Detention: Proxy Detention

The Washington Post had an important story yesterday involving the future of the 53 military detainees who remain in U.S.

What is happening in Mali to people who are captured rather than killed by French, Chadian, or Malian forces?  I asked this in February, but so far as I know the question remains unanswered in the public record.

Part of the answer may be that there just aren’t many captures.  But we know that there are some.  Why, consider the strange case of Gilles Le Guen (aka Abdel Jelil), a Frenchman from Nantes who moved to Mali from Morocco in 2011 and then became somewhat well-known as an arms-bearing participant in the Islamist insurgency that briefly occ

As Ritika notes below, the United States has captured a senior al Qaeda figure (Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, who was the son-in-law of Osama bin Laden), and will be bringing him to the United States for prosecution in civilian court.  One important question this story raises is whether it is right to think of this as a continuation of the "Warsame model," or if instead this reflects a policy decision to steer even furth

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) is now posted to SSRN.  In it, I argue that (i) there is a widespread perception that the legal framework for detention and targeting has reached a point of relative stability thanks to a remarkable wave of interbranch and inter-party consensus since 2008; (ii) this facade depends almost en