Daphne Eviatar

On Monday, the Supreme Court handed down a list of cases it would (& would not) review next term. One was noticeably absent from the list: Latif v. Obama.

Perhaps the most closely watched Guantanamo-related case since the Supreme Court confirmed detainees' right to judicial review in Boumediene...

Brilliant legal minds have been debating the arcane details of proposed amendments to the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act for the last 48 hours or so, but I'm afraid the general public may be far less aware of the chicanery going in Congress right now than many of...

When even the former chief prosecutor opposes a trial in the military commissions he headed, there's something seriously wrong.

Since their creation, the Guantanamo Bay military commissions have been a political football, with Bush and then Obama Administration officials supporting their use, conservatives in Congress...

The strategic partnership agreement signed Sunday between the United States and Afghanistan is being heralded as an important breakthrough following months of intense negotiations. But once again, the agreement isn't public. And as is the case for all these recent U.S.-Afghan agreements intended to secure the...

On April 5, the Defense Department quietly sent a report to Congress indicating how it intends to implement a new law requiring lawyers and judges for detainees held in long-term U.S. military custody. As expected, DoD largely wrote the new rights out of existence, ensuring they'd be accorded...

Over the weekend, independent human rights advocates in Afghanistan released yet another report documenting systematic torture by Afghan police and security services. The report from the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and Open Society Foundations reveals evidence that U.S. forces in Afghanistan have continued to transfer suspected insurgents...

It's nice to hear that President Obama called Afghan President Hamid Karzai today to congratulate him on the birth of his new daughter. Among other subjects that reportedly came up were the pace of the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and the presence of foreign troops in Afghan...

The latest dust-up between the U.S. government and Afghan president Hamid Karzai involves the treatment of some 3000 prisoners the U.S. is holding in Afghanistan. The lack of due process for detainees at Bagram has been a problem since the prison opened, and was documented most recently in...

This time last year, President Obama responded to the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act with a signing statement. Objecting to the law's restrictions on the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the U.S. for trial or to their home countries, the president promised: "My Administration will work with the...

FBI Director Robert Mueller just this morning told the Senate that he fears the proposed law will create confusion over who has authority to investigate terrorism cases.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the National Defense Authorization Act will restrain the Executive Branch's ability to use...

When the U.S. military first briefed the media on the new Army Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collector Operations in 2006, a reporter asked whether it was really a good idea to make public the full array of interrogation techniques that the U.S. military was allowed to use.

The Obama administration will mark next year's 10-year anniversary of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay with the trial of a man tortured by the CIA, locked up for a decade without trial, and accused of "war crimes" committed long before the United States was even at war.

That's...

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the U.S. government doesn't actually know who it's killing with many of its drone strikes in Pakistan. That suggests the United States may well be violating international law.

As the Journal reports, the bulk of the CIA's drone strikes...

In the days after the so-called "underwear bomber" tried to take down a plane over Detroit on Christmas 2009, critics of the Obama adminstration were all over the national news decrying the decision to read the would-be bomber his Miranda rights and try him in a U.S. federal court.

When...

Though President Obama received plenty of praise from Republicans right after the killing of the U.S. citizen and Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki last Friday, a growing number of former Bush administration officials and policy wonks across the political spectrum are calling on Obama to provide a more detailed legal justification...

Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has sent a terrific letter to his fellow Senators Carl Levin and John McCain on the Armed Services Committee explaining why he won't be bringing the Committee's reported version of the National Defense Authorization Act to the Senate floor for a vote until a...

Last week's killing of the notorious cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen seems so far like a clear political victory for President Obama.

Even the Republican House Homeland Security Chairman, Peter King, lauded this latest targeted killing by U.S. Special Forces as "a tremendous tribute to...

As if we didn't have enough wars already, a battle is now reportedly taking place within the Obama administration over whether the U.S. government has the legal authority to kill low-level suspected terrorist supporters in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere outside of Afghanistan and Iraq, where the U.S. now...

Crossposted from the blog of Human Rights First

A month from now, we will mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11. In addition to memorial gatherings and speeches, we're sure to hear politicians vowing "never again": they will protect the homeland by sending the U.S. military to fight terrorism...

As Rep. Peter King (R-NY) led his latest hearing about the radicalization of Muslims in the United States last week, it turns out a radical of a different sort, based in Brooklyn, was plotting to spread his anti-Muslim message across the United States.

The New York Times revealed...