Descend for a moment, won’t you, into a bureaucratic labyrinth with me, in pursuit of constitutional rights and government transparency.
In April, anonymous administration officials claimed to reporters that they possessed the right to kill an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, because of Awlaki’s apparent connections to al-Qaeda. There was More…
I spent my morning attending the fifth birthday of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the management organization dedicated to marshaling the 16 intelligence agencies toward a coherent, unified goal. Surrounded by the heads of all those agencies, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, gave More…
Adam Serwer reads through the State Department legal adviser’s recent defense of why drone strikes outside Afghanistan are legal and observes that the rationale Harold Koh offered could be used to argue that assassinations of people like Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S. citizen-turned-extremist who has argued that Muslims More…
As you’ve probably read this morning, the Pakistani Taliban executed a complex attack — using suicide car bombers and gunmen — on the American consulate in Peshawar. The Taliban didn’t get past a consulate checkpoint. Nor did their team manage to kill any Americans. But they did bring their More…
Last month, Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, gave an interview to The Washington Post bragging about the impact the CIA’s drone strikes have had on al-Qaeda and Taliban operations in Pakistan. Not having sufficient information to independently evaluate it, I sort of marked Panetta’s comments As Read. More…
I snarked Wednesday about CIA Director Leon Panetta’s assertion that the CIA has lately dealt al-Qaeda a hefty blow, since we don’t really have the visibility into that process to independently evaluate the claim. But the Los Angeles Times’ Greg Miller has a great piece about how U.S. More…
Attorney General Eric Holder had a testy exchange yesterday with House Republicans determined to paint him as weak for his faith in civilian courts that have convicted many orders of magnitude more terrorists than military commissions. It took a baroque turn when Holder fielded a hypothetical question about whether More…
The Washington Post sits down with the CIA director, who has lots of great things to say about how the CIA is disrupting al-Qaeda:
Panetta credited an increasingly aggressive campaign against al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies, including more frequent strikes and better coordination with Pakistan. He called it “the most
Buried on page B-2 of an annex in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Aug. 30 strategic assessment of the Afghanistan war is a vague promise about how he will run it. “Draft C2 guidance for command and control of special operations forces will be issued soon,” McChrystal writes. That forthcoming order will More…
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) – last seen slandering Justice Department lawyers and then distancing himself from Liz Cheney’s similar slanders — goes way further than Sen. Lindsey Graham’s objections to a civilian trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He writes in a New York Daily News More…
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