In November 2009, the ACLU brought a suit on behalf of an American citizen--Amir Meshal--against two FBI agents and two unnamed officials, alleging the following: that he went to Somalia in 2006, that he...

In prior posts such as this one, I've noted that the United States eventually will transfer control over the Detention Center in Parwan to Afghan authorities.  The most recent goal for that transfer was ...

The discussions of drone strike decision-making in Warrick's The Triple Agent sheds light on the proportionality debate in several respects.  First, the book is shot through with references to the conce...

Joby Warrick  (of the Washington Post) provides a number of fascinating nuggets regarding CIA activities in Pakistan in his just-published book The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole Who Infiltrated the CIA...

Stuff.co.nz, a New Zealand news web site, usefully informs us that: It's not quite corporal punishment, but Wellington [New Zealand] High School pupils have had a first-hand taste of Guantanamo Bay. Thr...

Stepping out of his persona as a Guantanamo habeas lawyer, David Remes writes in with the following comments in response to my recent post on fears that Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula is working on ...

Esquire magazine has this lengthy feature on Guantanamo detainee and convicted war criminal Noor Uthman Muhammad. It's a sympathetic account, one that treats Uthman chiefly as a victim. But it contains e...

The Congressional Research Service's Charles Doyle reviews proposals in the 112th Congress to amend National Security Letter authority in this report.

I spent the other day at the ruined Roman city of Ephesus, on the Aegean Coast of what is now Turkey. Ephesus, unlike a great many other ancient cities, was not sacked or destroyed in war or built upon b...

Benjamin Friedman has an interesting and thoughtful piece at the National Interest this afternoon, commenting on Dennis Blair's recent criticism of the current approach to drone strikes in Pakistan.  One...

Published by Yale University Press (2011) Reviewed by Paul Rosenzweig

This is a nice illustration of the fact that in at least some circumstances, the United States simply must use civilian criminal courts if it wants to have its hands on a terrorism-related suspect--not t...

...and guess what? This post is not about any gross factual errors in either of them concerning the legality of detention. Perhaps that's because neither editorial really deals with the legality of deten...

Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula is working on a ricin attack: WASHINGTON — American counterterrorism officials are increasingly concerned that the most dangerous regional arm of Al Qaeda is trying to p...

The Washington Post is reporting, in what is hardly a surprise, that we shouldn't expect the United States to give up the Bagram detention facility any time soon: BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan — The Unite...

This case may have almost nothing to do with national security law. But it has infuriated me ever since, as a Post editorial writer some years back, I spent a lot of time writing about criminal justice i...

Julian Barnes and Evan Perez have an interesting piece today in the Wall Street Journal, suggesting that at least some military officers are increasingly concerned about the lack of a clear option for de...