Author: Charlie Savage

It looks like the  Obama administration is going to leave office without giving a copy of the torture report to the judiciary for safekeeping. In late December, Judge Royce Lamberth of the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia ordered the Obama administration to deposit a copy of the full, still-classified, 6,000-word Senate Select Committee […]

President Obama is today scheduled to deliver his last major speech about national security, which will summarize and defend his counterterrorism legal policy and strategy over the past eight years. Ahead of that, the administration released a pile of documents yesterday. These included a 61-page report that described the legal framework for its counterterrorism policies, […]

The House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) today released the text of the annual intelligence authorization act for 2017 following conference negotiations with the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI). Two provisions in it jumped out at me: DISCLOSING DOSSIERS ABOUT FORMER GITMO DETAINEES Section 701 requires the government to declassify, and make available to the public, intelligence reports […]

Over at Emptywheel, Marcy Wheeler’s latest post about legal issues raised by the Yahoo scan controversy/mystery is worth reading. I agree with much but not all of it. This post will explain. First, some context. The Yahoo scan issue, first revealed in an important but in places murky October 4 scoop by Reuters, has gradually […]

In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit I filed with The New York Times (represented by David McCraw, who is getting some attention today for his letter to Donald Trump’s lawyer rejecting a demand that the NYT retract an article about two women who say Trump touched them inappropriately), the Federal Bureau of […]

I just noticed that when President Obama nominated someone yesterday to be the first United States ambassador to Cuba in more 50 years, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who opposes Obama’s efforts to thaw relations with the Communist dictatorship, said this in making his argument that the Senate should not confirm that nominee: Just like releasing all terrorists […]

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, today called for holding Ahmad Khan Rahami, the Afghan-American arrested as the sole suspect in the Chelsea bombing, as an enemy combatant: placing him in indefinite military custody and interrogating him without a defense lawyer or a Miranda warning that he has any right to remain silent. Graham argued that the […]

In the past few weeks, the New York Times and I have filed two new Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. This post will explain them. (The hard work, as always, is being done by the NYT’s lawyer, David McCraw, as well as our outgoing annual NYT First Amendment fellow, Tali Leinwald, who is off to […]

Another excellent Freedom of Information Act case for surveillance documents came to an end late last month while I was on vacation, so I’m only now getting to it. It was for inspector general reports at the National Security Agency about the three programs that grew out of Stellarwind. The germ of the idea for this FOIA came from […]

Today, my friend Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald, who does God’s work by traveling to Guantanamo to cover every day of every pre-trial hearing in the dysfunctional military commissions system, reports that the military has closed Camp 5 and consolidated the remaining 46 regular detainees in Camp 6. (The 15 former CIA black-site high-value prisoners […]