Author: Charlie Savage

A FOIA lawsuit that brought to light large amounts of information about post-9/11 surveillance may be ending

Today, Judge Analisa Torres of the Southern District of New York issued a ruling in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by The New York Times and me. The case centered on various Justice Department inspector general reports about post-9/11 surveillance. The government had already made public a sizable amount of information due to this […]

Q&A with the Pentagon about Battle Damage Assessments, the Law of War Manual, and Non-Combatants who Support the Enemy

Below, I publish a written Q&A between myself and the Pentagon about rules for targeting and battle damage assessments, including how civilians who provide support to a military force, and are killed in strikes aimed at that force, are counted. Although I was addressing my questions to military lawyers, the exchange took place through Lt. Col. […]

Who are the two mystery agencies Obama says must help review capture operations, but not targeted killings?

The May 2013 Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG), also known as the “playbook” for drone strikes outside of conventional war zones, is now mostly public, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union. In Chapter 6 of Power Wars, I outlined the second-term interagency process for signing off on proposed targeted killing […]

Lawyer asks Venezuela to let the ex-Gitmo detainee who went missing from Uruguay talk to him

In June, Jihad Diyab (also spelled Dhiab), an erratic former Guantanamo Bay detainee from Syria who was resettled in Uruguay (and who is also the plaintiff in a continuing lawsuit seeking to make public videotapes of forcefeeding sessions), said he was going to be incommunicado for the month of Ramadan. Then authorities lost track of him. This […]

F.B.I. discloses 250 pages of internal shooting incident review reports

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has disclosed another batch of internal shooting incident review reports in response to my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit with the New York Times (pursued by the NYT’s lawyer David McCraw and the annual NYT First Amendment fellows, currently Tali Leinwand). The names of the people who were shot are redacted unless […]

Recent citations to “Power Wars”: Immigration, Forever War, and whether White House lawyers could constrain a President Trump

When you write a book–missing a lot of time with your family and flirting with walking away from a job you love in order to get it done–it is sincerely gratifying to see it find an audience. The first wave of that, of course, is reviews. The flurry for Power Wars are subsiding, although Barron’s published a nice review earlier this month by the FIU […]