Five individuals suspected of being involved in plotting the September 11th attacks are due for arraignment on May 5. They are to be formally charged with “terrorism-related crimes that could bring the death penalty if the defendants are convicted.” And, as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reports, the government under the Obama administration is [...]

The military commissions system, a system that many civil liberties groups consider to be a second-class system of justice, will be used to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others, who are accused of being involved in the September 11th attacks. The Defense Department also may give Mohammed and the four others the death penalty [...]

A poll released by the Washington Post and ABC News provided another opportunity to discuss how important civil liberties and national security issues are to liberals. The poll results showed majority support among liberals for President Barack Obama’s handling of “counterterrorism,” including his use of drone strikes and failure to close Guantanamo Bay prison. Scott [...]

Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan has published a tell-all book about what he saw and experienced in his role as an FBI interrogator on some of the biggest pre and post 9/11 terror cases. But his biggest revelation is that he and other FBI investigators “were deliberately kept out of the loop” on the existence of Al Qaeda terrorists identified by the CIA. The result, these operatives were not found, nor their links to their associates, the other 9/11 terrorists, and, well, we know the rest…

The deluge of 9/11 reflections and editorials on the aftermath has been overwhelming. It is tempting to contribute more commentary on how the US has responded to terrorism and what the government has treated as “terrorism” since the attacks. It would be easy to go through incident by incident and point to atrocity after atrocity, [...]

(photo: jorge dragon) Cassandra Vinograd and Bradley Klapper of the Associated Press conducted a partial review of US State Embassy cables released by WikiLeaks focusing on the sources the State Department “categorized as most risky.” The findings in the report cast further doubt on the official party line the government promotes when commenting on anything [...]

In the aftermath of the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) moved to increase airport security. Passengers flying “non-stop” to the US were subject to enhanced screenings, including in some cases a full-body pat-down. But, immediately, [...]

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (photo: marcn) Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who should be investigated and tried for war crimes that include but are not limited to torture and abuse of detainees, has mounted a tour to publicize his memoir In My Time. Waterboarding has historically been considered torture and a war crime yet [...]

(photo:Truthout.org) The batch of US State Embassy cables recently published by the media organization WikiLeaks contain a few assessments of how other countries’ governments manage their terrorism watch lists. The assessments reveal much about how countries have tried to implement security regimes for travel in the aftermath of 9/11. And, each assessment is in the form [...]

(photo: kalavinka) The liberal news magazine Mother Jones has published a major investigation of the FBI’s use of terrorism informants for investigations, such as sting operations. The investigation is the product of a year’s worth of work by Trevor Aaronson who looked into every terrorism case prosecuted by the government since 9/11. The project is [...]