As the Obama Administration continues to expand the policies of the Bush Administration the newest theater of the War on Terror is your checking account. The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank [...]

The United Nations special rapporteur for counterterrorism will lead an inquiry into civilian deaths from US drone strikes around the world, to determine whether the strikes violate international human rights and humanitarian laws. The announcement was made by Ben Emmerson QC, a UN special rapporteur, in a speech to Harvard law school in which he [...]

Greg Miller will shine a light on the new American way of war for the next three days, with a multi-part series in the Washington Post on the kill list, the way in which terrorist suspects are selected for death from above by Predator drones. The goal here appears to be to codify the techniques into executive branch practice, for turnkey use by any current or future Administration.

Tonight’s debate is supposed to be focused mainly on the economy, but the Romney campaign has worked hard to get the Benghazi consulate attack into the conversation. And given the shifting story from the White House and the potential implications, that might be a good idea. House Republicans gave a boost to this argument by [...]

Today the US State Department pulled out all of their government personnel from Benghazi – essential personnel and non-essential alike. In the wake of the attack on the US consulate, they have determined the city too unsafe, even after residents drove militia groups operating in Benghazi from their bases. The FBI has still not reached [...]

US intelligence agencies have officially described the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11 that killed four Americans as a planned terrorist attack carried out by militants friendly to Al Qaeda. That’s distinct from it being an Al Qaeda attack, though the decentralized (and also battered) nature of the organization means [...]

Over two dozen antiwar members of the House have asked the Administration for the legal justification for the Predator drone program, in particular the “signature” strikes which do not target an individual but a general set of suspected terrorist activities abroad. These signature strikes count all adult males operating in the area of the strike [...]

Scarecrow has already gone on in this space about the New York Times’ big takeout today about the “kill list” – the President’s leadership in presiding over a list of suspected terrorists that the US then assassinates with Predator drone strikes. There’s a lot that can be said about this article, most of it from [...]

The one-candidate Presidential election in Yemen happened today. You’ll never guess who won! Yemenis voted Tuesday to instate their U.S.-backed vice president as the new head of state tasked with steering the country out of a crisis created by an anti-government uprising that has raged for a year. The vote can hardly be called an [...]

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 [...]

A couple weeks ago, Adm. William McRaven of the Joint Special Operations Command wondered if there was even a standard system for capturing and interrogating terrorist suspects in the Obama era. Now we know that there’s a template – you hold the suspect at sea for months until you figure out a way to charge [...]