Relatives of 9-11 victims were brought to Guantánamo Bay to witness as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four co-defendants appeared before a US military tribunal. The five men told a military judge they intend to confess in full—an evident challenge to the government to put them to death. (NYT, AFP, Dec. 9) A Dec. 9 New York Times piece, "Relatives of 9/11 Victims Add a Passionate Layer to Guantánamo Debate," explicitly states that the survivors are being played in a political strategy over the prison camp's future under President Barack Obama:

In the days before the presidential elections, the US launched an air-strike on a village in Syria. Since then, the US has been bombing Pakistan every few days, with the media paying very little note. Our November Exit Poll was: "Will the Bush administration instrument a new global crisis in the time remaining to it?" We received the following responses:

On the heels of talk about forming an an anti-Obama "underground," the right-wing talk radio set is now broaching actual secession from the union. The liberal blog Think Progress Nov. 25 posted an audio link from a recent broadcast by shock-jock Glenn Beck. Here's the offending quote:

ABC News' Political Punch blog notes that Samantha Power—the Pulitzer-winning Harvard professor booted from the Barack Obama campaign in March for calling Hillary Clinton a "monster"—has re-emerged as a member of the president-elect's transition team. Power is listed as a member of PEBO's "agency review team" on national security. Surprisingly, Power is said to be focused on the State Department—where Sen. Clinton will likely soon take the helm.

From Lebanon's Daily Star, Nov. 3:

Members of Israeli spy ring 'related to 9/11 hijacker'
BEIRUT — Two men arrested for running an Israeli spy ring in the Bekaa Valley are relatives of a suicide hijacker who piloted a plane in the September 11, 2001, attacks, a security source told The Daily Star on Sunday. The Lebanese Army announced on Saturday that it had arrested two people suspected of involvement with a spy network that gathered information for Israel's intelligence services.

A typically subtle distortion is at work in this Nov. 21 New York Times story, "Global Forecast by American Intelligence Expects Al Qaeda's Appeal to Falter." You have to read halfway through the story before you find out that the report's more important point is that US power is also going to decline. This correlation should not be surprising. The Middle East's secular left forces consider political Islam and US imperialism to be twin "poles of terrorism." As we've said many times before, the terrorists love the GWOT.

A judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia Nov. 20 ordered the release of five Algerian detainees from Guantánamo Bay. In the first ruling on detainees' rights since the June Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush, Judge Richard Leon found that the government's evidence was insufficient that the men were planning to travel to Afghanistan to join al-Qaeda, the basis for ther classification as "enemy combatants."

US President-elect Barack Obama's pick to run the Department of Homeland Security, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, is described by the AP Nov. 20 as "tough on illegal immigration"—although she has been a skeptic on the border wall, having once said, "You build a 50-foot wall, somebody will find a 51-foot ladder." We've noted that she signed last year's state law imposing sanctions on employers who hire undocumented immigrants, but has opposed or vetoed other more draconian measures. In 2005, she declared a state of emergency for Arizona counties along the Mexican border, and pressured Homeland Security for stepped up enforcement.