Following up on this item, it’s worth noting that, while an aggressive counter-terrorism policy may be publicly popular, there are indications that it’s completely unnecessary. Kevin Drum has this chart showing that indictments for homegrown support for terrorist attacks have declined significantly. In addition, violent attacks carried out by Muslim-Americans in 2011 were almost non-existent. [...]

A new poll shows that the lack of forceful opposition to Administration counter-terrorism policies, especially from Congressional Democrats, has led to them becoming broadly popular. This is true even for controversial policies like the continued presence of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, or drone strikes abroad. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that Obama, [...]

On the foreign policy front, the biggest development of 2011 was not the European crisis, which could still lead to a breakup of the common currency. It was not even the Arab spring. It was the development of the new American way of war, the unaccountable, secret, shadow operation being undertaken throughout the world in [...]

An amendment from Dianne Feinstein passed as part of the Senate’s defense authorization bill yesterday punts one small aspect of detention policy to the courts, namely whether the US military can indefinitely hold an American citizen. Adam Serwer, who has had excellent coverage of the detention pieces of the defense bill, had this report: Can [...]

For months now, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have spoken out about the Justice Department’s interpretation – wrongful interpretation, in their view – of the Patriot Act, which has led to some unnamed manner of mischief in terms of civil liberties deprivation through mass data collection. Wyden and Udall have implored DoJ to explain [...]

Charlie Savage digs out the process for authorizing the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, killed in Yemen late last month. He wasn’t able to obtain the secret memo from the Office of Legal Counsel authorizing the placing of Awlaki on a kill list, but he had some of the memo described to him: The secret document [...]

This was a good day for this poll to come out. A new Gallup survey finds that Americans believe government has overreached. The irony of that coming out today, when the US completed the executive assassination without trial of Anwar al-Awlaki, even though the survey results have nothing to do with that kind of executive [...]

If you knew where to look, you could find a healthy debate about today’s announcement of the government-sponsored killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen. Over at Wired there’s a debate about the Constitutionality of the drone strike, between law professors Charlie Dunlap and Mary Ellen O’Connell, who says that “The United States is not [...]

The fact is that the entire US program of extra-judicial assassinations by drone requires a bit more study and debate, but this is especially true when the targets are US citizens. In that case, the Constitution comes into play, and the right of due process of the law. But we never really had such a [...]

Amidst the inevitable 9-11 retrospectives, I feel like only the Los Angeles Times is putting the past ten years in the proper perspective. Because the longest-lasting legacy of the 9-11 attacks is clearly the terror industry it spawned. Over the weekend the LAT looked at the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on absurd [...]

I know this is normally The Dissenter’s beat, but I’ve grown pretty concerned at the shift of all law enforcement organizations into anti-terror operations. We have two more examples of that today. First, Charlie Savage writes that the FBI has stepped up their counter-terror operations. Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been more [...]