a disastrous 2006 Ethiopian invasion of that country, what could possibly go wrong?  Some days when I read the news, I can’t help but think of the late Chalmers Johnson; on others, the satirical newspaper the Onioncomes to mind. If Washington did it -- and by “it,” I mean invade and occupy a country, intervene in a rebellion against an autocrat, intervene in a civil war, launch a drone campaign against a terror outfit, or support and train local forces against some group the U.S. doesn’t like -- you already know all you need to know. Any version of the above has repeatedly translated into one debacle or disaster after another. In the classic term of CIA tradecraft that Johnson took for the title of a book -- a post-9/11 bestseller -- send a drone over Yemenwith the intent to kill, kick down doors in Afghanistan or Iraq, put U.S. boots back on the ground in Somalia and you’re going to be guaranteed “unintended consequences” and undoubtedly some form of “blowback” as well. To use a sports analogy, if since 9/11 Washington has been the globe’s cleanup hitter, it not only hasn’t managed to knock a single ball out of the park, it’s struck out enough times to make those watching dizzy, and it’s batting .000.  You would think that someone in the nation’s capital might have drawn a lesson or two from such a record, something simple like: Don’t do it!But -- here’s where the Onion should be able to run riot -- there clearly is no learning curve in Washington. Tactics change, but the ill-conceived, ill-begotten, ill-fated Global War on Terror (GWOT), which long ago outran its own overblown name, continues without end, and without either successes of any lasting sort or serious reconsideration. In this period, al-Qaeda, a small-scale organization capable of immodest terror acts every couple of years and, despite the fantasies of Homeland and Fox News, without a sleeper cell in the United States, managed, with Washington’s help, to turn itself into a global franchise. The more the Bush and Obama administrations went after it, the more al-Qaeda wannabe organizations sprang up across the Greater Middle East and north Africa like mushrooms after a soaking rain.  The earliest GWOTsters, all Onion-style satirists, believed that the U.S. was destined to rule the world till Hell froze over. Their idea of asnappy quip was “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran,” and they loved to refer to the Greater Middle East as “the arc of instability.” That, mind you, was before they sent in the U.S. military. Today, 12 years later, that long-gone world looks like an arc of stability, while the U.S. has left the Greater Middle East, from North Africa to Syria, from Yemen to Afghanistan, a roiling catastrophe zone of conflict, refugees, death, and destruction. As it happened, the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq proved to be the only genuine weapons of mass destruction around, loosing, among other things, what could prove to be the great religious war of modern times.  And the lessons drawn? As TomDispatch regular Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam(just out in paperback), suggests in today’s post, the Obama administration has overseen the reorganization of the Global War on Terror as a vast secret operation of unrivaled proportions. It now oversees a planetary surveillance network of staggering size and reach (itself leading to historic blowback) and the spread of a secret military spawned inside the U.S. military and now undergoing typicallymindless expansion on a gargantuan scale. What could possibly go wrong? Tom The Special Ops Surge:  America’s Secret War in 134 Countries  By Nick Turse They operate in the green glow of night vision in Southwest Asia and stalk through the jungles of South America. Theysnatch men from their homes in the Maghreb and shoot it outwith heavily armed militants in the Horn of Africa. They feel the salty spray while skimming over the tops of waves from the turquoise Caribbean to the deep blue Pacific. They conduct missions in the oppressive heat of Middle Eastern deserts and the deep freeze of Scandinavia. All over the planet, the Obama administration is waging a secret war whose full extent has never been fully revealed -- until now. Since September 11, 2001, U.S. Special Operations forces have grown in every conceivable way, from their numbers to their budget.  Most telling, however, has been the exponential rise in special ops deployments globally.  This presence -- now, in nearly 70% of the world’s nations -- provides new evidence of the size and scope of a secret war being waged from Latin America to the backlands of Afghanistan, from training missions with African allies to information operations launched in cyberspace.  In the waning days of the Bush presidency, Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed in about 60 countries around the world.  By 2010, that number had swelled to 75, according to Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post. In 2011, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told TomDispatch that the total would reach 120. Today, that figure has risen higher still. Click here to read more of this dispatch.

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Robert Greenwald's Drone documentary "Unmanned: America's Drone Wars."

(from Carl)           http://unmanned.warcosts.com

Jeremy Scahill, Perpetual War: How Does the Global War on Terror Ever End?   TomDispatch, 29 October 13

Reader Supported News

Scahill writes: "... the day Obama was sworn in, a U.S. drone strike hit Yemen. It was the third such attack in that country in as many days. Despite the rhetoric from the president on the Capitol steps, there was abundant evidence that he would continue to preside over a country that is in a state of perpetual war." 
READ MORE

Perpetual War

Jeremy Scahill, Op-Ed: In January of this year, Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term as president of the United States. Just as he had promised when he began his first campaign for president six years earlier, he pledged again to turn the page on history and take U.S. foreign policy in a different direction. “A decade of war is now ending,” Obama declared. “We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.” READ  |  DISCUSS  |  SHARE

---

·                                 Culture

·                                           Books

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

In this book, journalist Filkins collects together his dispatches from various frontlines in Afghanistan and Iraq, says Jo Littler

o                                                        Jo Littler

o                                                        The Guardian, Friday 25 September 2009

1.                   The Forever War

2.                     : Dispatches from the War on Terror

3.                   by Dexter Filkins

4.                  

5.                    

Buy the book

In The Forever War, New York Times journalist Filkins collects together his dispatches from various frontlines in Afghanistan and Iraq. The point of this book, we learn, is not to explain why these wars came about or to evaluate them; rather it is to provide a series of different portraits of how they feel to the various different parties involved. And so we get an up-close-and-personal view of what the ravages of war feel like to Taliban warlords, Metallica-playing marines, women suddenly forced to wear burkas, refugees on the move, orphaned children, Americans lying to themselves about progress and stray dogs in the city. Its collage of perspectives is startling not only because of its often obviously disturbing content (two-year-olds with artificial legs, people selling their children to buy food) but also because of the distance between wealthy and devastated worlds. It is a compliment to both books that The Forever War's snapshot structure has prompted many comparisons with Michael Herr's classic piece of reportage from Vietnam, Dispatches.

07 December 13 PM, Reader Supported News

Pratap Chatterjee, How the CIA Bungled the War on Terror 
TomDispatch 
Chatterjee writes: "Think of it as the CIA's plunge into Hollywood - or into the absurd. As recent revelations have made clear, that Agency's moves couldn't be have been more far-fetched or more real. In its post-9/11 global shadow war, it has employed both private contractors and some of the world's most notorious prisoners in ways that leave the latest episode of the Bourne films in the dust ..."
READ MORE

New York Times Sunday Book Review

Killing Machine

‘The Way of the Knife,’ by Mark Mazzetti

Veronique de Viguerie/Getty Images

Predator drones in Kandahar, Afghanistan, 2006.

Review By FRED KAPLAN   : May 10, 2013

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It’s hard to remember, but for the last quarter of the 20th century, the C.I.A. took no part in assassinating bad guys. How the agency transformed itself into “a killing machine, an organization consumed with manhunting,” is the subject of Mark Mazzetti’s fascinating, trenchant, sometimes tragicomic account, “The Way of the Knife.”

THE WAY OF THE KNIFE:  The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth.   By Mark Mazzetti

Illustrated. 381 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 propelled this shift, but even then, the resistance from within was fierce. Mazzetti — a New York Times reporter who was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team — has done much to document the C.I.A.’s use and abuse of its new powers. Here he traces the bitter fights between Langley’s old guard and Young Turks over whether the agency should use the new armed Predator drones to hunt and kill even Osama bin Laden. A few months earlier, there wouldn’t have been so much as a debate. Mazzetti quotes a former counterterrorism chief telling the 9/11 Commission that, before the Twin Towers’ fall, he would have refused a direct order to take out Al Qaeda’s leader. The agency’s motto back then, when it came to such matters: “We’re not Mossad.”

This reticence stemmed from Senator Frank Church’s mid-1970s hearings, which uncovered the C.I.A.’s long, dark history of black-bag jobs and inspired President Ford to sign an executive order barring assassinations of foreign leaders. The probe scarred most of the spies who survived it (“the post-Church generation,” Mazzetti calls them) with a deep reluctance to go down that alley ever again. Mazzetti generally sides with the old-school resisters, but not dogmatically. He notes the absurdity of their position, taken at National Security Council meetings in the final year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, that it would be fine to kill bin Laden with a Tomahawk cruise missile but not with a bullet between the eyes.

After 9/11, President Bush signed his own executive order, restoring the powers that the C.I.A. lost in the wake of the Church hearings. To Mazzetti, a huge drawback of this shift has been a narrowing of the agency’s focus. Pushed by presidents (Obama no less than Bush) to find Qaeda operatives, intelligence officers spend less time on “broader subjects” like the level of support for Al Qaeda in the Muslim world or the possibility that the damage wreaked by American drone strikes might be “radicalizing a new generation of militants.”

In the late summer of 2011, a few days before David Petraeus became C.I.A. director, Michael Hayden, one of his predecessors (and a fellow retired general), warned him of a “real danger” that the manhunting was “consuming” the agency. The C.I.A. is “the nation’s global intelligence service,” Mazzetti quotes Hayden as saying. “And you’ve got to discipline yourself to carve out time to do something else besides counterterrorism.”

Petraeus entered Langley determined to widen its scope, but in his 14 months on the job, the trends that Hayden had warned him about continued. Hayden of course had done much to accelerate those trends during his own tenure. As Mazzetti puts it (with perhaps slight exaggeration), a spy agency that was criticized on 9/11 “as bumbling and risk-averse had, under the watchful eye of four successive C.I.A. directors, gone on a killing spree.”

Mazzetti offers a few persuasive reasons why Obama, to the surprise of many, has embraced this spree with even more gusto than Bush. First is the simple fact that, since Bush left office, the drone program has matured, drone production has spiked and the cadre of drone crews has swelled.

The second reason, one laden with irony, is that, in 2004, a report by the C.I.A.’s inspector general condemned the agency’s program of detaining and interrogating terrorists (at least its harsher aspects) as “unauthorized” and “inhumane.” The fear spread among C.I.A. officers that they might face criminal prosecution and that the agency could be pummeled if the political winds shifted, as they had 30 years earlier. Forced to rethink the war on terror, officials saw that armed drones and targeted killings “offered a new direction,” Mazzetti writes. They seemed “cleaner, less personal” and “risk-free.” And so “the C.I.A. began to see its future: not as the long-term jailers of America’s enemies but as a military organization that could erase them.” Obama, who had long opposed the enhanced interrogations, agreed.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate’s War Stories columnist and the author of “The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War.”

A version of this review appears in print on May 12, 2013, on page BR28 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Killing Machine.

July 28, 2013
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Luck Was a Lady Last Week

Now You See Him, Now You Don’t 
Living in a One-Superpower World (or Edward Snowden vs. Robert Seldon Lady) 
By Tom Engelhardt

He came and he went: that was the joke that circulated in 1979 when 70-year-old former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller had a heart attack and died in his Manhattan townhouse in the presence of his evening-gown-clad 25-year-old assistant.  In a sense, the same might be said of retired CIA operative Robert Seldon Lady.

Recently, Lady proved a one-day wonder. After years in absentia -- poof! -- he reappeared out of nowhere on the border between Panama and Costa Rica, and made the news when Panamanian officials took him into custody on an Interpol warrant.  The CIA's station chief in Milan back in 2003, he had achieved brief notoriety for overseeing a la dolce vita version of extraordinary rendition as part of Washington’s Global War on Terror.  His colleagues kidnapped Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, a radical Muslim cleric and terror suspect, off the streets of Milan, and rendered him via U.S. airbases in Italy and Germany to the torture chambers of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. Lady evidently rode shotgun on that transfer.

His Agency associates proved to be the crew that couldn’t spook straight.  They left behind such a traceable trail of five-star-hotel and restaurant bills, charges on false credit cards, and unencrypted cell phone calls that the Italian government tracked them down, identified them, and charged 23 of them, Lady included, with kidnapping.

Lady fled Italy, leaving behind a multimillion-dollar villa near Turin meant for his retirement.  (It was later confiscated and sold to make restitution payments to Nasr.)  Convicted in absentia in 2009, Lady received a nine-year sentence (later reduced to six).  He had by then essentially vanished after admitting to an Italian newspaper, “Of course it was an illegal operation. But that’s our job. We’re at war against terrorism.”

Last week, the Panamanians picked him up.  It was the real world equivalent of a magician’s trick.  He was nowhere, then suddenly in custody and in the news, and then -- poof again! -- he wasn’t.  Just 24 hours after the retired CIA official found himself under lock and key, he was flown out of Panama, evidently under the protection of Washington, and in mid-air, heading back to the United States, vanished a second time.

State Department spokesperson Marie Harf told reporters on July 19th, “It's my understanding that he is in fact either en route or back in the United States."  So there he was, possibly in mid-air heading for the homeland and, as far as we know, as far as reporting goes, nothing more.  Consider it the CIA version of a miracle.  Instead of landing, he just evaporated.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

PHILIP ALSTON, REPORT BY UN SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR FOR EXTRA-JUDICIAL KILLING

http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/14session/A.HRC.14.24.Add6.pdf

·                                 UN: Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions

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UN: Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions

Author: Philip Alston
May 28, 2010

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State policies permitting the use of targeted killings are often justified as a necessary and legitimate response to "terrorism" and "asymmetric warfare," but have had the very problematic effect of blurring and expanding the boundaries of the applicable legal frameworks. This report describes the new targeted killing policies and addresses the main legal issues that have arisen.

In the legitimate struggle against terrorism, too many criminal acts have been re-characterized so as to justify addressing them within the framework of the law of armed conflict. New technologies, and especially unarmed combat aerial vehicles or “drones”, have been added into this mix, by making it easier to kill targets, with fewer risks to the targeting State.

The result of this mix has been a highly problematic blurring and expansion of the boundaries of the applicable legal frameworks – human rights law, the laws of war, and the law applicable to the use of inter-state force. Even where the laws of war are clearly applicable, there has been a tendency to expand who may permissibly be targeted and under what conditions. Moreover, the States concerned have often failed to specify the legal justification for their policies, to disclose the safeguards in place to ensure that targeted killings are in fact legal and accurate, or to provide accountability mechanisms for violations. Most troublingly, they have refused to disclose who has been killed, for what reason, and with what collateral consequences. The result has been the displacement of clear legal standards with a vaguely defined licence to kill, and the creation of a major accountability vacuum.

In terms of the legal framework, many of these practices violate straightforward applicable legal rules. To the extent that customary law is invoked to justify a particular interpretation of an international norm, the starting point must be the policies and practice of the vast majority of States and not those of the handful which have conveniently sought to create their own personalized normative frameworks. It should be added that many of the justifications for targeted killings offered by one or other of the relevant States in particular current contexts would in all likelihood not gain their endorsement if they were to be asserted by other States in the future.

This report describes the publicly available information about new targeted killing policies and addresses the main legal issues that have arisen. It identifies areas in which legal frameworks have been clearly violated or expanded beyond their permissible limits; where legal issues are unclear, it suggests approaches which would enable the international community to return to a normative framework that is consistent with its deep commitment to protection of the right to life, and the minimization of exceptions to that constitutive principle.

Full Text of Document

NICOLAS J. S. DAVIES, “FROM OHLENDORF TO OBAMA.”  Z MAGAZINE (September 2013).   The US political and economic system of legalized bribery that promotes leaders who can win the votes of the public while serving only the interests of the wealthy has also created the War on Terrorism as part of the inverted totalitarianism we witness today. Davies is author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.  –Dick

Tuesday Oct 29, 2013 1:37 PM PT

Travel

NY court: Long interrogation OK before terror case

By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press

Updated 11:13 am, Thursday, October 24, 2013

0NEW YORK (AP) — In a boost to U.S. efforts to gain intelligence from terrorism suspects before prosecuting them, a federal appeals court on Thursday upheld the conviction of an ex-Guantanamo detainee in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected arguments that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani's long detention overseas by the Central Intelligence Agency violated his constitutional right to a speedy trial, concluding that he was properly convicted and sentenced to life in prison for his role in the attacks that killed 224 people, including a dozen Americans.

Ghailani's lawyer, Peter Quijano, promised a Supreme Court appeal.

The court seemed to embrace an opportunity to say that evidence necessary to prosecute in U.S. civilian courts and the legal rights of a defendant are not necessarily spoiled by efforts to obtain intelligence from terrorism suspects.

"This appeal presents a question bound to arise from the government's efforts to obtain actionable and time-sensitive intelligence necessary to thwart acts of terror, while still bringing those charged with committing crimes of terrorism against Americans to justice in an orderly fashion under the laws of our country," Circuit Judge Jose A. Cabranes wrote.

The three-judge panel concluded Ghailani's right to a speedy trial was not violated, and it rejected his lawyers' arguments that the government may never bring a defendant to trial after detaining him for national security purposes. Quijano, though, said in an email statement that he never argued that the government could never bring a defendant to trial after detaining him for national security purposes.

"The government did not act expeditiously to afford Ahmed Ghailani a trial after subjecting him to enhanced interrogation techniques and then forcing him to languish for years at Guantanamo Bay," Quijano said. "A claim of national security does not and cannot suspend and vitiate one's fundamental right to a speedy trial. Here, a delay of more than five years — during which the defendant was tortured to extract information — was constitutionally excessive."

Last week, Abu Anas al-Libi, also known as Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, pleaded not guilty to terrorism charges when he was brought to a Manhattan courtroom after he was snatched off the streets of Libya and subjected to a week of questioning aboard an American warship. He is charged in the same embassy attacks. Republicans in Congress have demanded he be sent to the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for indefinite interrogation.

In supporting its conclusions in the Ghailani case, the 2nd Circuit noted that the Supreme Court "has repeatedly held that the government may purposely delay trials for significant periods of time, so long as, on balance, the public and private interests render the delay reasonable."

The court also rejected arguments that Ghailani was prejudiced for speedy trial purposes by his treatment during his CIA detention.

The Sixth Amendment's speedy trial clause "protects defendants against prejudice caused by delays in their trials, not against the harms of interrogation," Cabranes wrote.

Ghailani, 39, served as Osama bin Laden's cook and bodyguard after the al-Qaida suicide bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. He had been arrested in Pakistan in 2004, transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006 and moved to Manhattan for trial in 2009.

He was convicted in 2010 of a single count of conspiring to destroy government buildings and was acquitted of 280 charges that he took part in the bombings. Prosecutors said he helped an al-Qaida cell buy a truck and components for explosives for one of the bombings. He is serving life at the United States Penitentiary in Florence, Colo.

Ghailani had claimed he was tortured at a secret CIA detention site after his arrest in Pakistan. U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan had imposed the maximum sentence, saying that whatever Ghailani suffered "pales in comparison to the suffering and the horror" caused by the nearly simultaneous attacks.

The Last Refuge:YEMEN, AL-QAEDA, AND AMERICA'S WAR IN ARABIA

Gregory D. Johnsen (Author).  Norton, 2012.

Overview | Inside the Book

A gripping account of how al-Qaeda in Yemen rebounded from an initial defeat to once again threaten the United States.

Far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States and al-Qaeda are fighting a clandestine war of drones and suicide bombers in an unforgiving corner of Arabia. 
The Last Refuge charts the rise, fall, and resurrection of al-Qaeda in Yemen over the last thirty years, detailing how a group that the United States once defeated has now become one of the world’s most dangerous threats. An expert on Yemen who has spent years on the ground there, Gregory D. Johnsen uses al-Qaeda’s Arabic battle notes to reconstruct their world as they take aim at the United States and its allies. Johnsen brings readers in-side al-Qaeda’s training camps and safe houses as the terrorists plot poison attacks and debate how to bring down an airliner on Christmas Day. The Last Refuge is an eye-opening look at the successes and failures of fighting a new type of war in one of the most turbulent countries in the world.

ENDORSEMENTS & REVIEWS

“Gregory Johnsen has written a break-through book on one of the most under-reported and misunderstood stories of the post 9-11 era. Penned in gripping prose and with incredible attention to detail, The Last Refuge unfolds with the pace of an action novel. But this story is all too true. If we ignore the widening covert war in Yemen and fail to learn from its complicated history, we do so at our own peril. Years from now, Johnsen will be seen as one of the few who got it right.” — Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestseller,Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

Contents of #4

Cole and Lobel, Less Safe, Less Free

Costs of Privatized War on Terror

Klare: Al Qaeda to China

Obama, Oil, China

Allende to Bin Laden

Mother Jones: FBI vs. Muslims, Continued Rendition

JPN: Islamophobia Around the World

Younge: Bigotry and Europe’s Terrorists

FAIR: Perceiving “Islamic Terror” in Norway

Contents of #5

Bacevitch, What Is It?

European Nations and US

Engelhardt and Bacevich, Special Operations

Who’s Winning?

FBI’s Manufactured Plots

Silverstein, “Terrorism Expert”

In Colombia

Contents of #6

Two Terrorists:

   Shakir Hamoodi

   Tarek Mahanna

Bacevitch, Obama’s Secret Ops

Fox News Misinformation

Two Books on Terrorism

Contents of #7

Chomsky, Liberties Destroyed

Hedges, NDAA Lawsuit

Bolen, NDAA Lawsuit

AFSC Defends Salah

Pal, “Islam” Means Peace

Chomsky, Bibliography

END WAR ON TERRORISM NEWSLETTER #10