Alice Hoagland's son Mark Bingham died on hijacked United Flight 93 which crashed in rural Pennsylvania and she had come to Washington to attend the Senate Judiciary Committee's oversight hearing of the Justice Department where Holder's decision about prosecuting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others was the main subject.

"I take great exception to your decision to give short shrift to the military commissions and to put the five most heinous criminals and war criminals into court in New York City," an emotional Hoagland told Holder. "It will give these ugly people, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh especially, very eloquent access to all the media sources in the United States."

That is one of several complaints some family members of the Sept. 11 victims have made. Others have worried that it will make the trials and prisons targets for attack. But some families have welcomed the trials in New York and want the suspects prosecuted quickly.

Holder took exception to Hoagland's points, gently but firmly telling her that he did fully consider the military commissions as a venue for the terrorism suspects and that Mohammed and the others had tried to use the military commission trials at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a platform for espousing their views.

"This was a tough decision," he told Hoagland, adding that he is privy to evidence that has not been made public that he believes makes the government's case to convict the five suspects.

"This is almost a trust me thing I suppose, there are reasons why bringing this case in an Article III (criminal) court when it comes to the admissibility of certain evidence is really the right way to go and really maximizes our chances of getting a successful outcome," Holder said.

After their five-minute encounter, Hoagland told reporters that while she appreciated Holder's remarks, she was unpersuaded and even opposed his decision to seek the death penalty against Mohammed and the others.

"Listening to Attorney General Holder throughout the course of this morning into the afternoon has persuaded me that he is a sincere man," she said. "I don't think he's changed his mind and I know I haven't changed my mind."

Click here for more Reuters political coverage.

-- Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque (Holder testifies to Senate Judiciary Committee.)

The former Louisiana lawmaker faces between 27 and 33 years in prison according to federal sentencing guidelines and prosecutors said that sounds good to them. Authorities discovered $90,000 in Jefferson's freezer during their investigation.

"As the defendant stands convicted of some of the most serious corrupt schemes uncovered in recent history, he is without remorse and has yet to accept responsibility for his actions," according to a memorandum filed with the court late Friday.

"A severe sentence would send the message to the public that such egregious and criminal behavior will not be tolerated in our society," the prosecutors counseled. They also asked that Jefferson, 62, immediately go to prison for fear he would flee the country before his appeals are exhausted.

The ex-congressman was convicted in August on 11 of 16 counts of bribery, racketeering and money laundering. He was accused in 2007 of soliciting millions of dollars in bribes from companies while using his office to broker business deals in Africa.

Jefferson lost re-election last year to Republican Anh "Joseph" Cao -- yes, the lone Republican who voted for the Democrats' health care reform bill that passed the House of Representatives late Saturday. (The district is heavily Democratic and includes most of New Orleans.)

Jefferson acknowledged when he was first charged that he had made mistakes in judgment that he regretted, but denied selling his office or trading official acts for money.

For more Reuters political news, click here.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (Jefferson after his arraignment in federal court in 2007)

Republicans are hoping to capture the governors' mansions in those two states to rebuild some momentum after being trounced by Democrats last year. They also are trying to make it a referendum against Obama's agenda to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system and financial regulatory structure as well as his plans to address climate change.

In Virginia where Obama won narrowly in 2008, Republican Bob McDonnell has built a sizable lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds while in traditionally Democratic-leaning New Jersey Republican Chris Christie is neck and neck with Democratic incumbent Governor Jon Corzine.

Obama has campaigned for both of his fellow Democrats but that may not be enough for them to win.

While Republicans are salivating at their prospects in those two races, Democrats are eyeing a congressional race in upstate New York to replace a Republican lawmaker who became Obama's Army secretary. Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman was barely ahead of Democrat Bill Owens in the traditionally Republican district.

After tremendous infighting, the Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, withdrew from the race and endorsed the Democrat, highlighting the rift between moderates and the conservatives of the Republican party.

Elsewhere, the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Markets Committee begins a two-day meeting this morning to discuss interest rate policy and whether the U.S. economy is starting to build its own momentum towards a recovery.

And the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will begin working on a climate change bill, but unhappy Republicans are threatening to boycott the session.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (Obama returns from a campaign trip to New Jersey)

It turns out that the issue was debated at least as far back as early 2004 when American forces captured ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, according to a document released late Friday night under Freedom of Information Act requests by the American Civil Liberties Union.

A few weeks after the former Iraqi leader was captured hiding in a hole in Tikrit, a memorandum was sent to the FBI's general counsel, Valerie Caproni, discussing whether Saddam would have to be advised of his legal rights.

The FBI's counterterrorism division said the primary reason the FBI would be interrogating him would be for "intelligence purposes" rather than for trying him in a U.S. court.

"Significantly, we are aware of no current intent to try Hussein in an United States court," the memorandum said. "Accordingly, we conclude that the interrogation team is not legally obligated to advise Hussein of his legal rights, which are generally afforded criminal defendants in the United States under Miranda v. Arizona."

However, the FBI lawyers offered two caveats: if the U.S. government changed its position about trying Saddam in an American court or if the Justice Department or other "political entities with proper authority" who were involved with his interrogation believed he should be advised of his rights.

The memorandum also advised the FBI that Saddam was given "Enemy Prisoner of War" status under the Geneva III Convention which barred any coercion, physical or mental torture to obtain information and required that he be given proper food, water, clothing, showers, sanitary conditions and medical attention while detained.

The four-page document also noted that Iraqi law did not require advising Saddam of his rights nor did the statute creating the tribunal to try him.

Since then, some Republicans have questioned Obama administration officials about whether soldiers on the battlefield are being required to read Miranda rights to suspects they pick up.

FBI Director Robert Mueller in September denied that they were advising captured foreign suspects of those rights and said he did not believe that the issue was causing problems.

"I do believe, sir, if you ask the commanders in the field in Afghanistan or Iraq to determine whether or not the issue of whether or not you give Miranda warnings has ever interfered with their ability to do their job, I think they would say no," Mueller told Senator Jeff Sessions during a congressional hearing.

Click here for more Reuters political coverage.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Nikola Solic (Saddam Hussein during his trial)

As the Justice Department argued that former U.S. government scientist Stewart Nozette should remain in jail while he awaits trial on espionage charges, juicy new details emerged about the sting operation leading to his arrest for passing top secret information to an individual he thought was an Israeli intelligence officer but really was the FBI.

Nozette was arrested at the famous Mayflower Hotel in Washington on Oct. 19 but before FBI agents put the cuffs on him, the Justice Department said that he went to the bathroom in the suite and stashed $10,000 in the toilet's upper tank. (The money was later recovered so don't bother booking the room.)

The money was meant as a down payment on some $2 million Nozette demanded for handing over details about a classified program that the United States had spent $1 billion to develop and deploy, according to the Justice Department.

Nozette allegedly also sought from the undercover FBI employee an Israeli passport with an alias and he opened a safe deposit box in California in which he stashed three computer drives, eight videotapes, 55 gold South African Krugerrand coins worth roughly $50,000, and $30,000 in savings bonds, the government said. (The Justice Department has said that Israel had no involvement in the attempted espionage.)

Earlier this year a jury convicted a former congressman, William Jefferson of Louisiana, in a corruption case that included $90,000 hidden in a freezer.

To bolster the government's case to keep Nozette under lock and key until his trial, the Justice Department said its investigation "has revealed that Nozette is a person of means," noting that he owns several residential properties across the country including a $2 million house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and a $550,000 vacation home in Merritt Island, Florida.

"No treaty allows the United States to compel the extradition of an individual charged with espionage," the government's filing said.

Nozette has held a number of senior government positions and even helped with the development of a radar experiment that helped in the discovery of water ice on the south pole of the moon, the government said. He also worked at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and held special security clearance.

In January 2009, Nozette pleaded guilty to fraud and tax evasion charges, paying $265,000 in restitution.

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Jamal Saidi

And now a day later, it became public that an ongoing investigation apparently has been impacted by those troubles -- a plot by two men to attack a newspaper in Denmark over its publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed including one in which he is wearing a turban with a bomb in it.

U.S. authorities arrested the two Chicago area men earlier this month and unsealed the complaints against them on Tuesday that detailed how they communicated over email and by telephone to develop the plot.

In those documents, however, an FBI agent acknowledged that the translations from Urdu to English had not yet been finalized (and some of them dated back to late 2008).

"While translators have attempted to transcribe the foreign language conversations accurately, to the extent that quotations from these communications are included, these are preliminary, not final translations," the affidavits said.

The Justice Department inspector general report said that the FBI had lost 3 percent of its translators since 2005, falling to 1,298, and it was taking an average of 19 months to hire new ones. Additionally, millions of foreign language electronic files have gone unread and scores of hours of recorded conversations had not been heard, including some involving top priority terrorism cases.

While the authorities stressed that an attack was not imminent in the Danish case, it provided a glimpse into the real-time challenges the FBI is facing when suspects speak a foreign language.

Click here for more Reuters political coverage.

- Reuters/Lars Helsinghof (Muslims prayed at the Town Hall Square in Copenhagen after a Danish newspaper apologized for publishing cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed.)

Buried in a 160-page report by the U.S. Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine was a little nugget that the Federal Bureau of Investigation apparently has been receiving calls from telemarketers on telephone lines set up for wiretaps.

When the FBI gets a court order to tap a phone line, they set up telephone lines that deliver those calls to the authorities.  However, it turns out that those phone lines are assigned actual numbers by the phone company.

"It is not uncommon for these lines to 'receive' calls from telemarketers and others who use auto-dialers and other automated call technology to place calls," FBI Deputy Director John Pistole said in a letter to the inspector general.

The issue came up when the inspector general expressed concern that an FBI field office had gone beyond the period in which a court ordered wiretap was authorized, known as an 'overrun', or had possibly collected material after a judge had ordered the FBI to stop.

As a public service, here's the link to the Federal Trade Commission's Do-Not-Call registry in case the FBI wants to avoid getting those calls in the middle of dinner -- or a stakeout.

Click here for more Reuters political coverage.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Finbarr O'Reilly (A call center in Senegal)

It would be tough to find a White House that didn't get upset with media coverage -- especially when they believe they are not winning the "message battle" for their agenda. And sometimes it escalates.

The latest target is of course Fox News which the Obama administration has labeled as an outlet for opinion rather than news and more simply just an arm of the Republican party doing its bidding.

The White House anger with Fox has bubbled for some time now, but only recently did it break out into full public view.

The White House snubbed Fox last month when it was the only major television network that did not interview President Barack Obama one Sunday when he was in the throes of defending healthcare reform.

Some, including a few former Bush administration officials, have cried foul about the attack on Fox by the Obama administration. But memories can be short in this town.

In May 2008, the Bush administration sent a blistering letter to NBC News questioning how it handled an interview with President George W. Bush as well as accusing the network of making analytical and editorial judgments about the conflict in Iraq being a civil war and how the U.S. economy was faring.

And you can be sure Newsweek got the cold shoulder (and probably many others too) during the Clinton administration for the intense coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

But in the end, despite the skirmishes between the White House and news outlets, the questions still get asked.

NBC News continued to get called on for questions during press briefings and news conferences and Fox asks questions along with everyone else at White House briefings. And the Obama White House has said it will still send its officials to speak on Fox News.

Some may speculate that the Obama White House is using its public criticism about Fox to fire up its base or in an attempt to distract from the difficulties the president's agenda is facing.

No matter, it would seem to be par for the course of any White House in the era of 24-hour news.

Click here for more Reuters political coverage.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Gibbs during a press briefing)

"There's no question in my mind that those detainees who would be moved to the United States would be held in such a fashion that they would not be any threat to public safety, and I say that as a former prosecutor," Napolitano said in an interview during the Reuters Washington Summit. She served as a U.S. attorney in Arizona during the Clinton administration.

President Barack Obama has pledged to close the controversial prison by Jan. 22, 2010, including bringing some of the terrorism suspects to U.S. soil for trial in military commissions or U.S. criminal courts. There have been questions and doubts about whether his goal can be achieved because of political, legal and logistical complications.

Napolitano held out hope that the administration could meet the fast-approaching deadline: "I would hope so." She declined to comment on the likely location of where the detainees could be held in the United States.

But Republicans have criticized the idea of bringing the terrorism suspects to U.S. soil, arguing that they are not entitled access to the criminal court system and could pose threats to the communities where they may be imprisoned.

Her remarks came as former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey issued a stinging condemnation of the Obama administration plan, writing in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that civilian courts were not the right place to try the terrorism suspects and could make communities, jurors and courts targets.

"Based on my experience trying such cases, and what I saw as attorney general, they aren't. That is not to say that civilian courts cannot ever handle terrorist prosecutions, but rather that their role in a war on terror—to use an unfashionably harsh phrase—should be, as the term 'war' would suggest, a supporting and not a principal role," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

Mukasey served as a federal prosecutor in the 1970s and then as a federal judge in New York from 1988 to 2006, presiding over terrorism cases that included the trial of those who plotted to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. He was attorney general under former President George W. Bush.

While Mukasey also argued in his op-ed that imprisoning terrorism suspects in the United States could expose others in the prison to their beliefs, many of the individuals convicted like Zacarias Moussaoui are kept in maximum security facilities isolated from the general population.

He also warned that U.S. criminal court procedures would risk revealing too much sensitive information and that the cases against Guantanamo detainees were not built for civilian court proceedings. Many of the hearings in U.S. District Court for petitions by prisoners seeking their release from Guantanamo have been held in closed session to protect classified information.

So do you believe U.S. criminal courts can handle the terrorism cases and would communities become targets or should terrorism suspects from Guantanamo only be tried in military commissions?

For more news from the Reuters Washington Summit, click here.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (Napolitano speaks to the Reuters Washington Summit)

Original Post Text:
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defended the Obama administration's plans to bring terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United States -- countering critics who questioned whether it would create security risks.

"There's no question in my mind that those detainees who would be moved to the United States would be held in such a fashion that they would not be any threat to public safety, and I say that as a former prosecutor," Napolitano said in an interview during the Reuters Washington Summit. She served as a U.S. attorney in Arizona during the Clinton administration.

President Barack Obama has pledged to close the controversial prison by Jan. 22, 2010, including bringing some of the terrorism suspects to U.S. soil for trial in military commissions or U.S. criminal courts. There have been questions and doubts about whether his goal can be achieved because of political, legal and logistical complications.

Napolitano held out hope that the administration could meet the fast-approaching deadline: "I would hope so." She declined to comment on the likely location of where the detainees could be held in the United States.

But Republicans have criticized the idea of bringing the terrorism suspects to U.S. soil, arguing that they are not entitled access to the criminal court system and could pose threats to the communities where they may be imprisoned.

Her remarks came as former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey issued a stinging condemnation of the Obama administration plan, writing in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that civilian courts were not the right place to try the terrorism suspects and could make communities, jurors and courts targets.

"Based on my experience trying such cases, and what I saw as attorney general, they aren't. That is not to say that civilian courts cannot ever handle terrorist prosecutions, but rather that their role in a war on terror—to use an unfashionably harsh phrase—should be, as the term 'war' would suggest, a supporting and not a principal role," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

Mukasey served as a federal prosecutor in the 1970s and then as a federal judge in New York from 1988 to 2006, presiding over terrorism cases that included the trial of those who plotted to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. He was attorney general under former President George W. Bush.

While Mukasey also argued in his op-ed that imprisoning terrorism suspects in the United States could expose others in the prison to their beliefs, many of the individuals convicted like Zacarias Moussaoui are kept in maximum security facilities isolated from the general population.

He also warned that U.S. criminal court procedures would risk revealing too much sensitive information and that the cases against Guantanamo detainees were not built for civilian court proceedings. Many of the hearings in U.S. District Court for petitions by prisoners seeking their release from Guantanamo have been held in closed session to protect classified information.

So do you believe U.S. criminal courts can handle the terrorism cases and would communities become targets or should terrorism suspects from Guantanamo only be tried in military commissions?

For more news from the Reuters Washington Summit, click here.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (Napolitano speaks to the Reuters Washington Summit)