In a January 2010 Observer article, he had sounded one of the earliest calls for not holding the 9/11 terror trials in the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Monday afternoon that the trials will, indeed, be held at the Guantanamo Bay prison (to the dismay of many among President Obama's lefty base). 

The Observer nabbed Big Real Estate's super at the 101 Club on Park Avenue and queried: Was REBNY the first to sound the call? "I do believe we were," said Mr. Spinola with a wide grin.

As early as December 2009, Mr. Spinola (pictured) met with Bill Rudin, the landlord and Association for a Better New York chair, in his office. Initially, Mr. Spinola spoke with then-White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and presidential adviser and policy wonk David Axelrod. The board at first kept a low public profile on the issue to resist offending the administration.

But Mr. Spinola was getting an earful from REBNY members, as The Observer noted a month after the meeting with Mr. Rudin, more than he had gotten on any single issue since he took over the board in the mid-1980s: "They're saying to me, 'You've got to stop this, you can't let it happen.'" To hold the trial downtown, they said, would disrupt traffic and create security concerns that could drive out tourists and office tenants, plummeting the downtown economy to post-9/11 lows.

The real estate board, one of the most powerful lobby groups in the state, has had an impact on other issues like property taxes, but none with quite such national resonance. In other words, the board took on the president of the United States and won. 

During his Monday evening recap with The Observer, Mr. Spinola also gave credit to Community Board 1 for helping. Victory, Mr. Spinola said, was not surprising (rumors of the administration's reversal surfaced this past January). "We assumed it would not be in New York," he said. "We're very happy." 

lkusisto@observer.com 

Glenn Greenwald at Salon feels that the conditions of Manning's detention amount to torture.

"For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not "like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole," but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, isolated entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out."

Many nations and humanitarian organizations have classified this kind of long term near total isolation as torture. The treatment is particuarly galling to Greenwald, because Manning has never been given a trail. "The U.S. ought at least to abide by minimal standards of humane treatment in how it detains him. That's true for every prisoner, at all times. But departures from such standards are particularly egregious where, as here, the detainee has merely been accused, but never convicted, of wrongdoing."

When did fearmongering in a time of war become an act of patriotism?

Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try Al Qaeda strategist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other residents of the Guantánamo prison in American civilian courts has provoked angry criticism from all the usual sources, from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to the Fox News airwaves. While some of the complaints are thoughtful, many are nothing more than demagogic appeals that seek to undermine the foundations of justice in a democratic society.

When Mr. Holder’s critics say that Mr. Mohammed doesn’t “deserve” an open and adversarial trial, they are misunderstanding the spirit of our laws. The right to a trial—indeed, all the rights afforded to criminal defendants under the Constitution—is not apportioned according to what the defendants supposedly deserve. What they deserve is, in fact, precisely what a fair trial is designed to determine.

The nation’s founders despised the passions of the lynch mob and the arbitrary penalties handed down by kings and despots. They were particularly appalled by the tortures and abuse inflicted on American Revolutionary soldiers by the British oppressor—and vowed never to do the same to America’s enemies.

When Mr. Holder’s critics say that we don’t dare try a criminal like Mr. Mohammed on the soil of the United States, in a New York City federal courthouse, that is a terrible concession to the terrorists. The same is true when those critics protest against incarcerating a figure such as Mr. Mohammed in an American prison, rather than Gitmo. Essentially, those arguments exaggerate the power of Al Qaeda—which conservatives usually claim has been profoundly weakened over the past several years—and underestimates the strength of the American justice system.

In fact, we have been trying dangerous terrorists in American courts for many years, and then incarcerating them in American prisons. According to a new study by the Center for Law and Security at New York University, the U.S. government has indicted 828 defendants on terrorism-related charges since 2001. Of those indictments, trials are still pending against 235 defendants—and of the remaining 539 defendants, 523 were convicted either at trial or via plea. The single largest venue for terrorism trials is New York City, where 145 terrorism indictments have been filed. The center found in a previous study that the conviction rate in New York is higher than in the rest of the nation, and that sentencing in New York is also tougher. That is understandable—and may help to explain why the attorney general chose the Southern District of New York for the Mohammed prosecution. In the city’s federal courts, the conviction rate of individuals charged with terrorism involving a U.S. target is 100 percent.

When Mr. Mohammed is convicted (or pleads guilty, as he has previously said he will do), the U.S. federal prison system is ideally suited to inflict suitable punishment on him and his cohort. Better than providing him with martyrdom via execution, he should be buried in a “Supermax” prison, from which nobody has ever escaped, and left to rot.

The most basic challenge of the terror campaign waged by jihadi extremists is to preserve the differences between us and them—a challenge that the American government has failed at in far too many instances over the past eight years, through the use of torture, extrajudicial detentions, renditions to other countries and various other violations of U.S. law and treaty obligations. Our own courts found that these acts by the previous administration were lawless and required them to be reversed.

As a nation, we should have the confidence to make the case against these murderers according to our laws and Constitution, without fear of their propaganda or violence. Every precaution should be taken to protect national security and public safety—and then our system will prevail over their perverse ideology.

jconason@observer.com

“When war descends, whether it’s a so-called asymmetrical war or some other kind, we know that innocents get swept up,” said Mr. Rather. “There are, as we speak, 21 detainees still there in Guantánamo who have been cleared and ordered released but are in this Never-Never Land. The courts and others say you are to be released, but nobody will take you.”

It was the afternoon of Monday, June 1, and Mr. Rather was holed up in his office at the Dan Rather Reports “world headquarters” on 42nd Street, crashing on a deadline, and detailing for The Observer via speakerphone the current target of his relentless reportorial appetites.

Mr. Rather sounded revved up. In staccato sentences, he outlined the upcoming hour-long episode of his eponymous newsmagazine that will air on HDNet on Tuesday, June 9. “What do we know about Guantánamo that we didn’t know before?” said Mr. Rather. “What is the situation there at the moment? What is the outlook for the future?”

The project, he said, was some three months in the making. Days earlier, his team had landed the first on-air interview by an American network with Lakhdar Boumediene—a native of Algeria and former resident of Bosnia, who was recently released after spending nearly seven and a half years as a detainee at Guantánamo.

Along the way, Mr. Boumediene had proclaimed his innocence; gone on a prolonged hunger strike; served as the lead petitioner in the 2008 Supreme Court case that helped to establish legal rights for Gitmo prisoners; and ultimately won a ruling from a federal judge that there was “no legal basis” for holding him.

In mid-May, after Mr. Boumediene’s release to France, his lawyer, Stephen Oleskey, granted the first on-camera interview to Dan Rather Reports. But much to his chagrin, Mr. Rather was momentarily detained by a family medical emergency, and, for once, unable to charge headlong into the field. In his stead, Mr. Rather dispatched one of his producers, Adam Teicholz. “He’s a graduate of Harvard Law School,” said Mr. Rather. “But we try not to hold this against him.”

In a hotel in the suburbs of Paris, Mr. Teicholz spent two hours interviewing the former detainee. Throughout the interview, according to Mr. Rather, Mr. Boumediene alleged various humiliations at Guantánamo during the Bush administration. The interview, said Mr. Rather, was packed with details about Mr. Boumediene’s alleged torture—from intravenous needles being jammed into his arms to stories of soldiers snapping photos of the inmate’s painful transport to the detention center.

“I find large portions of the interview riveting,” said Mr. Rather. “One can make one’s own decisions about whether to believe or disbelieve him. But it’s a side of the story that we haven’t seen before.”

Early excerpts from the interview were set to air on Dan Rather Reports on June 2. At a stage in life when most newsmen hang up their workaday suspenders for a cushy academic chair and the occasional trot around the Sunday morning yakety-yak circuit, Mr. Rather continues to chase stories. As long as he has his health, he said, and somebody to employ him, he’ll keep pushing for news.

“Nobody likes to deal with a subject like Guantánamo, because it’s grim,” said Mr. Rather. “But to have the kind of editorial and creative control and freedom that we have here is about as close to journalistic heaven as I expect to get.”

fgillette@observer.com

To get to the analysis of the speech, skip Mr. Raban’s rather long warm-up (an overview, aimed at British readers, of inaugurations past, followed by a brief introduction to Jon Favreau, Mr. Obama’s 27-year-old chief speechwriter); proceed directly to the paragraph in which he declares that many of Mr. Obama’s phrases “had the dull patina of silver that has jingled in dead presidents’ pockets.” In the next paragraph Mr. Raban refers to “somewhat moth-eaten metaphors”—and for a moment it looks like a harsh review.

And then comes the twist:

“What needed to be said had to be phrased in language as well-worn and conventional as possible, to give the illusion of smooth continuity”—even as Mr. Obama, in a notable deviation from precedent, categorically rejected “the political philosophy and legislative record of the previous occupant of the White House.”

Mr. Raban believes that Mr. Obama’s address—couched in “familiar and emollient language”—“is as near as George W. Bush has come to being impeached.”

In other words, the moth-eaten metaphors were just a ploy—and Mr. Raban’s review is a rave.

WE'RE ALL LOOKING FORWARD to the day when we can contemplate Cuba without wincing at the thought of Camp Delta. When that day comes—less than a year from now, with any luck—the title of Richard Fleming’s delightful travel book, Walking to Guantánamo (Commons, $27), will lose its inapt political overtones.

Mr. Fleming, a New Yorker in his late 30s who feared he was on the brink of a nasty midlife crisis, set out to walk from one end of Cuba to the other, west to east, a plan he nursed for five years before actually taking the first step. An integral part of the plan, of course was to write a book about his adventures.

Charmingly candid and laid back, resolutely friendly with the Cubans he encounters and always ready to complain to the reader about blisters and bad knees and other aches and pains, Mr. Fleming is refreshingly post-ideological—he has no agenda other than the urge to scratch the itch of his curiosity.

Walking to Guantánamo offers a view of the island entirely free from the “political venom” that poisons perspectives on both sides of the Straits of Florida. You won’t be perhaps surprised to hear that Mr. Fleming experiences a “gradual, almost osmotic, personal disillusionment with Castro’s politics”—but that’s in effect irrelevant to his eyewitness report on the daily life of a neighboring nation that’s fabulously foreign.

NOW THAT THE ACADEMY of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has ratified Rex Reed’s judgment and guaranteed that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button will be remembered as a good or even great movie, we can disclose the sad secret behind its success: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story, from Tales of the Jazz Age (Juniper Grove, $11.99), is slapdash and unfunny, at once clunky and utterly insubstantial. It’s all premise—there’s no plot and no characterization, and even the prose is lackluster. In other words, the director, David Fincher, and the writers, Eric Roth and Robin Swicord, took from Fitzgerald only an idea (which Fitzgerald had filched, in turn, from Mark Twain) and a pleasantly alliterative title; unburdened, they let imagination roam free.

Consider the compound ironies: Fitzgerald hated Hollywood (“Isn’t Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word?” he asked). His West Coast stint, from 1936 up to his death in 1940, was mostly miserable, and a good deal of the misery was inflicted by a studio (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). I can’t help thinking that his failure as a screenwriter played a part in his rapid decline over those four years. And the flip side: The movie industry has never made a decent film out of any of his books—until now. Success at last … with one of his weaker stories.

Popular City Hall reporter Stephanie Gaskell is quitting her job with the New York Post to go cover the war in Iraq as a freelancer, she told me.

Gaskell, who covered Guantanamo Bay for the AP around 2002, is leaving on Friday night -- missing the Inner Circle show! -- and should be in Baghdad by Monday.

She'll be embedded with the military for two or three months.

We all wish her extremely well.

-- Azi Paybarah

At 10 a.m., the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Committee discusses the EPA's cleanup at Ground Zero.

At 11 a.m., the Queens West Development Corporation meets at 633 Third Ave.

At noon, Hiram Monserrate and veterans groups call for the mayor to spend $5 million to create Veterans Resource Centers.

Also at noon, anti-war and human rights groups protest Iraq troop escalation and Guantanamo Bay detentions at both Thomas Paine Park and Lafayette and Centre streets.

At 12:30 p.m.Gloria Steinem, John Liu and others ask the state to pass anti-human trafficking laws, at state Supreme Court.

At 4 p.m., there will be a demonstration of proposed voting systems, at Fordham University.

At 5:30 p.m., the City Council hosts a Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King celebration in the Council Chambers

At 6 p.m., the December 12th Movement and Black Men's Movement discuss police brutality at the Calvary Baptist Church in Queens.

Also at 6 p.m. the Staten Island peace marks the fifth anniversary of people held at at Guantanamo Bay with a protest at the Staten Island Borough Hall

And at 6 p.m., there will be a reception for the exhibition of Eliot Spizter's campaign photos, called "Making of a Governor," at Grand Central Terminal.

-- Azi Paybarah

According to Tasini's campaign, he'll also be looking for signatures in the coming days outside movie theaters playing "The Road To Guantanamo," "An Inconvenient Truth" and "The War Tapes."

The guy knows his audience.

- Jason Horowitz

According to the Associated Press, “Smith let his unmuzzled Belgian shepherd threaten three detainees at the prison, conspired with another dog handler to try to frighten prisoners into soiling themselves and directed his dog to lick peanut butter off other soldiers’ bodies.”

The New York Times reported that Sergeant Smith’s defense was that “he was merely following interrogation procedures approved by the chief intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, Col. Thomas M. Pappas. In turn, Colonel Pappas had said he had been following guidance from Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, commander of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay.” General Miller visited Iraq in September 2003 to establish conditions for what was called “enhancing prison interrogations.” General Miller had been dispatched to Gitmo by Donald Rumsfeld and his superior officers.

Throughout the months of the torture-abuses scandals, the conduct of the officers responsible for what happened can only be described as swinish. Sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, these men (and possibly a few women) failed to oversee what was happening and/or ordered it and, when the disgusting details came out into the open, denied authorship or even any connection.

You need more than a clothespin over the nose to avoid the stink hanging over the military establishment—which, if not taken care of soon, will besmirch the honorable along with indecent. The smell in question concerns more than torturing Arabs.

Wafting up from all kinds of dark, humid places are questions about how money has been handled, bribe-taking and the suspicious death in Afghanistan two years ago of Cpl. Pat Tillman, the Army Ranger who forsook a professional-football career to serve a nation that has not reciprocated. After no less than three investigations by the Army, countless official lies, fuzzinesses and the destruction of evidence relevant to the case, yet another investigation is underway. From the service-academy rapists to the Secretary of Defense, there appears to be too many people in positions of command who should not be leading others into combat. Conceded: There is no one-to-one correlation between moral cowardice and physical cowardice. Yet there must be some connection.

There is no measuring these things, but some of our moral decomposition might be blamed on the dirty war our politicians have involved us in. No rules govern these things, but history suggests that a bad war can do grievous things to decent people.

An inkling of what despicable things otherwise fine people can do in rotten circumstances can be gleaned from a book just out called My Battle of Algiers, by Ted Morgan (Smithsonian Books/Harper Collins). Mr. Morgan, a Frenchman who now lives in New York, was an officer serving in the French Army in the 1950’s as it struggled to retain Algeria as a colony.

The book has many passages that ought to be instructive for Americans now. Here is one worth thinking about: Mr. Morgan describes a conversation he had with a major in the French Army. The major, Mr. Morgan writes, says: “‘I fought in 1940. I was wounded.’ He pointed to his glass eye, ‘I fought in Indochina. I was wounded. I hope this time not to be wounded. But I confess I don’t understand this war at all. It’s the politics of the dead dog bobbing on the water, as General Navarre used to say. We’ll win battle after battle until we lose the war.’”

Our services have their share of men who lost an eye in various colonial escapades. We also have, as the French did, more than our share of enlisted and National Guards men pulling additional tours in Iraq with little belief in the way they have found themselves fighting.

As the Algerian conflict dragged on, small mutinies began to break out in the French Army. Mr. Morgan writes that “the men of the 401st Anti-Aircraft Regiment, who were being kept ‘under the flag’ an extra nine months, were sent on a training operation on the beach, where they took off their clothes and went swimming. Pamphlets began to appear in the barracks saying: ‘We who have lived under a foreign (German) occupation learned to hate the occupiers. We are not cowards or defeatists, but we refuse to fire on our Arab brothers, many of whom served in the French army in World War Two.’”

Americans seem to be more obedient than the French, who often protest and demonstrate in vast numbers, not only about wars but even about laws and regulations. Americans will demonstrate when their college or professional sports team wins a championship, but other than that, they pretty much do as they’re told. Nonetheless, a dirty war can only go on so long before even an American might do something untoward.

Prior to the Algerian war, terror—that is, the deliberate slaughter of civilians—had been mostly a tactic employed by what are sometimes called “advanced nations.” In World War II, the Germans did it—followed in short order by the British and the Americans. After the French massacred Algerians by shooting them through the bars of the jails, insurgents placed bombs in cafés, clubs and ocean resorts.

It wasn’t long before Frenchmen, fighting in a war they had no use for, were exacting atrocities on the other side. Mr. Morgan tells of an incident that, one suspects, has probably been played out in Iraq more than once these past three years:

“The fellagha (insurgent) had been strung up with his wrists tied over a horizontal beam, so that his feet didn’t touch the ground. He wore a khaki uniform without rank or insignia. His coarse black hair was cut short, and he had a bushy beard and a mustache. His gaze was more defiant than fearful.

“I asked him his name, but he did not reply. ‘Ask him the location of his base camp,’ Lastours (Mr. Morgan’s commanding office) said. I asked him, and he did not reply.

“‘Ask him a bit more forcefully,’ Lastours said.

“I punched him hard in the stomach.

“‘Hakarabi. Makache,’ the man said. ‘I swear I don’t know.’ I hit him again. ‘Hakarabi. Makache.’ Then something happened to me. I started to lose it. I was in an altered state, where my mental processes broke down. It was as if the scene had been rehearsed and choreographed. My role was to punch him, and his role was to repeat his line. This went on for about two minutes, and then he stopped repeating.

“Lastours felt his pulse and said, ‘He’s dead. And he didn’t talk.’

“I was horrified by what I had done. I had killed a defenseless man. I had not intended to kill him, but that didn’t make him any less dead.

“‘Place me under arrest,’ I said.

“‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Lastours said. ‘When you go to the hamam [steam bath], you sweat, and in war there are losses. It’s the logic of things. I’ll find a couple of men to bury him.’”

Like the French, our politicians encourage torture and lie about it. We call our concentration camps “detention centers.” We plant phony stories in the media; the French also. We kill people who should still be walking around, as did the French, but we do one thing the French didn’t do. They didn’t court martial their dog handlers.

Sale guerre. Dirty war.

Surely as brilliant as his admirers claim, Justice Scalia’s intellect is too often overshadowed by aggressive bluster and rigid ideology. He suffers from an uncontrollable impulse to give insult and an insufficient respect for the opinions of others. Widely advertised as exceptionally smart, he sometimes does and says things that are extraordinarily stupid.

On March 26, after receiving communion at a special mass for politicians and lawyers in Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Justice Scalia answered a reporter’s question with a rude hand gesture. Asked whether some Americans doubt his impartiality, he replied, “You know what I say to those people?” and then flicked his fingers under his chin, adding, “That’s Sicilian.”

The conservative Boston Herald noted that this incident occurred “just feet from the Mother Church’s altar” and described it as “conduct unbecoming a 20-year veteran of the country’s highest court.” After two decades, Justice Scalia should have learned to speak with a measure of decorum and responsibility. Yet the 70-year-old jurist seems more erratic as the years go by—and his Sicilian sign-language clowning is certainly his lesser offense this month.

A few weeks earlier, he visited the University of Fribourg in Switzerland to deliver a talk on his “originalist” approach to the Constitution. Following his lecture, the combative justice engaged in discussion with the audience—and reacted emotionally to questions about the prisoners incarcerated in military custody at Guantánamo Bay.

As first reported in Newsweek, he bristled at implied criticism of the imprisonment of hundreds of men at the Gitmo facility over the past four years, which he denounced as “hypocritical.” Brushing aside the notion that those detainees should be entitled to any rights guaranteed by the Constitution and by the Geneva Conventions, he was quoted as saying: “War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts. Give me a break.” He reportedly went on to deny that such persons possess any rights under international treaties. “If [a prisoner] was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs,” he said, and went on to mention gratuitously that one of his sons served as an officer in Iraq.

“I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I’m not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial,” he said. “I mean it’s crazy.”

He failed to restrain himself, knowing that the Supreme Court would soon be hearing the case captioned Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. In that matter, lawyers representing Salid Ahmed Hamdan, a Gitmo prisoner who once served as a driver for Osama bin Laden, have filed a petition protesting the Bush administration’s decision to try their client in a military tribunal without the rights guaranteed by international treaties.

Like Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers, the Swiss students argued that the Geneva Conventions we ratified long ago mean what they say. Like our other European friends and allies, they think that democratic values are best served by fair and decent treatment of our enemies.

That perspective is shared by several courageous American flag officers and generals, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief endorsing the Hamdan petition. They worry that by depriving our enemies of the “judicial guarantees that are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples,” as described in Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Convention, the Bush administration places our own soldiers, sailors and Marines in jeopardy of similar treatment. They also believe that the White House’s wanton violation of the best American military traditions in the name of the war on terror sabotages our struggle against totalitarians and extremists.

After hearing about Justice Scalia’s remarks in Fribourg, the military officers sent him a letter suggesting that he should recuse himself from the Hamdan case. His rant had clearly violated the simple standard for recusal, which is whether a justice’s “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

Back in 2004, after Justice Scalia foolishly denounced the separation of church and state at a Knights of Columbus rally, he recused himself from the argument over removing the phrase “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. In that case, he knew his vote wouldn’t matter. He refused to recuse himself from the government-secrecy case involving Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force, despite their notorious duck-hunting junket.

In the Hamdan case, Justice Scalia’s vote could be crucial. So he showed up for the oral argument on March 28 and openly displayed his support for the government’s position. He thus brought America’s global reputation into further disrepute, when that is what we can afford least.