Following Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement Monday that the United States would try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-conspirators in military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, The Heritage Foundation’s Senior Legal Fellow, Cully Stimson, testified at a House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday on the 9/11 trials. Stimson’s message? The right decision on military commissions has finally been made; now Congress and the White House must stand by it and fully resource them to ensure their success: [T]he administration and Congress must take every reasonable step to ensure that the trial …
Bowing to political realities, the Obama administration reversed itself and announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM), the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, would be tried at Guantanamo in a military commission, instead of in a federal court in the United States. The decision comes as the 10-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks is months away, and on the eve of a House Judiciary hearing on military commissions and the 9/11 case. The victims of 9/11 deserve justice, and it was high time for the administration to make a decision. …
Between the 9/11 terrorist attack and the inauguration of Barack Obama, the CIA’s detention and interrogation program yielded intelligence that foiled several terrorist attacks, according to author Mark Thiessen. That program, according to Thiessen, uncovered plots for attacks on high-rise apartment buildings; the U.S. Marine Camp in Djibouti, the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles – the tallest building on the West Coast; and London’s Heathrow Airport and downtown buildings. On the second day of Barack Obama’s presidency, he signed an executive order ending the CIA program. Marc A. Thiessen, …
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) today swung hard against a public-relations campaign by the Obama Administration to clean up its tattered image over its handling of the war on terrorists, and especially Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. In a major address at The Heritage Foundation, McConnell gave a point-by-point refutation of all of the administration’s failures in this area, from the decision to close the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay to the botched attempt to try some terrorists in New York. But McConnell took special aim at the administration …
By now, you’ve heard the news. On Christmas Day, a 23-year-old Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow a full Northwest Airlines jet out of the air above Detroit. The only events that stopped this from happening were courageous passengers and a faulty explosive device. If either one of these two events had not taken place, nearly 300 passengers and crew would be dead, and immeasurable collateral damage would have occurred on the ground in Michigan. What you did not hear between this attempted attack on our nation and …
Edwin Meese III, the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and Chairman of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation as well as the United States Attorney General between 1985 and 1988 released the following statement today on the proposed trials of terrorists in New York City, including confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “It is clear that foreign terrorists and terrorist groups have committed acts of war against the United States, and that our national security requires that we respond accordingly. This means that …
