The federal government arrested Ali Saleh Kalah al-Mari shortly after 9/11, accusing him of being an Al-Qaeda “sleeper agent” posing as a graduate student. In 2003, still detained, al-Mari was judged an “enemy combatant” by President Bush. As the Washington Post’s Josh White reports, it’s now 2008 and al-Mari ...

And eventually everything calms down and you can get back to business as usual.  Based on James Risen's report in the New York Times, that's what appears to have happened with Blackwater USA, the private security contractor with the largest role in protecting U.S. personnel and resources in Iraq.  Eight ...

The chances that urban hospitals can deal with a terrorist attack or natural catastrophe are bad and may be getting worse. Congress’s House oversight committee released a report yesterday that hospitals in the seven cities arguably most vulnerable to an attack have shortages in emergency room capacity.  The lack ...

Of the 775 terrorist suspects detained by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay, not one has been tried for a crime. The Washington Post’s Josh White reports that this trend will likely persist a “year or longer.”  It has ...

The Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration has announced that by 2010 they will screen all cargo on passenger planes. This means freight packages, often shipped by manufacturers, which are stored beneath a plane’s passenger cabins.

But USA Today’s Thomas Frank reports that the ...

Yesterday President Bush appointed Silicon Valley entrepreneur Rod Beckström to run the National Cyber Security Center. What is the National Cyber Security Center, you ask? Well, it was born in January of a classified order by ...

More on FOIA: the Treasury Dept. complied yesterday with a federal judge’s order to release complaints about their “Specially Designated Nationals List.” The list is meant to catalogue citizens linked with drug trafficking and terrorism.

But according to the Department’s own estimate, 90,000 consumers, whose names are identical or ...

Two Inspector General reports -- from the Justice Department and the Director of National Intelligence -- conclude that the process for nominating people (including thousands of Americans) to the National Counterterrorism Center’s “terrorist watch list” is inconsistent and varies across intelligence agencies.

The ...

Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal has put together a powerful overview of the National Security Agency's information-gathering activities, and those of domestic security agencies, including the FBI.  Gorman notes that the NSA's efforts "have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people's communications, travel and finances in ...

The Coalition Support Funds, a U.S. aid package designed to support Pakistan's efforts to control the dangerous areas bordering Afghanistan, are under renewed attention by U.S. government, military officials, and Congress, according to the Washington Post's Robin Wright.  The funds, sent at $80 million per month since 2002, are supposed ...