Today’s Headlines and Commentary

The third and final part of the Washington Post series on targeted killing is out. Craig Whitlock discusses Camp Lemonnier, a drone base in Djibouti, which has become the hub of the Obama administration’s future drone program outside the Afghanistan region. Read Bobby’s thoughts on the first part of the series, and here are Bobby and Jack on the second installment. The Associated Press sheds light on an inquiry before the U.K. High Court of Justice on whether intelligence sharing between British and U.S. governments could make the U.K. liable for the CIA’s drone strikes. Speaking of inquires into the drone program, guess who’s jumping on the bandwagon? The United Nations, says the New York Times’s Scott Shane, who reports that Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, is going to study civilian casualties. Ben Weiser of the Times reports that Fazal Abdullah Mohammed, mastermind of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa, apparently wrote a lengthy autobiography of his life’s work---which is being used in the resentencing of another gentleman, Wadih El-Hage, “who was convicted in 2001 in Manhattan of terrorism conspiracy.” From a war zone to . . . sheep? According to the BBC, New Zealand has offered a new home to 23 Afghan interpreters and their families who are worried about being targeted by the Taliban after NATO troops leave in 2014. Terry Baynes of Reuters reports that the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the Clapper case---a lawsuit brought by journalists and human rights groups on the legality of the FISA Act. Stay tuned for an oral argument preview, a Lawfare podcast, and other goodies from us on that subject. Lots more on Benghazi after those leaked emails that surfaced earlier this week. SecDef Panetta said at a Pentagon news briefing that there wasn’t enough information for the military to get involved, reports CNN’s Chris Lawrence. And Suzanne Kelly, Pam Benson and Elise Labott of CNN inform us that U.S. intelligence officials believe that the Libya attackers are connected to Al Qaeda in Iraq. Speaking of leaks, WikiLeaks has begun releasing “more than 100 U.S. Defense Department files detailing military detention policies in camps in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay in the years after the September 11 attacks on U.S. targets,” says Reuters. Toronto Star journalist Michelle Shephard has spent the last decade chronicling the lives of several detainees after they were released from Guantanamo Bay. NPR has the highlights. From the Department of This Only Gets More Convoluted As Time Goes On: Morten Storm, the Danish agent who says he worked with the CIA to help find Anwar al-Awlaki a Western wife, now claims that Danish intelligence tried to “buy his silence” by offering him 1.5 million Danish Krone ($260,000). Nic Robertson, Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister of CNN have the story. And coming soon to a robot near you: grace and elegance, all from a barefoot engineer. From MIT, it's today's Moment of Zen: For more interesting law and security-related articles, follow us on Twitter, visit the Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law’s Security Law Brief, Syracuse’s Institute for National Security & Counterterrorism’s newsroll, and Fordham Law’s Center on National Security’s Morning Brief and Cyber Brief. Email us noteworthy articles we may have missed at wakeman.lawfare@gmail.com and singh.lawfare@gmail.com, visit the Lawfare Events Calendar for upcoming national security events, and check out relevant job openings at the Lawfare Job Board.