Our guest blogger is Laura Heaton, the writer-editor for the blog, Enough Said. She is reporting from Juba, South Sudan

“I’ve got 99 problems but Bashir ain’t one” is emblazoned on t-shirts for sale in the capital of the brand-new country of South Sudan, which officially gained its independence from the North on Saturday.

Even before Sudan gained independence from the United Kingdom and Egypt in 1956, civil war had broken out between the North and South, where rebels rose up to protest the region’s marginalization. Decades and 2 million deaths later, the South is now independent. The weekend was jubilant — from midnight on Friday when crowds filled the streets waving South Sudan flags, through the official declaration ceremony attended by dozens of heads of state and high-level delegations, to the Monday holiday.

“The independence we celebrate today transfers the responsibility for our destinies to our hands,” said newly sworn-in President Salva Kiir, addressing the tens of thousands of people who gathered for the independence ceremony on Saturday. “From today on we will have no excuses or scapegoats to blame.” The president thanked the international community for “addressing the gap” in providing basic services to Southern Sudanese and said that his administration would make public interest its “first, second, and final priorities.”

South Sudan may no longer have to deal with Omar al-Bashir as its leader, but there are many potentially explosive issues that the two countries must continue to work together to sort out, as well as internal issues ranging from the development basics — education, health, infrastructure — to the region’s propensity for conflict. The 99 problems is “just the condensed list,” as one journalist quipped.

Since 2009, a high-level panel convened by the African Union has been facilitating discussion between the North and South governments over big-ticket issues like how to share oil revenue, which is mostly found in the South but must be refined and transported for export through the North. Oil experts estimate that about half of the North’s revenue comes from oil, so finding a compromise is necessary for the viability of the North’s economy, thus regional stability as well. The new international border, 1,200 miles in length, must be demarcated and arrangements made for the communities on either side who are used to being able to travel freely in search of water and pasture. Citizenship more broadly must be settled to ensure that people who have long lived in the other part of what’s now two countries don’t become vulnerable – or at least not more so. Read more

Appearing yesterday on Fox Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) railed against the Obama administration’s decision to try a captured Somali terrorist in U.S. courts. McConnell said captured foreign terrorists should be detained and tried by military commissions at the controversial U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Why does McConnell think U.S. courts are unsuitable to try foreign terrorists? Because the U.S. justice system was unable to secure a murder conviction in the tabloid-fodder case of Casey Anthony, a Florida woman acquitted last week of the murder of her two year old daughter Caylee.

McConnell told Fox’s Bret Baier:

We just found with the Caylee Anthony case, how difficult is to get a conviction in a U.S. court.

I don’t think a foreigner is entitled to all the protections of the Bill of Rights. They should not be in U.S. courts. They should be at Guantanamo and before military commissions.

Watch:

As CAP’s Ken Gude notes, the trial of the Somali terrorist, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, will hardly be the first instance of the U.S. capturing a terrorist abroad and bringing them to the U.S. to be tried:

The most recent similar case dates from the Bush administration, when Afia Siddique was detained in Afghanistan by U.S. troops in 2008 for attempting to shoot U.S. military personnel. She was quickly brought to New York, convicted, and sentenced to 86 years in prison. During the Clinton administration, Mir Aimal Kasi stood outside CIA headquarters in Virginia in 1995 and murdered two CIA employees as they drove into work. He was captured in Pakistan in 1997 and brought to Virginia for trial, convicted of murder, and executed in 2002.

Gude says conservatives lodged no complaints about these procedures until the Obama administration picked up where his predecessors left off. “U.S. criminal courts…have an excellent record at convicting terrorists, writes Gude, adding that “military-commissions convictions can be counted on one hand.”

New York University’s Center for Law and Security tracks terrorism trials and found, according to a report most recently updated in April, that U.S. courts have successfully convicted 187 defendants on “Jihadi-related” terror charges since 9/11. Likewise, law-oriented group Human Rights First found even more convictions related to Islamic extremism, writing in a report:

[F]ederal courts, while not perfect, are a fit and flexible resource that should be used along with other government resources—including military force, intelligence gathering, diplomatic initiatives, and cultural and economic strategies—as an important part of a multi-pronged counterterrorism strategy.

At least McConnell, for his part, supports trying terrorism suspects at all. His Senate colleague Lindsey Graham (R-SC) laid out a case last week for what amounted to permanent interrogation of untried suspects.

Former Fox News television personality Glenn Beck addressed the Knesset — Israel’s parliament — today, delivering a mixture of pro-Israel talking points, commentary on the media and a typical smattering of his end times-inspired predictions of chaos and destruction.

Beck has a history of running afoul of mainstream U.S. Jewish organizations. In February, Beck’s comments comparing Reform Judaism to Islamic extremist terrorism were characterized as “bigoted ignorance” by the Anti Defamation League and his ongoing attacks on George Soros — who he refers to as “The Puppet Master” — have been widely criticized for running disturbingly close to the fraudulent antisemitic tract, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” But that didn’t keep Danny Danon, a right-wing Likud Party Minister, from praising Beck, saying “If we didn’t have Beck, we’d invent someone similar.”

Multiple standing ovations met Beck’s standard litany of cryptic and sinister warnings. +972 Magazine’s Ami Kaufman reported Beck said:

You have to think out of the box. The way to do that is to tell the truth. Everyone feels the truth, in the gut. My message to you is: ‘stop playing the game’. We in the West are being set up. Israel is being set up.

Beck’s descriptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict served more as a reminder of his ignorance rather than a call to arms. He said:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at the ruling class, is about the destruction of Israel and the end of the western way of life. Period. That’s what it is. I don’t know a lot of Palestinians but I also don’t know a lot of Jewish people either. I don’t really classify people that way. They’re just people.

Watch it:

In his remarks today, Beck might have been preaching to the choir, but it’s worth noting that his fanbase now extends across the Atlantic and into the Israeli far-right.

It appears that Beck, a figure whose declining ratings led to his show’s cancellation in the U.S., is finding a ready audience among the Israeli right. But unless Beck starts talking about more specifics and cuts down on his cryptic references to the “ruling class” and predictions of world changing events, it’s hard to imagine his “Restoring Courage” rally, occurring next month in Jerusalem, making much of an impact in either Israel or the U.S.

In a recent interview with Defense News editor Vago Muradian, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen expressed his concern for military families if Congress does not raise the debt limit:

MULLEN: Well we went through a period of time where I know everyone was aware we almost shut the government down and that – the preparation that we had for that certainly was instructive on what we had to do. I certainly hope we don’t get to that point again.

One of the first questions that a spouse asked me I was out at a trip out on the West coast it was a National Guard spouse that asked me if she was going to get paid and her husband’s deployed. And that becomes a fundamental question. Some of our troops and some of our families they really are living paycheck to paycheck so I think we have to be very careful with that.

Watch it:

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner recently warned Congress that the military may not get paid if the debt ceiling isn’t raised:

“If Congress failed to increase the debt limit, a broad range of government payments would have to be stopped, limited or delayed, including military salaries and retirement benefits, Social Security and Medicare payments, interest on the debt, unemployment benefits and tax refunds,” Geithner said. “This would cause severe hardship to American families and raise questions about our ability to defend our national security interests.”

Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-CA) introduced legislation in April providing for continued payment to the Armed Forces in the event that the debt ceiling is reached.