The Pentagon announced Feb. 9 that a senior Department of Defense official has reduced the sentence of Ibrahim al-Qosi, the accused former al-Qaeda cook and accountant who pleaded guilty before a military tribunal last July to crimes of conspiracy and supporting terrorism. His sentence reduced to just two years, al-Qosi could return to his native Sudan as soon as summer of 2012, and he will serve the balance of his sentence in a minimum-security Guantanamo Bay facility until then. Unbeknownst to the 10-officer jury that sentenced him to 14 years last August, al-Qosi had struck a secret plea deal with Pentagon officials that will remain sealed until his eventual release. Under the terms of the deal, the Convening Authority for Military Commissions (CAMC), which has final review authority over military tribunal sentences, agreed to cut al-Qosi's jury sentence to the extent that it exceeded the bargained-for term. Senior CAMC overseer Bruce MacDonald had the authority to reduce al-Qosi's sentence further, but adhered to the two-year maximum term in the plea agreement.

The City Council of Berkeley, Calif., is to vote Feb. 15 on a resolution to invite Guantánamo Bay detainees who have been cleared of wrongdoing to resettle in the town. Of the 38 detainees that have now been cleared, Berkeley would invite two: a Russian ballet dancer and an Algerian who was once a top-rated Italian chef in Austria. "Our hearts are with all those people who were never tried, held for years and in some cases tortured," said Wendy Kenin, chair of the city's Peace and Justice Commission. "As a municipality, this is one thing we can do to right some wrongs of our federal government."

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on Feb. 3 said the death of a Guantánamo Bay detainee highlights problems with the detention system currently used by the US for dealing with terrorist suspects. The detainee, Awal Gul, had been at the Guantánamo detention center since October 2002, suspected of having aided the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Gul apparently died on Feb. 1 of an apparent heart attack after he had completed aerobic exercises.

The US is conducting a manhunt for a previously unknown cell believed to be involved in the planning of the 9-11 attacks, according to a US cable released by WikiLeaks. In the cable, Mirembe Nantongo, the deputy chief of mission in Doha, told the Homeland Security Department in Washington that three Qatari men were under suspicion of conducting surveillance operations on the attack sites.

An Italian court on Feb. 1 convicted former Guantánamo Bay detainee Mohamed Ben Riadh Nasri on terror charges and sentenced the Tunisian man to six years in prison. Prosecutors accused Nasri of working for a terror group associated with al-Qaeda while living in Milan in the 1990s. The US transferred Nasri, who was arrested in Afghanistan, from Guantánamo Bay to Italy in 2009 along with Abdel Ben Mabrouk as the part of the government's plan to shut down the detention center. Nasri's lawyer said he plans to appeal the conviction.

These news clips, as usual, make us feel very lonely. We are constantly being told by "leftists" that anti-Semitism doesn't really exist or is (at best) grossly exaggerated as a Zionist propaganda ploy—a demoralizing abdication of the supposed leftist value of opposing ethnic scapegoating as a distraction from class analysis. Exposing and denouncing anti-Semitism falls more and more to the pro-Zionist right (which does indeed seek to exploit it for propaganda purposes) and to the centrists, who increasingly seek to censor and even imprison those who espouse it—a demoralizing abdication of the supposed centrist value of "free speech." Here, alas, is the latest litany...

The US is doing away with the color-coded terrorism alerts adopted by the Bush administration in the wake of 9-11, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced in the State of Homeland Security address at George Washington University on Jan. 27. The following day, Russia's Duma voted to adopted such a system in response to this week's deadly bombing at the Moscow airport. (UPI, Jan. 28; RTT, Jan. 27)

World War 4 Report has been keeping a dispassionate record of Barack Obama's moves in dismantling, continuing and escalating (he has done all three) the oppressive apparatus of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) established by the Bush White House. On the second anniversary of his inauguration, we offer the following annotated assessment of which moves have been on balance positive, neutral and negative, and arrive at an overall score: