The Week That Was: All of Lawfare In One Post
Big week down at Guantanamo. Wells was up to Fort Meade, covering this week's hearings in United States v. Mohammed et al, the 9/11 trial.
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Big week down at Guantanamo. Wells was up to Fort Meade, covering this week's hearings in United States v. Mohammed et al, the 9/11 trial. Hearings were held on Monday (sort of), Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Tuesday didn't happen.
We noted the release of yet another FISC order to the public, this one dated August 29 and written by Judge Claire Eagan. Ben and Jane summarized it, and wrote a follow-up in response to critics of their interpretation. Meanwhile, Jack called attention to a letter provided to Firedoglake from the head of the NSA and its Deputy Director to the "NSA/CSS family"---one that publicly agrees with Ben's criticisms of the administration's response to the Snowden leaks.
Ben did an experiment in CLE, a West LegalEdcenter webcast focused on the NSA disclosures, alongside Steven Bradbury and Shane Harris. The webcast will be archived available for those who want to satisfy their CLE requirements with Lawfare material. We will provide a link to the archived program once it is available.
Some D.C. Circuit news this week too: I previewed, and Wells and I recapped, the oral argument before a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit in a trio of habeas cases brought by detainees held at Bagram airfield in Afghanistan. And Jane summed up the appellants' reply brief in Aamer v. Obama, the forced-feeding case that's currently before the D.C. Circuit.
Meanwhile, Nathan Myhrvold's recently-published paper on strategic terrorism, one of the Lawfare Research Paper Series, is making the rounds---Ben noted this Shane Harris piece in Foreign Policy about it.
And Ken reviewed two books about the use of chemical weapons in Iraq, a timely subject if you ask me. The books are A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja, by Joost Hiltermann, and Genocide in Iraq; The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds, by George Black.
And that was the week that was.
Raffaela Wakeman is a Senior Director at In-Q-Tel. She started her career at the Brookings Institution, where she spent five years conducting research on national security, election reform, and Congress. During this time she was also the Associate Editor of Lawfare. From there, Raffaela practiced law at the U.S. Department of Defense for four years, advising her clients on privacy and surveillance law, cybersecurity, and foreign liaison relationships. She departed DoD in 2019 to join the Majority Staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where she oversaw the Intelligence Community’s science and technology portfolios, cybersecurity, and surveillance activities. She left HPSCI in May 2021 to join IQT.
Raffaela received her BS and MS in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009 and her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 2015, where she was recognized for her commitment to public service with the Joyce Chiang Memorial Award. While at the Department of Defense, she was the inaugural recipient of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s General Counsel Award for exhibiting the highest standards of leadership, professional conduct, and integrity.
