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.

On the heels of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's second formal appointment—former Sen. Tom Daschle for secretary of health and human services—appears to be another tilt to the neocons. The New York Times Nov. 20 notes potential conflicts of interest related to his work for the Mayo Clinic. But we recall his comments as Senate majority leader in which he advocated "regime change"—and not for Iraq, but for Palestine. And not against Hamas, but against Fatah and Arafat. We noted his extremist comments to Fox News interviewer Tony Snow in June 2002:

Al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri released a video statement Nov. 19 calling US President-elect Barack Obama a "house slave" who had aligned himself with the "enemies" of Islam. "You were born to a Muslim father, but you chose to stand in the ranks of the enemies of the Muslims, and pray the prayer of the Jews, although you claim to be Christian, in order to climb the rungs of leadership in America," the militant leader said.

Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon acknowledged Nov. 16 while speaking to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child that the US has held 12 juveniles at the Guantánamo Bay prison. The announcement came in response to a study released last week by the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas (CSHRA). In May, the US reported to the CRC that only eight juveniles were detained in the prison. The study was based on information available through the US military and diplomatic sources. Other sources, including former detainees, the Red Cross and international sources, indicated to the CSHRA that the number of juveniles could potentially be higher. Eight of the 12 juveniles listed in the study have been released from the prison.