Five individuals accused of being involved in the September 11th attacks were arraigned and formally charged by a military commission at Guantanamo Bay over the weekend. Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam Al-Hawsawi, as required by the Constitution and the Military Commissions Act, were brought before a military judge.

What is a typically routine process turned into a twelve hour farce, which is not surprising. Those executing these proceedings are to some extent making it up as they go along. Hundreds of terror suspects have been tried in federal courts. The same cannot be said for military commissions. These supposedly reformed tribunals are an attempt to give some semblance of due process to terror suspects without granting foreign individuals access to the civilian US justice system.

There has already been a lot of very good commentary across the internets and media on the notable decision in the 9th Circuit this week in the case of Jose Padilla v. John Yoo. Although many, if not most, commenters seem outraged, the decision is, sadly, both predictable and expected. I also think Marcy had about the right, and appropriately snarky, take on the decision embodied in her post title “Jay Bybee’s Colleagues Say OLC Lawyers Couldn’t Know that Torture Was Torture in 2001-2003“. Yep, that is just about right.

Coverage of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s killing has been a prime example of American establishment journalism, a public relations operation designed to validate all the activities of the national security state and the military industrial-complex in the past year. This operation has been bolstered by the official release of documents found in bin Laden’s residence by the SEALs team that raided the compound in May 2011.

Abdulelah Haider Shaye, a journalist whose reporting focused on issues of terrorism, has been in a Yemeni jail since 2010.

Shaye was picked up, detained and convicted on “terrorism-related” charges by a client regime of the United States because he was interviewing people the now-assassinated US-born Yemen cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and members of al Qaeda. He has been designated a terrorist and remains jailed because the US maintains he is working with al Qaeda. On top of that, as Scahill has pointed out, not a single media organization, like ABC or the Washington Post, which benefited from his reporting have spoken up in opposition to what the Obama administration has done.

Counterterrorism adviser John Brennan spoke at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington DC on April 30 to mark the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. It was the first time a high level member of the Obama Administration spoke at length about the U.S. drone strikes that the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command have been carrying out in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Five individuals suspected of being involved in plotting the September 11th attacks are due for arraignment on May 5. They are to be formally charged with “terrorism-related crimes that could bring the death penalty if the defendants are convicted.” And, as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reports, the government under the Obama administration is moving to censor any testimony from the individuals on torture or inhumane treatment they experienced while detained in CIA “secret” prisons.

The whole world will be watching what happens in Chicago at the NATO Summit. Let us be the voice of the Afghan people—let us be the masses that speak out against war and militarism—let us come together in Chicago to represent humanity.

President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism chief John Brennan delivered a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center on Monday on the “ethics” and “efficacy” of the Obama administration counterterrorism policy. He particularly explained the policy of using remote-controlled aircraft or drones to target and assassinate alleged terror suspects or “militants” extrajudicially.

Having grown up in the 1960′s and 1970′s, I always assumed that when the South lost the Civil War, that unfortunate matter was pretty much settled. After all, slavery had ended, and while de facto segregation and and racist disenfranchisement were proving to be stubbornly difficult to eradicate, a steady progression of court cases and civil rights laws seemed to mean that such peculiar institutions existed less and less de jure.

A US soldier who served in Afghanistan released photos to the Los Angeles Times which show American troops posing with the mangled corpses of insurgents or suicide bombers. The photos are not the first to show soldiers posing with dead bodies, and these appear to have been taken two years ago.