Lawyers for four Chinese Muslim Uighurs detained at Guantánamo Bay filed a petition with the US Supreme Court Nov. 10, raising issues with the policy for transferring detainees from the facility. The case, known as Kiyemba II, is an appeal from an April ruling by the US District Court for the District of Columbia, and is separate from a case that the Court agreed to hear last month, known now as Kiyemba I. A critical issue raised in the appeal is whether a federal court can require the government to give 30 days notice before detainees can be transferred out of Guantánamo. This period would give the detainees time to bring any claims such as persecution or torture in US courts before they are transferred to locations outside of federal court jurisdiction. (Jurist, Nov. 11)

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the presumed gunman in the deadly Fort Hood shootings, worshipped at Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, VA, led by a radical imam said to be a "spiritual adviser" to three of the apparent 9-11 hijackers—two of whom attended the mosque at the same time as Hasan, the UK's Sunday Telegraph reported Nov. 7. The funeral of Hasan's mother was held there in May of the same year, 2001. The preacher at the time was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni scholar who was banned from addressing a meeting in London by video link this August because he is accused of supporting attacks on British troops and backing terrorist organizations.

Judge Oscar Magi of the Fourth Chamber of the Court of Milan Nov. 4 convicted 23 former CIA agents for the 2003 kidnapping and rendition of Egyptian terror suspect Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr. The nearly three-year trial, which was delayed many times, is the first in the world involving the CIA's extraordinary rendition flights. Former Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady was sentenced to eight years in prison, while 22 other Americans were sentenced to five years. Magi acquitted three other Americans, finding diplomatic immunity, and five Italian operatives, due to Italy's withholding of evidence because of national security issues.

The federal government has agreed to pay $1.2 million to settle the cases of five Muslim immigrants were among hundreds detained without charge in Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center for months after 9-11. The plaintiffs—whose names were cleared but were still deported—accepted the payout after seven years of court cases. A larger suit filed by other detainees, Turkmen v. Ashcroft, is ongoing. The government admits no liability or fault under the terms of the settlements.

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Nov. 2 that Canadian citizen Maher Arar cannot sue the US government for damages based on his detention in the United States and subsequent detention, interrogation, and torture in Syria after he was mistakenly identified as a terrorist. Arar attempted to challenge the US government's policy of extraordinary rendition under the Torture Victim Protection Act and the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution.

Six Chinese Uighur Guantánamo Bay detainees were transferred to the Republic of Palau Oct. 31, according to the US Department of Justice. The six men, Ahmad Tourson, Abdul Ghappar Abdul Rahman, Edham Mamet, Anwar Hassan, Dawut Abdurehim and Adel Noori, were relocated to a home in the middle of Koror, the commercial center of the island nation, where they will be among a Muslim population of about 500. The DoJ said the men had been cleared for release under the Bush administration, as they were no longer considered unlawful enemy combatants. The men had also been subject to review by the Joint Task Force for Guantánamo detainees, and were approved for release. With the transfer, seven Uighurs remain in custody at Guantánamo.

The US Supreme Court on Oct. 20 agreed to hear Kiyemba v. Obama, in which the court will consider whether a group of 13 Uighur detainees at Guantánamo Bay can be released into the US. In February, a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed an October 2008 district court order that would have provided for their release.

In case after case since 9-11, the feds have have created specious terror scares by recruiting marginal wing-nuts for fictitious conspiracies through the use infiltrators (read: provocateurs) posing as al-Qaeda operatives—and the media have utterly failed to challenge this unscrupulous entrapment. Now exactly the same tactic has been used against a veteran technician at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the Energy Department's Livermore Labs who is accused of "espionage"—even though the guy who lured him to pass on information was himself a federal agent! And the foreign government in this pseudo-plot wasn't Iran or North Korea, but our supposed ally Israel. From Bloomberg, Oct. 19: