This won’t be as exciting or informative as the title suggests, apologies [although it turns out I have said rather more than I was going to; you can read an even longer version of my views at SSRN here]. The front page of the Washington Post carries a story from Dana Priest on US military […]
Archive | Counter-Terrorism Policy
More Criticism of Mirandizing the Christmas Day Bomber
Yesterday I expressed my concern about the decision to Mirandize the Christmas day bomber. Today’s Wall Street Journal has this excellent editorial forcefully criticizing the Administration’s decision to do so. Here’s an excerpt: On “Fox News Sunday,” Chris Wallace asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs whether the President was told that Abdulmutallab was Mirandized after only […]
The Emerging Law of Detentions: The Guantanamo Habeas Cases as Lawmaking
By Kenneth Anderson on January 22, 2010 9:22 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, International Human Rights Law, Supreme Court, Terrorism, Uncategorized, War on Terror
Anyone doing serious work on detention, Guantanamo, war on terror, any of these areas, will want to read an extraordinary new study just out from the Brookings Institution by Benjamin Wittes, Robert Chesney, and Rabea Benhalim, The Emerging Law of Detention: The Guantanamo Habeas Cases as Lawmaking. (I’ve given the SSRN free download link; here […]
Administration’s Guantanamo Panel Backs Indefinite Detention
The Justice Department’s task force on what to do about Guantanamo and detention has said that nearly fifty of the 196 detainees at Guantanamo should be held indefinitely without trial, under the laws of war, on the grounds that they are too dangerous to release but unprosecutable. Stories are in the Washington Post and the […]
Comstock and National Security Implications for Detention?
By Kenneth Anderson on January 12, 2010 6:59 pm in Civil Rights, Counter-Terrorism Policy, Executive Branch, Federalism, War on Terror
(Update: Thanks to Ilya for his post above, and Orin for his comment below to this post. Bottom line is that Comstock does not have national security implications.) Could I put a question to the VC staff who are following Comstock? For those of us in the national security area, the whole matter of continued […]
D.C. Circuit Upholds Broad Detention Authority
Earlier today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit released its opinion in Al Bihani v. Obama, its first substantive post-Boumediene Guantanamo detainee habeas decision. In an opinion by Judge Janice Rogers Brown, the court rejected Al Bihani’s habeas claims, affirmed the district court’s denial of his habeas petition and embraced a fairly […]
Cost-Benefit Analysis and Airline Security – A Query about Method
In the various discussions about airport and airline security here at VC, a common response in the comments is something like this one (some version of this pops up from many commenters, and I’m just pulling up the most convenient example): With the current procedures, flying is one of the safest things we do. Even […]
Getting Serious about Airline Security
The Reason Foundation’s Robert Poole argues that if we are serious about airline security, we need to alter our focus. He argues we spend too much time and effort “keeping bad things—as opposed to bad people—off of airplanes.” A risk-based approach would invert these priorities and concentrate efforts on identifying higher risk passengers for greater […]
Security or Silliness
Screenwriter (and recovering attorney) David H. Steinberg writes about his recent TSA experience flying home to the U.S. from Aruba. Among other things, his family was frisked by a baggage handler and a flight attendant snatched the pillow from under his 2-year-old daughter one hour before descent. A lunatic tries to blow up an airplane, […]
How Does Cost-Benefit Analysis Draw Lines in the Sand?
By Kenneth Anderson on December 31, 2009 5:09 pm in Cost-Benefit Analysis, Counter-Terrorism Policy, Terrorism, War on Terror
Many of us who write, read, and comment on this blog work frequently with cost-benefit analysis, perhaps typically through discipline specific tools, whether in economics or finance or business or engineering or other disciplines. In my case, in my day job I’m mostly an international business-finance professor who uses the typical, and really not very […]
Execution Even More than Design – Revisiting Richard Posner on Domestic Counterterrorism
By Kenneth Anderson on December 31, 2009 1:30 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, Terrorism, War on Terror
A difficult real world lesson for academics like me is that execution matters. It very often matters much more than institutional design. A suboptimal institutional design often matters less than how it is executed, and the attention with which it is executed. Hard for academics like me to keep in mind, because we are conceptually […]
Yemen, Somalia and ….
By Kenneth Anderson on December 30, 2009 8:20 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, International Law, Targeted Killing, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
Following up on Eric’s post re President Obama’s legal authority to target in Yemen … I’m a bit of a broken record on the need for the United States government to articulate a more coherent legal basis for its targeted killing. But it is just more so since the Christmas terrorist attack … the range […]
Does Obama have authority to order military strikes in Yemen?
(A possibility that seems to be on the table.) Recall our friend, the AUMF: the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order […]
Relentlessly Tactical, Event-Specific Catastrophism, and the Limits of Cost-Benefit Analysis
By Kenneth Anderson on December 29, 2009 3:00 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, Terrorism, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
I’m traveling, so have not been able to comment as I’d like regarding the Christmas terror attack. However, I wanted to add one thought about cost benefit analysis and counter-terrorism. A couple of years ago I wrote a paper on ways in which the American political class is riven by deep foundational disagreements about the […]
Our Glorious TSA
Once you eliminate the implausible corner solutions—the TSA undertakes body cavity searches of every passenger, or security screenings are abolished—a number of consequences follow. 1. The TSA must randomize (play a “mixed strategy,” in game-theoretic parlance). Otherwise, terrorists can predict some of its precautions and evade them. The same principle explains why police vary patrol […]