As I noted yesterday, I have an essay at CFR on the President’s speech. I don’t write the headlines or the summaries of my pieces, and I was surprised and dismayed when someone at CFR summarized my piece by saying: … Read more »
Ryan Goodman and Sarah Knuckey maintain that the new targeting framework announced by the President “raises some troubling questions and leaves important older questions completely unanswered.” Their list is long, but here are the first two:
Where do the rules
My reactions to the President’s speech can be found in this essay at the CFR page. The headline writers gave it the title of Obama Passes the Buck: The President’s Empty Rhetoric on Counterterrorism. The subtitle captures the basic … Read more »
Bill Keller of the NYT urges President Obama to order the Justice Department “to appoint an independent investigator with bulldog instincts and bipartisan credibility” to fully examine the IRS imbroglio and determine “whether the treatment of conservative groups seeking special … Read more »
A few years ago I wrote an op-ed that gave these reasons (among others) why the USG should not prosecute Julian Assange for the WikiLeaks disclosures of State Department cables:
A conviction [of Assange] would also cause collateral damage to
The President will give a speech on counterterrorism at the National Defense University on Thursday, reports the WP:
A White House official, speaking Saturday on the condition of anonymity to describe the speech in advance, said Obama will “discuss our
Melissa Hathaway has a new essay that argues for putting cybersecurity and related issues on the G20 agenda:
To counteract these [cybersecurity] risks, some governments and businesses are turning to international venues, seeking mechanisms to drive a path toward international
A common assumption in the debate about the appropriate legal regime for extra-AUMF threats is that the AUMF is cabined and cannot be extended to newly threatening Islamist terrorist threats. Yesterday’s SASC hearing exploded this assumption. The hearing made clear … Read more »
The New York Times has a story about the problems of expanding CALEA to on peer-to-peer communications. The story discusses a Center for Democracy and Technology report on the topic by several experts. One signatory is Susan Landau, who writes … Read more »
I participated in an extraordinary hearing before the Armed Services Committee today on the scope of the AUMF. Lawfare readers interested in the scope of the AUMF will want to watch the hearing video carefully (or read the transcript, when … Read more »
Charlie Savage reported in the NYT today that the Obama administration “is on the verge of backing a Federal Bureau of Investigation plan for a sweeping overhaul of surveillance laws that would make it easier to wiretap people who communicate … Read more »
Curtis Bradley and I have a casebook on foreign relations law that includes a heavy dose of national security law (including chapters on covert action and targeted killing) that might be of interest to Lawfare readers. Here is a TOC … Read more »
John Rizzo, Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA. Publication date: January 2014.
Speaking of a strange meeting of the minds over the President’s press conference remarks, Dana Milbank and Maureen Dowd had basically the same reaction to President Obama’s tetchy press conference yesterday: stop whining about Congress, stop complaining about how hard … Read more »
Susan Landau, author of Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies (which I highly recommend), writes in with a different take than Paul’s on the WP CALEA story:
The Washington Post reported yesterday on the FBI’s
Neal Katyal has a review of my book Power and Constraint in the Harvard Law Review. My response is here. Neal’s review basically claims that I don’t understand American separation of powers, and my response basically says the same … Read more »
Stewart Baker points to a provision in Congress’s continuing resolution that is the first serious attempt I have seen to punish (as opposed to rail against) China for its cybersecurity practices. Section 516 of what Stewart describes as “the continuing … Read more »
James Lewis had an op-ed yesterday in the WP about “Five Myths About Chinese Hackers.” The fifth myth:
5. America spies on China, too, so what can we complain about?
Chinese officials portray their country as a victim of hacking
The WSJ has a story (behind paywall, I think) about the CIA “expanding its role in the campaign against the Syrian regime by feeding intelligence to select rebel fighters to use against government forces.” The point of the CIA aid … Read more »
Following up on Wells’ post, I increasingly think that the shift in drone authorities from CIA to DOD first reported by Dan Klaidman might not amount to much in substance, and that any proposed changes face many hurdles in … Read more »
That is the title of Dan Klaidman’s important story:
Three senior U.S. officials tell The Daily Beast that the White House is poised to sign off on a plan to shift the CIA’s lethal targeting program to the Defense
We address all of Jennifer and Steve’s latest arguments in our paper, and so I urge any interested reader to look for responses there. I will limit myself here to one point. Jennifer and Steve believe that when the … Read more »
Jennifer and Steve describe the statutory proposal for next-generation terrorist threats by Bobby, Matt, Ben, and me as a “sweeping and preemptive militarization of counterterrorism” which is “not just unnecessary on current facts, but also deeply misguided—and likely counterproductive—as a … Read more »
Judge Garland’s persuasive opinion in the ACLU FOIA case is important but narrow, and its significance for intelligence community transparency is entirely unclear.
Recall that the CIA had refused to respond to the ACLU request for records pertaining to drone … Read more »
Senator Paul has an op-ed this morning that repeats many of the misrepresentations of the administration’s positions that were contained in his filibuster. It also contains in a nutshell one reason why this issue has been so hard to resolve: … Read more »
First, I objected to the large mischaracterizations in Senator Paul’s remarks, and think the ones about our targeting practices abroad were especially damaging. But there is no doubt that Senator Paul succeeded wildly in focusing public (and congressional) attention on … Read more »
There is a connection between Senator Paul’s filibuster and the need for a comprehensive renewal of presidential authorities for the administration’s stealth counterterrorism tactics (i.e., the cluster of tactics that include “covert action, Special Forces, drone surveillance and targeting, cyberattacks … Read more »
Recall that Senator Paul asked John Brennan whether he believed the President “has the authority to order lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and without a trial?,” and that John Brennan and … Read more »
Several years ago, in a prescient op-ed in the Washington Post, our colleague John Bellinger argued that the September 2001 AUMF was an increasingly poor fit for the evolving threats facing the United States. It is a theme to which … Read more »
I noted last week than in his answer to the question whether the Obama administration could “carry out drone strikes inside the United States,” John Brennan gave this non-response: “This Administration has not carried out drone strikes inside the United … Read more »
Former Obama administration Acting and Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal has an interesting op-ed today in the NYT that criticizes the idea of an Article III “drone court” and proposes instead a “National Security Court” inside Article II in which … Read more »
I have often asked whether the Obama administration had a strategy to confront the apparently enormous problem of cyber exploitation by the Chinese against U.S. firms. Yesterday it published the Administration Strategy on Mitigating the Theft of U.S. Trade Secrets… Read more »
Ryan Goodman follows up his EJIL draft with a briefer and more pointed version of the argument in Slate.
In an interview last weekend, Congressman Mike Rogers, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, gave unambiguous acknowledgment of CIA involvement in drone strikes. The ACLU attached the interview in a letter to the D.C. Circuit in connection with its … Read more »
They are available here. Lots of interesting stuff on a first quick read, but two thing stand out. First, in response to the question “Could the Administration carry out drone strikes inside the United States?,” Brennan gave this non-response, … Read more »
Via this thoughtful essay by Pejman Yousefzadeh, I learned about this CNN interview (video below) with former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in which he notes his support for drone strikes but suggests ways to enhance accountability of Executive branch decisions to engage in targeted killing of an American citizen.
Senator Feinstein issued the following press release today:
The administration has publicly described—including now in an unclassified white paper—the legality and boundaries of targeted killing of terrorists, though details remain classified. The secrecy of the program has made it difficult
It is now available on the SSCI website.
An important Lawfare-related sentence from last night’s SOTU address:
[I]n the months ahead, I will continue to engage with Congress to ensure not only that our targeting, detention, and prosecution of terrorists remains consistent with our laws and system of
Congressman Mike Rogers, the Republican Chairmen of the House Intelligence Committee, revealed Sunday on Face the Nation much more than I had previously known about the nature and scope of congressional intelligence committee oversight of the drone program. He also … Read more »
I have been beating this one the death, and will not for a while after this, but the gap between the supposed threat of cyberespionage and our response to it continues to amaze. From Ellen Nakashima, we learn this morning … Read more »
John is right to note that Obama gets more slack than Bush on some of his counterterrorism policies – namely, most if not all of the elements of the aggressive Bush policies that he continued and (in some respects, like … Read more »
Ryan Goodman has a timely and important new article, forthcoming in EJIL, entitled The Power to Kill or Capture Enemy Combatants. The Introduction to the piece (footnotes omitted) should draw many readers to the body of the argument:
During
Susan Landau is the author of Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, a careful, clear, and informed book about how government mechanisms for surveillance (legal and otherwise) weaken cybersecurity. (Surveillance or Security is apparently … Read more »
Noah Feldman has a piece entitled Obama’s Drone Attack on Your Due Process, which concludes:
The white paper should have said that due process doesn’t apply on the battlefield. By instead making due process into a rubber stamp, the
The most interesting element in Scott Shane’s interesting story on the growing pressure for a Court to vet drone strikes (which quotes Bobby several times) is that the ACLU opposes it. Shane says that Hina Shamsi of the ACLU (these … Read more »
Ben Emmerson, the Special Rapportuer for Human Rights who is conducting an inquiry into the legality of (among other things) U.S. drone strikes, and who has suggested that the United States might have committed war crimes, has told Spencer … Read more »
John Yoo has a piece in the WSJ which argues that the real problem with the White Paper is that it extends due process protections to enemy combatants on the battlefield, thereby threatening to diminish due process at home:
The
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 »
