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 […]
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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 […]
What Google Earth Shows About Guantanamo’s Super-Secret Camp 7
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 […]
FBI Discloses 700 Pages of Internal Shooting Incident Review Reports
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 […]
“It’s not like the lawyers couldn’t have come up with a theory”: The Obama legal team and the lawfulness of attacking Assad
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 […]
Will Florida’s sunshine law thwart the federal government’s censorship of the Orlando nightclub shooter’s 911 call?
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 […]
“The Imperial Presidency?” ACS Panel Discussion on Executive Power
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 […]