MILAN — An Italian judge found 23 Americans and two Italians guilty Wednesday in the kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect, delivering the first legal convictions anywhere in the world against people involved in the CIA's extraordinary renditions program.

Human rights groups hailed the decision and pressed President Barack Obama to repudiate the Bush administration's practice of abducting terror suspects and transferring them to third countries where torture was permitted. The American Civil Liberties Union said the verdicts were the first convictions stemming from the rendition program.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/04/italy-convicts-23-america_n_345274.html

President Barack Obama has stated that he has a low threshold for "success" in Afghanistan. He wants an Afghanistan that can no longer serve as a base for any terrorist group that would be able to attack the United States. Assuming that the President of the United States is true to his word, he should perhaps consider the possibility that the minimum objective for an American withdrawal from Afghanistan has already been achieved. If that is so, it is time for the United States to end its de facto occupation of the country and leave the Afghan people to settle on a form of government that will satisfy their needs, not those of a segment of the international community led by Washington.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=255

In four years of researching and writing about Guantánamo, I have become used to uncovering shocking information, but for sheer cynicism, I am struggling to think of anything that compares to the revelations contained in the unclassified ruling in the habeas corpus petition of Fouad al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti prisoner whose release was ordered last week by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (PDF). In the ruling, to put it bluntly, it was revealed that the US government tortured an innocent man to extract false confessions and then threatened him until he obligingly repeated those lies as though they were the truth.

http://www.inteldaily.com/news/173/ARTICLE/12056/2009-10-02.html

Longtime counterintel official acknowledges evidence behind key aspect of allegations against Marc Grossman made by former FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds

George W. Bush's third-highest ranking State Department official, Marc Grossman, who became the Under Secretary of State after previously serving as Ambassador to Turkey, was targeted as part of a "decade-long investigation" by the FBI, according to an 18-year veteran manager of the agency's Counterintelligence and Counterespionage departments.

For still-unknown reasons, the investigation, which also involved a multitude of cases involving Israeli espionage, was ultimately "buried and covered up," according to the official.

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7439

see also:

http://totalwarfiles.com/?p=80

Hearings are underway in the US Senate to assess what to do with the 240 detainees still behind bars at Guantanamo Bay, and what will become of the military tribunals and detention without trial that the administration of former US president George W. Bush and a compliant Congress put into place.

The US Congress is also debating what will happen to the detention camp itself, which was established in 2002 to house men who were allegedly “the worst of the worst,” in a setting deliberately framed by Bush attorneys as “legal outer space.”

But are those Senate hearings actually window dressing on a new reality that is just as bad as the old one — and in some ways worse?

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2009/08/09/2003450693

More than 1.5 billion government and private sector records about US citizens and foreigners are stored in an FBI database, declassified documents have revealed.

The database is kept at the FBI's National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) near Washington, according to the documents acquired under a freedom of information request by US magazine Wired.

Data has been drawn from a wide variety of sources, including records of international travel, hotel bookings, car rentals, department store transactions and active aircraft pilots.

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/09/24/237851/fbi-database-holds-records-on-1.5-billion-people.htm

In the debate over the PATRIOT Act, the Bush White House insisted it needed the authority to search people's homes without their permission or knowledge so that terrorists wouldn't be tipped off that they're under investigation.

Now that the authority is law, how has the Department of Justice used the new power? To go after drug dealers.

Only three of the 763 "sneak-and-peek" requests in fiscal year 2008 involved terrorism cases, according to a July 2009 report from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Sixty-five percent were drug cases.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/23/watch-doj-official-blows_n_296209.html

Hours after the Justice Department announced it would limit its use of the state secrets privilege in new cases, the administration appeared before a federal judge here Wednesday and continued to invoke that defense in a closely watched spy case.

The litigation at issue, now five years old, tests whether a sitting president may bypass Congress and adopt a warrantless surveillance program, as President Bush did in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/09/obama-stands-behind-state-secrets-in-spy-case/

This is the first time [the DOJ] claimed sovereign immunity against Wiretap Act and Stored Communications Act claims. In other words, the administration is arguing that the U.S. can never be sued for spying that violates federal surveillance statutes, whether FISA, the Wiretap Act or the SCA.

http://archive.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/06/obama/index.html

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jon Tester (D-MT), Tom Udall (D-NM), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Daniel Akaka (D-HI) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) have introduced legislation to fix problems with surveillance laws that threaten the rights and liberties of American citizens.  The Judicious Use of Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts (JUSTICE) Act would reform the USA PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendments Act and other surveillance authorities to protect Americans’ constitutional rights, while preserving the powers of our government to fight terrorism.

http://feingold.senate.gov/record.cfm?id=317927

The Obama administration supports extending three key provisions of the Patriot Act that are due to expire at the end of the year, the Justice Department told Congress in a letter made public Tuesday.

Lawmakers and civil rights groups had been pressing the Democratic administration to say whether it wants to preserve the post-Sept. 11 law's authority to access business records, as well as monitor so-called "lone wolf" terrorists and conduct roving wiretaps.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i9LLhtcanBcNhniDqSpnQljdFVogD9ANTS1O4