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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 […]

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. […]

Latest statement from Jon Eisenberg, lawyer for Jihad Diyab/Dhiab: Andres Conteris, who is a member of the U.S. human rights group Witness Against Torture and is part of an informal group of Uruguayans who have offered support to Mr. Dhiab since his arrival in Uruguay, met this morning with a member of the Venezuelan foreign […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

UPDATED Jan. 28, 2018 with Strava fitness map data visualization insight UPDATED Sept. 18, 2017 with updated Google Earth satellite images UPDATED Apr. 6, 2021 with archival Google Earth satellite images *** Today I read on TechCrunch that Google had figured out a way to make its satellite maps clearer, and checked Camp 7 of […]

With the help of the New York Times‘ legal guru, David McCraw, I have been using a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to assemble a massive public library of internal Federal Bureau of Investigation shooting incident reports dating back to 1993. We’ve just updated that library with about 700 pages of such reports […]

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 […]