I am puzzled by two news reports on USG cyber policy in the last few days. This AP story from Friday surprised me for what it revealed about the lethargic U.S. reaction to the now-many-years-old problem of Chinese cyber exploitations … Read more »
A few days ago I posted a tongue-in-cheek reaction to President Obama’s inaugural address assertion that a “decade of war is now ending.” The post was a timeline of USG war-related events in the weeks before and the week after … Read more »
January 28, 2013: The United States signs a status of forces agreement with Niger “that clears the way for a stepped-up American military presence on the edges of the conflict in neighboring Mali,” and that portends a drone base in … Read more »
Herb Lin, the chief scientist at the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (which is a component of the National Research Council of the National Academies), has been the study director of many important NRC reports related to cybersecurity (and other … Read more »
In transition from long-time legislator to senior Executive branch official, and asked to reconcile positions that are impossible to reconcile, Senator Kerry in his confirmation testimony took a nuanced and not always coherent position today on the relationship between presidential … Read more »
As Ben noted, I have a short essay on extra-AUMF threats as part of a Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law series. Drawing on Bobby’s important paper on the topic, I briefly explain why terrorist threats … Read more »
The WSJ reports that U.S. banks “are pressing for government action to block or squelch what Washington officials say is an intensifying Iranian campaign of cyberattacks against American financial institutions.” The banks are asking the USG to use diplomatic pressure, … Read more »
The Sunday NYT story on the French intervention in Mali noted that the United States had long trained Mali forces but had also long believed that “a Western assault on the Islamist stronghold could rally jihadists around the world and … Read more »
Current events in Africa illustrate the unintended and sometimes-self-defeating effects of humanitarian efforts on that continent.
First, France’s military action against Islamist insurgents in Mali raises the question why Islamists are on the rise in Mali and elsewhere in North … Read more »
Eric Posner and Alan Sykes have a new book entitled Economic Foundations of International Law. The book does what its title suggests: gives a comprehensive rational choice account of public international law. It distinguishes itself from other books in … Read more »
Last weekend I linked to a Sunday Times story by a usually reliable reporter, Christina Lamb, to the effect that the USG “is launching a covert operation to send weapons to Syrian rebels.” Today’s FT, however, quotes a senior Obama … Read more »
That is the title of Eric Posner’s essay in Slate reacting to Jeh Johnson’s Oxford speech. The first part of the piece roughly tracks some of the points I made last week, but then Eric widens the lens:… Read more »
Last week I noted that U.S.-blessed Qatari arms shipments meant for Libyan rebels were diverted to Islamist terrorist groups in North Africa. This morning’s papers imply the possibility of something similar happening in Syria. The New York Times has a … Read more »
Just after the election, I wrote:
As we have often discussed on this blog, and as Bobby has best documented, terrorist organizations that threaten the United States are increasingly difficult to fit under the AUMF rubric. This raises the
Raha Wala of Human Rights First writes in with this comment on Jeh Johnson’s Oxford Speech:
Ken and Jack are right that DoD General Counsel Jeh Johnson, in his remarks at the Oxford Union, made a serious attempt to
Walter Russell Mead coined the phrase “Libyan afterparty” to describe the many unintended and unhappy consequences – especially for the rise of Islamist terrorist power centers in Northern Africa – of the 2011 U.S. and NATO invasion of Libya. (Some … Read more »
I agree entirely with Ken that DOD General Counsel Jeh Johnson’s speech on the end-of-conflict with al Qaeda “makes a serious attempt to grapple with the conditions defining the endgame” and is “a significant articulation of the US government’s view … Read more »
A significant amount of hysteria has greeted the World Conference on International Telecommunications (“WCIT-12”), which will be held from next Monday until December 14 in Dubai. A casual reader of the news might wonder whether, as a Stanford Law panel … Read more »
The NRC has issued a Report on vulnerability in the U.S. electric power delivery system. (A downloadable copy can be found here.) I have only skimmed the Report, but it covers vulnerabilities not only from cyber-operations, but also from … Read more »
John McLaughlin, who was Deputy Director of the CIA from 2000-2004, has a nice essay in FP on how the patterns of terrorism we face today differ from the ones that prevailed in the years after 9/11. Many of his … Read more »
Today the DOJ and SEC released a joint Resource Guide to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. One difficulty with complying with the sometimes-maddeningly-indeterminate FCPA is that there are very few judicial decisions interpreting it. (And there are few decisions … Read more »
While I am sure we differ in emphasis and details, I agree with the thrust of Trevor’s latest post. As I argued in my last two books, the early Bush administration approach to presidential power was, in reality and … Read more »
When I wrote on Friday about the “basic counterterrorism policies that Obama continued, with tweaks, from the late Bush administration,” I meant to refer only to policies that “Obama continued” from the Bush era, and not to make a claim … Read more »
In connection with the Petraeus matter, the NYT reports:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not inform the Senate and House Intelligence Committees about the inquiry until this week, according to Congressional officials, who noted that by law the
One important consequence of President Obama’s re-election will be the further entrenchment, and legitimation, of the basic counterterrorism policies that Obama continued, with tweaks, from the late Bush administration. We will have four more years of a Democratic president presiding … Read more »
In my book Power and Constraint, I argued that the ACLU/CCR al-Aulaqi lawsuit “was merely an early battle in a long war over the legitimacy of U.S. targeting practices—a war that will take place not just in the United … Read more »
I agree with Bobby’s analysis of this morning’s Washington Post profile by Karen DeYoung of John Brennan, and would add these thoughts:
Eliminating CIA’s Drone Capacities. Count me as skeptical that we will see drone targeting capacities moved out of … Read more »
Last week I asked whether per se opposition to military commissions was in the GTMO detainees best interests, where their “interests” were defined as “(a) maximizing [the detainees’] procedural rights, and (b) shortening their time in GTMO.” I had in … Read more »
Jonathan Witmer-Rich of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law writes in with these comments on Hamdan II:
Reflecting on Hamdan II, I wonder if the court really responded to the government’s opening argument (in Part I.A of its opening brief
The President had this to say about issues of interest to readers of the blog:
Obama: There are some things that we haven’t gotten done. I still want to close Guantanamo. We haven’t been able to get that through Congress.
The Washington Post reports :
The Center for Constitutional Rights, a private group which has been deeply involved in detainee issues, praised Tuesday’s decision but said it does not go far enough. The center says detainees at Guantanamo Bay are
Five brief thoughts on yesterday’s Hamdan decision:
First, I am less confident than Steve and Ben that this opinion forecloses conspiracy claims in military commissions. The historical arguments for a conspiracy charge in military commissions under the laws of … Read more »
In cybersecurity circles I often hear that firms are increasingly taking matters into their own hands in the face of cyber-exploitations or cyber-attacks by taking retaliatory steps against the computer systems that are the source of the exploitations or attacks. … Read more »
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s speech last week on cyber is more significant than has been reported. Most of the coverage focused on Panetta’s grave warnings about cyber threats facing the nation, but the speech’s real significance, I think, concerns … Read more »
One focus of Ken’s response to Eric Posner’s Slate piece is Eric’s claim that “the United States has invoked a new idea of the ‘unable or unwilling’ country, one that outside powers can invade because that country cannot prevent terrorists … Read more »
As a counterpoint to the much-noted critical study of drones in Pakistan from the clinics at NYU and Stanford, I recommend this piece by Joshua Foust of the American Security Project, which is sympathetic to the NYU-Stanford study but maintains … Read more »
Eric Posner has a piece in Slate which argues – based on this report in the WSJ about the ever-thinner forms of consent by Pakistan to USG airstrikes in that country – that the United States is making a mockery … Read more »
As many Lawfare readers know, John Witt has recently published a book called Lincoln’s Code. The book is about, among many other things, the history of the laws of war in the United States, especially in its first century, … Read more »
Earlier today I argued that a Romney administration would not pursue significantly different counterterrorism policies than a second Obama administration. Below I note three caveats to this claim, and I describe what I think is most at stake in the … Read more »
Last week Ben argued that, despite the Romney Team memo on interrogation and Romney’s promise to use “enhanced” interrogation techniques, a President Romney would not change the Obama interrogation policy, “at least not in the short term,” because (I summarize) … Read more »
Charlie Savage of the NYT has an interesting piece on a memorandum entitled “Interrogation Techniques” that Savage reports was circulated last year among the Romney campaign’s “National Security Law Subcommittee” – a subcommittee that, Savage says, “consists of a brain … Read more »
Today the D.C. Circuit will hear oral argument concerning the ACLU’s FOIA request to the CIA for records related to the government’s program of targeted killing via “drones.” Cutting through the statutory and doctrinal niceties, the main issue is whether … Read more »
Lawfare reader Col. Fritz Barth USMCR (ret.) writes in with this comment on the SCI nondisclosure obligations of Matthew Bissonnette, author of No Easy Day:
There is one additional element of Bissonette’s SCI access that seems to have been
The Defense Science Board recently issued a new study on The Role of Autonomy in DoD Systems. Spencer Ackerman has a good story summarizing and explaining its conclusions:
The Pentagon’s science advisers want military robots to operate with far
“How the hell can we run sensitive operations here that go after enemies if people are allowed to do that?,” asked Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, on CBS, in response to the revelations about the Bin Laden mission by … Read more »
Tom Ricks has an uncharacteristically uninformed post about the No Easy Day kerfuffle, in which he claims that it “would be a bad thing if people came to expect some sort of right of the military to review memoirs, … Read more »
Amy Zegart of the Hoover Institution, author of several terrific books on intelligence, now has a regular column on intelligence matters at Foreign Policy that should be of great interest to Lawfare readers. Her first piece uses the kerfuffle over … Read more »
In Power and Constraint, I argued (in a chapter summarized here) that the Center for Constitutional Rights litigation strategy for GTMO garnered crucial judicial support for GTMO detentions that in the end significantly strengthened the legitimacy of such … Read more »
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
William P. Barr (former Attorney General), Jamie S. Gorelick (former Deputy AG), and Kenneth L. Wainstein (former Assistant AG for National Security) have this Times op-ed on the AP subpoena controversy. They write:
While neither we nor the critics know the circumstances behind the prosecutors’ decision to issue this subpoena, we do know from the government’s public disclosures that the prosecutors were right to investigate this leak
