U.S. District Court judge Lewis Kaplan, who had been presiding over the bin Laden case in Manhattan federal court, issued an order called ‘nolle prosequi’, which means ‘do not prosecute’ in Latin, a typical legal move once a defendant is deceased.

Bin Laden was indicted back in 1998 in the Southern District of New York for his role in the al Qaeda attack on the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which killed more than 200 people, including a dozen Americans.

The indictment was later revised to charge bin Laden in the dual bombings of two American embassies in East Africa that killed 224 on August 7, 1998, and in the suicide attack on the USS Cole in 2000. None of the charges involved the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

It was 5 long years ago that author Ed Haas had noticed that the FBI web page for Bin Laden did not mention the attacks of 9/11. He called the FBI to find out more:

On June 5, 2006, author Ed Haas contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters to ask why, while claiming that bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 1998 bombings of US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the poster does not indicate that he is wanted in connection with the events of 9/11.

Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI responded, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Tomb continued, “Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11.” Asked to explain the process, Tomb responded, “The FBI gathers evidence. Once evidence is gathered, it is turned over to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice then decides whether it has enough evidence to present to a federal grand jury. In the case of the 1998 United States Embassies being bombed, bin Laden has been formally indicted and charged by a grand jury. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.”

Since that report, the FBI has not displayed bin Laden’s web-page with information connecting him to the 9/11 attacks. Even further, the FBI has acknowledged evidence of controlled demolitions as “backed by thorough research” when presented by Richard Gage. That letter from the FBI is downloadable here.

Lack of evidence to connect Bin Laden to 9/11 aside, many are wondering why the death of Usama does not translate into the death of the ill-named “War on Terror.” Quite the opposite has become the case actually.

Within days of killing Bin Laden a NATO air-strike was launched on Tripoli, Libya killing one of Gaddafi’s sons. The death was not confirmed by NATO and there are questions as to the veracity of the report as Al Jazeera noted, however the article also pointed out the following:

Gaddafi and his wife were in the Tripoli house of his 29-year-old son, Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, when it was hit by at least one missile fired by a NATO warplane late on Saturday, Libyan government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said on Sunday.

Al-Arab’s compound in Tripoli’s Garghour neighbourhood was attacked “with full power” in a “direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country”, Ibrahim said, calling the strike a violation of international law.

“What we have now is the law of the jungle,” he told a news conference. “We think now it is clear to everyone that what is happening in Libya has nothing to do with the protection of civilians.”

Alongside the Libya campaign were drone strikes in Yemen; barely remembered at this point but not completely forgotten. Karen Greenburg reports at Salon:

As if to underscore the policy implications of this commitment to “redoubling our efforts,” drone aircraft were dispatched on escalating post-bin-Laden assassination runs from Yemen (including a May 6th failed attempt on American al-Qaida follower Anwar al-Awlaki) to Pakistan. There, on May 23rd, a drone failed to take out Taliban leader Mullah Omar, while, on June 2nd, an attempt to kill Ilyas Kashmiri, a militant associated with the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai, India, may (or may not) have failed. And those were only the most publicized of escalating drone attacks, while reports of a major “intensification” of the drone campaign in Yemen are pouring in.

Appropriately she also brings up the PATRIOT Act, Guantanamo Bay and other attempts to expand the all-out-war-on-everything:

In the meantime, President Obama used the bin Laden moment to push through and sign into law a four-year renewal of the Patriot Act, despite bipartisan resistance in Congress and the reservations of civil liberties groups. They had stalled its passage earlier in the year, hoping to curtail some of its particularly onerous sections, including the “lone wolf” provision that allows surveillance of non-US citizens in America, even if they have no ties to foreign powers, and the notorious Section 215, which grants the FBI authority to obtain library and business records in the name of national security.

One thing could not be doubted. The administration was visibly using the bin Laden moment to renew George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror (even if without that moniker). And let’s not forget about the leaders of Congress, who promptly accelerated their efforts to ensure that the apparatus for the war that 9/11 started would never die. Congressman Howard McKeon (R-CA), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was typical. On May 9th, he introduced legislation meant to embed in law the principle of indefinite detention without trial for suspected terrorists until “the end of hostilities.” What this would mean, in reality, is the perpetuation ad infinitum of that Bush-era creation, our prison complex at Guantanamo (not to speak of our second Guantanamo at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan).

However all is not lost. At a recent Conference of Mayors the discussion was focused on bringing money for the war back home (interestingly money seems to be the factor – not the human toll). One mayor summed it up nicely as The Nation reports:

Mayor Joseph O’Brien of Worcester, Massachusetts, summed up sentiments at the conference when he complained that, “We are spending a billion a month after Osama bin Laden has been killed. And while I appreciate the effort to rebuild nations around the world, we have tremendous needs in communities like mine.”

Also Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul and others came together to sue the Federal Government for violating the War Powers Act and the Constitution during its war with Libya. The AP notes:

The lawmakers say Obama violated the Constitution in bypassing Congress and using international organizations like the UnitedNations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to authorize military force.

The lawmakers want a judge to issue an order suspending military operations without congressional approval. They said they were filing their lawsuit Wednesday against Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Capping this story well is a reminder by Jonathon Shell at TomDispatch:

Nobody seems to have noticed, but in the nearly two and a half years of the Obama administration at least three commonplace phrases of the George W. Bush era have slipped into oblivion: “regime change,” “shock and awe,” and “imperial presidency.” The war in Libya should remind us of just how appropriate they remain.

And please, Remember Building 7:

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First, consider what Democrats and Republicans just jointly did with regard to the Patriot Act, the very naming of which once sent progressives into spasms of vocal protest and which long served as the symbolic shorthand for Bush/Cheney post-9/11 radicalism:

Top congressional leaders agreed Thursday to a four-year extension of the anti-terrorist Patriot Act, the controversial law passed after the Sept. 11 attacks that governs the search for terrorists on American soil.

The deal between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner calls for a vote before May 27, when parts of the current act expire. The idea is to pass the extension with as little debate as possible to avoid a protracted and familiar argument over the expanded power the law gives to the government. . . .

From its inception, the law’s increased surveillance powers have been criticized by liberals and conservatives alike as infringements on free speech rights and protections against unwarranted searches and seizures.

Some Patriot Act opponents suggest that Osama bin Laden’s demise earlier this month should prompt Congress to reconsider the law, written when the terrorist leader was at the peak of his power. But the act’s supporters warn that al-Qaida splinter groups, scattered from Pakistan to the United States and beyond, may try to retaliate.

“Now more than ever, we need access to the crucial authorities in the Patriot Act,” Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

This will be the second time that the Democratic Congress — with the support of President Obama (who once pretended to favor reforms) — has extended the Patriot Act without any changes.  And note the rationale for why it was done in secret bipartisan meetings:  to ensure “as little debate as possible” and “to avoid a protracted and familiar argument over the expanded power the law gives to the government.”  Indeed, we wouldn’t want to have any messy, unpleasant democratic debates over “the expanded power the law gives to the government.”  Here we find yet again the central myth of our political culture:  that there is too little bipartisanship when the truth is there is little in Washington but that. And here we also find — yet again — that the killing of Osama bin Laden is being exploited to justify a continuation, rather than a reduction, in the powers of the National Security and Surveillance States.

Next we have a new proposal from the Obama White House to drastically expand the scope of “National Security Letters” — the once-controversial and long-abused creation of the Patriot Act that allows the FBI to obtain private records about American citizens without the need for a subpoena or any court approval — so that it now includes records of your Internet activities:

White House proposal would ease FBI access to records of Internet activity

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. . .

Stewart A. Baker, a former senior Bush administration Homeland Security official, said the proposed change would broaden the bureau’s authority. “It’ll be faster and easier to get the data,” said Baker, who practices national security and surveillance law. “And for some Internet providers, it’ll mean giving a lot more information to the FBI in response to an NSL.” . . .

To critics, the move is another example of an administration retreating from campaign pledges to enhance civil liberties in relation to national security. The proposal is “incredibly bold, given the amount of electronic data the government is already getting,” said Michelle Richardson, American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel.

The critics say its effect would be to greatly expand the amount and type of personal data the government can obtain without a court order. “You’re bringing a big category of data — records reflecting who someone is communicating with in the digital world, Web browsing history and potentially location information — outside of judicial review,” said Michael Sussmann, a Justice Department lawyer under President Bill Clinton who now represents Internet and other firms.

So first they conspire with the GOP to extend the Patriot Act without any reforms, then seek to expand its most controversial and invasive provisions to obtain the Internet activities of American citizens without having to bother with a subpoena or judicial approval — “they” being the Democratic White House.

Most critically, the government’s increased ability to learn more and more about the private activities of its citizens is accompanied — as always — by an ever-increasing wall of secrecy it erects around its own actions.  Thus, on the very same day that we have an extension of the Patriot Act and a proposal to increase the government’s Internet snooping powers, we have this:

The Justice Department should publicly release its legal opinion that allows the FBI to obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process, a watchdog group asserts.

The nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges in a lawsuit filed Thursday that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel violated federal open-records laws by refusing to release the memo.

The suit was prompted in part by McClatchy’s reporting that highlighted the existence of the memo and the department’s refusal to release it. Earlier this year, McClatchy also requested a copy and was turned down.

The decision not to release the memo is noteworthy because the Obama administration — in particular the Office of Legal Counsel — has sought to portray itself as more open than the Bush administration was. By turning down the foundation’s request for a copy, the department is ensuring that its legal arguments in support of the FBI’s controversial and discredited efforts to obtain telephone records will be kept secret.

What’s extraordinary about the Obama DOJ’s refusal to release this document is that it does not reveal the eavesdropping activities of the Government but only its legal rationale for why it is ostensibly permitted to engage in those activities.  The Bush DOJ’s refusal to release its legal memos authorizing its surveillance and torture policies was unquestionably one of the acts that provoked the greatest outrage among Democratic lawyers and transparency advocates (see, for instance, Dawn Johnsen’s scathing condemnation of the Bush administration for its refusal to release OLC legal reasoning: “reliance on ‘secret law’ threatens the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from Congress and the public of legal interpretations by the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) upsets the system of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government.”

The way a republic is supposed to function is that there is transparency for those who wield public power and privacy for private citizens.  The National Security State has reversed that dynamic completely, so that the Government (comprised of the consortium of public agencies and their private-sector “partners”) knows virtually everything about what citizens do, but citizens know virtually nothing about what they do (which is why WikiLeaks specifically and whistleblowers generally, as one of the very few remaining instruments for subverting that wall of secrecy, are so threatening to them).  Fortified by always-growing secrecy weapons, everything they do is secret — including even the “laws” they secretly invent to authorize their actions  — while everything you do is open to inspection, surveillance and monitoring.  

This dynamic threatens to entrench irreversible, absolute power for reasons that aren’t difficult to understand.  Knowledge is power, as the cliché teaches.  When powerful factions can gather unlimited information about citizens, they can threaten, punish, and ultimately deter any meaningful form of dissent:  J. Edgar Hoover infamously sought to drive Martin Luther King, Jr. to suicide by threatening to reveal King’s alleged adultery discovered by illicit surveillance; as I described earlier today in my post on New York’s new Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer was destroyed in the middle of challenging Wall Street as the result of a massive federal surveillance scheme that uncovered his prostitution activities.  It is the rare person indeed with nothing to hide, and allowing the National Security State faction unfettered, unregulated intrusive power into the private affairs of citizens — as we have been inexorably doing — is to vest them with truly awesome, unlimited power.

Conversely, allowing government officials to shield their own conduct from transparency and (with the radical Bush/Obama version of the “State Secrets privilege”) even judicial review ensures that National Security State officials (public and private) can do whatever they want without any detection and (therefore) without limit or accountability.  That is what the Surveillance State, at its core, is designed to achieve: the destruction of privacy for individual citizens and an impenetrable wall of secrecy for those with unlimited surveillance power.  And as these three events just from the last 24 hours demonstrate, this system — with fully bipartisan support — is expanding more rapidly than ever.

UPDATE:  I confused the timing of the second incident I mentioned here:  the White House’s proposal to expand NSL’s to include Internet records.  That actually occurred last July.  But I also neglected to include in this list the Obama White House’s September demands that all ISP’s and manufacturers of electronic communication devices (such as Blackberries) provide “backdoors” for government surveillance, so that bolsters the points I made here.

UPDATE II:  So patently illegal is Obama’s war in Libya as of today that media reports are now coming quite close to saying so directly; see, for instance, this unusually clear CNN article today from Dana Bash.  As a result, reporters today bombarded the White House with questions about the war’s legality, and here is what happened, as reported by ABC News‘ Jake Tapper:

Talk about “secret law.”  You’re not even allowed to know the White House’s rationale (if it exists) for why this war is legal.  It simply decrees that it is, and you’ll have to comfort yourself with that.  That’s how confident they are in their power to operate behind their wall of secrecy: they don’t even bother any longer with a pretense of the most minimal transparency.

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The deal between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner calls for a vote before May 27, when parts of the current act expire. The idea is to pass the extension with as little debate as possible to avoid a protracted and familiar argument over the expanded power the law gives to the government.

Support for the extension was unclear. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., wanted tighter restrictions on the government’s power and may seek to amend it. In the House, members of the freshman class elected on promises of making government smaller were skeptical.

“I still have some concerns, and at this point I’m leaning against (voting for) it,” said one, Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md.

The legislation would extend three expiring provisions until June 1, 2015, officials said.

The provisions at issue allow the government to use roving wiretaps on multiple electronic devices and across multiple carriers and get court-approved access to business records relevant to terrorist investigations. The third, a “lone wolf” provision that was part of a 2004 law, permits secret intelligence surveillance of non-U.S. individuals without having to show a connection between the target and a specific terrorist group.

From its inception, the law’s increased surveillance powers have been criticized by liberals and conservatives alike as infringements on free speech rights and protections against unwarranted searches and seizures.

Some Patriot Act opponents suggest that Osama bin Laden’s demise earlier this month should prompt Congress to reconsider the law, written when the terrorist leader was at the peak of his power. But the act’s supporters warn that al-Qaida splinter groups, scattered from Pakistan to the United States and beyond, may try to retaliate.

“Now more than ever, we need access to the crucial authorities in the Patriot Act,” Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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Astute followers of American politics might think those items a dog whistle, evoking the worst civil liberties abuses permitted by the USA PATRIOT Act and other “emergency” provisions passed in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001.

They are, in fact, just a few of the powers claimed in an Egyptian “emergency” law passed in 1958, that goes even further than the controversial American security provisions.

The law has been used to keep the country under an officially declared “state of emergency” since the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981. Prior to that, it had been invoked frequently since 1967, in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli war.

Egyptians have been campaigning against it ever since.

Criticism of the policies escalated again last May, when their parliament extended the government’s emergency powers for another two years.

Authorities promised to limit the law’s application to terrorists and drug traffickers: a promise which human rights advocates called into doubt.

In an unclassified diplomatic cable from the US embassy in Cairo, released by secrets outlet WikiLeaks on Friday, American officials acknowledged the many abuses the law had brought on, from torture to caps on personal expression, limits on public assembly and the seizure of publications.

The cable explains:

— The Emergency Law creates state security courts, which issue verdicts that cannot be appealed, and can only be modified by the president.

— The Emergency Law allows the president broad powers to “place restrictions” on freedom of assembly. Separately, the penal code criminalizes the assembly of 5 or more people in a gathering that could “threaten public order.”

— Over the past two decades, the vast majority of cases where the government has used the Emergency Law have been to target violent Islamist extremist groups such as the Islamic Group and Al-Jihad, and political activity by the Muslim Brotherhood. However, the GOE has also used the Emergency Law in some recent cases to target bloggers and labor demonstrators.

Provisions of the law were used in recent years to arrest members of the country’s minority party, the Muslim Brotherhood. The government has often scapegoated the group as one of their reasons for needing such laws.

Opposition leader and Nobel winner Mohamed ElBaradei, who was placed under house arrest on Friday, had previously suggested they demonize this group simply to perpetuate their enhanced power over the people.

The country was gripped in a series of growing protests since Jan. 25, with tens of thousands of protesters risking their lives to demand President Mubarak, a key US ally, resign power. He’s held the country’s highest office for over three decades.

Torture and brutality in Egypt’s prisons was long known to American officials, another leaked cable revealed Friday.

During murder investigations, police regularly rounded up 40 to 50 suspects and hung them by their arms until they obtained a confession from someone, according to the cable.

Another leaked cable noted that “credible human rights lawyers believe police brutality continues to be a pervasive, daily occurrence in [Egyptian] detention centers, and that [the State Security Investigative Service] has adapted to increased media and blogger focus on police brutality by hiding the abuse and pressuring victims not to bring cases.”

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party was ostensibly reelected in late 2010 by 83 percent of the popular vote, but many elections observers called the election fraudulent. The Muslim Brotherhood and Wafd, the other opposition party, boycotted the election. Voting in December was hindered by violence in many places around Egypt.

Though Mubarak has been in power over three decades, US Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that he is not a “dictator” and should not resign, in spite of the popular uprising against his regime.

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