Read Ali Soufan’s op-ed about Zero Dark Thirty today in the New York Times. If you’ve read Ali’s gripping book, his take won’t surprise you. As he puts it: “I watched ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ not as a former F.B.I. special agent who spent a decade chasing, interrogating and prosecuting top members of Al Qaeda but as someone who enjoys Hollywood...
“Having the executive being the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner, all in one, is very contrary to the traditions and the laws of this country,” Senator Angus King Jr. of Maine said at the Brennan hearing. “If you’re planning a strike over a matter of days, weeks or months, there is an opportunity to at least go to some outside-of-the-executive-branch body, like the FISA Court, in a confidential and top-secret way, make the case that this American citizen is an enemy combatant.” Mr. Brennan said the idea was worthy of discussion, adding that the Obama administration had “wrestled with this.” Two other senators, Dianne Feinstein of California, the chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, and Ron Wyden of Oregon, also expressed interest. Even Robert Gates, a former C.I.A. director who was defense secretary under President George W. Bush and President Obama, said on CNN that such a judicial panel “would give the American people confidence” that a proper case had been made against an American citizen.The speed with which this idea has gained currency in Washington has, I fear, less to do with its merits and more to do with the intense attractiveness of the notion that there might be a neat procedural solution to a messy substantive problem. Alas, I don’t think it works that way. Here’s my thinking.
According to NPR: President Obama directed the Justice Department late Wednesday to give Congress access to classified information that details the rationale for targeted strikes against U.S. citizens believed to have links to al-Qaida. NPR's Carrie Johnson is reporting on the story for our Newscast Unit. She says the decision comes after Senators threatened to hold up nominees for the...
I set out to begin to untangle the strings of argument in the DOJ white paper, and find myself, after three pages of writing notes myself, having untangled only as far as the paper’s page 5 (of 16). There is something wrong with a memo like this. Let me see if I can explain why. The white paper says that it...
For those following the ongoing public controversy surrounding the film's depiction of the hunt for bin Laden, two notes. First, the conservative thinktank the American Enterprise Institute hosted a forum on the film featuring three of the former CIA officials centrally involved at the policy level in the "enhanced interrogation" program: former General Counsel John Rizzo, former CIA director Michael...
I can’t imagine that the DOD-DOJ-DOS-DNI-CIA lawyers assigned to this one are getting much sleep these days. According to the Washington Post: The Obama administration is considering significant military backing for France’s drive against al-Qaeda-linked militants in Mali…. The loosely affiliated web of Malian militants in the country’s north includes members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). But other...
Perhaps my favorite scene in the film Zero Dark Thirty comes relatively early on, when the two CIA interrogators around whom the early film revolves arrive at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan to interrogate their next detainees. The soldiers on the base have been keeping a cage of small monkeys (for unexplained reasons), and the scene opens with...
This statement, coming from the Acting Director of the CIA, is perhaps even more remarkable than the Senators'. The press release is posted on the CIA website and is reprinted below. Statement to Employees from Acting Director Michael Morell: "Zero Dark Thirty" December 21, 2012 ________________________________________ I would not normally comment on a Hollywood film, but I think it important to put Zero Dark...
Today marked the limited release in the United States of the already much heralded new film on the United States' hunt for Osama bin Laden. I have not yet seen the film and won't comment on it until I do. But I do want to at least pass along this remarkable open letter issued today by 1 Republican and 2...
As loathe as I am to call any attention to Eric Posner’s latest over on Slate, his piece engaging the Jeh Johnson speech (about the notion that the Al Qaeda that attacked us on 9/11 might someday be defeated) is such a blast from the past it’s hard to resist. Turns out the President has really been detaining everyone under...
In case you missed it, the past week saw the announcements that both Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson and State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh would be stepping down from the Obama Administration at the end of the year. Johnson reports he’ll be returning to the private sector; Koh will head back to his professorship at Yale Law School. ...
Look much beyond the blogosphere and you’ll be hard pressed to find many headlines about Jeh Johnson’s important speech at Oxford last week. But important it was. Here are three more of the reasons why I think so. 1. It is difficult to overstate the depth of the scholarly consensus that existed (before last week) around the view that when Congress...
