By Nathan A. Sales - It didn’t take long after 9/11 for the conventional wisdom to crystallize. The devastating terrorist attacks were almost immediately, and almost universally, chalked up to the intelligence community’s failure to share information. Yet if al Qaeda’s attempt to down Northwest flight 253 is any indication, the feds still haven’t learned how to connect the dots. […]

By Paul Rosenzweig - “We slipped up.” That’s what Patrick F. Kennedy, the Undersecretary of State for Management, said at a Senate hearing last week about the Christmas day bomb plot and the arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He has a gift for understatement. But the real question isn’t whether we “slipped up”—everyone knows we did. It’s rather how and […]

By Jonathan Abrams, NSJ Staff Editor, HLS 2012 On October 27th, the Ninth Circuit granted en banc review to an important case involving the “state secrets” privilege. The case, Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., 579 F.3d 943 (9th Cir. 2009), involves a lawsuit brought by five foreign nationals who claim they were part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition program.” The […]

By NSJ Staff Writer The House Judiciary Committee recently voted to reauthorize certain expiring provisions of the PATRIOT Act as part of the USA PATRIOT Amendments Act of 2009. The bill, H.R. 3845, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers, proposes privacy protections that in many respects go beyond those included in the bill that recently passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee. […]

By NSJ Staff Writer The November 8th shootings at Ft. Hood are less than a week old, and yet investigators and pundits are already interpreting what they see to be their deep-seated meaning. Officially, after two days of investigation, the FBI and the Army Criminal Investigation Command have come to the tentative conclusion that the attacks were not part of […]

By Mat Trachok, HLS 2012 NSJ Staff Writer What exactly is the nature of the cyberterrorist threat? How realistic is the prospect of nation-to-nation cyberwarfare? How should the government respond to and protect against such threats? What role should the law play in fighting cyberterrorism? On Wednesday, October 28th, the Harvard Law School National Security & Law Association and the […]

By Mary Ostberg, HLS 2012 NSJ Staff Writer On Friday, October 16, 2009, the United Kingdom’s High Court ruled that seven paragraphs of UK-U.S. exchanges detailing the alleged torture of Binyam Mohamed should be disclosed. In reversing its 2008 ruling, the High Court called the public interest in disclosing the paragraphs “overwhelming.” Mr. Mohamed, a British resident who was born […]

By NSJ Staff Writer The Obama Administration is one step closer to achieving its goal of closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay by January 22, 2010. On Tuesday, October 20, 2009, the Senate, by a vote of 79 to 19, passed the $44.1 billion budget for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes a provision that would permit the […]

By NSJ Staff Writer Today’s Wall Street Journal features an op-ed from former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in which he argues that alleged terrorist detainees should not be tried in US civilian courts. In particular, Mukasey criticizes Attorney General Holder’s August decision to try Ahmed Ghailani in New York rather than Guantanamo for the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and […]

By Anthony Palermo and Lindsay Schare “DADT is government-sanctioned discrimination. There are thousands of closeted gay women and men serving in our armed forces today, and we disrespect their service by clinging on to this insulting law,” said Captain Joe Lopez, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and a current JD/MBA candidate at Harvard Law […]