Alan Rozenshtein is a third-year student at Harvard Law School, where he is an articles editor on the Harvard Law Review. While at law school he has interned in the violent crimes and terrorism section of the criminal division of the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York and in the Office of the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division at the Department of Justice. He graduated with an A.B. in history from Harvard University in 2007 and studied philosophy at Balliol College, University of Oxford from 2007 to 2008. You can reach him by email at rozenshtein.lawfare@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @arozenshtein.
It’s been a rough week for the Obama Administration. In addition to outrage over IRS targeting of conservative groups and continued conspiratorial rumblings about the Administration’s response to the Benghazi attack, the Department of Justice (DOJ) faces blowback over subpoenas… Read more »
From The American Interest‘s Via Meadia blog comes this installment of the Department of Terrifying Advances in Science: the first 3D-printed gun. The all-plastic gun still needs a standard-issue metal nail for the pin, so it’s technically not entirely … Read more »
As Wells noted on Tuesday, the D.C. Circuit granted the government’s petition for rehearing en banc in Al-Bahlul v. United States. This is a very important development, as the full appeals court will now determine whether military commissions may … Read more »
A very interesting post on the New York Times‘s FiveThirtyEight blog argues that, while Americans think future terrorist attacks are likely, they’re also increasingly “skeptical about sacrificing personal freedoms for security.” A Fox News poll right after 9/11 found … Read more »
Lawfare‘s crack team of contributors has been busy invading The Huffington Post. Hot on the heels of Susan and Ritika’s excellent backgrounder on Chechnya and Kyrgyzstan, I’ve posted an article arguing that it’s far too soon to call … Read more »
The Federal Public Defender Office for the Districts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island has said it expects to represent Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, according to Miriam Conrad, the office’s federal public defender.
As it so happens, … Read more »
We’re reposting our Twitter feed of reliable sources on the manhunt that’s ongoing in Boston right now. As with last time: “This does not mean that everything they are saying will turn out to be correct. This is a fluid … Read more »
Detainees and guards clashed violently early yesterday morning at Guantánamo Bay. See reports from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and NBC. In response to the hunger strikes the detainees have engaged in for the past … Read more »
The New York Times has posted a lengthy and very interesting article by reporter Mark Mazzetti entitled “Rise of the Predators: A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood,” which will appear on tomorrow’s front page. The piece is an … Read more »
Peter Margulies recently discussed the effect of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Clapper v. Amnesty International USA denying standing to plaintiffs challenging the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program on the ongoing litigation in Hedges v. Obama. (Steve made a … Read more »
As Steve noted on Tuesday, the government petitioned for rehearing in the military commission case of United States v. Al-Bahlul, asking the full D.C. Circuit to overturn: (1) a three-judge panel’s holding, in Hamdan II, that commissions lack jurisdiction … Read more »
Readers by now know this much: Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz harbor great anxieties about possible drone strikes against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil—chiefly against citizens who pose no imminent threat to our national security. And their concerns apparently … Read more »
As the New York Times reports, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been speaking on the Senate floor since before noon in an effort to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor and nominee to lead … Read more »
As Wells reported, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Clapper v. Amnesty International USA this morning. By a 5–4 vote, it held that a group of human rights organizations, lawyers, activists, and journalists lacked standing to challenge the … Read more »
Fawzia Koofi (website, Twitter) is an Afghan Member of Parliament and Vice President of the Afghan National Assembly. She is also running for President of Afghanistan in the planned April 2014 elections, and would be the first … Read more »
The D.C. district court issued two Guantánamo-related orders on Wednesday.
The first involved something of a triple habeas Hail Mary: Judge Richard Leon denied Obaydullah’s (no last name) motion for relief from (1) the court’s March 2012 denial of the … Read more »
The Guantánamo military commissions yesterday released—after a security review—a pair of important filings by the Office of the Chief Prosecutor (OCP), regarding the ongoing controversy over the conspiracy charges against the five 9/11 defendants. (For background, see our prior coverage … Read more »
Oaths, poems, 472 evening balls—color me unimpressed. This is the proper way to do an inauguration, courtesy of the leading source for national-security news and analysis, The Onion:
Obama Begins Inauguration Festivities With Ceremonial Drone Flyover
NEWS IN BRIEF
As Wells noted, the Guantánamo Military Commission Convening Authority has declined to adopt Chief Prosecutor Brig. Gen. Mark Martins’s recommendation to withdraw the conspiracy charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 defendants. Withdrawal, which can be done … Read more »
Rezwan Ferdaus, a 26-year-old U.S.-born citizen of Bangladeshi origin, was arrested in September 2011 for plotting to attack the Pentagon and the Capitol Building with remote-controlled model airplanes carrying C-4 explosives, as well as for providing material support to al … Read more »
As Ben noted the other day, the Obama administration issued a signing statement on the new NDAA arguing that its Guantánamo detainee-transfer restrictions are unconstitutional as a violation of the separation of powers. The language is similar to last year’s … Read more »
As Ritika noted earlier today, the New York Times editorial page has renewed its call for the Obama administration to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay. (I’ll take it from Ben’s lack of snark that he judges the Times… Read more »
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Stuxnet, the virus that targeted Iran’s uranium enrichment program and that is generally thought to have been created jointly by the United States and Israel, also infected the computer systems of energy … Read more »
On Monday, October 29, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Clapper v. Amnesty International, which poses the question whether a group of human rights organizations, lawyers, activists, and journalists have standing to challenge a congressionally-authorized warantless government surveillance … Read more »
Proving once again that the judiciary is the most hardcore of the three branches, the Supreme Court remains open for business this morning. The Justices will hear oral argument in Clapper v. Amnesty International, about whether human rights groups … Read more »
Yesterday the D.C. Circuit issued its decision in United States v. Mohammed, in which the defendant, Afghan citizen Khan Mohammed, appealed his conviction on narcoterrorism charges stemming from his involvement in a plot to attack a NATO base in … Read more »
Professor Kent Roach, the Prichard Wilson Chair in Law and Public Policy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has written a new book, The 9/11 Effect: Comparative Counter-Terrorism, which came out last August from Cambridge University Press. … Read more »
The New York Times has just published a story in which it quotes an unnamed “senior American official” who confirms Israel’s assertions that the Bulgaria bombing was carried out by a Hezbollah cell operating in Bulgaria:
The official said the
Earlier today, numerous Israeli English-language media outlets (Times of Israel, Haaretz) picked up Bulgarian news stories that identified the Bulgarian suicide bomber as Mehdi Ghezali, a 33-year old Swede who was held at Guantanamo Bay from 2002 … Read more »
The Wall Street Journal and Ars Technica report on some very intersting results of a FOIA request for information on the “national security letters” that the FBI sends to tech companies to get information on users. These letters have provoked … Read more »
If she wasn’t your favorite monarch before, she should be now. On the eve of the Diamond Jubilee:
The New York Times published an editorial yesterday criticizing Monday’s decision by the Second Circuit in ACLU v. Department of Justice, which held that various interrogation-related materials sought by the ACLU and other groups were exempted from Freedom of … Read more »
As Raffaela has already noted, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously ruled this morning that Abu Hamza al-Masri and four other wanted terrorism suspects may be extradited from the United Kingdom to the United States. (Additional reporting on … Read more »
This morning the Supreme Court released its opinion in Zivotofsky v. Clinton. In an 8–1 decision, it reversed the lower courts’ dismissal of Menachim Zivotofsky’s suit to have “Jerusalem, Israel” listed as his place of birth. The Court held … Read more »
The D.C. Circuit heard oral argument yesterday in Doe v. Rumsfeld (11-5209), a Bivens case brought by a U.S. citizen working as a military contractor in Iraq who alleged detention and interrogation abuses by the U.S. government. The case is … Read more »
The New York Times is reporting that a group of flu and public health experts at a WHO-convened meeting in Geneva have decided that the full research details will be released regarding the highly contagious and deadly avian influenza developed … Read more »
The Senate is currently holding hearings on the upcoming cybersecurity bill. You can watch the live feed here.
As Ben mentioned, we’re still waiting for iTunes to approve the Lawfare Podcast. Even before approval, however, you can subscribe to it through iTunes by following these simple steps:
The Constitution Project will be hosting a teleconference debate tomorrow (Wednesday) from 2:15 PM to 3:15 PM EST on the constitutionality of President Obama’s recent recess appointments. Details below the fold.
The New York Times published two op-eds this weekend by former Guantánamo detainees — one by Lakhdar Boumediene, the lead plaintiff in Boumediene v. Bush, which extended a constitutional right to the writ of habeas corpus to Guantánamo … Read more »
The State Department announced today that the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism has been upgraded to bureau level and renamed the Bureau of Counterterrorism (press briefing and fact sheet). Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, who leads the office (now … Read more »
As Raffaella mentioned earlier, the Ninth Circuit released three opinions on Thursday relating to class action litigation against the government and major telecommunications companies (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) for the warrantless wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) under … Read more »
In September, a team of Dutch virologists announced that they had created a strain of the avian influenza (H5N1) that, at least in lab animals, was as contagious as the seasonal flu. (A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has … Read more »
The new regulations for the military commissions have just been posted on the military commission’s website. This long (202 page) document is a comprehensive list of the military commissions’ procedures, from the charging process to the rules governing appeals. … Read more »
Oral arguments in Lebron v. Rumsfeld took place before the Fourth Circuit on Wednesday. The oral argument audio recording is available here, and my argument preview, with background on the case as well as links to the lower court … Read more »
Reuters has an interesting story about the NSA helping U.S. banks defend against foreign cyber attacks by providing them with “technical expertise.” According to the article, the NSA has already been helping NASDAQ protect against hackers. The government appears to … Read more »
Tomorrow, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit will hear oral arguments in Lebron v. Rumsfeld, in which Jose Padilla and his mother, Estella Lebron, appeal a district court’s dismissal of a Bivens claim against former Secretary … Read more »
The text of the speech that Jeh Johnson, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, gave at the Heritage Foundation earlier today is available here. We will post the video of the event, including the Q&A, as soon as … 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.
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 »
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 »
