[updated to clarify that there are new regs in the works, not a new manual] Charlie Savage reports this morning that Secretary Gates may soon lift an order that has precluded the initiation of new milit...

An interesting opinion yesterday in United States v. Kassir (2d Cir. Jan.

According to CNN, the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Buck McKeon, suggests not closing Guantanamo but expanding it: The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said he would l...

The D.C. Circuit today announced its decision in ACLU v. Dep't of Defense, a Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA") case in which the ACLU challenged the government's withholding of documents relating to th...

Habeas lawyer David Remes sent in the following thoughts about the Supreme Court's denial of certiorari in Al Adahi today--about which I commented here: That the Court did not grant review is a disappoin...

...but I make very occasional exceptions, one of which has just been published. I wrote this lengthy article in the Harvard National Security Journal with a remarkable law student named Adam Klein (about...

Having now read the transcript of today's oral argument in General Dynamics v. United States/Boeing v.

Back in September I noted that the Supreme Court granted cert. in a pair of state-secrets privilege ("SSP") cases, General Dynamics v. United States and Boeing v.

The Supreme Court's denial of cert in Al Adahi is not in any sense a surprise. To the contrary, I would have been shocked if the justices had agreed to hear the case. It is, however, an important develop...

Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog has a useful preview of today's oral argument in General Dynamics Corp. v. U.S. and Boeing Co. v. U.S., a pair of Supreme Court cases that test the ongoing vitality of the st...

Well, yes, in Yemen, in absentia.  According to al-Jazeera, the government of Yemen indicted al-Awlaki and his cousin (Othman al-Awlaki) for inciting another man--Hisham Mohammed Assem--to carry out an a...

A few weeks ago, I received an email from a producer inviting me to participate in a “debate+discussion with Glenn [Greenwald] about the legality of the Predator strikes.” I responded, “I would be happy ...

That is the title of an informative post by Marcy Wheeler about recent examples of ineffective congressional oversight (to put it mildly) of DOD’s growing cyber operations.

Believe it or not, this blog does have a higher purpose than to send Glenn Greenwald into paroxysms of rage--though I confess that such paroxysms are great fun when we happen to provoke them, and they se...

I am trying to collect major examples of the various roles that inspectors general play in national security.  Below I have broken down their roles into three categories, and listed examples of each.  (I...

For those who haven't yet heard, DOJ announced earlier today that David Kris is stepping down as Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division.

The Obama administration does badly on each of the final three elements of the Human Rights First report card. On the first of these, the group writes, Grade: C Accountability and Oversight of U.S. Priv...

Steve Vladeck has a good post up noting that Justice Kagan has to recuse from most if not all the GTMO-related cases that are percolating up, and that as a result there's relatively little prospect of ge...