Prescience In 1948, E.B. White penned a little essay that would become a little book. “The city,” he wrote, “is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds mu...

Congratulations to John Carlin, who has been serving as the acting head of NSD since this past March.  From the White House comes the formal announcement of his nomination: THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the ...

On Monday morning---after a marathon argument in a well publicized net neutrality case---the D.C. Circuit turned to this question, in the case of Hentif v. Obama: whether the appellant timely noted his a...

Published by Touchstone (2013) Reviewed by Bruce Riedel

[Updated (11:34 a.m.): Ben rightly points out to me that his reply does not use the phrases "clearly legal" or "settled," and so my use of quotation marks around those terms may convey the wrong impressi...

In his response to my post in defense of the NSA, Steve raises a few issues about my claim that the "NSA's activities are legal." I would like to address them each very briefly. First, he asks, "does Be...

I have no doubt that Ben meant to provoke--and, at least in my case, he did (enough, at least, to make a Coming to America reference in the title of this post).

I've been quiet of late -- mostly because our Lawfare readership is so self-evidently (and, I might add, appropriately) engaged in questions of greater immediacy relating to the coming debate over Syrian...

The NSA has been somewhat less in the news the past few weeks, thanks largely to Syria. That's going to change in the coming days, when the latest tranche of declassified materials becomes public.

Julian Ku is right to poke fun at the administration for conveying its vague and conclusory legal rationale for intervening in Syria through the reporting of the NYT’s Charlie Savage.  But vague and conc...

Sam Tanenhaus had an essay over the weekend in the NYT that I think is at bottom a “little c” conservative critique of President Obama’s Syria push.  But the essay makes little sense, at least to me. Ta...

. . . from the Onion: WASHINGTON—As President Obama continues to push for a plan of limited military intervention in Syria, a new poll of Americans has found that though the nation remains wary over the ...

The issue for tomorrow morning's argument in the D.C. Circuit:  whether Guantanamo detainee Fadel Hussein Saleh Hentif's appeal was filed on time. In a redacted 2011 opinion, the district court had conc...

I normally let our podcast posts speak for themselves, but I want to say a particular word about the event Brookings held on Thursday, which Wells just posted as the latest episode of the Lawfare Podcast...