In my inbox: a letter Sen. Graham wrote to Attorney General Holder asking him to stop being cute about the ultimate venue for the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators. “In your testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 14, 2010, you stated that ‘New York is not off the table’ as [...]

Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking to Bob Schieffer from the Aspen Ideas Festival, told you nothing new on the ideational trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the closure of Guantanamo Bay. “No decision has been made yet on exactly where the trial will occur.” … “Bound and determined” to hold some kind of trial, as [...]

Marc Ambinder wrote a good update on Guantanamo detentions on Friday that I somehow missed. It’s a timely scorecard of who’s still at GTMO and what the administration’s plans for them are. Hanging over the head of all of them is a prospective deal between the White House and Lindsey Graham to trade the closure [...]

Hustler’s gambit: when the mark starts paying, raise his interest rate. And Lindsey Graham is hustling. According to the Post, now he wants a “grand bargain” over terrorism detentions — which is to say, allowing them fewer procedural and substantive rights to contest their detentions and plead their cases — with the White House in [...]

Ezra Klein has some fun with Lindsey Graham’s health-care-dare. (“‘If they jam through health care,’ said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, then Democrats will have ‘poisoned the well’ on other issues…’”) The thing about Graham is this: other GOPers can pull the trigger on Permanent Obstructionism, but he can’t. He’s the guy who wants [...]

It took me a while, but Sen. Lindsey Graham’s staff — and, really, credit to them for dealing with a reporter who obviously disagrees with the senator’s position — pointed me to the heart of Graham’s objections to a civilian trial for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators. Graham favors a military commission for KSM [...]

NYU’s Center on Law & Security has launched a new blog, and Peter Clarke takes to it to observe: Looked at from the UK, the debate raging in the United States about how and where the trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should take place seems somewhat bizarre. To the British, it [...]

This is the deal Lindsey Graham thinks he can use to get the White House to abandon a civilian trial for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed: Republican support for the closure of Guantanamo Bay. According to the more sophisticated explanation/rationalization I’ve heard for accepting the deal, it’s not so much that Graham can really bring along Republicans [...]

I started hearing this a few hours ago but Major Garrett, as far as I’ve seen, is the first to report it outright. The White House press briefing was cancelled today, probably because Gibbs didn’t want to have to deal with this shit. Not that I blame him. Also, for the good-faith files. Here’s Cully [...]

I don’t want to step on the toes of a forthcoming piece, so I hope you’ll forgive me being a bit cryptic. But one of the basic principles animating the Obama administration, as I understand it, is a very civic-minded impulse to resolve the complex interplay of terrorism and justice. In other words, when he [...]