Wikileaks has revealed our military secrets on a wholesale and largely indiscriminate basis to our foes. We would be horrified if a foreign agent accomplished the same result.  more

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not some Bond villain, an errant super-criminal finally put behind bars. He led an organized network of foreigners abroad who were at war with us long before KSM’s actions pushed us into war with them. For those foreign terrorists, as opposed to their home-grown financiers or fellow travelers, our criminal justice system is ill-fitted.  more

The following are excerpts from Richard Klingler’s testimony on June 9, 2009 before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution.

The debate over indefinite detention often wrongly focuses on Guantanamo Bay. No matter how Guantanamo detainees are handled, the Obama Administration will continue, directly or indirectly, to detain hundreds if not thousands   more

For national security matters, the bad news was that David Souter never met an ACLU argument he didn’t like or an executive branch view he couldn’t brush off. The good news: unlike, say, Justice Stevens, Souter could never generate a new or powerful argument, or a clearly stated principle of law. 
Thus the risk in Souter’s resignation. It isn’t   more

The excerpts from Jack Goldsmith’s afterword to The Terror Presidency, like the book itself, raise extremely important questions of the proper allocation of power among the branches in the face of severe national security threats. The issue, less academically: does the President have the power to defend the nation effectively against our enemies, especially those who may   more