Spencer Ackerman
Happy Fourth of July
Remember many things, but especially the Marines fighting in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. Here’s a progress report emailed out at 4 p.m. Friday local time/9 a.m. Friday EST from USFOR-A, the U.S. military command in Afghanistan, about Operation Khanjar:
The Marines and Afghan forces are continuing to patrol and have begun engaging with key leaders in the [...]
BREAKING: Obama Administration Wants CIA Torture Report Withheld Until August 31
Word’s coming now that the Obama administration is seeking to withhold the CIA’s 2004 inspector-general report on the implementation of its former “enhanced interrogation regime” until August 31. The ACLU, which had an agreement with the administration to declassify the report as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, is going to challenge the [...]
Civilians in Helmand: An Update
So after I wrote this post, I checked in with State Department contacts to see what’s on the horizon for resourcing the Marine offensive in the Helmand River Valley. The biggest piece of news I can report: lots of diplomats are anticipating a relaxing Fourth of July. But there’s more.
The two State Department and USAID [...]
Trita Parsi on the Iranian Opposition: Nothing Is Over
The regime crackdown has broken up the large demonstrations and the international media has largely moved on — enabled unintentionally by Michael Jackson’s death — but don’t think the Iranian opposition is done for, according to Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council. Parsi just held a conference call to reinforce the point. “The [...]
Human Rights First’s Rona Dissents From Kate Martin’s Detention Position
What I should have written yesterday about Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies is that she supports using an executive order on preventive detentions if and only if it’s a method of forestalling an overbroad legislative proposal to impose them. Even so, that position probably won’t impress Gabor Rona, the international legal [...]
Joe Biden Is Literally in Iraq
Just out from the White House:
Vice President Biden has arrived in Iraq to visit U.S. troops and to meet with Iraqi leaders, including President Jalal Talabani, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Speaker of the Council of Representatives Ayad al-Samarrai. The Vice President will reiterate the United States’ commitment to fully implement the Security Agreement and [...]
Detentions and the War/Use-of-Military-Force Distinction
To build off Daphne’s post about defining the battlefield on which detentions occur, Hofstra law professor Eric M. Freedman writes in to make a point about the constitutional differences between a Congressionally-declared war and the situation we’ve been in since 9/11, in which Congress authorized the use of military force. That has implications for the [...]
The Largest Marine Operation Since Vietnam
Underway in southern Afghanistan. There’s not a whole lot I can add from Washington (or, actually, Detroit, where I’m blogging from right now) to Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s on-the-ground report. Brig. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson, the Marine commander in the area, is very well respected by everyone I’ve spoken to, and his admonition that “We’re not going to [...]
Help the Iranian People by Killing Them
The Iranian opposition movement has been brutally suppressed by a regime that has traded legitimacy for control. Facing dire straits, what’s left for it to do? Die in a maelstrom inflicted by the Israelis, according to John Bolton, a Bush-administration undersecretary of state and U.N. ambassador.
There’s a lot of stuff in Bolton’s new Washington Post [...]
Kate Martin: Well, Preventive Detention for Whom?
Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, read my piece today and emailed over a couple of thoughts about the current debate over preventive detention. (Martin attended the June 9 meeting of the administration’s detention policy task force that I reported on.) She makes the solid point — insufficiently distinguished in my [...]
