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Anchored by Jake Tapper, The Lead airs at 4 p.m. ET on CNN.
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buried lead
Guantanamo closing, for real this time?
A major campaign promise in 2008 was back in the spotlight Tuesday as President Barack Obama promised to renew his push to close the Guantanamo Bay prison.
The memoirs of one Guantanamo detainee were declassified and published Tuesday by Slate, where the prisoner writes he “trusted the American justice system too much.”
Slate's politics and foreign affairs editor William Dobson told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead” that detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi was picked up in Mauritania 2001, shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City, and then transferred to Jordan for questioning.
“In Jordan [Slahi] was interrogation for close to eight months, and he was interrogated there under some of the harshest conditions – he was tortured,” Dobson said.
“From there the Jordanians said they did not believe this was a person who had any responsibility for any past terrorist plots. The U.S. government wasn’t satisfied with that response, and he was then sent to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, held for two weeks, and then ultimately moved to Guantanamo August 5, 2002, where he has remained ever since.”
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national lead
Brother of slain MIT officer: I don't want him to be a hero, I want him to be here
MIT officer Sean Collier, just 27 years old, was the final victim of the Boston terror attacks. Collier was ambushed in cold blood in his car during the manhunt for Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Collier died bravely, serving and protecting others, when the city of Boston needed people like him the most.
His family saw the qualities that made him a hero long ago.
"There's two Seans that we're mourning. There's this symbol of what happened that people feel so connected to," said Jennifer Lemmerman, Collier's sister. "Then at the same time, you realize this is my little brother that we're talking about, and it's a whole other feeling."
"When they first started saying Sean was a hero, of course my first reaction was, 'I don't want my brother to be a hero, I want my brother here,'" said brother Andrew Collier.
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national lead
Bombing suspect's legal team includes a 'miracle worker'
When Dzhokar Tsarnaev has his day in court, he will be defended by some of the best lawyers in the business. Only two weeks after he allegedly planted the Boston bombs that took three lives, and severely wounded so many others, the court has appointed a defense team with client rosters that read like a worst-of-the-worst list.
Miriam Conrad is one of the country's most well-respected public defenders. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Conrad has defended notorious clients for more than two decades. This is not even Conrad's first terrorism case, she assisted in the defense of Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, who tried to blow up a passenger plane in 2001 with explosives packed in his sneakers. Reid was sentenced to life in prison.
Conrad recently defended a Muslim-American radicalized by online videos who plotted to fly remote-controlled model airplanes packed with explosives into the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
"Miriam is really committed to the cases that have no chance of winning, just as committed as she is to the cases that she could possibly win. She's really hard working, and cares a whole lot about her clients, and is really a determined, tenacious lawyer," said Tamar Birckhead, of the University of North Carolina School of Law. Birckhead helped defend Richard Reid, working with Conrad in Boston's Federal Public Defender Office.
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national lead
Top intelligence official to review Boston
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper will be digging on some tough questions of his own. President Barack Obama said Tuesday that Clapper would lead an investigation into the intelligence community’s handling of tips from a Russian intelligence agency to scrutinize Tsarnaev’s older brother.
“I think it’s so important that the DNI is now leading a review. We don’t know yet either whether the FBI should have reviewed it more of whether their protocols are too weak given the kind of threat we have now,” CNN National Security Analyst Juliette Kayyem said.
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world lead
What Amanda Knox left out of her book
Amanda Knox, the American student who was tried and convicted of the murder of her roommate in Italy in 2009, is out with a new book, "Waiting to be Heard." Knox served four years in prison before her murder conviction was overturned in 2011.
In the case of any memoir, there is a lot of selective memory and internal editing, said Barbie Latza Nadeau, author of "Angel Face: Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox." Nadeau is the Rome bureau chief for "Newsweek" and "The Daily Beast," and followed the Knox case from the very beginning.
"She really glossed over the night of the murder. For example, she's got an alibi that she had together with her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito," said Nadeau. "What she failed to do ... in the book, was to really explain to the readers why they didn't have an alibi that was congruent the night they were interrogated."
"Their stories changed several times in the course of the initial interrogations, but she chose to stick to the alibi that they settled on," said Nadeau.
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