01/21/12: CNN reports that Yemen's parliament approved a controversial law Saturday that ensures President Ali Abdullah Saleh complete immunity from prosecution. The law was delayed for weeks as Saleh insisted on specific changes guaranteeing his aides partial protection from legal actions. In return, Saleh will step down from power in Yemen next month after ruling the country for more than 33 years. Yemeni Information Minister Ali al-Amrani said the law was the best option for the country and that people can now look forward for change and development.
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12/12/11: ABC News reports that the US Special Operations commander who directed the operation that killed Osama bin Laden defended the unpopular night raids on homes in Afghanistan that have provoked the fury of the country's president and held up a security agreement with the United States. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called for an end to the raids, in which troops borne in by helicopter search homes, because he says the forces conducting them treat too many civilians as if they were insurgents and violate privacy in an intensely conservative society. McRaven said in a rare interview with journalists late Saturday that the U.S. understands Afghan concerns about night raids and has allowed its partner Afghan forces to take the lead in those and other operations.
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12/07/11: The New York Times reports that Iran’s foreign minister promised that Iranian protesters will not overrun and vandalize any more embassies in Tehran, the way they did Britain’s diplomatic facilities in Tehran last week. “This will not recur,” the foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi, said in an interview published Tuesday in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a leading German newspaper. He called the pillaging of Britain’s embassy and a residential compound on November 30 “unlawful actions.”
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11/15/11: The Washington Post reports that further reductions in nuclear weapons beyond those agreed to in the New START agreement with Russia are being discussed within the Obama administration as part of the Defense Department review of future spending. Maybe it is time for thinking outside what is still a Cold War nuclear box, which focuses on the United States having enough secure nuclear weapons to deter some other country from using theirs against America or its allies, today or in the future.
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11/13/11: The San Francisco Chronicle reports that several Republican presidential hopefuls say they would continue to hold terror suspects at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. In Saturday night's debate, businessman Herman Cain, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and Minnesota's Representative Michele Bachmann all say they want to keep the prison open, allow the use of controversial techniques to interrogate terrorists and use military courts to try the terrorism suspects who are held there.
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10/29/11: The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that a bipartisan group of lawmakers is asking FBI Director Robert Mueller and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to put Palestinians released from prison in a swap for an Israeli soldier on the terrorist watch list. In a letter this week to Mueller and Clinton, the lawmakers said the Palestinians who were convicted on various terrorism charges should not be allowed to enter the United States.
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10/23/11: The San Francisco Chronicle reports that tens of thousands of Basque separatists held a rally in the region’s largest city Saturday, two days after armed militant group ETA declared it was abandoning violence. Many Basque political leaders were present at the march in Bilbao, carrying banners saying “The Basque region wants solutions,” a reference to a long espoused yearning for greater regional autonomy. Some demonstrators could be heard shouting for a return of ETA prisoners to jails in the Basque region.
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09/27/11 The Washington Post reports that when Putin, currently Russia’s prime minister, makes the very short trip back to the Kremlin next May from his current digs, he will likely bring a tougher tone to Moscow’s engagement with the Obama administration, and the next administration, and possibly the one after that. “There is a really good chance that this makes the atmosphere more frosty,” said Fiona Hill, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. “We know that Putin is more distrustful of the relationship as a natural condition than Medvedev.”
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09/22/11: The Washington Post reports that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says the government’s main disaster aid account is “running on fumes” and could be tapped out by early next week. Napolitano says she’s counting on Congress to provide more aid money because without the additional relief dollars, there will be delays in getting disaster projects approved. She wouldn’t say what arrangements the Federal Emergency Management Agency has made to prepare in the event the money runs out.
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06/11/11: The New York Times reports that the Justice Department has eased restrictions preventing lawyers representing prisoners at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from reading the classified files about their clients that were leaked to WikiLeaks and then made widely available on the Internet. In guidance to the lawyers — who have security clearances, and thus are required to follow government rules for the handling of classified information — the department’s court security officer said Friday that they were now permitted to view the leaked documents on the Internet. But they are still not allowed to download, save or print the documents because they might contain restricted information.
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Commentary: What we still don’t know after September 11
09/18/11: The New York Review of Books features a new article by David Cole, addressing what, precisely, did and did not change after September 11, particularly with respect to law, liberty, and security. Cole discusses the response of the Bush and Obama administrations to terrorism, concluding that one of the most important lessons of the past decade may be that the rule of law has proved far more resilient than many would have predicted.
September 18, 2011 at 11:10 AM in Judiciary / Cases, Executive Branch, Law Enforcement / Criminal Law, Homeland Security / Immigration, Terrorism / Counterterrorism, Politics, International Law / Law of War / Human Rights, Constitutional Law, Detainees / Guantanamo, Secrecy / Transparency / FOIA, State Secrets Privilege / CIPA, Surveillance / Privacy, Terrorist Finance / Material Support, Commentary / Opinion | Permalink