I have a long review in the New Republic of Mark Mazzetti’s excellent new book, The Way of the Knife. The first half of the review simply summarizes the book, the main point of which is to demonstrate how … Read more »
David S. Kris and J. Douglas Wilson’s second edition of National Security Investigations & Prosecutions is a necessary read, or at least necessary to have in your library, for just about anyone who practices, teaches, or writes about national security … Read more »
Big Data finally has its own coffee table book. From Day in the Life series creators Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt, The Human Face of Big Data is bursting with stories of Big Data modern miracles, promising even those will … Read more »
When people outside Israel imagine its intelligence and counterterrorism system, they immediately think of the Mossad, the foreign-intelligence agency. But the Israeli Security Agency, commonly known as the Shin Bet or, in Israel, the Shabak, is equally if not more … Read more »
Whether you support or oppose the broader U.S. war on terrorism, you are likely to use Yemen to prove your point. Those who are optimistic about the struggle contend that the Al Qaeda core has taken repeated body blows in … Read more »
The verdict of history depends on who writes it, and the lessons of history depend on who reads it. Contemporary readers will look for the lessons of a 19th century international human rights initiative that involved treaties, international courts, and … Read more »
(Note from the Review Editor: We’re pleased to welcome this film review by Lawfare’s own Alan Rozenshtein; the Book Review also handles occasional reviews of media other than books. Other Lawfare contributors will likely weigh in on different matters raised … Read more »
Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, by David E. Sanger (Crown 2012)
Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, by Daniel Klaidman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt … Read more »
The image of the child soldier as “faultless passive victim” resonates throughout Professor Mark Drumbl’s newest book, Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy. The faultless passive victim image dominates the international discourse on child soldiers, almost always … Read more »
David K. Shipler’s Rights at Risk offers a detailed account of the many ways in which, he says, U.S. constitutional rights have been under attack over the past thirty years. His primary areas of concern are the procedural rights of … Read more »
Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State details the institutional expansion of national security in America post-9/11. The book documents unbridled spending, duplicative organizations, bureaucratic in-fighting and turf wars, and lack of inter- and intra-group communication … Read more »
Though The Hunt for KSM is not written as an epic, it nevertheless begins in medias res, during the 2002 takedown of an Al-Qaeda senior lieutenant in Afghanistan, Abu Zubaydah. Allegedly quite knowledgeable about past terror plots and upcoming ones, … Read more »
Consider two views about what went wrong after 9/11 (if you think anything did).
In one view, endless war began: the conflict with Islamic radicals was defined as war (rather than crime), with all the special executive prerogatives that implied; … Read more »
In 2004 the Rift Valley Institute organised its first Sudan field course. The course was conceived in a spirit of cautious optimism and motivated by a simple idea. Already by that time it was clear that the negotiations in … Read more »
Stephen F. Knott’s new book, Rush to Judgment: George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and His Critics, is a powerful and pointed challenge to Bush’s critics, especially those in the academy. Claiming that his critics “applied a relatively … Read more »
The American Civil War remains – perhaps surprisingly, perhaps even astonishingly – a well of Constitutional experience informing this nation’s sense of law and legitimacy throughout the conflicts set off by 9/11. It is the deeper well to which this … Read more »
Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda explores the emergence of new strategic thinking in American counter-terrorism. Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker are two consummate national security reporters at the New York Times and their … Read more »
Ali Soufan’s recent book, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda (written in conjunction with Daniel Freedman), has attracted a good deal of attention since its release a few months ago. Soufan—a native Arabic … Read more »
National security as law means policies that are law-governed, neither arbitrary nor wholly discretionary. It requires difficult tradeoffs among multiple social goods, starting with security and liberty; this is the premise of Lawfare, but it takes by assumption that neither … Read more »
In honor of this year’s inaugural, “supersized” Patch Tuesday, Lawfare reviews Mark Bowden’s The Worm: The First Digital World War.
The Worm chronicles the appearance and evolution of the Conficker worm from the perspective of the small cadre … Read more »
William Shawcross’s widely-noticed new book, Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, asks the following: how does a civilized society bring justice to mass murderers, al Qaeda and its adherents, when it has … Read more »
Joel Brenner’s America the Vulnerable offers the best general-interest treatment I have yet read of this country’s cyber-vulnerabilities. It is elegantly argued, teeming with facts and illuminating anecdotes, sophisticated about technology, and all written with an insider’s understanding of the … Read more »
Brief Reviews:
Three Books on Combatants, Civilians, and Prisoners of War
Prisoners in War
Ed. Sibylle Scheipers (Oxford 2010)
The Treatment of Combatants and Insurgents under the Law of Armed Conflict
Emily Crawford (Oxford 2010)
Reviews in Brief
Noam Lubell, Extraterritorial Use of Force Against Non-State Actors (Oxford 2010)
Kimberley N. Trapp, State Responsibility for International Terrorism (Oxford 2011)
Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers, The Changing Character of War (Oxford 2011)
Targeted killing through drone … Read more »
Amy B. Zegart’s splendid new book, Eyes on Spies, is a brisk and brief discussion of why Congressional intelligence oversight is so persistently inadequate. The book, it bears noting at the outset, is political science and not law. It … Read more »
Daniel Byman’s recent book, A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism, has two main goals: to tell the story of Israel’s counterterrorism forces and strategy, and to draw out lessons from the Israeli experience that can … Read more »
This edited volume is devoted to some of the most momentous international law issues faced by successive State Department Legal Advisers dating back to the 1970s. Created in 1931, the post of Legal Adviser to the Department of State brings … Read more »
The Triple Agent: The Al-Qaeda Mole who Infiltrated the CIA, by Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick, ranks among the very best pieces of narrative journalism I have read related to the history of America’s conflict with Al Qaeda. Like … Read more »
In 1077, St. Anselm of Canterbury offered an analysis that has come to be known as the ontological argument for the existence of God. God, posited Anselm, was “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Since, in Anselm’s view, … Read more »
The thesis of The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic is directly relevant to one of the underlying themes that animates the title of this blog. One meaning of the term “lawfare” refers to the ways in which the national … Read more »
Jonathan Hafetz’s new book on post-September 11 habeas corpus strikes an oddly dissonant chord. The keynote in Habeas Corpus After 9/11: Confronting America’s New Global Detention System is celebratory as to the writ’s role—the now-predictable exultation on the part of … Read more »
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Leading the news: President Obama speaks today at the National Defense University on counterterrorism policy. Many are previewing the speech, including John. According to the New York Times’s Charlie Savage and Peter Baker, Obama will announce more stringent targeting criteria for non-battlefield strikes. This approach will govern the use of force against both citizens and non-citizens.
Here are the Washington … Read more »
