Mark Mazzetti had a piece yesterday in the Times covering the important news that CIA once again has located and killed al Qaeda's top officer for operational planning (Atiyah abd al-Rahman, who took ove...

The discussions of drone strike decision-making in Warrick's The Triple Agent sheds light on the proportionality debate in several respects.  First, the book is shot through with references to the conce...

Joby Warrick  (of the Washington Post) provides a number of fascinating nuggets regarding CIA activities in Pakistan in his just-published book The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole Who Infiltrated the CIA...

Stepping out of his persona as a Guantanamo habeas lawyer, David Remes writes in with the following comments in response to my recent post on fears that Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula is working on ...

Benjamin Friedman has an interesting and thoughtful piece at the National Interest this afternoon, commenting on Dennis Blair's recent criticism of the current approach to drone strikes in Pakistan.  One...

...and guess what? This post is not about any gross factual errors in either of them concerning the legality of detention. Perhaps that's because neither editorial really deals with the legality of deten...

Scott Shane has an important story in the New York Times on the controversy over the number of civilian deaths caused by the CIA's drones program outside of Afghanistan. Shane reports that, The civilian ...

During the early months of the Arab Spring phenomenon, there was much discussion of the role that technology played in undermining the capacity of authoritarian regimes to suppress political dissent.  So...

An interesting column by David Ignatius pointed me to this fascinating-looking report by Richard Danzig, Marc Sageman, and others. Published by the Center for a New American Security, the report is entit...

Thomas Barnett has an interesting post at Battleland playing off Thom Shanker's piece in the Times today regarding biometrics and security in Afghanistan.  Barnett's point: such measures are more likely ...

In her post the other day, Marcy Wheeler hit on a theme I have been thinking a great deal about recently--indeed, that I have been writing a book about. So I know this is supposed to be a debate, but in ...

I promised yesterday that I would collect and post my thoughts in response to Spencer Ackerman's and Marcy Wheeler's comments on drones and debates. Rather than try to take on the many big themes they ra...