Today's Headlines and Commentary
Published by The Lawfare Institute
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A lot of catchup from the holiday weekend.
Last week's DOJ announcement that it would be investigating the deaths of two detainees in CIA custody overseas has generated a great deal of news coverage, including here on Lawfare (see Bobby's initial post here and his foll0w-up here). The New York Times' Eric Lichtbau and Eric Schmitt focus on the DOJ's decision to close the other inquiries (numbering 99). The Wall Street Journal notes that this announcement came to the relief of the CIA, where it was believed that if the DOJ had decided to pursue a larger number of investigations, the agency's reputation would be damaged. NPR reports that one case involves a death at Abu Ghraib, while the second occurred in "Salt Pit," a CIA site in Afghanistan, while Peter Finn and Julie Tate go into detail about the alleged procedures used in both cases in the Washington Post's story. TIME's Battleland blog reports on the Abu Ghraib detainee's death, whose case is currently in front of a grand jury in Alexandria, VA.
Greg Miller wrote a lengthy story in the Washington Post last week on the plethora of information collected from the bin Laden raid in May detailing the challenges al Qaeda has faced in the last decade.
This Washington Post editorial discusses how the U.S. should deal with terrorist suspects.
The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung reports that U.S. aircraft flights from a Baluchistan, Pakistani military base were ended in April--the result of a CIA effort to be sensitive to Pakistani concerns about the use of U.S. contractors in military activities.
David Ignatius' most recent column in The Washington Post focuses on prioritizing U.S. goals in Afghanistan as it begins its troop drawdown.
Eugene Robinson writes in his Washington Post column on the use of drones in warfare, to which Ben has already written a response here.
As Bobby reported last week, President Obama will nominate Matthew Olson, current NSA general counsel, to be the next director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Politico's Jennifer Epstein covers the story here, which also notes that Olsen was the executive director of the Guantanamo Review Task Force from 2009 to 2010.
For more news and analysis links, see Today’s Terrorism News over at the CenterLine.
Raffaela Wakeman is a Senior Director at In-Q-Tel. She started her career at the Brookings Institution, where she spent five years conducting research on national security, election reform, and Congress. During this time she was also the Associate Editor of Lawfare. From there, Raffaela practiced law at the U.S. Department of Defense for four years, advising her clients on privacy and surveillance law, cybersecurity, and foreign liaison relationships. She departed DoD in 2019 to join the Majority Staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where she oversaw the Intelligence Community’s science and technology portfolios, cybersecurity, and surveillance activities. She left HPSCI in May 2021 to join IQT.
Raffaela received her BS and MS in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009 and her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 2015, where she was recognized for her commitment to public service with the Joyce Chiang Memorial Award. While at the Department of Defense, she was the inaugural recipient of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s General Counsel Award for exhibiting the highest standards of leadership, professional conduct, and integrity.
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