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What Are the U.S. Objections to the Law of the Sea Treaty?

International lawyers from outside the U.S. often wonder why exactly the U.S. has yet to join the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. This is a good question, since most U.S. international lawyers support joining the treaty, they are not usually able to give a fair description of the basis for opposing the convention.  I am a squish...

Importance of the Brennan Speech (II)

The first part of John Brennan's speech, as I explain below, is an explication of the Administration's understanding of the U.S. armed conflict with al-Qaida and its co-belligerents, the legal constraints governing our use of force, and the self-imposed parameters of the government's use of force outside of "hot battlefields."  That is to say, it is a description of the...

Importance of the Brennan Speech (I)

In his speech last evening, Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan clarified and strengthened a number of important points that the Obama Administration had previously articulated or suggested, and helpfully tied them together to provide a more comprehensive account of the President's counterterrorism approach, particularly with respect to the U.S. commitment, emphasized by Brennan, on adherence to the rule of...

John Brennan Speech on Obama Administration Antiterrorism Policies and Practices

John Brennan just finished delivering this speech at the Harvard Law School.  I believe it is the most comprehensive single statement of the Obama Administration's policies and practices with respect to al Qaeda and other terrorist threats.  There's a lot of material here that will be of interest to OJ readers.  I will use boldface to identify what seem to...

Victor Davis Hanson Reviews Cheney Memoirs

I believe I’ve now read most of the leading reviews of Cheney’s memoirs, though I am only partway through In My Time.  (Lawfare’s Rafaella Wakeman provides a helpful roundup of the reviews.)  Of the reviews, though appearing after Rafaella's roundup (so not included there), Victor Davis Hanson’s is the most interesting and worth reading (it is posted over at the Hoover Institution’s...

CIA Does Not Have to Respond to ACLU FOIA

The ruling by Judge Rosemary Collyer was not unexpected; it provides that the CIA does not have to release records related to its drone-targeted killing program, as sought by the ACLU in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit.  The opinion is here, and Politico gives a brief summary of it here (h/t Lawfare).  Politico’s Josh Gerstein sums it up:

Ruling in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Judge Rosemary Collyer said records about the use of drones could be withheld under the rubric of “intelligence sources and methods.” She rejected the ACLU’s arguments that lethal drones aren’t really involved in acquiring intelligence. “At first blush, there is force to Plaintiffs’ argument that a ‘targeted-killing program is not an intelligence program’ in the most strict and traditional sense,” Collyer wrote, before concluding: “The Court has no reason to second-guess the CIA as to which programs that may or may not be of interest implicate the gathering of intelligence.”

Gerstein goes on to note that this ruling does not address other agencies of the government, such as State, which do not have these specific exemptions related to intelligence; without having done an exhaustive survey of FOIA cases, however, I would be surprised if something that the CIA could withhold on intelligence exemptions could be got sideways from other federal agencies.  Perhaps I'm wrong.