Former President Bill Clinton is back to practicing one of his core competencies: exploiting the 1995 mass murders in Oklahoma City for political advantage in order to suppress criticism of himself and his political allies. Accordingly, some persons might be interested in reviewing the multiple severe injuries that President Clinton inflicted on the Constitution in […]
Archive | Terrorism
I can’t resist …
It’s almost like Christmas. I just got the cover design for Skating on Stilts, my policy memoir about DHS, terrorism, and technology. I found the artist, Mart Klein, on line and explained the basic picture I had in mind. Much credit to Hoover Press, though, for the font and cover design. Book covers, like everything […]
“If you don’t want us to see you naked, maybe we’ll just put bees down your pants.”
TSA is facing new challenges from powerful explosives hidden in areas that usually can’t be searched until after dinner and a nice wine. No one is wild about the millimeter wave and backscatter machines that show how we’d look on the beach if we were dumb enough to wear Speedos. The “puffer” machines that tried […]
Drone Warfare Subcommittee Testimony, Up at SSRN
By Kenneth Anderson on March 27, 2010 2:45 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, International Law, Robotics, Targeted Killing, Terrorism, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
After getting a number of email requests for this testimony, I’ve posted it up for convenience at SSRN, although it is also available through the hearing page as well. I submitted along with it my earlier Weekly Standard article, Predators Over Pakistan. As I have said here earlier, however, this hearing on March 23 came […]
Harold Koh Statements on Drone Warfare at ASIL Tonight
By Kenneth Anderson on March 25, 2010 11:43 pm in International Human Rights Law, Robotics, Targeted Killing, Terrorism, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
Update: I have had a chance to watch the video twice – I strongly recommend watching it, as it adds considerable language to the statements below in the press release. And welcome Instapundit readers and any others. Given how much I have pressed publicly for a statement by the administration’s lawyers, I want to say […]
Drone Warfare and the Harvard National Security Conference
By Kenneth Anderson on March 9, 2010 1:51 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, Robotics, Targeted Killing, Terrorism, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
I’m writing from Cambridge, where I just finished a great short conference on targeted killing and drone warfare put on by the Harvard Law School National Security Law Society and Journal. The presentations should go up as video one of these days I hope!) and I highly recommend them if you are studying this topic. […]
Where and how to try Adam Gadahn:
Taliban propagandist Adam Gadahn (a/k/a Adam Pearlman and “Azzam the American”) has been captured in Pakistan. In 2006, he was indicted for treason in the federal district court for the Central District of California. Both during and after World War II, federal courts were successfully used for treason trials for American citizens who had served as […]
Predators over Pakistan, My New Weekly Standard Essay
By Kenneth Anderson on February 28, 2010 3:47 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, International Human Rights Law, International Law, Robotics, Targeted Killing, Terrorism, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
Well, “polemic” is probably closer to it. Regular readers have been hearing about this piece for a while, and I have posted various arguments from it (concerning targeted killing and Predator drones and the CIA and armed conflict and self-defense, and my general concern that the Obama administration has embraced a policy that its lawyers […]
Harold Koh Discussion with John Bellinger on International Law and the Obama Administration
By Kenneth Anderson on February 19, 2010 10:12 am in Counter-Terrorism Policy, International Human Rights Law, International Law, Robotics, Targeted Killing, Terrorism, War on Terror
Harold Koh, Legal Adviser to the State Department, held an informal public discussion a couple of days ago with his predecessor from the Bush administration, John Bellinger. This was an American Society of International Law event, held at John’s law firm, Arnold & Porter, and moderated by my old friend and ASIL’s Treasurer, Nancy Perkins. […]
“Wait, don’t change the channel! We left Fox News out of the Privacy Assessment.”
By Stewart Baker on February 13, 2010 1:11 pm in Libertarianism, Privacy, Terrorism, Uncategorized, War on Terror
With his usual nudge-and-wink, Matt Drudge invites us to be dismayed that “BIG SIS” — his moniker for Janet Napolitano — is “Monitoring Web Sites for Terror and Disaster Info.” Drudge links to a story saying that DHS will be monitoring social media like Twitter, as well as websites like Drudge, to keep abreast of […]
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 […]
Further Limitations on Civil Liberties…
Many of us said during the days of the Bush administration that restrictions on civil liberties motivated by the conflict with Al Qaeda would be maintained during any subsequent administration, whether Democratic or Republican, as long as the terrorist threat remained. This prediction has been amply confirmed. The most recent example is the implementation of […]
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 […]
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 […]