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There’s an inconclusive — but nevertheless intriguing — detail in Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars that might explain why Abdulrahman al-Awlaki decided, in September 2011, to go search for his father. After the boy ran away from home, the family tried to figure out why, having expressed no plans to go search for his father, he […]
The other day, when I reported that the Senate Judiciary Committee would get to glimpse the Office of Legal Counsel memos authorizing the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, I noted that the House Judiciary Committee was not included in that reporting. Also no word on whether the House Judiciary Committee will laso get to glimpse these […]
Ever since I wrote this post, I’ve been thinking about the fate of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye. As Jeremy Scahill reported last year, President Obama personally intervened in February 2011 to make sure that Shaye would remain in prison, for terrorism charges presented at a kangaroo court, for at least five years. In the course […]
I was going to leave well enough alone with this NYT article on Anwar al-Awlaki, having criticized both its legal editorializing and its selective presentation of evidence against Awlaki. But since I suspect it is intended to prepare the ground for an Obama speech on targeted killing, I want to look at how assiduously the […]
Mark Mazzetti, Charlie Savage, and Scott Shane team up to provide the government’s best case — and at times, an irresponsibly credulous one — for the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki and the collateral deaths of Samir Khan and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Yet even in a 3,600 word story, they don’t present any evidence against the senior […]
A lot of people have discussed this section of Judge Colleen McMahon’s January 2, 2013 ruling dismissing ACLU and NYT’s FOIA for memos and other documents related to the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki: I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the […]
Believe it or not, there’s a fascinating debate going on over at NRO. First, Charles Krauthammer points to the muddle of the Administration’s white paper, which could have (he argues) just authorized Awlaki’s killing under the laws of war. Unfortunately, Obama’s Justice Department memos justifying the drone attacks are hopelessly muddled. They imply that the […]
In case you don’t want to read these two long posts, I want to point to two passages from the white paper that show, on two key points, the government wasn’t even claiming Anwar al-Awlaki was the “senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces” they keep saying he was when they killed him. […]
I’ve been working on a theory on why the white paper is so crappy based, in part, on a problem international law experts keep making. For my purposes, Noura Erakat’s description of the problem will suffice, but a ton of people have raised it. Imminence is one element of the law of self defense and […]
You should read both the AP and OregonLive accounts of yesterday’s Mohamed Osman Mohamud trial for their description of the problems surrounding the FBI’s account of its early investigations of the teenager (not to mention its choice, when Mohamud’s drinking suggested he was abandoning his radicalism, they nudged him back into extreme views). But for […]
