Attorney General Eric Holder and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Tuesday unveiled a new framework for sharing “sensitive but unclassified” information to detect national security threats.

“Sensitive but classified” refers to information that is sufficiently sensitive to warrant some level of protection but not classification. Two new Program Management Offices will coordinate information-sharing among federal, state, local and tribal agencies and the private sector, the Justice Department said.

From the department/DHS news release:

The new PMOs will work jointly to provide sustained funding and personnel support to 72 state and local Fusion Centers nationwide and provide training and resources to frontline law enforcement officials to better document activities possibly linked to terrorism through NSI, a DHS-DOJ collaboration designed to detect, analyze and share intelligence about suspicious behavior and other indicators while protecting privacy and civil liberties.

The offices grew from work by the Presidential Interagency Task Force on Controlled Unclassified Information, which is led by Holder and Napolitano. In a report, the task force also recommended standardizing the way such information is handled with one set of markings. There are currently more than 100 different markings for sensitive but classified information.

The task force consulted civil liberties and open-government groups. Advocates have raised concerns about the federal government stockpiling information about Americans and using the sensitive-but-classified designation to withhold records without justification.

Eric Holder (Photo by Ryan J. Reilly / Main Justice).

Attorney General Eric Holder today met with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and other officials to discuss the upcoming trial of alleged Sept. 11, 2001, mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, ABC News reports.

Holder’s decision to prosecute the man known as KSM in U.S. federal court has been a source of controversy, with lawmakers, some former Attorneys General and families of victims of the terrorist attack opposing the decision.

Although details of the meeting were not reported by ABC News, it did report that meeting attendees — including representatives of the New York City Police Department, FBI, U.S. marshals and intelligence agencies — likely discussed a detailed security package for the next three years.

Among the security issues of concern are how to secure and release classified information; how to remove the torture element from the case and how to accommodate the large attendance at the trial, ABC News reports. New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly on Tuesday said that security for the duration of the trial will cost significantly more than the $75 million Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. mentioned during a Senate hearing last month, ABC News reports.

A  federal grand jury has begun to hear evidence in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist trials scheduled to take place in Manhattan, but when KSM and his fellow defendants will arrive in New York from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility is unclear, ABC News reports. Before the suspects can be moved from Guantanamo Bay, the Justice Department must give Congress 45 days notice, which has yet to occur, ABC News reports.

Edwin Meese III

Former Attorney General Ed Meese on Wednesday joined in the criticism of Attorney General Eric Holder’s controversial decision to try alleged Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court in New York. Meese served as Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan from 1985 to 1988.

In a blog posting on Web site of the Heritage Foundation, where Meese is the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and chairman of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, he also criticized the decision to “abandon” the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

Here’s Meese’s full blog posting:

“It is clear that foreign terrorists and terrorist groups have committed acts of war against the United States, and that our national security requires that we respond accordingly. This means that President Bush’s prudent actions and the military response which he led should continue as our answer to these attacks.

Congress overwhelmingly reaffirmed their commitment to military commissions in 2006, which have historically been the way that we respond to acts of war. To abandon our two centuries of tradition and to substitute some new civilian procedure as a response to such attacks endangers the security of our country and our national interest.

It was a tragic mistake to decide to abandon the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, which was designed physically and legally to handle these types of cases. It is a further tragic mistake to now bring the detained war combatants into the United States and to employ civilian criminal procedures which were never intended for this type of situation.

The U.S. Constitution protects American citizens and visitors from the moment they are suspected of criminal wrongdoing through a potential trial. These same protections are not, have never, and should not be granted to enemy combatants in war, since it is clear that regardless of the outcome of the trial, these detainees will likely remain in the custody of the United States.”

Attorney General Eric Holder used his Senate Judiciary Committee appearance today to push back against conservative critics on national security.

Without naming names, Holder refuted recent comments by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Mukasey’s close friend, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, both of whom have slammed Holder’s controversial decision to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court in New York.

“There are some who have said this decision means that we have reverted to a pre-9/11 mentality, or that we don’t realize this nation is at war,” Holder said in his opening remarks before a Justice Department oversight hearing. “I know that we are at war.”

The “pre-9/11 mentality” comment appeared aimed right at Mukasey, who was President George W. Bush’s last Attorney General, and who served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York in the mid 1970s with Giuliani.

Mukasey had earlier criticized the Obama administration for dropping use of the Bush-era “war on terror” phrase.

“Using soft, cushy euphemisms instead reflect they’re back in a pre-9-11 mentality,” Mukasey told the Washington Times. “In some ways it’s worse, because at least before [the attacks] we were not aware of what we were facing.”

And Giuliani said Wednesday that if Holder “truly believes we are at war,” he will reverse the decision to try KSM in civilian court and instead let the military try him. “It sends a signal to the terrorists that we are not taking this seriously, as we did before,” the 2008 Republican presidential candidate told reporters on a conference call arranged by the Republican National Committee.

Giuliani became famous for his leadership of New York through the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that brought down the World Trade Center. He became mayor in 1994, a year after followers of an Islamist leader with ties to Osama Bin Laden, the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, had first tried to bring down the towers, using explosives.

NBC’s First Read political newsletter points out a perceived inconsistency in Giuliani’s statements over time. In 1994, the New York mayor praised a guilty verdict in the first WTC bombing trial as demonstrating that “New Yorkers won’t meet violence with violence, but with a far greater weapon — the law.”

For his part Mukasey has been on an op-ed spree in recent weeks, publishing arguments in favor of military commissions in the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

Holder on Wednesday said his critics who said courts can’t handle terrorism cases and that classified information wouldn’t be protected are spreading “misinformation.”

“Our courts have a long history of handling these cases, and no district has a longer history than the Southern District of New York in Manhattan,” Holder said. Among the high profile terrorism trials in New York was the 1994-95 trial of Abdel Rahman, who was convicted of plotting to blow up the United Nations and other New York City landmarks. Mukasey, then a federal judge, presided over the trial.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) cited Mukasey’s previous statements that he believed the Abdel Rahman trial had been bad for national security. The trial produced a public list of  unindicted co-conspirators — including bin Laden — that may have tipped off the al-Qaeda leader he was wanted by the U.S. government, Mukasey has said.

Holder parried that prosecutors would have sought to keep the unindicted co-conspirator list classified and secret, if it had really compromised national security.

But one of the most interesting exchanges Wednesday came with a Democrat on the Senate panel. Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis) asked Holder what he planned to do if a jury failed to convict KSM. ”Failure is not an option,” Holder said, adding that he’d spoken already to the prosecutors about it. “These are cases that have to be won. I don’t expect that we will have a contrary result.”

Replied Kohl: “Well, that’s an interesting point of view. Um, I’ll just leave it at that.”

Former District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova, who supported Eric Holder’s nomination for Attorney General, has joined the chorus of conservative critics who disagree with the decision to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court.

Joseph diGenova (diGenova & Toensing)

“It’s insanity, absolute insanity,” DiGenova told the Washington Examiner. “I think it’s a reckless decision borne of ideology, absolutely bereft of any reason for it happening. It’s just mind boggling.”

DiGenova said it will be difficult to make a case against Mohammed (he didn’t mention the issue of the CIA waterboarding), said the litigation will take forever, the judge would have to have security for the rest of his live, and it l make New York City a target for terrorists again.

Mohammed is being held at the Guantanamo Bay military facility, which President Barack Obama has pledged to close.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Holder’s predecessor in the Bush administration, has also slammed the decision to try KSM in a civilian setting. Conservative commentators on outlets like Fox News have also been unsparing of the decision.

DiGenova, who served as the top D.C. federal prosecutor during the Reagan administration, is married to former Justice Department and Senate Judiciary Committee official Victoria Toensing. Both lent their support to Holder — another former D.C. U.S. Attorney — during his confirmation process earlier this year.

DeGenova told the Examiner, referring to the dismissed corruption case against former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska):

“We know Eric, and we like him,” says DiGenova. “We supported him because we thought the department needed a revamping, because it had been so messed up by the Bush people. There were prosecutors run amok — just look at the Stevens case, which happened under Bush.” Holder’s nearly nine months as attorney general is “a mixed bag,” says DiGenova. “We still think he’s a good guy, and we think he’s honest. We just disagree with this decision.”

Attorney General Eric Holder announced today that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described “mastermind” of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, would be tried in New York City.

The government plans to seek the death penalty. There are questions about whether some evidence might be tainted, given that KSM was subject to waterboarding.

Read the New York Times coverage here.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation didn’t open a criminal investigation into accused Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan’s communications with a prominent al Qaeda-linked cleric in Yemen because investigators concluded they were protected “free speech,” Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reports.

Instead, investigators concluded the communications “were consistent with a research project the psychiatrist was then conducting at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington on post-traumatic stress disorder,” the  New York Times reported.

The new information comes from a background briefing that three unnamed senior government investigators held for reporters Monday evening, according to Isikoff.

Radical cleric Anwar al-Awalki (left) was in communication with Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan before the shootings.

As calls in Congress for an investigation grew Monday, the investigators offered an explanation for how Hasan was allowed to remain in his military post, despite evidence the Army psychiatrist was in contact with an American-born cleric who has provided inspiration for jihad against the West.

Yet the briefing also shows how the government, eight years after the intelligence failures that led to the 9/11 attacks, still wrestles with how to coordinate and assess information vital to national security.

For example, information about Hasan’s recent purchase of a semi-automatic handgun with a magazine allowing him to fire many rounds without reloading wasn’t given to the FBI, the investigators said, according to Isikoff.

Hasan is accused of going on a shooting spree last week at the military base in Fort Hood, Tex., killing 13 people.

On Monday, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote the FBI, CIA, NSA and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair to direct them to keep relevant documents for congressional review. And Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said his panel would investigate.

Communications believed to be emails between Hasan and the cleric, Anwar al-Awalki, were intercepted last year and this year. But “[t]here was no indication that Major Hasan was planning an imminent attack at all, or that he was directed to do anything,” a senior investigator told the Times.

The U.S. intercepted 10 to 20 emails from Hasan to Awalki. The cleric answered at least twice, The Washington Post reported. The correspondence was ”not a smoking gun, but communications that in hindsight raise some concern,” a terrorism expert with knowledge of the case told the Post.

Isikoff reported that the FBI wasn’t made aware that Hasan had purchased hand guns in August at a Killeen, Tex., gun shop named “Guns Galore.” Tight restrictions imposed by Congress on how information about weapons purchases can be shared with law enforcement authorities helped keep that crucial information from the FBI, the investigators said at the background briefing.

Still, it appears the FBI had already decided to close its inquiry into Hasan by the time of his gun purchase. And it’s clear that Hasan’s communications with Awalki didn’t elevate the matter sufficiently to remove him from military duty, despite abundant evidence in government files that the cleric promoted jihad.

Law enforcement authorities also suspected that Awalki was assisting al-Qaeda in plotting attacks from Yemen.

Transcripts and audiotapes about Awalki’s lectures about waging attacks on the West were found in the password protected computer files of suspects arrested in bombing plots in Europe and North America.

As former Washington Post reporter Susan Schmidt wrote Monday in an article for the International Assessment and Strategy Center:

The 9/11 Commission and congressional investigators reported that Aulaqi was visited in early 2000 by a close associate of Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh jailed for conspiracy [connected to] the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Soon after, however, in March 2000, the FBI shut down its counterterrorism investigation of Aulaqi, saying later it did not have sufficient evidence to bring a case. A month before it did so, hijackers Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, fresh from an al Qaeda planning meeting in Malaysia, arrived in the United States and turned up at Aulaqi’s mosque in San Diego.

Awalki was a spiritual leader to 9/11 hijakers Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who slipped into the country after the CIA failed to alert the FBI, the congressional 9/11 commission report found. The cleric befriended them at a San Diego mosque in 2000, and he later counseled the future hijakers when he moved east to Falls Church, Va., where he was imam at the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center.

Hasan and his family also worshiped at Dar al-Hijrah.

Awalki moved to Yemen after the 9/11 attacks. He was arrested in 2006 and released in 2007 under still unexplained circumstances. The cleric said in a taped interview posted on a British Web site after his release that he was interrogated by the FBI several times.

Awalki now runs his own English-language Web site. On Monday, he posted a blog item praising Hasan’s alleged shooting spree.  ”How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done? In fact the only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the US army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal,” Awalki wrote.

The recently confirmed Rhode Island U.S. Attorney said the fight against terrorism will continue to be a priority for his office, The Providence Journal reported yesterday.

Peter Neronha (DOJ)

Peter Neronha, who was confirmed Sept. 15, said combating terrorism is a “critical thing.” His predecessor, Robert Clarke Corrente, also said prosecuting terrorism cases would be a top priority when he took office in 2004.

“When we met in D.C. with the administration, their message was: Keeping the American people safe is the most important thing,” Neronha told the newspaper.

The U.S. Attorney told The Journal that he does not plan to prioritize other issues. He said his office has the resources to effectively handle several matters, according to the newspaper

“The department’s view — and it jibes with my view — is that we as U.S. Attorneys or as members of the Department of Justice don’t need to prioritize by subject matter,” he told The Journal. “In other words, I don’t think we have to say we are going to put environmental cases ahead of drug cases, or gun cases ahead of public corruption cases, because we have the resources and the talent to do any kind of case that comes down the pike.”

Neronha, a veteran prosecutor, told The Journal he didn’t set out to become a U.S. Attorney when he decided to take a job as a state prosecutor 13 years ago. The U.S. Attorney, who served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for seven years, told the paper his objective was “just keep trying to do a decent job and worry about what is on your plate right now.”

“Have you ever seen the movie ‘Any Given Sunday’?” Neronha asked The Journal. “It’s a terrible movie. But Al Pacino gives this great speech to his [football] team. In the speech he says, ‘Life is like the six inches in front of your face.’ That’s kind of the way I have always looked at my career.”

Steven Dettelbach (ohio.gov)

Steven Dettelbach, who was sworn in Monday as Northern Ohio’s new U.S. attorney, says he will put a renewed focus on civil rights enforcement and financial fraud.

“After 9/11, we had to divert a lot of resources to anti-terrorism activities and we need to continue to do that,” Dettelbach said in an interview with WKYC-TV. ”We need to re-focus our efforts on things like fighting economic crime, because people in the community need to understand that a free market also has to be a fair market.”

Dettelbach was one of six U.S. attorneys confirmed by unanimous consent on Sept. 15.  He was sworn in at the Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Cleveland today. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) administered the oath of office.

Dettelbach jointed the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in 1992 as a trial lawyer. He was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Cleveland assigned to the Organized Crime and Corruption Task Force from 2003 until he left for private practice in 2006. Before his selection as U.S. Attorney, Dettelbach was a partner at Baker & Hostetler, splitting time between the firm’s Washington and Cleveland offices.

In another interview, Dettelbach said that that fighting terrorism would remain his top focus, but he would devote resources to other problems as well.

“We have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time…we have to keep the level of protection against terrorism at the same place it’s been and, at the same time, we have to get back to the bread-and-butter work of federal investigators because threats don’t just come from terrorists,” said Dettelbach.

Dettelbach’s office is currently prosescuting a huge corruption scandal in Cuyahoga County and a civil rights case involving a white supremacist who mailed a noose to an Ohio chapter of the NAACP.

We drove two hours to the federal courthouse in Richmond, Va., yesterday, hoping for a glimmer of sunlight in a long-running, largely secret court battle between the government and a cluster of Islamic organizations that came under investigation in a terrorism-financing probe after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Nancy Luque has represented figures in a terrorism-financing probe that became public in 2002. (Getty Images)

It was our understanding that the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals hearings in Richmond were open to the public; after all, this New York Sun report described the proceedings from a related March 2008 hearing in detail.

To its credit, the panel — composed of Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, Chief Judge William B. Traxler, Jr., and Judge Margaret Seymour, who is on loan from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of South Carolina – planned on hearing arguments in open court. The organizations would be identified as entity No.1, entity No. 2, etc., and counsel would use pronouns rather than individuals’ names.

So, imagine our surprise when the panel of judges abruptly announced that defense lawyers Nancy Luque and Steven Barentzen had asked to close the proceedings, citing the need to preserve grand jury secrecy.

We know, from the previous New York Sun report, that the issue before the 4th Circuit revolves at least in part around a civil contempt of court ruling against the now-defunct SAAR Foundation in Herndon, Va. The Sun reporter, Joe Goldstein, described in his report how he had to fight to keep that 2008 hearing open. But his success last year yielded the information that the SAAR Foundation had paid $500,000 to the government in connection with the contempt finding.

Founded by a Saudi banker to spread the harsh interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism, the SAAR Foundation, its officers, and a network of related Islamic organizations and businesses were at the center of the aforementioned major post-9/11 terrorism financing investigation, once dubbed Operation Green Quest, news reports have said.

That probe wielded a treasure trove of public information over the years about what government investigators believe were the operations of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States and related organizations, including Hamas. After winning several related convictions, it appears to have petered out. We’ll try to delve more into what happened to Green Quest in later reports.

But back to our story.

After taking a vote behind closed doors, the judges granted the motion from the defense attorneys. We scrawled a thoroughly inadequate objection on our legal pad and passed it to the courtroom deputy, who fed it to the judges. They took our note under advisement. When the panel reconvened, Chief Judge Traxler said the secrecy of the grand jury proceedings had won the day. We had been ejected.

There are many reasons to view the 4th Circuit’s decision to keep its proceedings secret as somewhat farcical, not the least of which is that we already know who Luque’s clients are.  She’s on the public record as an attorney for Mar-Jac Poultry, a Georgia chicken-processing plant that was under investigation in the Green Quest probe. One of the Mar-Jac officers was M. Yaqub Mirza, another of Luque’s clients. Mirza was an officer of the SAAR Foundation, and a board member of a company called Ptech. An indictment unsealed in July charged Ptech officers with making false statements on a loan application to the Small Business Administration to conceal the ownership interest of a Saudi national named Yassin Qadi, designated by the U.S. government as a financier of terrorism.

We wish we could tell you what happened in Richmond on Wednesday. Maybe another day.

Mary Jacoby contributed to this report.