A Request for Reader Assistance

One of the questions I have been fascinated by over the past year, but unable to shed much light on, is how the court rulings in the Guantanamo habeas cases play out in the field. We tend to think of the Guantanamo cases as dealing with a limited and declining population at a single detention facility, but as Bobby and I have argued, they are actually far more important than that. Even if the courts never assert habeas jurisdiction beyond the base, they are defining the permissible scope of detention authority, after all, and that means they are necessarily setting law that applies whether or not a judge is looking over the government's shoulder. What's more, to the extent these cases interpret the AUMF, they are actually doing something broader even than that: defining for legal purposes the substantive scope of the current conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. They consequently have implications even beyond detention. If a given person is beyond the scope of the AUMF for detention purposes, he also presumably lies beyond it for targeting purposes. All of this raises the question of how and to what extent principles identified by the courts in Washington are migrating out into the field. Bobby and I have been looking for some time for a way to try to tackle this question, and it occurs to me that Lawfare readers may have useful insights. I'm not soliciting leaks. I'm not looking for anything sensitive. But we seem to have a lot of readers well-positioned to see this effect in action. So here's a call for help: If you have seen application of Gitmo case law in the field and can ethically talk about it, shoot me a note. If you can think of bodies of data that might shed light on the subject, shoot me a note and let me know. My hypothesis is that there's actually a fairly extensive record of application. I don't see how there could not be, since the law keeps changing and the Pentagon has to apply the law. But I'd love to see direct evidence of how the law of Guantanamo is affecting detention elsewhere--and to the extent it's affecting other things, I'd love to see evidence of that too.