But in the U.S., a different news advisory was released to media firms and to the public — one with a more generic headline and with the reference to humiliating authorities deleted.

According to Department of Justice records, the firm behind this PR turn-about is Qorvis Communications, a United States public relations firm that provides “press and public relations services” for Bahrain and which has worked with the country since 2002. The firm also has a contract to provide similar services for the Yemeni government’s “National Awareness Authority,” a state communications arm founded by Tariq Mohammed Abdullah Saleh, nephew of the vacated President Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose regime has been repeatedly condemned for human rights abuses. In the last year, the countries paid more than $500,000 to Qorvis.

An investigation by The American Independent with research assistance provided by the Project on Government Oversight found that the state of Virginia also currently employs Qorvis’s PR services. All told, the state has had slightly more than $70 million in dealings with the company.

Virginia’s contract dates to 2007 (link), when the state awarded the firm an approximately $2 million per year contract to provide “marketing, advertising and communications” services, in addition to $18 million per year in media and production costs handled by the company. The firm’s contract was renewed in 2010, with an agreement to provide only “communications” services, and at the cost of $300,000 per year. Qorvis’s contract will be up for second renewal in April, 2012.

Since the firm’s work began, Virginia has since had record-breaking lottery sales, netting $1.4 billion during the last fiscal year — $444.2 million of which the state put towards education. Jeff Caldwell, press secretary for Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, who appointed the head of the lottery, declined to comment on the relationship, saying “this contract predates this administration.”

"Beating marks on the back of Nabeel Rajab after police attacked a peaceful protest on July, 15 005" Img via Bahrain Center for Human Rights

A portfolio of the work Qorvis provided to the state can found on Qorvis’s website. Jill Vaughn, director of communications for the lottery, said the firm “help[s] us day to day. If we have a crisis they are very helpful, and we have a lot of special projects throughout the year.” In the last year, the firm has worked on marketing events and promotions — especially for new products. Qorvis did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Both Bahrain and Yemen have come under scrutiny of late for perceived human rights abuses. Yemen, in particular, has been censured by the United Nations for the killing of a journalist and for stifling free speech. The government of Bahrain, long seen as a U.S. ally in the region, has of late been harshly criticized. Freedom House, a human rights watchdog, issued a policy brief today titled “Killing the Messenger: Bahrain’s Brutal Crackdown,” detailing state violence and torture and calling for the U.S. to apply pressure to the country.

According to the New York Times, rights groups estimate that since protests began, “at least 34 people have been killed, more than 1,400 have been arrested and as many as 3,600 have been dismissed from jobs” in Bahrain. Earlier this fall, Doctors Without Borders and other medical groups were pitched in a fight with the country over the torture and imprisonment of doctors who had treated ailing protesters. And according to Reuters, the leader of a fact-finding mission setup by the country to investigate allegations of human rights violations now believes “torture had been a systematic, though limited, policy.”

Amateur video shot earlier this year and posted on LiveLeak appears to show protesters killed in drive-by shootings conducted by the police.

“Bahrain is taking a turn for the worse on human rights,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, in a release this April.  The Obama administration suspended and is reviewing its arms sales policy to the country after a number of U.S. senators, including Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Senate Foreign Relations Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee chairman Robert Casey (D-Pa.) called for a cessation. Bahrain’s internal fact-finding commission, and subsequent review of alleged torture, is being closely watched by the U.S. as it determines whether to renew its arms agreement.

Virginians alerted to the dealings often expressed exasperation at the state’s use of resources. In some cases, though, the reactions were more personal.

Robert Marrow, board of trustees and chair of the government relations committee at the Adams Center, a northern Virginia mosque and one of the largest Muslim community centers in the United States, said that some of his community members fled from the regimes whose “image” Qorvis’s services are meant to enhance.

“They would oppose that if they had a say,” he said. “Their preference would be against who have made money with blood money on their hands. And if they’re going to be providing a public service they should be people who should have a somewhat higher moral standard.”

Rev. Eddy Aliff, executive director for the Virginia Assembly of Independent Baptists, said that Baptists would likely share that concern, and that he believes the state should “be putting money in the proper places to individuals who truly need that help, and I think that is how most of us who are Baptists would view it.”

Some saw it simply as a business dealing gone awry. “Virginians on a whole are slightly right of center. which means they’re more fiscally conservative than not,” explained Quentin Kidd, chair of the Department of Government at Christopher Newport University.

For Imad Damaj, president of the Virginia Muslim Coalition for Public Affairs, the business fundamentals don’t add up.  “My suggestion is to the state of Virginia is to look into this company and see if you can do business with another one that is not doing these things,” he said. “It is morally right and from a business perspective it is right.”

The Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group that looks into the effective use of taxpayer resources and which provided The American Independent with records of Qorvis’s PR work for Bahrain, urged transparency on the issue. Ben Freeman, a national security fellow, said, “Virginia residents, whose money is used to pay Qorvis, have a right to know that the company also works to control the media spin for governments that many believe to be guilty of human rights violations.”

Qorvis has repeatedly come under the spotlight for its employment by autocratic regimes, beginning in 2002 when the company was hired by Saudi Arabia in the wake of 9/11 for the purposes of improving the country’s image after it was revealed the majority of hijackers had been of Saudi origin. While a number of firms perform this type of work, often the transactions go more smoothly. Three of the firm’s partners soon left Qorvis out of discomfort with the relationship. Shortly after, the FBI searched the company’s offices.

That scenario repeated itself this spring when more than a third of the firm’s partners left amidst concern about Qorvis work for Middle East regimes with troubled human rights records. “I just have trouble working with despotic dictators killing their own people,” a former Qorvis insider told The Huffington Post.

According to that same insider, Qorvis’s Geo-Political Solutions (GPS) division has a ‘”black arts” program responsible for creating fake blogs and websites that link back to positive content, “to make sure that no one online comes across the bad stuff.”

Last month The New York Times, commenting on the work of foreign relation firms such as Qorvis in Bahrain, reported about a surge in Bahraini trolls — social media users who “cajole, harass and intimidate commentators and journalists who write about the protests in Bahrain and the government’s response.” Guardian writer Brian Whitaker, who has extensively analyzed the firm’s PR techniques, including in some of the documents referenced in the beginning of this article, blogged how Qorvis attempts to present Bahrain as a tolerant country.

The firm’s founder and CEO, Michael Petruzzello, told the Huffington Post that complaints about clientele are “ridiculous” and disingenuous, asserting that the firm’s work with international clients preceded the tenure of departing partners. And the firm’s clients also include household names such as the Dance Institute of Washington, The Washington Post, Intel and the Rosslyn Business Improvement District, according to the firm’s website.

Department of Justice files confirm that news releases issued on behalf of the “Bahrain Ministry of Interior” are issued by Qorvis. Those newswires often reach a wider U.S. audience, such as this release posted by the Sacremento Bee.

Other examples of the firm’s work include a press release dated June 24 that describes the sentencing of 21 individuals convicted of plotting to violently topple Bahrain’s government and of the country’s commitment to fair judicial process. CNN covered the same event noting that Britain’s foreign office minister for the Middle East, Alistair Burt, was “extremely concerned” over the sentencing and the nature of many of the charges. “It is deeply worrying that civilians are being tried before tribunals chaired by a military judge, with reports of abuse in detention, lack of access to legal counsel and coerced confessions,” he said.

This July, Bahrain had its “National Dialogue,” a program by the state that attempts to achieve national unity on issues of politics and religion. Days before this year’s “Dialogue,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner visited Bahrain to encourage the government to speak with dissenters. But the Shia-oriented al-Wefaq, the largest political opposition group in Bahrain and one of the most fervent protest voices in the country, and the General Federation of Bahrain Trade Unions, withdrew, claiming their concerns, including the rehiring of fired workers, had been ignored in the talks.

At that time, Qorvis issued a glowing press release on behalf of the Kingdom of Bahrain saying, “All the participants are actively debating the issues.” On the same day, Reuters published an article quoting a more inclusive choice of voices: “To reach a complete solution to the big problems, you have five minutes to speak? What is that?” asked Sayed al-Mousawi of the main Shi’ite opposition group Wefaq, quoted in the article. “Is this dialogue?” Two days later, Qorvis issued another press release, praising a “second successful day.”

On the ground in Bahrain, however, the results of the talks have been less than successful. Last week, according to the New York Times, Ali Hassan al-Daihi, the 70-year-old father of an al-Wefaq leader, died after being beaten by police officers the night before. In an extensively blogged post, The Times explained how mourners to his death were forbidden from returning to a symbolic square. It also showed video of police vehicles charging protesters and of a Bahrani police’s statement about its using its vehicles that way: “These allegations don’t have an iota of truth, being baseless,” the official said.

John Brennan (UPPA/ZUMApress.com)

“We will destroy al-Qaeda.”

That’s how John Brennan capped his presentation Wednesday morning on counterterrorism’s role in the forthcoming National Security Strategy, and the often intense White House senior counterterrorism adviser smiled a bit as he said it. His exploration of the administration’s pathway for getting there was mostly familiar. “A broad, sustained integrated campaign” making use of “every tool of American power: military, civilian, kinetic and diplomatic, and indeed, the power of our values and partnerships,” will sustain “pressure” on al-Qaeda in “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond” while addressing the “political, economic and social forces” that can create either demand for extremism among populations or acquiescence to it. Judge for yourself how that fits within the broader National Security Strategy.

[Security1] But Brennan did highlight a new development the Obama administration faces — and subtly defended a controversial tactic that he says contributed to it. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates have entered a “new phase” of their campaign against the United States, relying on operatives with “little training” who don’t fit “the traditional profile of a terrorist” for attacks of “little sophistication but with very lethal intent.” English-speaking al-Qaeda allies like California metalhead-turned-extremist Adam Gadahn and Yemen-based radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, both American citizens, seek to inspire people already in America to execute their own independently planned terrorist attacks.

All of these moves, Brennan said, are tactical responses from al-Qaeda to a successful pressure campaign from the U.S. and its allies abroad to reduce its safe havens and to hardened U.S. homeland security measures by law enforcement and at ports of entry, for which the Bush administration deserves some credit. And in only the vaguest terms, without making an explicit reference, he suggested that the drone strikes the administration has accelerated and exported in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan are a principle reason for al-Qaeda’s adjustment. Limited by an ability to speak publicly about a classified program, Brennan signaled as well that the administration is concerned that blowback from civilians killed by the drones could turn tactical success into strategic failure — but thinks the problem is under control.

In all efforts, we will exercise force prudently, recognizing that we often need to use a scalpel and not a hammer. When we know that terrorist networks are plotting against us, we have a responsibility to take action to defend ourselves, and we will do so. At the same time, an action that eliminates a single terrorist but causes civilian casualties can in fact inflame local populations and create far more problems. A tactical success but a strategic failure. So we need to ensure that our actions are more precise and more accurate than ever before. This is something that President Obama not only expects but demands.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to independently verify Brennan’s claims. Anecdotal reporting indicates that the drone program is expanding beyond precisely targeted top extremist leaders to mid-level operatives and below. There’s also a low-level rumbling in intelligence circles that the CIA’s drone strikes cause fewer civilian casualties than those executed by the military, particularly in Afghanistan, and the agency doesn’t like the media conflating two different programs. But any differences in impact on local populations are extraordinarily difficult to verify.

Brennan’s forecast of success against al-Qaeda rested on another foundation: It’s in America’s power to determine how it will react to terrorism. Al-Qaeda’s enduring strategy is to get America to “overextend” itself and compromise its values, thereby weakening the sources of its strength and isolating it internationally, until it retracts its overall global posture. “We must be honest with ourselves,” Brennan warned. “No nation, no matter how powerful, can prevent every attack from coming to fruition.” But just as the U.S. has an obligation to destroy al-Qaeda proactively, he said, it also has a responsibility not to overreact in the event of a successful attack.

“Al-Qaeda can sew explosives into their clothes, and can place explosives in an SUV, but it is our choice how to react,” he said. “They can seek to recruit people already living among us but it is our choice to treat those communities with suspicion or to support those communities.”

I asked Brennan if the Obama administration was counterproductively compromising American values by retaining policies of indefinite suspension without charge at Guantanamo Bay and beyond. “When this administration came in, in January of last year, we dealt with a number of legacy situations that we wanted to make sure we were able to deal with appropriately without compromising the security of the American people,” Brennan said.

I think as everybody recognizes, on both sides of the political spectrum, the situation at Guantanamo is a very, very difficult and challenging one. I think that even as the president said he was determined to close Guantanamo within one year, it still remains open because the president is determined not to do anything that would compromise America’s security. It is something that we are working very closely with the Congress on. We are trying to do things in a very thoughtful manner. We have transferred about 50 of those detainees over the past year and a half, and we’re continuing to look at their situations there. But this is a challenge that we need to look at from a policy perspective, from a legal perspective as well as from a security perspective.

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 no due process involved, as the Constitution entitles an American citizen at the risk of losing his life at the hands of the government; he could simply be targeted for death. Not knowing why such an act was legal, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request on April 7 with the Justice Department and the CIA, the two agencies most likely to make an assessment of the killing’s legality — Justice because that’s probably a job for its Office of Legal Counsel; CIA because it would probably be the agency asked to kill an American citizen believed to be part of al-Qaeda. (And because Awlaki is in Yemen, where the CIA has launched missiles at non-citizen al-Qaeda targets in the past.)

Today I got my answer: No. That wasn’t unexpected. The path the agencies took to to reject — sort of — my FOIA request, however, was. I’ll explain.

First, the CIA. I received a letter from CIA’s information and privacy coordinator, Delores M. Nelson, reminding me that the agency’s mandate deals with “foreign intelligence — not domestic — matters.” And that apparently causes an administrative problem with addressing my request. Nelson:

Our records are not configured in a way that would allow us to perform a search reasonably calculated to lead to responsive records. Therefore, we must decline to process your request.

So I’m not being denied on any substantive ground. The CIA just doesn’t know how to search for any record it may possess about the legality of killing an American citizen, just weeks after public confirmation appears that this is an active issue in internal counterterrorism deliberations focusing on an area of historic CIA counterterrorism operations. This is quite the non-responsive search tool.

Then there’s the Justice Department. My request went to its National Security Division and not the Office of Legal Counsel, for reasons that mystify me. But Arnetta James, the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts initiatives coordinator at the division, wrote to tell me that the division doesn’t handle the information that interests me. Reasonable! But instead of forwarding my request to OLC, she sent it to the Defense Department’s Freedom of Information Policy Office. Someone there, I’m assured, will get back to me.

While I won’t complain — I suppose it stands to reason that the Defense Department could be tasked with killing al-Awlaki and accordingly it has a legal equity here — I’m going to try to re-file explicitly through the Office of Legal Counsel, which I still presume is the branch of government most likely to handle this rather remarkable constitutional assertion. I’ll commiserate with my editors and figure out how to respond to CIA as well.

[A]pproval of the guidelines is being delayed, primarily by State Department officials who are concerned that formalizing the rules will lead inevitably to greater use of long-term detention by the administration under conditions similar to those at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, which President Obama has pledged to close.

You have to figure that’s Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser, taking that position. Since the absence of a new detentions framework for outside Afghanistan — like for, oh, I don’t know, Pakistan and Yemen — creates an incentive for the Obama administration to kill terrorism suspects rather than capture them and put them … somewhere … it casts a new light on Koh’s legal blessing of the administration’s drone strikes. (And, perhaps, assassinations.)

Attorney General Holder briefly touched on a similar point about the geopolitical implications of a terror-detentions system last night, although I didn’t really view what he said as particularly significant. After reading the Los Angeles Times’ piece, however, I wonder if he was sticking up for State’s viewpoint here. You make the call:

[T]here is the issue of international cooperation.   Our civilian courts are well respected internationally.   Our allies are comfortable with the formal and informal mechanisms to transfer terrorism suspects to the United States for trial in civilian court.   As we prove the effectiveness and fairness of military commissions, I expect our allies will take notice.   And I hope they will grow more willing to cooperate with commission trials.

But if the allies aren’t comfortable with the commissions yet, how comfortable will they be with indefinite detention? Especially after the hard-fought battle to close Guantanamo?

Finally, the paper identifies some of the advocates of a new indefinite detention system as coming from the Pentagon. That would make sense, given Col. William Lietzau’s mandate, as Pentagon detentions chief, to come up with new post-Guantanamo detentions policy for the department.

No one should labor under the misconception that Kappes is the linchpin of the drone-strike effort, which has many authors and advocates and structural factors pushing it forward. (Simply put, it’s what you do when you perceive a terrorist threat in a place you can’t invade.) But now that Kappes is out and his replacement is a longtime CIA analyst, not an operative, named Michael Morrell, it’s an open question whether Panetta and Morrell will shift the agency’s focus at all. The smart early money is probably not, since Panetta believes the strikes to be a smashing success. But watch his next round of congressional testimony to see if any post-Kappes shift is underway.

“We’re still working through [this issue] in the interagency and, frankly, working with Sen. Graham as well,” Holder said. “Hopefully we will have something to share, and, more importantly, put into place” in the next several months, he said, later clarifying that he believes the administration can finalize that process by the end of the year. “There is a symbolic significance to this review process,” Holder added, comparing it to the negative symbolism posed by the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

“There is much debate about how broadly both the Bush and Obama administrations have interpreted [the Authorization to Use Military Force], a concern that I share, but this instance is not one of those cases,” Gude says. “It cannot plausibly be argued that Awlaki, who is mentioned repeatedly in the 9/11 Commission report as having assisted the 9/11 hijackers, is not a person who aided the 9/11 attacks.”

But the evidence the 9/11 Commission report presents about Awlaki is far more fragmentary than Gude suggests. Awlaki’s possible role in the attacks is discussed in chapter 7 of the report, “The Attack Looms.” Basically, when hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar arrived in San Diego in mid-2000, they attended a mosque the American citizen Awlaki ministered at. This is what the commission says on page 221 of the first-edition text:

Another potentially significant San Diego contact for Hazmi and Mihdhar was Anwar Aulaqi, an imam at the Rabat mosque. Born in New Mexico and thus a U.S. citizen, Aulaqi grew up in Yemen and studied in the United States on a Yemeni government scholarship. We do not know how or when Hazmi and Mihdhar first met Aulaqi. The operatives may even have met or at least talked to him the same day they first moved to San Diego. Hazmi and Mihdar reportedly respected Aulaqi as a religious figure and developed a close relationship with him.

When interviewed after 9/11, Aulaqi said he did not recognize Hazmi’s name but did identify his picture. Although Aulaqi admitted meeting with Hazmi several times, he claimed not to remember any specifics of what they discussed. He described Hazmi as a soft-spoken Saudi student who used to appear at the mosque with a companion but who did not have a large circle of friends.

Aulaqi left San Diego in mid-2000, and by early 2001 had relocated to Virginia. As we will discuss later, Hazmi eventually showed up at Aulai’s mosque in Virginia, an appearance that may not have been coincidental. We have been unable to learn enough about Aulaqi’s relationship with Hazmi and Mihdha to reach a conclusion.

Both future 9/11 hijackers made their way to the Dar al Hijra mosque in Falls Church, where Awlaki had again taken up religious service. Page 229:

Aulaqi had moved to Virginia in January 2001. He remembers Hazmi from San Diego but has denied having any contact with Hazmi or [fellow hijacker Hani] Hanjour in Virginia.

At the Dar al Hijra mosque, Hazmi and Hanjour met a Jordanian named Eyad al Rababah. Rababah says he had gone to the mosque to speak to the imam, Aulaqi, about finding work. At the conclusion of services, which normally had 400 to 500 attendees, Rababah says he happened to meet Hazmi and Hanjour. They were looking for an apartment; Rababah referred them to a friend who had one to rent. Hazmi and Hanjour moved into the apartment, which was in Alexandria.

Some FBI investigators doubt Rababah’s story. Some agents suspect that Aulaqi may have tasked Rababah to help Hazmi and Hanjour. We share that suspicion, given the remarkable coincidence of Aulaqi’s prior relationship with Hazmi. As noted above, the Commission was unable to locate and interview Aulaqi.

The pattern of behavior is doubtlessly suspicious and the coincidence cries out for further investigation. But it’s not the same as tying Awlaqi to the 9/11 plot. In a footnote, the 9/11 Commission reveals that Awlaqi had come under FBI investigation in 1999 and 2000 after it learned the imam “may have been contacted by a possible procurement agent for Bin Laden.” It determined that he knew anti-Israel extremists, including some with ties to Hamas. But “none of this information was considered strong enough to support a criminal prosecution.”

Awlaki, we now know, is himself an extremist, and possibly tied to al-Qaeda in Yemen or beyond. But is this the level of connection to the 9/11 attack that can justify the execution of an American citizen without due process, according to the 2001 Congressional authorization? This is what that authorization empowers:

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

Even “aided” is a stretch in Awlaki’s case. The 9/11 Commission suspected it, and details the basis for reasonable suspicion. But it lacked the basis to reach any such conclusion.

Anwar al-Awlaki is an American citizen, born in New Mexico, and now residing in Yemen, where he repeatedly issues exhortations to murder his fellow Americans. Any court would find him guilty of incitement. He has nebulous connections to al-Qaeda. What a court would say about those connections is uncertain, but courts have tended to give the government the benefit of the doubt in terrorism cases since at least 9/11. But al-Awlaki’s American citizenship entitles him to due process of law should the government seek to deprive him of life, liberty or property. When I asked Karen Greenberg of NYU’s Center on Law and Security whether al-Awlaki could be lawfully assassinated last month, she scoffed, “They can’t do this with al-Awlaki. He is an American citizen, born in New Mexico. They can’t take away his citizenship.”

The Obama administration begs to differ, according to Reuters, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Anonymous administration officials cite secret evidence to say that al-Awlaki’s connections to al-Qaeda affiliates have passed from the incitement phase into the operations phase, and so the CIA has marked him for death. Nowhere in those pieces does the Obama administration explain the legal basis for revoking al-Awlaki’s most basic constitutional right. As I wrote in my piece last month, not even John Yoo made a claim that radical while serving under the Bush administration:

In June 2002, John Yoo, then a lawyer for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, assessed that U.S. citizenship was no obstacle to the government detaining a suspected terrorist and providing him with a trial before a military commission. “[T]he President’s authority to detain an enemy combatant is not diminished by a claim, or even a showing, of American citizenship,” Yoo wrote. But even Yoo did not consider the more radical claim of stripping American citizenship from a suspected terrorist for the purpose of legally killing him; and President Obama formally annulled Yoo’s memorandum in an executive order within days of taking office.

The administration may very well be making the correct evaluation of the threat al-Awlaki poses. But if citizenship means anything, it means that a citizen can’t be killed because the government uses secret evidence to say he or she is an intolerable threat. Al-Awlaki is certainly exploiting his American citizenship. But CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano told the Post’s Greg Miller, “This agency conducts its counterterrorism operations in strict accord with the law.” We at least have the right to know the legal basis the Obama administration reached to order the extra-judicial killing of an American citizen, and so I’ll be spending my morning filling out FOIAs.

Koh told the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law that the administration is guided by the principles of proportionality — no overreaction to an al-Qaeda attack — and distinction, meaning no civilians can be targeted. There’s more:

Koh also responded to critics who have questioned the legality of such attacks under international law. “[S]ome have suggested that the very use of targeting a particular leader of an enemy force in an armed conflict must violate the laws of war. But individuals who are part of such an armed group are belligerent and, therefore, lawful targets under international law….[S]ome have challenged the very use of advanced weapons systems, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, for lethal operations. But the rules that govern targeting do not turn on the type of weapon system involved, and there is no prohibition under the laws of war on the use of technologically advanced weapons systems in armed conflict—such as pilotless aircraft or so-called smart bombs—so long as they are employed in conformity with applicable laws of war.”

I have to go back here to my colleague Dave Weigel’s coverage of the conservative effort last year to keep Koh out of his job because he was allegedly a wild-eyed enemy of American sovereignty. Koh’s chief persecutor was Ed Whelan of the Center for Ethics and Public Policy, who capped tendentious readings of Koh’s writings by contextualizing them in hysterical ways like this:

“What judicial transnationalism is really all about,” wrote Whelan, “is depriving American citizens of their powers of representative government by selectively imposing on them the favored policies of Europe’s leftist elites.”

Perhaps Whelan would like to explain how launching missiles from unmanned aerial vehicles onto targets in Pakistan and Yemen — which kill, by the New America Foundation’s estimate, one civilian for every two combatants — are the favored policy response of effete European elites. The ACLU, meanwhile, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the formal legal arguments prepared by the Obama team justifying the drone strikes.