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Need to Dodge a Drone? Here are 22 Al Qaeda Tips
Yesterday, the AP released an English translation of what appears to be a 2011 Al Qaeda tip sheet. (AP journalists evidently found the document in Timbuktu.) Its author, AQAP senior commander...
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A Statutory Framework for Next-Generation Threats
Several years ago, in a prescient op-ed in the Washington Post, our colleague John Bellinger argued that the September 2001 AUMF was an increasingly poor fit for the evolving threats facing the United...
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The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth
I have a long review in the New Republic of Mark Mazzetti’s excellent new book, The Way of the Knife. The first half of the review simply summarizes the book, the main point of which is to demonstrate...
View ArticleYou Are an Operational Commander of AQAP Reading the White House Fact Sheet
Along with President Obama’s speech yesterday on counterterrorism policy, the White House released a document titled Fact Sheet: U.S. Policy Standards and Procedures for the Use of Force in...
View ArticleThe Long, Classified War
A recent cluster of stories – on al Qaeda’s growth, dispersion, and resilience, on the USG’s increased use of surveillance drones outside of “hot war zones,” on the USG possibly ramping up secret war...
View ArticleDOD’s Weak Rationale for Keeping Enemy Identities Secret
Cora Currier at Pro Publica has an important story on why DOD won’t publish the list of AUMF “associated forces” against whom we are at war. DOD’s rationale: A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that...
View ArticleTwo Things I Don’t Understand
1. How are the hopeful suggestions by the Obama administration (including the President) that the armed conflict against Al Qaeda and affiliates may be winding down (or should be ended) consistent...
View ArticleNew America Says Guantanamo Recidivism Rate Isn’t as High as Intelligence...
The New America Foundation has released a fact sheet listing the identities of Guantanamo Bay detainees who are “confirmed to be or suspected of engaging in militant activities against either U.S. or...
View ArticleTools and Tradeoffs: Confronting U.S. Citizen Terrorist Suspects Abroad
Today, the Brookings Institution released a lengthy paper my colleague Daniel Byman and I have been working on for some time, entitled “Tools and Tradeoffs: Confronting U.S. Citizen Terrorist Suspects...
View ArticleSafe Havens Still Matter
Micah Zenko and Amelia M. Wolf, both with the Council on Foreign Relations, have a new piece in Foreign Policy which argues against the “myth” that safe havens allow terrorists a space in which to...
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