Today's Headlines and Commentary

As Bobby noted yesterday, two of the last remaining Guantanamo Uighurs will find a new home in El Salvador. Here are the New York Times and Associated Press stories. Lots of U.K. terrorist news surfacing before the weekend: Three men from Oman were arrested at London’s Heathrow airport today on suspicion, as the police put it, of “possessing articles and documents with intent to use them for terrorist purposes overseas,” according to the Times. In other news, U.K. terrorist Saajid Badat who was convicted of conspiring with Richard Reid to blow up the latter's shoe bomb—yeah, they’re the reason we have to take off our shoes off every time we go through an airport—has revealed that he met Osama bin Laden multiple times in Afghanistan, says CNN’s Security Clearance blog. And Robin Simcox of the Henry Jackson Society writes in the Wall Street Journal of the latest twists in the long-running efforts by the British government to get Islamic cleric Abu Qatada out of their country. And the Telegraph reports that al-Shabaab has issued fresh warnings on its online forums of a “disaster” if British authorities manage to deport him to Jordan. Money quote from a frustrated Prime Minister David Cameron:

Sometimes I wish I could put him on a plane and take him to Jordan myself. But the government has to act within the law. …[T]hat is what we’ll do, we will get it done.

The Economist discusses Al Qaeda’s future, arguing that the plucky bunch “is down, but far from out.” Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch declares that Al Nashiri’s military commissions hearing won’t meet the standards of fairness that both the defendant and the victims of the U.S.S. Cole deserve. The Hill has a story on the letter to the FAA from Reps. Joe Barton (R-Texas) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) that Ben and John Villasenor mentioned in their oped today. CNN informs us that the Taliban has claimed responsibility today for the Black Hawk crash in Afghanistan in which four U.S. soldiers died. Dana Priest of the Washington Post gave the keynote address at the Harvard National Security Journal’s symposium on "The Law and Policy of Covert Operations: Current & Future Challenges." Watch it here. The Los Angeles Times reports that Afghan President Hamid Karzai wants an accelerated drawdown in the wake of the horrifying pictures of U.S. troops posing with body parts of dead insurgents. Joe Heim morbidly writes in the Post about how we should not be surprised--war being dehumanizing and all that. And one can only hope that every Taliban commander goes down the path of the gentleman in the wanted poster below--who steals the show for today's Moment of Zen--courtesy of the Washington Post: