Ryan Goodman and Sarah Knuckey maintain that the new targeting framework announced by the President “raises some troubling questions and leaves important older questions completely unanswered.”  Their li...

This post draws on material from my current book project, the concluding chapter of which considers the legal architecture of counterterrorism in a "postwar" setting...and advances the argument that we a...

Ben Emmerson, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism---who Ben and I interviewed for a special edition of the Lawfare Podcast---issued the following statement on President Obama's spe...

Along with President Obama's speech yesterday on counterterrorism policy, the White House released a document titled Fact Sheet: U.S. Policy Standards and Procedures for the Use of Force in Counterterror...

As Wells reported this morning, the D.C. Circuit has affirmed the habeas denial in Al Warafi. Mukhtar Yahia Naji Al Warafi unsuccessfully argued that even if he was a member of the Taliban, he was entitl...

My reactions to the President’s speech can be found in this essay at the CFR page.  The headline writers gave it the title of Obama Passes the Buck: The President's Empty Rhetoric on Counterterrorism.  T...

In 2010, Yemeni detainee Hani Abdullah had sought a preliminary injunction from the district court.  He argued that the United States had to treat him in accordance with an executive agreement concluded ...

Judge David Sentelle wrote today's majority opinion in this long-running habeas case, in which Mukhtar Yahia Naji Al Warafi had claimed (among other things) that even if he was a Taliban member, he serve...

There are a number of areas in the president's speech yesterday in which Obama publicly aligns himself with critics of his administration, while promising in hard terms very little. As I described yester...

The President's speech was a dog's breakfast: some good parts, some bad parts, and some ugly parts. The Good.   The most significant part of the speech was the President's description of clearer standar...

Perhaps the most puzzling and opaque aspect of President Obama's speech today involves the question of whether he did, or didn't, narrow the criteria for targeting in drone strikes.

President Obama made two important announcements about aspects of Guantanamo and its detainees in his speech today. These are worth flagging before I pivot and harp on the big problem with the President'...

One week ago, a senior Pentagon official went before the Senate Armed Services Committee, along with the Pentagon's top lawyers, and declared that the armed conflict with Al Qaeda and its associated forc...

In his speech today, President Obama explicitly raised this perennial, maddeningly difficult issue.

THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary May 23, 2013  Fact Sheet: U.S. Policy Standards and Procedures for the Use of Force in Counterterrorism Operations Outside the United States and Areas of Act...

There are many important strands to President Obama's national-security speech, but I want to focus on just one particularly noteworthy element. In clear terms, President Obama announced today that the s...