(Benjamin Wittes & Robert Chesney) The Ghailani verdict is going to play badly--very badly--in the political arena. It won't matter that he will receive a minimum of a 20-year prison sentence and could ...

Ahmed Ghailani, charged with some 280 counts of conspiracy and murder in relation to the 1998 East African Embassy Bombings, has been convicted on one conspiracy count--but otherwise acquitted on all cha...

I have a lot of regard for Jeffrey Goldberg, and partly for that reason, I'm a little taken aback by these comments made to Mother Jones concerning Anwar Al-Aulaqi. Goldberg has been on overdrive recentl...

Responding to my earlier post on Buck McKeon's detention bill, Adam Serwer says the following, on which I cannot improve: I still maintain that there's less difference between Republican and administrati...

Not too many folks are familiar with the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a body Congress created in 2000 to report periodically on, well, economic and security issues associated with ...

In his speech yesterday, incoming House Armed Services chairman Buck McKeon promised that his committee would work in the coming Congress on a "legal framework" for detention. Here's hoping he is more se...

William Greider argues in an interesting essay in The Nation that President Obama’s political difficulties are tied to his failure to exercise the full powers of the presidency. Given the election result...

An interesting new issue has landed at the D.C. Circuit: Whether courts retain habeas jurisdiction even after a detainee leaves U.S. custody. Last week, two former Guantánamo detainees filed their merit...

In posting earlier this evening this speech by Republican Rep. Buck McKeon, the incoming chair of the House Armed Services Committee, I promised thoughts on its virtues and vices. The short version is th...

A fascinating story in the Guardian today concerning objections within the human rights community to the ACLU/CCR lawsuit on behalf of Anwar al-Aulaki.  Most notably, the story quotes a member of CCR's B...

Republican Rep. Buck McKeon, who will chair the House Armed Services Committee in the new Congress gave a speech today at the Foreign Policy Initiative that touched on, among other things, detainee polic...

This article in GQ has generated a fair bit of unfavorable buzz about Attorney General Eric Holder. The article is, in my judgment, rather unfair--both to Holder and to the Bush administration folks who ...