OTB Radio – Tonight at 5:30 Eastern

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live from 5:30-6:30 Eastern. Dave Schuler and I will talk about Sarah Palin's comeback tour and ensuing controversies and President Obama's Asia trip.  Alex Knapp will join us to provide his legal expertise on the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial and Steve Verdon will stop by to discuss the ...

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Show Trial

In my initial posting on the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Trial, I asserted that "there’s an incredibly good chance that Mohammed and his comrades will go free.  The fact that KSM was repeatedly waterboarded would seem to taint any subsequent evidence, including his own confession." This was based on the presumption that the whole point of trying KSM in a civilian court ...

75 Gitmo Detainees in Limbo

Marc Ambinder finds a hidden news story in this WaPo report by Perry Bacon: Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo will be tried in federal court or military commissions. About 90 others have been cleared for repatriation or resettlement in a third country, and about 75 more have been deemed too ...

Terrorism vs. Crime

[caption id="attachment_43970" align="alignright" width="298" caption="From left: Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Waleed bin Attash, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi and Ramzi Binalshibh. (AP)"][/caption] Responding to Attorney General Eric Holder's explanation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed is being tried in civilian courts because the 9/11 victims were mostly civilians and because the attacks took place on U.S. soil whereas his compatriots who attacked ...

Soldier Mom Refuses Deployment

A sad and not terribly unusual case: An Army cook and single mom may face criminal charges after she skipped her deployment flight to Afghanistan because, she said, no one was available to care for her infant son while she was overseas. Spc. Alexis Hutchinson, 21, claims she had no choice but to refuse deployment orders because the only family ...

Military Needs More Muslims

Robert Kaplan thinks that it would be a shame if the Fort Hood massacre led to recriminations against Muslims in the U.S. military, arguing we need more of them. The massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in which 13 soldiers were shot and killed by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, paradoxically took my memory back to April 2004, when I was embedded with ...

Fort Hood Fallen: Victims, Not Heroes

President Obama's speech at yesterday's memorial service for the victims of the Fort Hood massacre was touching and struck the right chords. Marc Ambinder and Taegan Goddard both say it was his best speech, ever, and Chuck Todd gushes that it will be "remembered and quoted from for quite some time." Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about ...

Was Fort Hood Massacre ‘Terrorism’?

Nidal Malik Hasan is a Muslim who killed 14 people. Does that make him a terrorist? Some think so. Sen. Joe Lieberman called the Fort Hood massacre an act of "Islamist extremism" - even as top Army brass warned Sunday against guessing at a motive, fearing backlash against Muslim soldiers. "There are very, very strong warning signs here that ...

Hasan a Muslim First, American Second?

In hindsight, it appears that Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the mass murderer who killed 14 (one of the soldiers killed, Francheska Velez, was six weeks pregnant) and wounded another 30 at Fort Hood, had long made it known that he sympathized with the enemy. Bloomberg's Justin Blum: Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of a shooting spree that killed ...

Pentagon Expected To Ask For Supplementary War Funding. As Usual.

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when Congress passed a $680 billion appropriation? Well, don't worry--the military will be getting still more money:The nation’s top military officer said Wednesday that he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though President Obama has pledged ...

Shipping Off

The Atlantic Council is sending a delegation of us out to the USS Eisenhower for the next couple of days. Barring unforeseen access to a computer, the Internet, and free time that means no posting from me until Saturday morning.  My OTB colleagues will, however, be slavishly posting away as usual if not at a slightly higher opstempo.

The Cost of Empire

Last week, Congress approved the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill, with costs totalling to a whopping $680 billion. And as Christopher Preble points out, that's not all:The defense bill represents only part of our military spending. The appropriations bill moving through Congress governing veterans affairs, military construction and other agencies totals $133 billion, while the massive Department of Homeland Security ...

Military Bureaucracy

Two separate reviews of The Fourth Star, a new book by David Cloud and Greg Jaffee, touch on a theme that has fascinated me since I wrote a dissertation on the subject. NYT foreign correspondent Dexter Filkins (via SWJ): “The Fourth Star” paints wonderfully dramatic portraits of the four senior officers highlighted here, but at its heart it’s a story about bureaucracy. ...

BRAC, Ft. Belvoir, and Northern Virginia Traffic

Virginia Congressman Jim Moran argues that the Defense Department ought to step up and pay for the increased traffic BRAC is about to bring to his district: The latest round of BRAC (Base Realignment and Closing) moves is poised to create a daytime nightmare of traffic congestion for Northern Virginia. Over the next two years, the on-base population at Fort Belvoir in ...

Predator vs. Terminator

This xkcd comic is indeed "More Accurate." via Andrew Exum