Latest in Somalia
King Abdullah tries to contain popular outrage over new taxes and subsidy reductions, the Gulf crisis enters its second year, and Turkey and the U.S. reach an agreement on the Kurdish presence in Manbij.
The reaction to the multinational strike on Assad’s chemical weapons facilities, the political crisis in Libya, and the Gulf feud’s latest casualty: Emirati-Somali ties.
The following congressional hearings on space warfighting readiness, Somalia's security status, and protecting cutting-edge technology and U.S. national security may be of interest to Lawfare's readers.
A primer on the New York Times story about possible changes to the U.S. policy on lethal force.
A U.S. citizen from Virginia by the name of Mohamad Khweis apparently was held in detention for three months by Kurdish authorities in Iraq, with the U.S. government seemingly exercising considerable control over the situation.
The front page of the New York Times carried a story this Sunday that would have commanded the news cycle many years ago. It describes in previously-unappreciated detail the complex nature and large scale of the U.S.
Charlie Savage’s piece on the legal basis for the March 5 U.S. strike against an al Shabaab training camp, which allegedly killed 150 fighters, raises the intriguing question of whether the AUMF has been stretched yet again, this time to justify U.S. operations against al Shabaab as a whole.
These days, when the United States plays the lead role in using lethal force or detaining and interrogating prisoners, the force typically involves only airpower and detention-and-interrogation typically are just transient. This has the effect of tamping down the political, legal, and diplomatic headaches that follow from using boots-on-the-ground to conduct raids and from holding detainees for the long term. But these are not the only means by which to tamp down those frictions.
Just this morning, I was thinking that things have been rather quiet with respect to media coverage of U.S. operations against AQ and AQ affiliates in places like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Well...
The Fourth Circuit has affirmed the dismissal of Alien Tort Statute claims against a former Colonel in the Somali National Army by a member of clan persecuted by the Barre regime who he detained, interrogated, tortured, shot, and left for dead.