By Malik Ahmad Jalal* Click here to read the full text as a PDF The Roman Empire in Germania, the French in Algeria, the United States in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan all conjure up the myth that insurgencies cannot be defeated. In recent years, this notion has only been reinforced by NATO’s slow progress against the Taliban. […]

By Vik Kanwar* — Click here to read the full text of the Review Essay Vik Kanwar reviews: P.W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (Penguin Press 2009), Ronald Arkin, Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots (Chapman & Hall 2009), William H. Boothby, Weapons and the Law of Armed Conflict (Oxford University Press […]

By Phillip B. Heymann* — Click here to read the full text of the Essay In response to various scholarly commentaries, Professor Philip Heymann argues that applying the law of war outside of the “normal state-against-state context,” in order to justify military detention, involves an “increased risk of mistakes, unfairness, and resentment by our allies,” as “in the context of […]

By David D. Clark* and Susan Landau** — Click here to read the full text of the Essay As a result of increasing Internet insecurity — DDoS attacks, spam, cybercrime, and data theft — there have been calls for an Internet architecture that would link people to packets (the fundamental communications unit used in the Internet). The notion is that […]

By Eric Sandberg-Zakian* — Click here to read the full text of the Article Eric Sandberg-Zakian addresses nonmilitary preventive detention, a scheme that has gained support as a sensible alternative to holding suspected terrorists now that indefinite, unreviewable military detention is no longer an option. Such a program would empower the government to detain suspects who are potentially dangerous but […]

By Vanessa Baehr-Jones* — Click here to read the full text of the Article In this Article, Vanessa Baehr-Jones addresses the familiar tension between due process and the prosecution of counterterrorism operations, but does so through the less familiar context of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1267, which targets terrorist financing. In the wake of the expanded employment of UNSCR […]

By Philip Alston* - Click here to read the full text of the Article This Article focuses on the accountability of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in relation to targeted killings, under both United States law and international law. As the CIA, often in conjunction with Department of Defense (DOD) Special Operations forces, becomes more and more deeply involved in […]

By James Moxness- Former Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism and the newest member of the NSJ Advisory Board, Juan Zarate, gave a lecture last week at Harvard Law School entitled “Whither the Arab Spring?” concerning the recent political upheaval in the Middle East, what it means for U.S. counter-terrorism policy, and the future of Al Qaeda. The unrest […]

On Sunday, May 1st, an elite unit of U.S. Navy SEALs carried out a raid on a fortified home in Abottabad, Pakistan, during which Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by two American bullets.

Now that indefinite, unreviewable military detention at Guantanamo is no longer an option, policymakers will have to decide whether and how to detain suspected terrorists.