Author: Deborah Pearlstein

A Summer of Shifting Alliances?

Just keeping up with the news on international terrorism/counterterrorism this summer could be a full time job. Among many other potentially significant reports, I wanted to highlight this statement recently released by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), often described by U.S. officials as the branch of Al Qaeda that currently poses the greatest threat to the United States....

OLC Memo Redux – The Bigger Picture

So did we learn anything new from the redacted OLC memorandum we didn’t already know from the earlier White Paper, Administration fact sheet, official speeches, testimony, and media leaks about the nature of the Administration’s legal theory supporting lethal targeting? Yes, several things, with important implications for operations going forward. The newly released memo has some key deficits (see, e.g.,...

OLC Memo – The Due Process Piece

Much to say on the redacted version of the U.S. Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memorandum on targeted killing, released by a U.S. court yesterday. For now, let me start with U.S. constitutional law – namely, what does the Fifth Amendment require by way of procedural protection before a U.S. citizen like Awlaki may be lethally targeted? Recall the earlier released DOJ White Paper on the topic had been clear its analysis was limited to the particular circumstances the intelligence community represented Awlaki presented: the use of “lethal force in a foreign country outside the area of active hostilities against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qa’ida or an associated force if al-Qa’ida – that is, an al-Qa’ida leader actively engaged in planning operations to kill Americans.” The memo’s effort to assess the due process requirements in this circumstance runs from page 38 to page 41. It begins by appropriately acknowledging that, because of Awlaki’s citizenship, the Fifth Amendment “likely” protects him even while he is abroad in such circumstances. The memo also correctly identifies Mathews v. Eldridge (a 1976 Supreme Court case assessing what process was due before the government could deprive an individual of property) as setting the test for assessing how much process is required in the targeting case as well; Mathews is the test the Hamdi Court applied in 2004 in determining that U.S. citizen Yaser Hamdi, picked up on the Afghan battlefield, was entitled to notice of the reason for his detention and an opportunity to be heard by a neutral arbiter, once the exigency surrounding his battlefield seizure had past. Here, the memo’s analysis becomes more problematic.

Bombing Iraq Doesn’t Just Pose Serious Questions of Domestic Law, International Law May Be a Problem, Too

My blogospheric colleagues have begun debating whether the Administration has sufficient domestic legal authority to proceed with what the Times has called a “targeted, highly selective campaign of airstrikes against Sunni militants in Iraq” – reportedly now under contemplation. Jack Goldsmith, for example, thinks it might, under the 2002 statute authorizing the President to use military force against the government of Iraq for the purpose of ridding it of its “weapons of mass destruction.” My friends at Just Security and elsewhere have usefully debunked this notion, and related others (like the idea I’ve argued against here, that ISIS can be considered any kind of “associate” of Al Qaeda). But while I’d contest the idea that the discussion so far is “premature” – it is no doubt precisely a topic with which Administration lawyers are currently struggling – the doubtful legality of such a set of strikes under domestic law is made even worse by the likely illegality of such strikes under international law. That is, even if the United States could come up with a domestic statutory basis for some military action in Iraq – extant Title 50 covert action authorities are quite broad, for example – it would still struggle for the approval of our allies on international legal grounds. Here’s my thinking.

An End-of-War Policy Diversion

Since I’ve given the New York Times grief in the past about using the name “Al Qaeda” to refer to non-Al Qaeda radical Islamist groups, I wanted to give them due credit for yesterday’s piece describing the takeover of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as having been accomplished by Sunni militants. The Times piece...

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Takes on the AUMF

As several of my friends at Just Security and Lawfare have noted, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday held an, um, interesting hearing on whether the primary domestic law authorizing the use of force against Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces needs to be repealed or revised. Witnesses’ written statements and (more interesting) video of the hearing is here. The hearings featured current DOD General Counsel Stephen Preston, Principal Deputy Legal Adviser at the State Department Mary McLeod, followed by former (Obama) State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh and former (Bush) Attorney General Michael Mukasey. The Administration witnesses took a pounding. Some of the harsh questioning was, as ever, partisan bombast seeking to score pre-election points. Some of it was the members’ impatience with the complexity of the (overlapping) domestic and international law in the area. But some of it was the members’ understandable difficulty in trying to follow the witnesses’ at times needlessly confusing responses, viz. “Q: Give me a sense of what you get from the AUMF that you don’t have under existing statutory or constitutional law? A: “…I think it would be fair to say that with or without an AUMF, to the extent that it grants authority for the use of military force against Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces, in which we are in armed conflict, to the extent that those groups continue to pose a threat of imminent attack against this country, the President does have constitutional authority to act….” And some of it was genuine frustration, viz. “Q: If a bill was introduced today to repeal the [2001] AUMF, would the Administration’s position be support, oppose, or I don’t know? A: As of today, Senator, I think the answer is, we don’t know.” So does the Administration really think the President's authority under Article II of the Constitution gives it all the power it needs, even without the AUMF? If one is concerned about this kind of broad inherent executive authority, and if all agree the Al Qaeda of 9/11 is diminished and the nature of the threat of terrorism is evolving, doesn’t that necessarily mean we need new statutory authority to define or constrain the President’s ability to go after these evolving threats? My view: no and no. Here’s why.

Circling Back to that Existence of Armed Conflict Discussion

Last week saw a set of posts, across the law-and-security blogs, about whether an armed conflict existed at the time current commission defendant Abd Al Rahim Hussayn Muhammad Al Nashiri was allegedly involved in planning the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. See, e.g., Frakt, Vladeck, Heller, and Margulies. While I’ve written about this at length elsewhere, after reading the posts, I find myself disagreeing (at least in part) with pretty much all of my friends on the question of who can/must decide the answer to the existence-of-armed-conflict question. Here’s my thinking.

Detention Post-Gitmo II: A Surreply to Steve Vladeck

Thanks to Steve Vladeck for his thoughtful response to my critique of his paper posted earlier this week. In great sum, Steve has a paper out proposing that the United States hold the remaining Gitmo detainees in the United States under a domestic immigration detention statute to ease the way for Congress to repeal the AUMF statute (under...

On Steve Vladeck’s Post-AUMF Detention

Nothing like spring break (yes, we break right before semester’s end) to do a little catch-up reading – starting this week with Steve Vladeck’s new essay grappling with one of the nation’s most intractable problems: closing Guantanamo. Among the many challenges associated with the prison’s continued existence, Steve highlights its role in preventing serious consideration of repealing the AUMF (the federal statute authorizing the use of military force against Al Qaeda and associated groups). The Gitmo detainees are held under the domestic authority of the AUMF; as long as the government wishes to continue to hold at least some of the Gitmo prisoners (as it does), Congress can’t repeal the law without risking their potential release. Despite the winding down of U.S. operations in Afghanistan, the serious weakening of core Al Qaeda, and the President’s announced desire to move the nation away from a permanent wartime footing – AUMF repeal is essentially impossible as long as we are concerned with maintaining the legality of the Gitmo prisoners’ detention under domestic law. So how to keep Gitmo from becoming the detention tail that wags the wartime dog? Steve proposes that even without an AUMF, we could continue to hold the approximately 45 Gitmo detainees the executive sees as the intractable core (those the administration has designated unprosecutable but too dangerous to release) under the authority of another federal law: Section 412 of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. Section 412 – which Steve notes has not been used once since its enactment in 2001 – requires the Attorney General to take into custody any alien he has reasonable grounds to believe is (for example) a member of a terrorist organization, or endorses or espouses terrorist activity, or “is engaged in any other activity that endangers the national security of the United States.” The alien may be detained for up to a week until the commencement of immigration removal proceedings or criminal prosecution, or for “additional periods of up to six months” if his “removal is unlikely in the reasonably foreseeable future,” and if release “will threaten the national security of the United States or the safety of the community or any person.” Steve’s diagnosis of the relationship between Guantanamo Bay and the AUMF is spot on in some critical respects. The uniquely problematic nature of the Guantanamo detention program skews the current debate about the need for continuing use-of-force authority, just as surely as it has skewed broader debates about U.S. counterterrorism detention, trial, and interrogation policies for the past dozen years. For a host of reasons, the Gitmo population is singularly unrepresentative of the challenges that would be posed by counterterrorism detention or trial following the arrest of any terrorism suspect today: Gitmo detainees were denied basic Geneva protections (including any initial hearing about who these men actually were); some detainees were transferred there following periods of unlawful (even torturous) detention elsewhere; criminal counterterrorism laws that are today used for prosecution were much narrower extrajudicial scope in 2001; Congress maintains unprecedented restrictions on the transfer of detainees to the United States for any purpose; and so on. Indeed, as Steve recognizes, given all that has gone before, closing Gitmo now involves only bad options; the policy task is to choose which among these bad options is least worst under the circumstances. Despite the low bar, I have to admit I’m still unconvinced that Section 412 is the least worst way to go.

More on the Al Qaeda Name

For those who try to keep up with the shifting nature of radical Islamist groups – groups too many in the media sometimes wrongly link to Al Qaeda –the stories earlier this week on the group formerly known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, now calling itself ISIS, are significant: Early Monday morning the leadership of al-Qaeda disowned Islamic State of Iraq...

Global Military Justice Reform

Excited to see news of a new blog by former National Institute of Military Justice head Gene Fidell on military justice systems worldwide. Here's a description: Developments in the field of military justice have been coming at an extraordinary pace for the last several years, both in the United States and around the world. Some of these developments have been...

Al Qaeda in the Headlines

Put the words “Al Qaeda” in a news headline, and you inevitably conjure a very particular idea in the mind of the American reader. “Al Qaeda” is the group that attacked the United States on 9/11. The group led by Osama bin Laden (now led, some might recall, by his successor, Ayman Zawahiri). The group we’ve been at...