News Briefs

Mr. President, how are those civilian trials working out for you?

Deadlock in First Civilian Trial of Gitmo Detainee, Ahmed Ghailani

The first civilian trial of a Guantanamo Bay terrorism suspect appeared deadlocked Monday when a juror asked to be dismissed because she felt "attacked" for being a lone holdout in reaching a verdict.

The potential for a hung jury and mistrial in the case of alleged Al Qaeda accomplice Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani threatened to further undermine the Obama administration's objective of trying "high-value" terror suspects in U.S. federal courts, including Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan declined to dismiss Juror No. 12 from his courtroom in Lower Manhattan and ordered the panel to resume deliberations despite the reported 11-1 impasse...

[Ghailani has been] charged with murder and conspiracy in the 1998 Al Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The coordinated attacks killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured thousands.

President Obama signed executive orders two days after taking office vowing to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility within a year and review prosecution options for the remaining terrorism suspects. In June 2009, Ghailani became the first foreign prisoner transferred from Guantanamo to the U.S. mainland for trial...

Obama's labor secretary to honor communist

The International Labor Communications Association, a national coalition of labor organizers, is bestowing its media award to John Wojcik, the labor editor for People's World, the official Communist Party USA publication...

According to an announcement of the Nov. 19 awards ceremony, President Obama's labor secretary, Hilda Solis, will be on hand for the awards dinner to lead a special session on how to respond to "expected" attacks from the new Republican-led House...

Petraeus warns Karzai on Afghan exit timing; He should have issued the same warning to Obama? Karzai=Obama

From CNN:

In what may be one of the most significant breaches between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Obama administration, Gen. David Petraeus personally warned Afghan officials over the weekend the U.S.-Afghan partnership could be "untenable" if Karzai wants U.S. troops out of Afghanistan prematurely...

Last year, President Obama told Gen. Petraeus in no uncertain terms that US troops must be withdrawn from Afghanistan in a shorter time frame than the one Petraeus had sought:

The president wanted to know why the Pentagon needed 21 months to send 40,000 troops to Afghanistan when it had taken only six months to send a similar number to Iraq in 2007. When Petraeus began to explain - saying that the Afghanistan escalation wasn’t modeled on his surge in Iraq -' Obama rejected this explanation. 'Petraeus was expected to work his magic' in Afghanistan in roughly the same amount of time that he had accomplished this feat in Iraq.

“The only way we’ll consider this [continuing the war with more troops], is if we get the troops in and out in a shorter time frame,” Obama told Petraeus and other advisers in the room that day.

[Obama also disagreed with Gen. Petraeus on the troop surge in Iraq.]

Why then, didn't Gen. Petraeus personally warn the President that the Petraeus-Obama partnership would be "untenable" if Obama insisted on withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan prematurely? Karzai=Obama, Obama=Karzai!