I’m very excited to join the Lawfare team. As a first post, I’d draw readers’ attention to Jack’s Washington Post op-ed, in which he discusses how candidate Romney might to try to differentiate himself f...

Two new Congressional Research Service reports came out earlier this month concerning the NDAA, thanks to Steve Aftergood of Secrecy News. The first, Detention of U.S. Persons as Enemy Belligerents, is a...

Yesterday, Jack posed the question of what ever happened to the periodic review process that President Obama had ordered for long-term detention review at Guantanamo Bay. "I have heard little about these...

Is al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) so distinct from the original al Qaeda network (“core al Qaeda”) that the use of force against AQAP cannot be justified, as a matter of U.S.

In March 2011, the Obama administration issued an Executive Order (13567) that created a process of Periodic Review of Individuals Detained at Guantánamo Bay Naval Station Pursuant to the Authorization f...

Professor Jonathan Hafetz (Seton Hall) writes in with the following response to my critique of the qualified immunity ruling in Hamad v. Gates. My thoughts in reply appear at the bottom.   Jonathan write...

Ken and Ben have recently commented on the national security speeches of Obama Administration officials, including most recently the remarks of CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston.  As a former Bush Admi...

So Charlie Savage is reporting over at the New York Times: The transfer [of the two Uighurs] leaves 169 detainees at the prison in Cuba, but the Obama administration notified Congress several days ago th...

... El Salvador. [I've just changed the title to reflect the fact that other Uighur detainees still remain at GTMO].  From DOD's press release: IMMEDIATE RELEASE No.     291-12 April 19, 2012

Was it clearly established in 2006-07 that GTMO detainees were entitled to the protections of the Fifth Amendment?  A district judge in Washington State thinks so, adding that it was clearly established ...

How should we understand CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston's speech at Harvard Law School the other day? It is not, like earlier speeches by senior administration lawyers and counterterrorism officials...

We now have a collection of speeches from the past two years by the Obama administration's top lawyers in the national security agencies and departments on targeted killing and (hypothetically speaking) ...