From The Economist, July 5:

Don't mention the GWOT
A new vocabulary is needed to confront terrorism
The "global war on terror" is what America calls its response to the September 11th attacks. Never mind the cliché, or the fact that "terrorism" is a tactic and "terror" a state of mind; George Bush's crisp slogan helped to rally a traumatised American public. His principal ally over the years, Tony Blair, shared the sentiment, if not always the same words. Now, dealing with his first terrorist plot as prime minister, Gordon Brown is changing the choice of language.

The National Intelligence Estimate has reached such findings before. Yet more evidence of what an astonishing success the Global War on Terrorism has been. From McClatchy Newspapers, July 11:

Calling al-Qaida the most potent terrorist threat to U.S. national security, the classified draft makes clear that the Bush administration has been unable to cripple Osama bin Laden and the violent terror movement he founded.

The Pentagon said July 6 it has appealed a decision by a military judge to dismiss the case of a Guantanamo Bay detainee accused of killing a US soldier in Afghanistan. It is the first use of the appeals process since it was created by Congress last year to handle cases involving Guantanamo detainees. Omar Ahmed Khadr, a Canadian citizen, is one of two detainees whose military trials were dismissed because they were not identified as "unlawful" enemy combatants. The other is Yemeni detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, allegedly Osama bin Laden's former driver. Prosecutors filed an appeal in Khadr's case with the Court of Military Commission Review on July 4, a Pentagon spokesman said.

Twenty-Two Years After the Philadelphia Massacre

by Hans Bennett, The Defenestrator

In a surprise development, the US Supreme Court agreed June 29 to hear an appeal they had refused to hear in April, asking whether "foreign citizens imprisoned indefinitely" by the US military can go to federal court and whether their imprisonment amounts to "unlawful confinement" from which a federal judge might free them. The court is to hear arguments next term, which begins Oct. 1.

The press is abuzz with the June 26 release of the CIA's "family jewels," nearly 700 pages of documents concerning domestic meddling, foreign assassinations and other real and potential violations of the Agency's charter that then-director James Schlesinger ordered compiled in 1973 in response to the scrutiny focused by the Watergate scandal. The front-page coverage in the New York Times noted (on the front page, above the fold) that in a note to Agency employees, current CIA director Gen. Michael V. Hayden said the release of documents was part of the Agency's "social contract" with the American public, "to give those we serve a window into the complexities of intelligence." Added the Times: "General Hayden drew a contrast between the illegal activities of the past and current CIA practices, which he insists are lawful."

Late on June 21 the US House of Representatives voted 214-203 against an amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill that would have closed the US Defense Department's Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), a combat-training school for Latin American soldiers, formerly the US Army School of the Americas (SOA). Critics say that since its founding in 1946, SOA/WHINSEC has trained many of the region's worst human rights violators.

Following the recent revelations about Ethiopia, a second African country has been named as hosting secret US detention center for terror suspects. Seymour Hersh's latest in the June 25 New Yorker, "The General's Report"—a reference to Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal—includes some quotes from a "recently retired high-level C.I.A. official" (anonymous, and therefore unverfiable, of course) about the "wrangling" over interrogation guidelines in the wake of the scandal. Writes Hersh: