The Department of Justice today unsealed a six-count indictment against a Nigerien citizen, including terrorism-related charges, making him the latest suspected member of al Qaeda to be brought before civilian courts.

Filed in the Eastern District Court of New York, the charges against Ibrahim Suleiman Adnan Adam Harun include “conspiracy to murder American military personnel in Afghanistan, conspiracy to bomb American diplomatic facilities in Nigeria, conspiracy to provide material support to al Qaeda, providing material support to al Qaeda, and related firearms and explosives counts.”

According to the indictment, Harun’s activities with al Qaeda spanned nearly a decade, including actively taking part in hostilities against U.S. forces between 2002 and 2003. From there he underwent additional training in Nigeria, with the ultimate goal of attacking U.S. diplomatic and consular facilities there. This aligns with a 2007 briefing on a separate detainee being held in Guantanamo Bay, released through Wikileaks, where Harun was identified as being an al Qaeda operative based in Nigeria at the time.

After the Libyan government released Harun from its custody in June 2011, right around the time then-leader Col. Moamar Qaddafi was fighting off rebels, the alleged terrorist was then arrested by Italian authorities following his assaulting officers on-board a refugee ship. He was then transferred to U.S. custody and later brought to New York, where charges were unsealed against him today:

FBI Assistant Director in Charge Venizelos said, “Vowing allegiance to al Qaeda and training to commit violent jihad are not the worst of Harun’s alleged crimes. The allegations include actually attacking U.S troops and plotting to use explosives to kill U.S. diplomats. As alleged, Harun not only intended to but did commit acts of terrorism against Americans. Now he is subject to the American justice system. We remain committed to protecting the safety of Americans and our national security.”

Following his arrival in the United States on Oct. 21, 2012, Harun was held in federal custody, a Justice Deparment official told ThinkProgress without providing further detail. While there, the U.S. government requested that the charges against him be sealed until today, to which Harun’s defense counsel agreed. This was done based on the government’s belief that Harun could provide information relative to U.S. national security, according to the same Justice Department official.

The fact that Harun is being charged in a civilian court at all, though, fits in with a change in the tide with regard to how instances of terrorism are prosecuted. Among the reasons to applaud this shift, civilian courts have been shown in the past to be better at obtaining usable information from suspected terrorists rather than military courts. Civilian courts also manage a much higher conviction rate than their military counterparts.

Harun joins Sulaiman Abu Ghaith — son-in-law of Osama bin Laden — in facing criminal charges in New York. The decision to try Ghaith in a civilian court, rather than at Gitmo, was immediately met with scorn from Republicans, including Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

John Bolton — a self-appointed supposed strong supporter of Israel — accused the Israeli government on Tuesday of lying in expressing its support for President Obama.

The Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. produced a video welcoming Obama on his visit this week to the Jewish state. The unusual video depicts cartoon-like versions of the president and Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu shaking hands to the tune of the “Golden Girls” theme song “Thank You For Being A Friend.”

Fox News host Greta Van Susteren wondered why then, if things were so bad between Obama and Israel, that the Israelis would make such a video. Bolton could think of only one answer: It’s propaganda:

VAN SUSTEREN: The Obama administration saying the president’s trip is mostly a fence mending mission, but it looks like [referring tot he video] the Israelis are welcoming him with open arms. Ambassador, what do you think about this?

BOLTON: I’m glad the Israeli government has enough budget surplus that they can produce propaganda like that. The president has Israel back, the bonds are strong. What could possibly go wrong?

Watch the clip:

Israeli President Shimon Peres will give Obama the Presidential Medal of Distinction during his trip to Israel this week. As Bolton would have it, that’s probably a bogus gesture as well.

But the former Bush administration U.N. ambassador is a regular in the Obama-hates-Israel circuit, the presumption being of course that Bolton is more friendly to the Jewish state than Obama is. But apparently that friendship doesn’t go too far as there’s nothing like having a good buddy who calls you a liar on national television.

Former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo is most famous for his legal memoranda defending torture and virtually unlimited presidential power in the realm of national security. On the Iraq War’s 10th anniversary, however, Yoo has decided to defend another one of his former boss’ unlawful actions, going so far as to argue that Bush administration had made up for harm done to Iraqis by spending money on them.

Yoo, who once said “I was never certain whether the Iraq war made sense as a matter of strategy,” now maintains that “invading Iraq was the best option in light of the information we had then,” and claims that if it weren’t, those who oppose the decision should want to “restore Saddam Hussein’s family and the Baath Party to power in Iraq.” Forced by 200,000 deaths to confront the fact that an extraordinary number of Iraqis were killed, injured, or driven from their homes by our invasion, Yoo suggests that the United States made up for all that by giving the Iraqis money:

Even though the benefits outweighed the costs, that does not mean we simply leave Iraq once we depose the Husseins. The legal system in such situations might still require a benefiting party to compensate a harmed party. In other words, we allow one harm to occur in society because there is a greater good achieved — but then the legal system can intervene afterward to require sharing of the benefits between the plaintiff and defendant.

And isn’t that what we did in Iraq? We spent billions of dollars in Iraq as damages. We did so not because the war was wrong, but because it was right — and we shared the benefits of the war with the Iraqi people by transferring some of it in the form of reconstruction funds.

Yoo fails to note that much of the damage done to Iraqis was a consequence of the Bush administration’s approach to said reconstruction, which Iraq War veteran Jason Fritz calls “a tidal wave of arrogance and stupidity.”

Several other former Bush administration officials share Yoo’s perspective — former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for example, tweeted that “10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.”

According to Yoo’s post, he is currently “finishing a book on war in the 21st century, where I make the case for preemptive and preventive war.” We’re anxiously awaiting its publication.

One of the most outspoken advocates for the war in Iraq said on NPR on Wednesday that asking whether the war was worth fighting is an “unreasonable question.”

During an interview with Richard Perle — who was chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee during the run-up to the war — NPR host Renee Montagne noted some of the war’s more grim results: hundreds of thousands of Americans and Iraqis dead or wounded and asked Perle whether it was all worth it:

Q: There’s no question you were a great proponent of going into Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Ten years later, nearly 5,000 American troops dead, thousands more with wounds, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or wounded. When you think about this, was it worth it?

PERLE: I’ve got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done in the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t, a decade later, go back and say, “Well we shouldn’t have done that.”

Listen to the clip:

Perle has tried hard over the years to either justify the war or even wipe his fingerprints from it altogether. He once even tried to say he, and the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had “no influence” on the decision and just yesterday, he said it didn’t matter whether Saddam Hussein had WMD, the U.S. should have invaded anyway (he actually had previously said the U.S. wouldn’t have invaded if the U.S. new he had no WMD).

But as far as whether the war was worth it, CAP’s Matt Duss has a pretty good take: “The end of former Iraq President Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a consider- able global good, and a nascent democratic Iraqi republic partnered with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future,” he writes in the Iraq War Ledger, A Look at the War’s Human, Financial, and Strategic Costs, “But when weighing those possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy. The war was intended to show the extent of America’s power. It succeeded only in showing its limits.”

The Central Intelligence Agency may be out of the armed drones business soon, according to a report out Wednesday morning, possibly granting more visibility to the Obama administration’s targeted killing program.

According to The Daily Beast, the White House is ready to approve a plan transferring authority to launch lethal missions in areas such as Pakistan from the CIA to the Department of Defense. Both DOD and the CIA currently have access to unmanned aerial vehicles, as drones are formally known, but use them in different ways for different purposes under different congressional authorities and different rules of transparency.

Should President Obama sign-off on the idea, the shift that would take place would not likely be immediately apparent to the public, but would go a long way to formalize the procedures in which drones are used. The process known as “institutionalization” has been in motion for over a year now, according to The Daily Beast, headed by newly-confirmed CIA Director John Brennan:

Brennan, who has presided over the administration’s drone program from almost day one of Obama’s presidency, has grown uncomfortable with the ad hoc and sometimes shifting rules that have governed it. Moreover, Brennan has publicly stated that he would like to see the CIA move away from the kinds of paramilitary operations it began after the September 11 attacks, and return to its more traditional role of gathering and analyzing intelligence.

Under the new structure, the CIA would still have a role in providing the intelligence necessary to identify targets, at least temporarily, but would no longer have operational control of lethal missions. That role in gathering intelligence means that the CIA’s use of unarmed drones for surveillance purposes is unlikely to be affected. While not a guarantee of greater transparency, placing the targeted killing program entirely under the Defense Department would mean that it would no longer be “covert” — or both secret and deniable by the government — but instead “clandestine” — meaning the administration would be unable to legally lie about operations.

The move mirrors an approach former Defense Department lawyer Jeh Johnson promoted in an appearance at Fordham University on Monday. Johnson is the latest in a long line of high-profile Democrats questioning the current structure of the targeted killing program and the secrecy surrounding it. In recent weeks, CAP Chair John Podesta, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) have all called for greater openness from the Obama administration about the way the program is carried out.