Benjamin Wittes is a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he co-directs the Harvard Law School-Brookings Project on Law and Security. He is the author of several books and a member of the Hoover Institution's Task Force on National Security and Law. For speaking information and for a larger collection of his work, see his Full bio »
I meant to post on this last week and clean forgot until I heard a bit of it on CSPAN radio yesterday. The Heritage Foundation held this event on detainee policy featuring all four people who have held the job … Read more »
The dictionary defines a “kris” as “a Malayan and Indonesian stabbing or slashing knife with a scalloped edge.” On this site, however, The Way of the Kris is not some new Mark Mazzetti book about Obama administration counterterrorism … Read more »
The Washington Post this morning has this editorial on AUMF reauthorization. It opens:
THE OBAMA administration’s political and legal authority to wage war against al-Qaeda has steadily eroded. Both liberal and conservative members of Congress have challenged the administration’s lack
Over the next few weeks, we will be starting our rollout of the Lawfare Wiki Document Library. The library will have many facets, and we will be introducing it piece by piece, sometimes page by page. The first page, a … Read more »
UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism, Ben Emmerson, came by the Brookings Institution this morning for a wide-ranging discussion on his investigation of drone strikes. We had planned the interview as a video, but Emmerson’s remarks broke enough … Read more »
This morning, I posted a link to a new article I have written with Stephanie Leutert about our efforts to edit the Wikipedia page on “lawfare.” The article describes how a volunteer Wikipedia editor named “ElijahBosley” removed all of our … Read more »
A few months ago, I was asked to give a talk at the Pentagon on the concept of lawfare. I opened it with a story about how some months earlier I had tried had tried to edit the Wikipedia page … Read more »
Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday made these remarks at the University of California Berkeley School of Law’s Commencement. In addition to the normal graduation-speech fare, he said the following:
How we respond to such adversity – as leaders, as lawyers,
National Public Radio has run this very interesting story on the situation at Guantanamo. It’s a lengthy segment, more than 11 minutes and features extended comments from former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg, and former military … Read more »
Laura Dean is a journalist and writer living in Cairo, from where she has been doing election monitoring projects in countries around the region. She is also a good friend, from earlier days when she lived in Washington and worked … Read more »
Over at the Heritage Foundation, Senior Legal Fellow Cully Stimson held this event the other day, at which Kenneth Wainstein spoke:
The event was notable for another reason: Cully announced Heritage’s formation … Read more »
Steve has responded to my post on Harold Koh’s sudden discovery of inviolable commander in chief powers. He asks me two questions, which I address below:
From Harold Koh’s speech to the Oxford Union the other day:
Suppose we are back at Sept 18, 2001, and Congress has just passed the AUMF against Al Qaeda. Suppose the President –let’s assume it for the sake of
From Harold Koh’s speech to the Oxford Union the other day: the first “obvious” difference between the Bush and Obama administrations is that “the Obama Administration has not treated the post-9/11 conflict as a Global War on Terror to … Read more »
From Harold Koh’s speech to the Oxford Union yesterday:
A third critical difference between this Administration and its predecessor is the Obama Administration’s determination not to address Al Qaeda and the Taliban solely through the tools of war. .
Hmmmm.
From Harold Koh’s speech to the Oxford Union: Congressional transfer restrictions with respect to Guantanamo detainees “must be construed in light of the President’s authority as commander-in chief to regulate the movement of law-of-war detainees, as diplomat-in-chief to … Read more »
I have been fretting for the last few weeks about the amount of misinformation that has been floating around the press coverage—and particularly the commentary—of the Guantanamo hunger strikes. But I was sent over the edge this weekend when I … Read more »
This must have national security implications—though I don’t pretend to be sure what they are.
This morning, a gentleman named Sina Kashefipour, who tweets on national security-related matters under the improbable moniker @rejectionking, came by my office to interview me for a podcast he runs on national security called the Loopcast. He just … Read more »
I have already written my thoughts on the Oxford Union drone debate from last week, but here is video of the guest speeches of that event. Unfortunately the video appears not to include the student floor speeches, several of which … Read more »
Slate magazine has a big scoop this week; it has published excerpts from a lengthy, 466-page memoir by Guantanamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi, released by Slahi’s lawyers. In the Slate package, Slahi describes the brutal interrogation he endured at … Read more »
I had an odd meeting of the minds today—with Glenn Greenwald.
After I posted my bewildered comments on President Obama’s Guantanamo remarks this afternoon, I received the following email from Greenwald:
So glad you wrote this—it’s been driving
I confess myself mystified by President Obama’s comments about Guantanamo this morning. Here is what the President said—with the parts I find confusing bolded:
QUESTION: Mr. President, as you’re probably aware, there’s a growing hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay
I was away when the New York Times ran its latest editorial related to national security legal issues, so I’m afraid I did not fly-speck “The Guantanamo Stain” for factual errors. No matter. It doesn’t really contain many … Read more »
On Monday, my Brookings colleague Bruce Riedel held an excellent discussion with Philip Mudd, former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and author of the new book Takedown: Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda. Mudd has also served … Read more »
The head of the House Intelligence panel is worried the Justice Department may have jeopardized the public’s safety by allowing a federal judge to read the Boston bombing suspect his Miranda rights before fully interrogating him.
Going to a university campus to defend the use of armed drones is a little like ascending the pulpit in a Southern Baptist church on a Sunday morning to speak on behalf of the Devil. So it was with no … Read more »
Whoa. This is very big news—though what it means is far less clear.
The D.C. Circuit has granted the government’s petition for rehearing en banc in the military commission case of U.S. v. Al-Bahlul. It thus appears that a majority … Read more »
I suppose this was inevitable: A Twitter hashtag has developed devoted to the proposition that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is innocent: #Freejahar, for those curious to check it out. Spencer Ackerman describes it as follows:
Barely two days after cops
Mary M. Laurie, a third-year law student at Penn State Law, has rewritten the DOJ White Paper on targeted killing from the perspective the Chinese government. She explains:
China considered using a drone strike against Naw Kham, the Burmese
Ben Fox of the Associated Press has a particularly good account of the situation at Guantanamo. Because it was posted on Friday, amid the late unpleasantness in Boston, most people undoubtedly missed it—so I thought I would flag it … Read more »
The Daily Mail ran the following picture in this article about the raid on the home of alleged Ricin-mailer Kevin Curtis:
Notice the device the guy on his knees is holding. I could be wrong about this, but it looks … Read more »
Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain were quick out of the box last night in declaring that the Obama administration should hold Dzhokar Tsarnaev in military detention:
Now that the suspect is in custody, the last thing we should want
. . . where one of the Boston Marathon suspects is dead and the other is on murderous rampage: It is very important that the remaining suspect be taken alive.
The New York Times has identified the two suspects … Read more »
In this short video, Lord Martin Rees—the British astrophysicist and cosmologist–gives a brief and elegant statement of the problem Gabriella Blum and I have been writing a book about: the dissemination of radically-empowering technologies to small groups and individuals. … Read more »
I am delighted to announce the appointment of Lawfare‘s first managing editor: Wells C. Bennett.
Wells is already well-known to Lawfare readers; he has spent the past year as our special correspondent and was a contributor to the site … Read more »
Twitter has much of the best, most accurate, fastest information on the situation in Boston right now. It also has a lot of crazed garbage. We’ve created the following feed composed entirely of people and sources we trust. This does … Read more »
Over at the CQ Weekly, Tim Starks has written a mini-profile of Lawfare. It opens (warning: paywall):
When the House Judiciary Committee summoned experts in February to testify about the legality of drone strikes on U.S. citizens, all
Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, has this oped in the New York Times, told through his lawyers:
ONE man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but
The subject of lethal autonomous weapons has been one of considerable debate on this site—following a Human Rights Watch report calling for a preemptive international ban on such systems. Last week, the Georgetown National Security Law Society took the … Read more »
John Villasenor has new law review article out taking a systematic look at drones and privacy. Entitled “Observations from Above: Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Privacy” and published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, it … Read more »
I’m happy to announce a new experimental feature on Lawfare–a weekly digest of our posts. I have received a lot of complaints in recent months that during heavy-blogging weeks, Lawfare‘s feed can be overwhelming. Because of the volume … Read more »
A while back, Jack asked a student named Samantha Goldstein to help him assemble some resources on targeted killing. The resulting bibliography has expanded over time, and we have decided to post it as a resource for people interested in … Read more »
Peter Margulies writes in with the following summary of recent NIST efforts to build a framework for best practices in cybersecurity:
The premise of President Obama’s Cybersecurity Executive Order (EO) is two-fold: first, that cybersecurity is a vital national objective,
Peter Margulies of Roger Williams School of Law writes in with the following thoughts on the First Circuit briefing in the Tarek Mehanna appeal:
The federal material support statute forces courts and juries to distinguish independent speech that supports terrorism
Brian Foster of Covington & Burling, responds to my comments on his earlier guest post as follows:
I don’t derive a double standard merely from your sympathy for the instinct behind the Latif majority’s factual assessment. I’m focusing on the
Here is video of the plenary panel from last week’s ASIL conference, entitled “International Law in the Obama Administration: The First Four Years.” Moderated by Donald Donovan, the panel included former State Department officials Harold Hongju Koh and Anne-Marie … Read more »
There are no major factual blunders in yesterday’s New York Times editorial on the Guantanamo Bay hunger strikes, and there’s actually a fair bit in the editorial with which I agree. But I’d be negligent in my duties as … Read more »
On Thursday, I participated in a particularly good discussion at Georgetown University Law Center on “Legal and Ethical Implications of Autonomous Weapons.” Hosted by the school’s National Security Law Society, the event was moderated by Washingtonian‘s Shane Harris and … Read more »
Monday, May 20, 2013
As Jack posted yesterday—and as everyone is buzzing about—President Obama will give a major counterterrorism speech on Thursday at the National Defense University. The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Politico all report on the talk, and subjects that the President will likely address.
Speaking of Jack, he noted another of today’s big stories: the Washington Post’s piece on the FBI’s search, a few years… Read more »
