Five Yemeni detainees have left Guantanamo. Four were sent to Oman and one was sent to Estonia.

122 detainees remain.

Senior U.S. officials say they hope to accelerate transfers in 2015 of the dozens of prisoners already cleared for release from Guantanamo and to complete reviews that could clear others to be moved. Obama is taking a more active role in the renewed effort to close the facility, pressing foreign heads of state to accept detainees and making a fiscal case for shutting the prison, which costs $400 million to $500 million a year to operate.

A Belgian arms dealer and "known underworld figure" turned himself into authorities today. He admitted supplying several weapons to Amedi Coulibaly which were used in the Paris attacks.

Federal police, who searched the suspect’s apartment, found papers linking him to a transaction with Amedy Coulibaly, the jihadist who murdered four Jewish men and held others hostage at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in east Paris on Friday.

According to the local press, the man sold Coulibaly the Skorpion submachine guns he used in the attack, as well as the rocket propelled grenade launcher and the Kalashnikov automatic assault rifles that Said and Cherif Kouachi used to perpetrate the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. The weapons were purchased near the Midi railway station in downtown Brussels for less than 5,000 euros, according to the reports.

In November 2008, this was posted at TalkLeft:

Ezra Klein thinks: "Presuming that Hillary Clinton will remain one of, if not the, central actors in Democratic life from the year 2000 to the year 2016 displays a certain poverty of imagination about the path of Democratic politics. With every passing day, her singular political position erodes. In 2004, she would have won the nomination in a walk. By 2008, there was a new politician who better tapped into that particular moment in the party's life. By 2016, there will be many politicians like that, most of whose names we don't know. It's very hard to imagine that eight years in the future, the party will want to move back to Clinton."

One thing for sure, Ezra is not suffering from a poverty of imagination in this post. The entire post seems a figment of his imagination to me. [...] I think the complete opposite of Ezra - If Hillary wants to be the Dem nominee in 2016, she will be the Dem nominee in 2016.

Told you so. Of course Ezra got the Vox money tho.

The Judge has rejected Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's request for a trial delay based on the Paris attacks.

"My detailed review of juror questionnaires in preparation for voir dire has so far confirmed, rather then undermined, my judgment that a fair and impartial jury can and will be chosen to determine the issues in this case,"

I'm in court all day, this is an open thread, all topics welcome.

[Warning: This is very long. It assumes you know the basics. If not, see my four prior posts on the Dershowitz - Jane Doe claims, accessible here.]

Victims' Rights Lawyers Paul Cassell and Bradley Edwards have not yet responded in court to Alan Dershowitz' motion to intervene in the civil suit between Jane Does 1 and 2 and the Department of Justice. The Court has not yet ruled on Dershowitz' motion. Yesterday, Dershowitz filed a supplement to his motion. I have uploaded it here.

In addition to asking that he be allowed to intervene, he asks that Cassell and Edwards' allegations against him be stricken and that the Court enter a "show cause" order (explaining why they shouldn't be held in contempt of court.) [More...]

AQAP has issued a statement taking credit for the Charlie Hebdo killings. The reason for the operaton: Their insults to the Prophet.

We in the Organization of Qa'idatul Jihad in the Arabian Peninsula claim responsibility for this operation as a vengeance for the Messenger of Allah. We clarify to the ummah that the one who chose the target, laid the plan nd financed the operation, is the leadership of the organization.

It says by coincidence, Coulibaly had another operation set at the same time.[More...]

Facebook is going to put Amber Alerts in users' newsfeeds.

Just another reason I don't like or have much use for Facebook. Or Joe Biden, who got the Amber Alert bill passed without hearings by sneaking it into another crime bill against drugs.

Worst presidential nomination scenario: Hillary decides not to run and Joe Biden takes a shot.

Update: 1/14/15: The fighter standing next to the child soldier who kills the Russian and Kazakh intel agents is Abu Saad al-Dagfhistani. He was killed in Kobane today according to ISIS accounts.

Al Hayat Media, an official media arm of the Islamic State, has a new video (I'm not linking to it) in which two captured Russian/Kazakh intelligence agents confess and are shot and killed. What's unusual is that the killer is about 10 years old. The video shows him prepare to kill the men and then proceed to shoot them in the head. The final screenshot in the video is of the child I wrote about here in an earlier video who was one of many children from Kazakhstan training in a camp in Syria. That child appears to be about 10 years old and looks and sounds female. S/he says to the camera, "We're going to kill you O kuffar...we're going to slaughter you."

[More...]

I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it. - Voltaire

There has been a bit of back and forth about the Je suis Charlie. See contra Denise Oliver Velez.

Maybe I'm simple, but to me the issue is really simple - je suis Voltaire - I'm not agreeing with what you say, I'm defending your right to say it without getting killed.

More

The big bitcoin trial over Silk Road begins today. WIRED tells you why it matters.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome

One issue regarding the Kosher market attacks by Coulibaly continues to have conflicting information: his motive for picking the Kosher market. In his swan song video and his conversations recorded when his phone had not hung up after talking to a news station, he doesn't mention animosity towards Jews as a motive. His anger is directed at the French Government.

Now there's an interview with one of the hostages who he was talking to him during the incident, trying to empathize with him. The hostage says:

Google translated version: [More...]

Update: Tsarnaev's defense team has now requested a continuance due to the Paris shootings.

Boston Magazine has an interesting interview with Stephen Jones, lead trial counsel for Timothy McVeigh, "Tale of Two Trials" on similarities and differences in McVeigh's case and that of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

On jury selection, he raises the issue of the "stealth juror."

The federal courts, in my opinion, engage in a fiction. The fiction is — and some sincerely believe it, but I think nevertheless it’s a fiction — that once the juror takes an oath as a juror that their personality and character sort of changes and now they recognize this tremendous responsibility on them. I’ve not found that to be true.

What I’ve found is that the more notorious the case is, or the greater the publicity, jurors campaign to be on the jury so they can be a part of history, and that was certainly the case in Mr. McVeigh’s jury.

[More...]