Bobby’s post from Friday argued that “the current shadow war approach to counterterrorism doesn’t really require an armed-conflict predicate–or an AUMF, for that matter.”  Bobby’s point is that most if n...

The major challenge to legitimating the shadow war against terrorists is that the Executive branch is hand-tied by its own secrecy rules, and cannot disclose what it is doing to permit Congress and the A...

As I noted yesterday, I have an essay at CFR on the President's speech.  I don’t write the headlines or the summaries of my pieces, and I was surprised and dismayed when someone at CFR summarized my piec...

Ryan Goodman and Sarah Knuckey maintain that the new targeting framework announced by the President “raises some troubling questions and leaves important older questions completely unanswered.”  Their li...

This post draws on material from my current book project, the concluding chapter of which considers the legal architecture of counterterrorism in a "postwar" setting...and advances the argument that we a...

Ben Emmerson, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism---who Ben and I interviewed for a special edition of the Lawfare Podcast---issued the following statement on President Obama's spe...

Along with President Obama's speech yesterday on counterterrorism policy, the White House released a document titled Fact Sheet: U.S. Policy Standards and Procedures for the Use of Force in Counterterror...

My reactions to the President’s speech can be found in this essay at the CFR page.  The headline writers gave it the title of Obama Passes the Buck: The President's Empty Rhetoric on Counterterrorism.  T...

There are a number of areas in the president's speech yesterday in which Obama publicly aligns himself with critics of his administration, while promising in hard terms very little. As I described yester...

Perhaps the most puzzling and opaque aspect of President Obama's speech today involves the question of whether he did, or didn't, narrow the criteria for targeting in drone strikes.

One week ago, a senior Pentagon official went before the Senate Armed Services Committee, along with the Pentagon's top lawyers, and declared that the armed conflict with Al Qaeda and its associated forc...

THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary May 23, 2013  Fact Sheet: U.S. Policy Standards and Procedures for the Use of Force in Counterterrorism Operations Outside the United States and Areas of Act...