I could lard this post with all sort of platitudinous reflections on the continuing relevance of that old 18th Century text. But I'll refrain. Grill some meat. Drink some beer. Watch some pretty explosio...

Deborah Pearlstein and Ben have been exchanging posts in relation to the pending NDAA legislation and detention authority issues.  One passage in the exchange struck me as particularly significant.  Deb ...

Deborah Pearlstein answers my question: Ben Wittes, long an advocate for clearer domestic legislation authorizing U.S. detention operations,writes to ask whether my recent post favoring the Senate’s over...

This will show Rumsfeld! From CNN.com: Tehran, Iran (CNN) -- Iran plans to prosecute 26 current and former American officials, an Iranian lawmaker said Sunday, potentially escalating a tit-for-tat dispu...

My former colleague Eugene Robinson has a column in the Washington post entitled "Assassination by Robot," which seems to me to warrant a brief response. Robinson begins by saying that, "The skies over a...

I was intrigued by this post from a few days ago by Deborah Pearlstein over at Opinio Juris. Entitled "Catching Up with the Senate on Detainee Matters," it concludes as follows: the Senate bill is a subs...

The appointment of Brig. General Mark Martins as chief prosecutor of the military commissions, as Jack and I discussed here and here, is a step of enormous importance in establishing legitimacy for a com...

The White House announcement is here.

Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedmann have a piece in the new issue of Foreign Affairs (mostly behind the pay wall, but an excerpt is here) offering a mixed verdict on drone strike operations in Pakistan. ...

Carrie Johnson at NPR posts (who knew that NPR reporters were blogging?  This is really great stuff - add Carrie to your RSS feed) some important additional details.  First, she confirms that there is st...

The Washington Post reports this morning that JSOC recently carried out a drone strike in Somalia, targeting two al-Shabab leaders.  The piece emphasizes that the Administration has recently highlighted ...