A detainee in what Jeremy Scahill describes as “a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held”–one with key US involvement–describes his internment this way. I have been here for one year, seven months. [...]

Here I was steeling myself for a big rebuttal from Benjamin Wittes to my “Drone War on Westphalia” post on the implications of our use of drones. But all I got was a difference in emphasis. In his response, Wittes generally agrees that our use of drones has implications for sovereignty. But he goes further–arguing [...]

Leon Panetta kicks off his new job as Secretary of Defense with a trip to Afghanistan. On the plane over there this morning, he told reporters that we just need to kill 10 or 20 leaders of al Qaeda and we will “strategically defeat” al Qaeda. (h/t Spencer) Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared Saturday that [...]

So, is it truly the case that Awlaki is indeed the unnamed “national of the United States” here in the Warsame indictment? I don’t know for certain, but it sure as heck fits the facts as we know them and the depraved refusal of the American government to talk about or let the public know its basis for impunity in marking an American citizen for extrajudicial termination with prejudice.

Goldman and Apuzzo have done good work on their story about the analyst who caught bin Laden, but the story is also an instructive primer on what didn’t work, to wit: torture.

No matter how you look at this attempt to suppress and ignore the WikiLeaks material, it is bizarre and somewhat comical. The WikiLeaks Gitmo Detainee files genie is out of the bottle; it would behoove the US government to join the battle and arguments on the merits and facts instead of trying to cram the genie back in and play hide the bottle.

When our children askin the future how the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus, the foundation of law, died, this is the time and this is the answer.

National Counterterrorism Center head Michael Leiter resigned yesterday. I’m agnostic about whether that’s a good thing or not. NCTC got most of the blame for missing the UndieBomber, which Leiter exacerbated by going off on a ski vacation just after the attempted attack. But Leiter supposedly made some improvements at NCTC. But I am rather [...]

As part of Robert Mueller’s reconfirmation hearing, he stated–and then was repeatedly asked–what threats face our country. Here’s how he described these threats in his hearing statement: The FBI has never faced a more complex threat environment than it does today. Over the past year, we have seen an extraordinary array of national security and [...]

The reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act focused a lot of attention on the fact that the Administration is interpreting the phrase “relevant to an authorized [intelligence] investigation” in Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act very broadly. As Ron Wyden and Mark Udall made clear, the government claims that phrase gives it the authority to collect [...]