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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

By Richard Fontaine and Micah Springut* - As the hundreds of American and South Korean officials involved in formulating and executing policy towards the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea over the years will attest, theirs is a difficult endeavor. Pyongyang’s actions and intentions are notoriously inscrutable, and the North’s alternating pattern of threats, bluster, and occasional concessions are as treacherous […]

Click here to listen to the full debate By Mat Trachok, NSJ Staff Editor - On April 19th, Professors Jack Goldsmith and Phil Heymann of Harvard Law School debated what the Obama administration should do with alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM). According to both Goldsmith and Heymann, the United States has three options available: it can try KSM […]

By Larkin Reynolds - On Monday, April 5th, The New York Times published a story about a controversial video now known in blogging circles as the “‘Collateral Murder’ video.” The video was posted on WikiLeaks.org, a Web site known for its disclosures of sometimes-classified government information. Because the tape WikiLeaks obtained had been encrypted, they needed help to descramble it. […]

By Ronak D. Desai, NSJ Staff Editor - Washington and New Delhi last week announced the successful completion of a nuclear agreement granting India rights to reprocess nuclear fuel imported from the United States, moving the two countries one step closer to implementing a historic civilian nuclear deal that has become the centerpiece of the widely touted U.S.-India “strategic partnership.” […]

By Jonathan Abrams, NSJ Staff Editor - The Justice Department, in an attempt to bolster its argument that suspected terrorists can be tried in civilian courts, released a report earlier this month that includes a chart detailing over 400 convictions of terrorists obtained in such courts. But this effort has not halted GOP criticism of the wisdom of civilian trials […]

By Jonathan Abrams, NSJ Staff Editor - There is hope that a tool for tracking terrorists’ finances that was effectively eliminated by the European Parliament in February will come back online this summer. The Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) was started after the September 11th attacks as a way to identify, track, and pursue suspected terrorists and their finances. As […]