The Case Against a Surge
Fareed Zakaria 10/10/2009 12:00:00 AM
It's true that the security situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated considerably. While it is nothing like Iraq in 2006—civilian deaths are a 10th as numerous—parts of the country are effectively controlled by the Taliban. Other parts are no man's land. But these areas are sparsely populated tracts of countryside. All the major population centers remain in the hands of the Kabul government. Is it worth the effort to gain control of all 35,000 Afghan villages scattered throughout the country? That goal has eluded most Afghan governments for the last 200 years and is a very high bar to set for the U.S. mission there.
JUSTICE
Life After Gitmo
Dan Ephron 11/26/2008 12:00:00 AM
With the economy commanding most of his attention, President-elect Barack Obama has probably had little time to work on his campaign pledge to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay. But he's benefited from two Guantánamo-related developments lately that are not of his own making. This week the Pentagon sent home Yemeni national Salim Hamdan, who had been convicted by a military tribunal earlier this year of acting as Osama bin Laden's driver. Hamdan was close to serving out his sentence but the Pentagon had been insisting it could hold him indefinitely as an enemy combatant. Separately, a Washington federal court ruled last week there was insufficient evidence to continue imprisoning five Bosnians and ordered the Bush administration to set them free. About 250 people remain locked up at Gitmo.
CAPITAL SOURCES
'A Long Way From Nuremberg'
Dan Ephron 8/11/2008 12:00:00 AM
Salim Hamdan, who served as Osama bin Laden's driver and was convicted at Guantánamo last week of providing material support for terrorism, could be back in his native Yemen before President Bush leaves office in January, according to his lawyers. Hamdan, 40, was the first Al Qaeda detainee to receive a full-blown trial at Guantánamo. A six-member military panel sentenced him last Thursday to 66 months in prison, minus time served (61 months). But it will be up to the Pentagon to decide whether to release Hamdan. The Bush administration has long held that it can continue imprisoning Al Qaeda members—even if they've served their sentence—until the War on Terror is over.
The Hamdan Case: Don’t Shoot the Driver
Michael Hirsh 8/6/2008 12:00:00 AM
The Bush administration needed a big win in the Salim Hamdan case at Guantánamo. It didn't get one. By convicting Osama bin Laden's former driver—the first "terrorist" to be tried under the first U.S. war-crimes tribunal since World War II—only of "material" support for terrorism, and absolving him of conspiracy to commit terrorism, the military judges provoked questions about what Hamdan was doing there in the first place. Is driving a car a war crime? The appeals court may decide not—in which case even this meager verdict could be thrown out.
TERROR
The Politics of Gitmo
Michael Isikoff 7/19/2008 12:00:00 AM
A federal judge's ruling last week threw a potential new curveball into the campaign debate over the War on Terror. Democratic appointed Judge James Robertson gave the Pentagon a green light to start the first-ever military-commission trial of a Gitmo detainee this week—that of Salim Hamdan, an alleged Qaeda member who served as Osama bin Laden's driver. (Robertson said that if defense lawyers see the trial as unfair, they can challenge the results later in federal court.) But the ramifications of the ruling go beyond that one case. Pentagon officials say it allows them to proceed with a series of military-commission trials, hearings and new charges that (coincidentally or not) will play out in the middle of the election campaign. Among them are hearings, if not the actual trial, in the conspiracy case involving 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. "We are moving forward," said J. D. Gordon, a spokesman for the Pentagon, noting that the next round of KSM hearings are slated for August and another commission trial, involving Canadian detainee Omar Khadr, is due to begin Oct. 8.
JUSTICE
Gitmo Grievances
Dan Ephron
You might think that the case against Mohammed Al-Qahtani would be relatively straightforward. The military prosecutors' file on him included strong circumstantial evidence that he was sent to the United States to be the 20th hijacker in the September 11 attacks. In August 2001, Qahtani traveled to Orlando, Fla., from Dubai, using the airline that a number of the other hijackers had used around the same time—but he was turned back at the airport by border authorities. About the time Qahtani's plane touched down in Orlando, 9/11 ringleader Muhammad Atta's car was photographed entering the airport parking lot, presumably to pick him up. When U.S. troops nabbed him in Afghanistan after the start of the war and sent him to Guantánamo, the 29-year-old Saudi allegedly confessed. So why did the Pentagon abruptly dismiss the charges against Qahtani last week—and without explanation?