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Brennan: Some Guantanamo detainees will go to Yemen — Washington (CNN) - The United States still intends to send some Yemeni detainees at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility back to Yemen despite a terrorist threat there, President Barack Obama's terrorism czar said Sunday.
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THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS
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Taking Chances on Yemen — The American and British embassies in Yemen have been closed reportedly in response to an al Qaeda threat. The Associated Press reports: … Two related items come immediately to mind — both of them related to former Guantanamo detainees.

Al-Qaeda benefits from a decade of missteps to become a threat in Yemen

Yemen's Chaos Aids Evolution of Qaeda Cell
Discussion:
Alshahid Network, TalkLeft, Canadian Press, BBC, PrairiePundit, Associated Press and Waq al-Waq


Low favorables: Dems rip Rasmussen — Democrats are turning their fire on Scott Rasmussen, the prolific independent pollster whose surveys on elections, President Obama's popularity and a host of other issues are surfacing in the media with increasing frequency.
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Partisan Trends — Number of Democrats Falls to New Low, Down Six Points Since Election 2008 — In December, the number of Americans identifying themselves as Democrats fell to the lowest level recorded in more than seven years of monthly tracking by Rasmussen Reports.

Soft on terror? Not this president — THERE IS, it seems evident, more than enough blame to go around in the botched handling of the botched Christmas bombing. Not for some Republicans. With former vice president Richard B. Cheney in the lead, they have embarked on an ugly course to use …
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Brennan responds to Cheney: He's either ‘willfully mischaracterized’ Obama or is ‘ignorant of the facts.’ — Earlier this week, former Vice President Dick Cheney joined the GOP's hypocritical attacks against President Obama's response to the attempted Christmas day terror attack, claiming that …


Living on Nothing but Food Stamps — CAPE CORAL, Fla. — After an improbable rise from the Bronx projects to a job selling Gulf Coast homes, Isabel Bermudez lost it all to an epic housing bust — the six-figure income, the house with the pool and the investment property.

OUR STUNTED DISCOURSE.... For over a week now, the right has been working aggressively to go after President Obama over national security policy. But since the failed Christmas-day plot, conservatives haven't quite come up with a coherent line of attack. Indeed, nine days later …

The Joke's on Us — The Pantybomber wasn't the big joke. We are. — On Christmas Day, a gentleman from Nigeria succeeded (effortlessly) in boarding a flight to Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. Pretty funny, huh? — But the Pantybomber wasn't the big joke. The real laugh was the United States government.
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GINA COBB


From the White House Flickr page. — UPDATE: No, I don't think Obama's facial expression is just a fluke of when the shutter went off. His eyes aren't closed, as some with poor displays seem to think. Here's a detail from the frame: — ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Joseph Gautier writes …


Peru upholds Fujimori's sentence — Peru's Supreme Court has upheld a 25-year jail sentence imposed on former President Alberto Fujimori. — The term was handed down last April for ordering the security forces to carry out killings and kidnappings. — Fujimori, who led Peru from 1990 to 2000 …
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Truthdig

DeMint: WH ‘distracted by other things,’ not focused on security — Republican Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.) on Sunday revived his assault against the White House approach to counter-terrorism, charging the president was too “distracted by other things” to focus intently enough on national security.