Today's Headlines and Commentary

Several stories have emerged about U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's ruling that the State Department doesn't have to make classified cables public irrespective of what WikiLeaks does with them. Here are the New York Times and the Associated Press. Carrie Johnson of National Public Radio tells us that U.S. District Judge Ellen S. Huvelle has ordered the release of Ali Mohamed Ali, a Somali pirate the government can't charge with much. The Times reports that Al Qaeda is  increasingly becoming involved in the conflict in Syria---a sign that the United States might not be able to turn a blind eye for much longer. President Obama made a big foreign policy speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on Monday, according to the Associated Press and just about every other news outlet. Here is the transcript, and the video is below.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney also spoke to the VFW. Here is the transcript of Romney's speech, and the video is below.

In his speech, Romney criticized Obama's handling of national security issues and "called for an independent investigation into claims the White House had leaked national security information for President Barack Obama’s political gain," reports the Associated Press. David Axelrod, a top aide of President Obama's, replies to Romney's leak accusations in this story from the Hill. Speaking of all this leak business, the Senate Intelligence Committee passed the intelligence authorization bill yesterday, which included measures to crack down on leakers, as well as improvements to "non-disclosure agreements and the penalties for not abiding by them," says the Hill. Dawinder S. Sidhu, assistant professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law, argues that Jesse Holmes, the alleged Aurora, CO movie theater shooter is not just a crazy person, but a terrorist. In related opinion, Holman W. Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal ponders whether Total Information Awareness would have stopped Jesse Holmes. BBC News tells us that the suicide bomber in Bulgaria "was part of a sophisticated group of conspirators." Not much else is known about him or this sophisticated group, but here's the story. The CIA just "found" a stack of documents that were "inadvertently overlooked" in response to a FOIA request filed by Judicial Watch for documents that the CIA shared with Hollywood filmmakers about the Osama bin Laden raid, Josh Gerstein at the Politico reports. Scott Shane of the Times examines trade-offs between civil liberties and national security. The Hill reports that a bipartisan group of senators met this morning to discuss how to move forward on cybersecurity legislation. Al Jazeera reports that the EU has rejected an Israeli request to add Hezbollah to its terror organization list because Hezbollah is just that warm and fuzzy, apparently. For more interesting law and security-related articles, follow us on Twitter, visit the Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law’s Security Law Brief, Fordham Law’s Center on National Security’s Morning Brief, and Fordham Law’s Cyber Brief. Email us noteworthy articles we may have missed at wakeman.lawfare@gmail.com and  singh.lawfare@gmail.com.