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,
Amid the debate about how legally to handle the Boston Marathon bomber and the President’s recent remarks about closing Guantanamo, Ahmed Ghailani’s appeal was argued today in the Second Circuit. As the New York Times reports in this summary of … Read more »
Earlier today, former State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh gave a talk at the Oxford Union, entitled “How to End the Forever War?” His remarks begin as follows:
Thank you, Mr. President and Members of the Union, for inviting me
Carrie Cordero, Georgetown’s Director of National Security Studies and a former Justice Department official, writes in with this piece on the Boston attacks and possible improvements to our approach to counterterrorism:
If the recent news reports are accurate (a
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.
Salam al-Marayati, President of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, sent in this piece on the Boston attacks and extremism:
An unfortunate consequence of the Boston Marathon bombings has been this: the sick words and deeds of a tiny,
Yesterday, Senator Lindsey Graham held a press conference, in which he unsurprisingly lamented the White House’s decision not to treat Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as an “enemy combatant.”
A transcript is below.
GRAHAM:
Thank you for coming.
I understand at 2:50, we’re
While the manhunt for one of the Boston bombing suspects was underway Friday, Susan and I wrote up this short annotated bibliography linking to pertinent resources about the conflicts in Chechnya and Kyrgzstan. Over the weekend, we took a deeper … Read more »
The Miranda issue is over. As Wells noted earlier, Tsarnaev made his initial appearance before a magistrate judge, at the hospital, and at that time the judge informed Tsarnaev of his right to remain silent and right to counsel … Read more »
The freshly unsealed criminal complaint was filed sometime yesterday. (The complaint’s attachments—a supporting affidavit and cover sheet—can be found here and here.) And it appears that Bobby’s prediction proved correct: the charges include one count of using a … Read more »
There will be no shortage of charges in the indictment that will issue against Tsarnaev shortly. Many if not most will be ordinary violent-crime charges rather than terrorism-specific ones–though they’ll be no less potent for that. But what about charges … Read more »
The Federal Public Defender Office for the Districts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island has said it expects to represent Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, according to Miriam Conrad, the office’s federal public defender.
As it so happens, … Read more »
Unless there is good reason to believe that the Tsarnaev brothers were acting as agents of al Qaeda or some other AUMF-covered group, talk of putting Dzhokar Tsarnaev into military custody as an enemy combatant makes no legal sense, for … Read more »
Now available in redacted form: the government’s opposition brief and the defendant’s reply in United States v. Ghailani, a criminal case arising from the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and now pending before the Second Circuit. … Read more »
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
Now this is a strange and interesting case. You may have seen an interesting post recently at Foreign Policy describing a US citizen (and former soldier in the US Army) named Eric Harroun, who appeared to have gone off to … Read more »
Philip Carter and Deborah Pearlstein have posted a thoughtful essay at Foreign Policy that emphasizes the utility of civilian criminal prosecution as a counterterrorism option. I very much agree with their positive take on DOJ’s track record, and I agree … Read more »
The Ahmed Warsame case (Warsame is the al Shabaab member captured by US forces while attempting to return to Somalia after a period of training with AQAP in Yemen, who was then held for two months in military detention at … Read more »
Ibrahim Suleiman Adnan Adam Harun (aka Spin Ghul) is in custody in Brooklyn, facing an array of federal court charges stemming from alleged al Qaeda activities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria between 2001 and 2003 (including joining and training with … Read more »
Ben writes that it is the “political reality” that “any president is going to feel obliged to maintain counterterrorism on offense,” i.e., counterterrorism through military means, “and Congress—whining, carping, complaining all the way both that the president is being … Read more »
It’s quickly becoming apparent that we and Jack appear to be talking past each other on the merits of the Chesney/Goldsmith/Waxman/Wittes (CGWW) proposal for a new framework statute for “extra-AUMF threats.” In Jack’s final response, for example, he frames … Read more »
We appreciate Jack’s quick and comprehensive clarification of his views—and of what the CGWW proposal we critiqued last night seeks to achieve. Like Jack, we want to start by emphasizing the many areas of agreement between us and CGWW … Read more »
In the very first days after the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration asked Congress for broad statutory authorization to use military force to “deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United … Read more »
Wednesday on the Senate floor, three senators spoke about the Obama administration’s decision to prosecute, in a federal court, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and Al Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. Republican Senators Kelly Ayotte and Lindsey Graham unsurprisingly opposed this … Read more »
Further to my last post on the capture and prosecution of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, I now want to share a few thoughts on the prosecution side of things.
The indictment has been unsealed, and is now available here. It … Read more »
Back in 2011, I posted on the civilian criminal prosecution of a pair of former Iraqi residents Mohanad Shareef Hamadi and Waad Ramadan Alwan. Both men were charged with having been involved in the insurgency while in Iraq and with … Read more »
Although our own coverage of this week’s pre-trial proceedings in the 9/11 military commission trial at Guantánamo already covered the issue in some detail, I couldn’t help but be taken by Amy Davidson’s post on the New Yorker‘s Daily … Read more »
In response to Charlie Savage’s piece today concerning an interagency debate over whether to continue to argue for the viability of conspiracy and material support charges in the military commission system (originally posted-on by me here), Andrew Rosenthal (editor … Read more »
Steve has already noted (and critiqued) this Washington Post story about continued “renditions” by the United States government. The term “renditions” is used in so many ways (often, as Steve suggests, with connotations of harsh interrogation), and this article defines … Read more »
Under the snazzy headline “Renditions continue under Obama, despite due-process concerns,” today’s Washington Post has a long article on the overseas arrest, detention, and subsequent criminal indictment in New York (civilian) federal court of three “European men with Somali roots.” … Read more »
Wells is exactly right–and Senators Levin and Graham are exactly wrong–about the implications of last night’s Senate vote approving Senator Feinstein’s amendment to the FY2013 National Defense Authorization Act. Wells linked to the amendment, but here is the relevant … Read more »
Peter Margulies of Roger Williams School of Law, writes in with the following preview of the coming Tarek Mehanna appeal. The Mehanna case was the subject of this earlier exchange between Margulies and David Cole.
Terrorism’s on-line profile has triggered
The government has advised the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that it may not have jurisdiction over a Guantanamo habeas appeal it is getting ready to hear. Last year, the government prevailed in the district court in the case of … Read more »
Writing at the New York Times web site, Eric Lewis of Lewis Baach, describes a human rights agenda for the Obama administration’s second term:
First, he must release certain Guantánamo detainees, who have never been charged or tried. Of
I was struck by this report of a recent oral argument in the 2nd Circuit involving a terrorism prosecution. The defendant (and his co-conspirators) were convicted of having plotted to blow up a synagogue in New York and sentenced to … Read more »
I’ve been around this town long enough to know that Lawfare will not be the site that everyone is checking obsessively today. We’re not going to have exit polls here, and this may well be the only time you see … Read more »
I was out of the country last week and missed the opportunity to weigh in promptly on the Hamdan decision. In reading the reactions, I have noted that many human rights and civil liberties groups have insisted that the decision … 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 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
[UPDATE: A reader points out that when discussing this subject back in 2011, the question had arisen as to whether this was indeed the best reading of 2339B(d) for the 1996-2004 period. I had responded that the issue was indeed … Read more »
In today’s New York Times is this article by Ben Weiser about some information that has come to light in a memorandum written by District Court Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy this week. Weiser writes:
Federal officials had to be intrigued
The Wall Street Journal reports (paywall, sorry) that France is considering a slate of new antiterrorism laws, including at least one prevention-oriented measure that appears to track 18 U.S.C. 2339D (making it a felony to obtain military-style training from a … Read more »
So we learn from ABC’s Jake Tapper, who in turn quotes from Mark Bowden’s forthcoming book, “The Finish,” about the bin Laden raid:
If Osama bin Laden had surrendered to the Navy SEALs, President Obama was prepared to put
I’d like to expand on Ben’s post below in relation to Hedges and the First Amendment, focusing on the “material support”/”substantial support” issue. (I’m having to write quickly, so please excuse any typos in what follows.)
Specifically, I’d like to … Read more »
The State Department has announced that it will, at long last, designate the Haqqani Network as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Apart from the rhetorical value of the designation, the main consequence is to attach to the Haqqani Network an array … Read more »
Yesterday the D.C. Circuit issued its decision in United States v. Mohammed, in which the defendant, Afghan citizen Khan Mohammed, appealed his conviction on narcoterrorism charges stemming from his involvement in a plot to attack a NATO base in … Read more »
I’m happy to report that I’ve recently completed drafting an article that has been much on my mind for the past few years. Beyond the Battlefield, Beyond al Qaeda: The Destabilizing Legal Architecture of Counterterrorism (Michigan Law Review, forthcoming 2013) … Read more »
Jonathan Witmer-Rich sends in the following commentary on the Amawi case, which I posted yesterday:
Just wanted to offer a bit of commentary on U.S. v. Amawi, which you flagged on the Lawfare blog . . . . I
Haven’t read this yet, but U.S. v. Amawi, which came down yesterday, looks pretty interesting. The opinion is by Judge Danny Boggs, and while the disposition was unanimous, one of the judges wrote separately concurring in the judgment. Here … Read more »
Friday, May 17, 2013
The Department of Justice’s Inspector General released an interim report on the Department’s handling of “known or suspected” terrorists who have entered the government’s witness protection program. The report found, among other things, that information on some program participants had not been turned over to no-fly list authorities; and, that two such people could not be located—though one… Read more »
