Uncategorized

By Brian Itami, NSJ Staff Editor – It is increasingly likely that the U.S. government will use military commissions to help bring about the closure of its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and to help resolve the question of what to do with the prison’s remaining detainees.  As reported by the Washington Post on March 5th, President Obama’s advisers plan to recommend that Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) and four accomplices be tried before a military tribunal, a little over a month after the Department of Justice withdrew charges from a military court in preparation for a transfer to the Southern […]

As the intensity of the unacknowledged U.S. drone campaign against al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives in Pakistan has continued to increase throughout 2009 and into 2010, questions about the drone program have grown louder.  To preserve the legitimacy and effectiveness of drones as an instrument of U.S. security policy, it is essential that government officials carefully evaluate and address the legal, moral, practical, and strategic concerns of critics. Concerns about the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones to conduct targeted killings falls into two related categories: moral and legal questions concerning the legitimacy of drone operations and practical considerations

On Saturday, February 27th, President Obama signed a one-year extension of the three expiring sections of the USA PATRIOT Act.  These sections are Section 215 (the so-called “library records” provision), Section 206 (involving “roving wiretaps”), and Section 207 (the so-called “lone-wolf” provision).  Last week, both the House and Senate voted to extend the sections without change, despite the fact that both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees had extensively debated and passed bills last year that would have made significant changes to these provisions.  In addition to amending these sections, the House and Senate bills would have added significant limitations

By Jonathan Abrams, NSJ Staff Editor – Five American Muslims who were detained in Pakistan on suspicion of terrorism have alleged torture by American and Pakistani authorities.  The men, all from the Washington, DC area, were detained in December shortly after arriving in Pakistan.  The Pakistani government has accused them of plotting terrorist attacks in Pakistan and seeking to join Islamist militants fighting U.S. troops in neighboring Afghanistan. On February 2nd one of the men tossed a tissue to reporters while being led into court.  The tissue read, “Since our arrest, the U.S., F.B.I., and Pakistani police have tortured us. 

In September and October of 2001, an anonymous source dropped a white powder containing deadly anthrax into the mail.  The attack killed five people; threatened the safety of Congress, the media, and the public at large; and rekindled the fears still raw from the September 11th attacks.  The FBI ultimately focused on Bruce Ivins as a suspect, a biologist at the Army’s Fort Detrick biodefense lab, who had the access and knowledge necessary to carry out the plot.  Over the past nine years, the FBI has conducted a far-reaching and costly investigation, looking into Ivins’s colleagues and tracing every scientist

By John Cella — The intrusion by unidentified Chinese hackers into Google’s networks in January is likely not an isolated incident, but part of the growing trend of state-sponsored acts of cyberwarfare.  While Google is a private corporation, attacks against it and other American corporations have significant national security implications.  Beyond the private harms inflicted by corporate espionage, such cyber-attacks have the possibility of stealing government secrets or corrupting government information.  Indeed, the National Security Agency (NSA) recognized this danger when it partnered with Google shortly after the attacks to help the internet behemoth improve its cybersecurity. Despite the best