Author: Charlie Savage

Several prominent law professors who were formerly members of the Obama national security legal team are debating the “dissent memo” signed by 51 mid-level career State Department diplomats about the administration’s current policy toward Syria. The diplomats think the United States should carry out airstrikes against the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad, not just […]

UPDATE: FBI/DOJ reverses course, releases uncensored version of 1st Orlando shooter 911 call (what about the others?) pic.twitter.com/WudWiLR9V3 — Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) June 20, 2016   The Federal Bureau of Investigation has released a partially censored transcript of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen’s 911 call in which he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and […]

C-Span has now made available the video of last weekend’s panel discussion on executive power at the American Constitutional Society for Law and Policy annual convention, which I moderated. The all-star panel included Walter Dellinger, Marty Lederman, Sai Prakash, Neomi Rao, and Hina Shamsi. Here is the description from ACS: The Imperial Presidency? President George W. Bush […]

The text of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s version of the 2017 intelligence authorization bill has finally been made public. The panel is chaired by Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina. The bill has been getting some attention because, as first reported by Jenna McLaughlin of The Intercept, it has a provision that would expand (or, depending […]

This doesn’t have anything directly to do with national security (or does it?), but this is such a marker of the incoherence of the 2016 presidential race that I can’t resist sharing it. A friend just passed on the below e-mail, which the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent out today to the mailing list of “Romney for President, Inc.” […]

Don Verrilli is stepping down after five years as the Solicitor General. News accounts of his departure, like this one by my colleague Eric Lichtblau, are understandably focusing on the big domestic law cases he argued before the Supreme Court – particularly the ones on Obamacare and same-sex marriage rights. But Verrilli’s impact on governance […]

Several months ago, as The New York Review of Books was preparing to publish its review of Power Wars, I received a letter from its editor, Robert Silvers, asking whether I would like to write a review essay about Playing to the Edge by Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA and the CIA. […]

Here’s a 4 p.m. before Memorial Day Weekend news dump item. The background is here. (Don’t hold your breath waiting for any similar from Senator Ayotte though!) Statement by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph F. Dunford Jr. on Gender-Neutral Staffing of Guard Forces at JTF-GTMO Military […]

The newly unveiled Senate Armed Services Committee version of the National Defense Authorization Act has a provision that would wildly expand the number of countries to which the U.S. government may not transfer low-level Guantanamo detainees. Specifically, it would ban transfers to any nation for which the State Department has issued a travel warning. Senator Ted Cruz, […]

One of the undemocratic – or at least, untransparent – things about how Congress shapes American national security law is that the armed services and intelligence oversight committees craft their annual authorization bills behind closed doors, sending them to the floor as a fait accompli. (Another is that these bills contain extensive classified annexes, as Dakota […]