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’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 »
Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal, the author of the recent book, The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay, has posted the following statement on the Facebook page associated with his new book (I have taken … Read more »
Brian Foster of Covington & Burling, who represents several Guantanamo detainees, writes in with the following comments on my defense of CIA lawyer Jonathan Fredman—and the case of his former client, Adnan Latif:
I’m interested in the basis and
It took only a few minutes from the time I posted my defense of CIA lawyer Jonathan Fredman last night for Marcy Wheeler (aka emptywheel) to begin tweeting bile against both Fredman and me. She used words like “criminal” and … Read more »
A good discussion on WHYY’s Radio Times of current goings on at Guantanamo Bay—with Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, David Frakt of University of Pittsburgh Law School, and me.
The quotation is apparently too sexy to resist—too sexy even to Google its speaker’s name before running with it. A single Google search would, after all, yield this article by Stuart Taylor Jr. in National Journal—an article that should … Read more »
From Weekend Edition, a very thoughtful and useful discussion with Greg McNeal on some of themes of his recent guest blogging on Lawfare:
Here are a bunch, which I should have included in my post this morning on Musa’ab Al Madhwani’s emergency motion on clothing, temperature, and potable water:
Over at the Hoover Institution’s Defining Ideas site, Victor Davis Hanson has this useful essay on the politics of drones. Hanson is a classicist, so it is fitting that he opens his discussion as follows:
The biographer Plutarch tells
An emergency motion filed before U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan the other day alleges that guards at Guantanamo are denying a hunger-striking detainee access to potable water and are cranking up the air conditioning to freeze the detainees. The government … Read more »
We are excited to announce the launch of a project at which we have been hard at work for some time. It’s a book—being published chapter by chapter—by the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law, explicating and … Read more »
The British Royal United Services Institute has issued a report entitled “Hitting the Target? How New Capabilities are Shaping International Intervention.” Here’s how the organization describes the project, along with its table of contents:
While the US drone-strikes
Ritika linked yesterday to a new Gallup poll on public attitudes towards drone strikes. The results are not surprising, but they are interesting. Americans largely support drone strike against foreign terrorist suspects abroad (65 percent support) but are less supportive … Read more »
Over at the graphical Drawnward blog, Caitlin Fitz Gerald has figured out an interesting way of illustrating our increasingly polarized attitudes over drones. She typed “drones are” into Google and grabbed a screen shot of the suggested searches Google … Read more »
Both the New York Times and Washington Post are reporting that U.S. and Afghan officials have resolved the dispute over the transfer of authority over the Detention Facility at Parwan to Afghanistan. The Times reports:
On Saturday, a Pentagon spokesman
Mary Dudziak has a truly bizarre oped in the New York Times today taking on the Obama administration’s drone wars on, let’s just say, a new basis: that President Nixon once secretly bombed Cambodia.
I’m not exaggerating. Here’s how it … Read more »
Keith Gerver writes in with the following account of yesterday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, which seems to have tracked closely some recent arguments on Lawfare:
The recent debate between Bobby, Jack, Ben, and Matt, on the one hand,
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday held a hearing on “Counterterrorism Policies and Priorities: Addressing the Evolving Threat.” Video is available here. The witnesses, and their prepared statements were:
The Honorable Jane Harman (D-CA)
Director, President, and CEO (Former
Charlie Savage of the New York Times has this story this morning on the hunger strikes at Guantanamo. It includes this lengthy statement from Captain Robert Durand, Director of Public Affairs, JTF-Gutananamo:
The mission of Joint Task Force Guantanamo is
In their latest post, Jen and Steve ask me the following question: “Why, exactly, are you so convinced that [ad hoc Congressional authorization for armed conflict is] unrealistic, and that we’d be better off with Congress abandoning the field … Read more »
Administrative note: Amazon.com has released a service allowing blogs to install a “Send to Kindle” button on posts that, well, does more or less what it sounds like. I have installed it, because I know that many Lawfare readers use … Read more »
I’ve so far stayed out of the exchange over the last few days between Jack, on the one hand, and Steve and Jennifer Daskal, on the other, about the paper that Jack and Matt and Bobby and I wrote on … Read more »
Over at the D.C. Exile blog, Ben Farley has this thoughtful post on U.N. Special Rapporteur Ben Emmerson’s recent statement on drone strikes in Pakistan. It concludes:
Pakistan’s behavior in general has been at best ambiguous. Despite having the capacity
I, for one, welcome our eagle-claw grasping robot overlords…
Former Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson is, at this hour, giving this speech at Fordham Law School in New York:
Keynote address at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School:
A “Drone Court”: Some Pros and Cons
by
This is pretty interesting. A gentleman on a Chicago Metra train got an entire train detained and searched by walking into the Metra system after a nuclear stress test, which the Mayo Clinic descibes as a way to measure … Read more »
Just in case you need one.
This strikes me as a big deal. U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights and Counterterrorism Ben Emmerson has returned from Pakistan and issued a lengthy statement summarizing his discussions with Pakistani officials. The statement contains a lot of material with … Read more »
About a month ago, I posted a draft paper my colleague Dan Byman and I had put together about the different tools the United States uses to go after citizens waging war against it from abroad. In the crush of … Read more »
What a useful contribution to the debate! From the Washington Post.
. . . by Ryan Calo over at Concurring Opinions:
For many, the word “drone” brings to mind an image of the military-grade Predator. The folks within the DYI Drones movement, however, and most local law enforcement, are more
Josh Gerstein of Politico is reporting:
A group has posted audio online of Bradley Manning’s speech to a military court in Fort Meade explaining his decision to release classified military information to Wikileaks, the first time the public has
Habeas lawyer David Remes, who represents Guantanano detainees, writes in with the following comment on the Guantanamo hunger strikes, and Steve’s, my and the Taliban’s response to them:
Several days ago, Steve Vladeck noted the release of a letter by
Earlier today, I posted a thoughtful essay by Benjamin Kleinerman arguing with respect to Eric Holder’s recent testimony on domestic drone strikes that, “as obvious as the targeting of American citizens might be in [the most] extraordinary situations, it does … Read more »
Benjamin Kleinerman of Michigan State University, one of the most interesting political theorists to write in the Lawfare-space, sent me the following thoughts on prerogative and killing Americans domestically. This is a subject Kleinerman treated at length in his … Read more »
"I like to write about foreign policy, national security, and related subjects. I like to make art. This site is an experiment in combining the two."
So writes Caitlin Fitz Gerald about her new blog, Drawnward, which I am … Read more »
The New York Times editorial page has still not corrected its error of the other day, when it promoted John Brennan to National Security Adviser. But that hasn’t stopped our friends over there from making some new doozies in … Read more »
Rand Paul has a triumphant blow-by-blow account of his filibuster in the Washington Post. It contains the following curious sentence that to me captures almost everything wrong with his little campaign: “I wanted to sound an alarm bell from … Read more »
Over at Politico, Ginger Gibson is reporting that:
Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) criticized the Obama administration on Thursday over reports that an al-Qaeda leader had been brought to New York.
According to The New
The Washington Post, meanwhile, has this excellent editorial on Rand Paul’s filibuster and openness in the drone program:
AFTER SEN. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) held the Senate hostage Wednesday in order to warn that American citizens could be targeted by drone
This morning’s New York Times editorial contains the following interesting sentence: “He was President Obama’s national security adviser in his first term and an architect of the Obama administration’s targeted killings policy.” Hmmm. Wonder what Tom Donilon and James Jones … Read more »
I have held off for nearly 24 hours in writing up my thoughts about Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster because I was trying to think of something to say beyond that this was a dumb publicity stunt. But here’s the problem: … Read more »
Friday, May 24, 2013
Coverage of President Obama’s speech yesterday is plentiful: Here are Peter Baker of the New York Times, Karen DeYoung and Greg Miller of the Washington Post, and Mark Mazzetti of the Times with an analysis of the key points of the speech. Scott Wilson of the Post also provides a rundown of the speech, and cites Ben. The Associated Press reports on lifting the transfer ban on Yemeni detainees, and Colleen McCain Nelson, Adam Entous, and Julia E. Barnes… Read more »
