Dafna Linzer reports that President Obama’s advisors are urging him to issue a signing statement proclaiming that certain aspects of the defense spending bill that limit his authority to try GTMO detaine...

One of the most important questions clouding the debate over the utility of military commissions has to do with the viability of material support charges in that forum.  To be blunt, we need to know the ...

"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist,” says the low-grade con man to the arrogant customs agent in the 1995 movie The Usual Suspects, speaking of the gr...

I am reliably informed (having checked the site) that Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor After Guantanamo is now available from Amazon.com--which presumably means it is available at other book sto...

Bobby is quite right to link yesterday's New York Times editorial to the one about which I complained back in October.

In an editorial that ran on Monday, the Times took up the laudable task of defending the administration’s plans to substantially enhance the procedural safeguards associated with the annual review board ...

(By Benjamin Wittes, Jack Goldsmith, and Robert Chesney) Lawfare readers will have noticed, by now, that we have installed a small quantity of advertising on the site. The purpose of these ads is to gen...

A few days ago, I expressed doubt as to the veracity of the President's comments that "Guantanamo is probably the number one recruitment tool that is used by these jihadist organizations." I did so tenta...

The Washington Post published a typically thoughtful editorial today on the idea of an executive order to establish a review process for Guantanamo detainees who lose their habeas cases. Like me, the Pos...

A few thoughts on President Obama's remarks Wednesday on Guantanamo, the full text of which I posted earlier. "Obviously, we haven’t gotten it closed.  And let me just step back and explain that the rea...

At his news conference Wednesday, President Obama made the following remarks about Guantanamo and the forthcoming executive order: Q    Guantanamo, sir.  I understand a draft of an executive order is bei...

Having already introduced a bill this week to modify CIPA, Senator Cardin has now introduced a bill to modify espionage-related statutes.  The Espionage Statutes Modification Act ("ESMA") bill--S.4051--i...

The combination of Jack's post and sleeping on the subject has mostly set my mind at ease on the difference between an executive order and a statute for purposes of the Guantanamo review system currently...

During my 2003 confirmation hearings to be the head of DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, one Senator showed up to ask me one or two perfunctory questions.  This was a time when relatively few people knew wh...

I think the proposed EO for periodic review of detainees is a sensible move.  Ben says the EO belongs in a statute “because in the long run, a detention system based on an aging AUMF and an executive ord...

I promised earlier that I would describe my exceedingly mixed feelings about the stories today that President Obama is preparing to issue an executive order outlining a Guantanamo review process.

Ben beat me to the punch in noting the stories by Dafna Linzer (ProPublica) and Peter Finn and Anne Kornblut (Washington Post) to the effect that the White House will soon announce an executive order cre...

If you haven't wasted a few minutes playing with Google Ngram, you've got to give it a ride.  The basic idea, as I understand it, is that Google has put together a vast database of every word in every bo...