Kim Zetter at Wired writes this afternoon of the discovery of a strain of malware that appears to build in significant part on components of Stuxnet–but that functions more as a reconnaisance tool enabling the future exploitation or manipulation of … Read more »
Jeh Johnson, the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, is currently speaking about detention legislation at the Heritage Foundation. The livestream is available here.
Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker of the NYT report that the Obama administration considered using offensive cyber-weapons in the war in Libya, but in the end did not use them. Schmitt and Shanker give several reasons why the USG declined … Read more »
As I’ve noted before (including this morning), I’ve been at work for some time on a paper exploring the legal issues generated by the convergence of military and intelligence activities and institutions—a convergence symbolized by the CIA drone program and … Read more »
Cully Stimson (Heritage) has posted a very handy review of the pros and cons of the pending NDAA FY12 bills, highlighting both the useful and problematic aspects of that legislation. And as a reminder, DOD’s General Counsel, Jeh Johnson, will … Read more »
Amy B. Zegart’s splendid new book, Eyes on Spies, is a brisk and brief discussion of why Congressional intelligence oversight is so persistently inadequate. The book, it bears noting at the outset, is political science and not law. It … Read more »
The Supreme Court has granted cert in the Kiobel case, in which the Second Circuit held last fall that corporations may not be held liable for violations of the “law of nations” under the Alien Tort Statute. As I have … Read more »
Yesterday Jack linked to this piece by Noah Feldman, which among other things advances the argument that the Obama administration has resorted to drone strikes at least in part in order to avoid having to grapple with the legal and … Read more »
Peter Margulies writes in with an excellent summary of what sounds like a fascinating conference Friday at Boston University:
BU’s conf. Friday on the “Long War” in Afghanistan and Pakistan featured good news and bad news. The conference, co-sponsored by
Pardiss Kebriaei writes in with the following response to my admittedly harsh summary of her D.C. Circuit argument in Al-Zahrani, in which I suggested that she had no good answer to a pretty basic jurisdictional question:
You’ve been sitting
My colleague Noah Feldman has an interesting essay on Bloomberg that draws connections between the controversial Bush-era legal opinions on interrogation and President Obama’s targeted killing policy. The essay is difficult to summarize, but these passages will provide a flavor:… Read more »
Drone strikes in Southern Yemen killed nine members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) on Friday, including Ibrahim al-Bana, the terrorist organization’s media chief, and, according to tribal elders in the area, Abdul-Rahman al-Aulaqi, the son of Anwar … Read more »
Raffaela has decamped to an undisclosed location for a few weeks, so I’ll be rounding up headlines and commentary for a spell. Feel free to email me noteworthy articles worth my including at singh.lawfare@gmail.com.
The alleged Iranian plot to … Read more »
The D.C. Circuit appears to have ruled in the case of Adnan Farhan Abd Al Latif (which Larkin previewed here, the briefs from which she posted here, the argument in which she and I covered here). Latif … Read more »
Jack highlighted a Wired story last week about a computer virus infecting the Air Force’s drone fleet, including the virtual “cockpits” at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. Wired reported on Tuesday that no one at Creech told the Air … Read more »
From the Washington Post:
Large caches of weapons from Libya are making their way across the Egyptian border and flooding black markets in Egypt’s already unstable Sinai Peninsula, according to current and former Egyptian military officials and arms traders
So reports NPR here.
The first thing to say about today’s long-belated New York Times editorial on the Al-Aulaqi killing–and the memo justifying it–is that it is not a ridiculous document, and I’m not going to ridicule it. It does not flamboyantly contradict … Read more »
Better late that never, the New York Times has finally run an editorial on the Al Aulaqi strike.
This makes it impossible to accept new entries in the Write the New York Times Al-Aulaqi Editorial Competition–making a winner … Read more »
This is a pretty remarkable development. Authorities have arrested a dual US-Iranian citizen on charges that he conspired with a senior official of Iran’s Qods Force (of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the … Read more »
The big news this morning is that Al Qaeda has joined the ranks of those who say that the U.S. targeted killing of Anwar Al-Aulaqi was unconstitutional. Jason Ukman at the Washington Post reports on the video released by the … Read more »
Jacob Sternberger, a political science and security studies major at Dickinson College, has the distinction of sending in the first entry in Lawfare‘s Write the New York Times Al-Aulaqi Editorial Competition–complete with annotations as to the Times editorial … Read more »
Reading the blogs today, you might think Marty Lederman and David Barron had gotten deeply in touch with their inner John Yoo when they wrote the Al-Aulaqi memo. Spencer Ackerman, to cite a typical example, puts it this way:… Read more »
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan has released its report on the treatment of detainees in the custody of the Afghan government.
Here is the executive summary:
From October 2010 to August 2011, the United Nations Assistance Mission in
The Economist argues this week that drones are the future of air power.
Wired magazine reported, as Jack noted over the weekend, that a fleet of Air Force drones has been infected with a computer virus.
From the AP… Read more »
Next Tuesday, October 18, at The Heritage Foundation:
[T]he House and Senate have proposed additional detainee-related legislation in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012. Both have provisions affirming the September 18, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military
I want to put discussion of whether the government should publicly disclose the full legal framework behind its targeted killings program, including the killing of Al-Aulaqi, an American citizen, in a larger and more general philosophical and political context. Across … Read more »
Columbia law professor Philip Bobbitt, author of Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century, writes in with the following comments in response to my comments on the Charlie Savage story:
I don’t know if this is
A second Sunday paper has come and gone since the Anwar Al-Aulaqi strike, and still no New York Times editorial about it. I guess the killing of two U.S. nationals by their own government isn’t adequately important to warrant comment–certainly … Read more »
I was planning to write a piece this morning pointing out that Charlie Savage’s story–to which I linked last night and which describes in some detail the legal rationale in the OLC opinion authorizing the Al-Aulaqi strike–actually heightens the … Read more »
A lot of new details in this Charlie Savage story on the OLC memo from last year on the legality of targeting Anwar Al-Aulaqi.
Noah Shachtman reports at Danger Room that a “computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.” The story does not indicate how … Read more »
Charlie Savage of the New York Times has filed this FOIA suit in an effort to acquire a classified report issued by DOJ and ODNI to Congress “pertaining to intelligence collection authorities” under section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act … Read more »
Today the Romney campaign issued a White Paper on Foreign Policy and National Defense. I have only had time to skim it, but this passage stood out as of particular interest to Lawfare readers:
Update the AUMF: The chief
Daniel Bethlehem, who recently stepped down as principal legal adviser of the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, has an interesting essay in the Harvard National Security Journal, on out-of-theater targeting and John Brennan’s recent speech. It opens:
The killing
Lots of stuff today.
Yesterday afternoon, Senator John McCain pushed back on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s effort to stymie the NDAA over disagreements about detention policy. McCain is touting the bipartisan nature of the provisions reported by the Armed … Read more »
Members of both the House and Senate this week criticized China for what Representative Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) called “a massive and sustained intelligence effort by a government to blatantly steal commercial data and intellectual property.” At a hearing before the … Read more »
Walter Russell Mead argues (via Instapundit) that as a result of the Libya intervention, the world may be “farther from enshrining the duty to protect in international law than we were six months ago.” His reasoning:
Thanks to what
The oral argument for the Al-Zahrani case, about which Ben just posted, took up much of my morning, so expect Headlines and Commentary tomorrow. But in the meantime, I wanted to share this very interesting article, which discusses … Read more »
I’m not going to do a full oral argument summary of this morning’s case before the D.C. Circuit, Al Zahrani v. Rodriguez, since it was not a habeas merits case. And the issue it raises, whether the families of … Read more »
The Texas International Law Journal has just announced the forthcoming publication of a very interesting set of papers on the law of military detention, exploring the relevance of the law of neutrality and notions of “enemy” status for this context. … Read more »
Steve Aftergood at Secrecy News reports that the government has filed a motion in the Sterling leak prosecution urging the court to “bar the defendant [Sterling] from presenting any evidence, argument or comments . . . that everybody leaks classified … Read more »
This belated report just in by slow boat: In a brief filed on August 29, the Justice Department asserted immunity on behalf of President of Rwanda Paul Kagame in an Alien Tort Statute suit brought against Kagame in federal court … Read more »
In response to some push back, and at the risk of some repetition, I would like to clarify a bit more why I think there is no serious bar to the government revealing more about the legal basis for its … Read more »
Certain segments of the Lawfare readership–and they know who they are–have been clamoring for a roundup solely dedicated to analysis of the legality of the targeted killing of Anwar Al-Aulaqi, so I will be doing that in the next few … Read more »
Stewart Baker – former Assistant Secretary for Policy at DHS and former NSA General Counsel – has an essay in Foreign Policy arguing that government lawyers are interpreting laws governing offensive cyber weapons unduly restrictively and in the process are … Read more »
By last Friday afternoon, I was–I admit–in a state of nearly fevered excitement. Al-Aulaqi had just been killed, and there would be a nice, fat, New York Times editorial about it to savage. It would contain errors, internal contradictions, and … Read more »
A friend in the intelligence community, using sophisticated data-mining techniques of a sort that threaten our civil liberties (namely, checking the D.C. government’s web site), has learned that nobody has yet claimed the D.C. vanity plate “LAWFARE”–which, believe it or … Read more »
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments on Thursday in the case of Al-Zahrani v. Rodriguez, which–believe it or not–is not a Guantanamo habeas case. It is, however, a Guantanamo case–and the only one that has … Read more »
Friday, May 17, 2013
The Department of Justice’s Inspector General released an interim report on the Department’s handling of “known or suspected” terrorists who have entered the government’s witness protection program. The report found, among other things, that information on some program participants had not been turned over to no-fly list authorities; and, that two such people could not be located—though one… Read more »
