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On Monday, June 21, the Supreme Court announced its ruling in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.  In a 6 to 3 decision, the Court held that the material-support statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2339B, is constitutional as applied to the forms of support the plaintiffs sought to provide to foreign terrorist organizations. The case was brought over ten years ago by several humanitarian groups concerned that their activities in relation to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) would lead to prosecution under the material-support statute.  Both the PKK and the LTTE have been designated […]

By Jordan Myers – Congress is taking the first step to increase oversight of the much-debated missile defense programs via new spending regulations in the proposed defense appropriations bill.  The Senate Armed Forces Committee inserted language requiring the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) to report baselines for individual projects. The proposed language would require the MDA to report back to Congress on costs of specific programs.  Agency spokesman Richard Lehner stated that the MDA has reported baselines to Congress since 2005, but those reports lumped spending under one category, the Ballistic Missile Defense System, instead of breaking it down into smaller

By Brian Itami, NSJ Senior Editor – Over the last week and a half, at least fourteen Americans were detained on terrorism charges in the United States and Yemen in two separate incidents.  Law enforcement officials arrested Mohamed Alessa and Carlos Almonte on Saturday, June 5 at John F. Kennedy Airport as the two allegedly began a trip to join the Somali terrorist organization al-Shabaab.  United States Department of State spokesman P.J. Crowley also confirmed on Monday, June 7 that Yemeni officials have detained at least twelve Americans who are suspected of being a part of Al-Qaeda. The United States

By John Thorlin, NSJ Digest Editor – On June 2, 2010, Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama resigned.  Though he poetically (or just strangely) claimed that a Japanese songbird he had seen during a recent trip to Korea had signaled to him that it was time to go, the real driving force behind the move was his failure to strike a deal to move the United States’ Futenma air base off of Okinawa.  His party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), rose to power after a half-century out of government partially due to campaign promises to make Japan a “more equal”

By Daniel Jacobson – On May 21, 2010, in Al Maqaleh v. Gates, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit unanimously reversed a previous district court ruling and held that there was no jurisdiction to hear the petitions for habeas corpus relief of three detainees being held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.  The three detainees in question are all non-U.S. citizens who claim to have been apprehended outside of Afghanistan.  The court’s twenty-six-page opinion was surprisingly short given the import of the case.  Moreover, a large portion of the opinion was spent simply recounting the relevant line of Supreme

By Laurie Blank* and Amos Guiora** – Click here to download the published PDF version Gone are the days of soldiers facing each other across large battlefields, tanks shelling tanks, and fighter jets engaging in dogfights.  War, or armed conflict, to use a more precise legal term, now takes place everywhere — in cities, refugee camps and other historically non-military areas — and involves or affects nearly everyone in the area.  These changes have a powerful impact on the conduct of hostilities.  The law of armed conflict (“LOAC”), also known as the laws of war or international humanitarian law (“IHL”),[1]