Already, President Obama announced today, the Justice Department is going to charge a former CIA-black-site resident in federal court. And who’s that lucky ex-GTMO detainee?

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a 34-year-old Tanzanian charged with aiding the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, is to be tried in the Southern District of New York, where he was first indicted more than a decade ago. 

Oh shit, it’s my July Surprise!

In the spring of 2004, John Judis, Massoud Ansari and I reported that the Bush administration pressed the Pakistanis to deliver a high-value al-Qaeda captive in time for the Democratic convention so as to secure Bush’s re-election. You should have seen the conspiracy-theorist charges that got thrown our way. And yet, a couple hours before John Kerry accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, this happened:

July 29, Faisal Saleh Hayyat, Pakistan’s interior minister, announced the arrest of a high-ranking Al Qaeda figure on local television. After a tense standoff in Gujrat, a city some 100 miles southeast of Islamabad, Pakistani security forces had captured the Tanzanian jihadist Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the FBI’s twenty-second "Most Wanted" terrorist and a suspected conspirator in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. A proud Hayyat dubbed the arrest "another crowning success of Pakistan’s security apparatus in the fight against terrorism." But it is doubtful Hayyat was really addressing his fellow Pakistanis: He made the announcement at midnight. More likely, his intended audience was half a world away – in the United States, where, in the middle of the afternoon, John Kerry was preparing to deliver his nomination speech to the Democratic National Convention.

Obviously Kerry lost for many, many more reasons than this, but it was still a holy-shit moment. I remember TNR’s Mike Crowley emailing me from Boston to be like Hey you tinfoil-hat-wearing motherfucker, looks like this blew up in your… oh wait. (Crowley, I take it, is now TNR’s national-security guy, which is a bit improbable, but welcome to the mission, brother.)

Anyway, it’s still surreal for me to read Ghailani’s name in print. I look forward to his trial, as I imagine he’ll make a number of baroque countercharges, but I look forward even more to this vile fuck’s conviction.