As the trial of a former Guantanamo detainee proceeded peacefully in a New York courtroom today, U.S. military prosecutors in Cuba were reportedly scrambling to get Omar Khadr, the alleged child soldier on trial for war crimes at Gitmo, to plead guilty to murder. Plea negotiations are reportedly ongoing and his trial, set to resume Monday, has been postponed for a week.

Lawyers made opening statements Tuesday as the trial began in earnest for the first former Guantanamo detainee transferred to U.S. soil. While the government portrayed the slight, baby-faced 36-year-old as a vicious al Qaeda murderer who helped plan two US embassy bombings that killed 224 people, the defense told a very different story. Although not contesting much of the evidence the government plans to present — about the bombings themselves, its destructiveness and their innocent victims — defense lawyers argue that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was a hapless young Tanzanian duped into helping his powerful childhood friends who, unbeknownst to him, were al Qaeda killers.

On Wednesday, to the surprise of some spectators in the courtroom, a U.S. federal judge did the right thing: he followed the law.

This diary is a summary of the law pertaining to the federal grand jury.

The first trial of a former Guantanamo detainee in a U.S. federal court began in New York City this week. With jury selection completed, opening arguments will begin Monday for Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani.

It’s hard to imagine how the United States could heap more abuse on Pakistan. We are approaching the one year anniversary since Jeremy Scahill disclosed the extensive JSOC-Blackwater secret war effort within Pakistan and yet there is no indication that either Barack Obama or David Petraeus sees a need to shut down the rogue operators there. Despite the occasional attempt to portray the US military as providing crucial relief efforts in the massive floods in Pakistan (such as in the accompanying photo), the reality is that US military relief to Pakistan has been derided as but a tiny fraction of the military relief provided in other recent world catastrophes. Last week’s sentencing of Aafia Siddiqui to eighty-six years in jail provoked massive protests across Pakistan. And now we are learning that NATO (which really means US) helicopters have killed over 50 people in air raids on the Pakistan side of the border with Afghanistan over the weekend.

When Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was first transferred to New York from Guantanamo Bay last year, House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio called it “the first step in the Democrats’ plan to import terrorists into America.”

Most people don’t even realize it, but an alleged al Qaeda terrorist – deemed among the most dangerous terrorists in US custody by US counterterrorism officials – has been quietly appearing in a U.S. federal court in downtown Manhattan for pretrial hearings for weeks now.

One of the issues that spurred our war of choice in Iraq was the false insistence by the criminal Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, specifically nuclear weapons. The premise was that he might fly a drone (nutty) or worse give one of his precious nukes to a terrorist group who would then try to smuggle it into the United States.

I am probably dating myself with this, but back when I was a kid one of the things that was almost an article of faith with my friends and I was the prospect of an nuclear war of some kind between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was not a daily worry but it was always there in the back of our heads. It led to a lot of blue sky talking about post apocalyptic survival (and the realization that Michigan had 300 primary targets and no one was likely to survive in the state if the worst happened).

Luckily the Cold War ended and the chance of world wide nuclear holocaust receded. However that dread is a part of many peoples childhood and still influences their thinking. While there is a much lower chance of a major nuclear war, there seems to be a higher chance of a single city being destroyed by a nuclear weapon.

I’ll agree with Sen. Lindsey Graham on one thing: “Americans still wait for justice.” That’s the headline of a column he wrote that ran in the SunNews and other South Carolina newspapers on Monday, lamenting that the U.S. government still hasn’t put the plotters of the September 11 terrorist attacks on trial. But Graham’s explanation for why we haven’t yet seen justice is actually backwards.