benjamin wittes

Ever since Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson mused that the Obama administration had the power to detain people acquitted at trial of terrorism charges — and he didn’t distinguish between the limited detainee cohort currently at Guantanamo Bay and future terrorism captures, either — it’s been difficult to gauge whether the administration views that as [...]

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 [...]

A letter to the White House asks the president not to expand a controversial Bush-era policy.

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 [...]

Add Human Rights Watch’s Joanne Mariner to the list of civil libertarians who dissent from the Obama administration’s emerging proposals for preventive detention. This is from a newly released statement from the organization:
“Pursuing a policy of indefinite detention without charge would send the Obama administration down the same misguided path as its predecessor,” said Joanne [...]

Huge news from Dafna Linzer and Peter Finn. The Obama administration fears that congressional prerogative is going to get in the way of closing Guantanamo Bay by January. So its answer is to cut Congress out of the decision-making and set up a system of “prolonged detention” for an estimated half of Guantanamo detainees it [...]

NPR’s report this morning that the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes has proposed what’s expected to be a highly influential plan for “preventive detention” — which could lock up “dangerous” terror suspects potentially forever without charge or trial — gives even more urgency to the question that Spencer raised here more than a month ago.
Will the [...]

The New York Times’ front-page story Sunday reporting the unanimous agreement among Justice Department lawyers that the “harsh” interrogation techniques approved by the Office of Legal Counsel for use by the CIA were legal relies on the classic journalistic “battle of the experts”: one “outside” expert says the CIA interrogation techniques like slamming, sleep and food [...]