Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)

With less than two months to go before it hands over power to the Trump administration, the Obama administration is continuing to fine-tune the legal, policy, and institutional architectures that guide its approach to the ongoing conflict with al Qaeda. Under that heading, I want to flag some important recent developments.

1. AUMF expansion: al Shabaab is now a full-fledged "associated force"

Despite the substantial overlap between counterterrorism activities undertaken by the CIA and JSOC, we tend to pay a lot more attention to the details of the congressional oversight framework for the former as compared to the latter. The NDAA often addresses CT oversight relating to DOD activities, however, and this year is no exception. What follows below is an attempt to provide a user-friendly guide to the proposals on the table.

I. Increasing the pace of quarterly operational briefings regarding CT:

It is commonly said that the Obama administration rejects the use of military detention, and understandably so. Many factors support that characterization, after all: no new detainees have been brought to Guantanamo under this administration; President Obama himself has depicted GTMO as inconsistent with our values and the rule of law (despite the fact that his Justice Department has been defending the legality of the GTMO detention model for seven years and counting); and in recent years we ended U.S.

I'm not certain this adds value, but I've decided to give Storify a shot. My first shot at it uses the platform to pull together my posts on the ongoing development of the statutory regime for oversight of kill/capture ops conducted by the military outside of theaters of major ongoing hostilities, along with some accompanying commentary from others and links to news articles and the statute itself. Not particularly different from my regular post here at Lawfare a few hours ago, but a different packaging. My sense is this will be useful in some contexts much more than others.