This new book by Benjamin Wittes is said to be required reading.

Six years after the September 11 attacks, America is losing a crucial front in the ongoing war on terror. It is losing not to Al Qaeda but to its own failure to construct a set of laws that will protect the American people—its military and executive branch, as well as its citizens—in the midst of a conflict unlike any it has faced in the past. Now, in the twilight of President Bush’s administration, Brookings Institution fellow Benjamin Wittes offers a vigorous analysis of the troubling legal legacy of the Bush administration as well as that of the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court. Law and the Long War tells as no book has before the story of how America came to its current impasse in the debate over liberty, human rights, and counterterrorism and draws a road map for how the country and the next president might move forward.

Moving beyond the stale debate between those fixated on the executive branch as the key architect of counterterrorism policy and those who see the judiciary as the essential guarantor of liberty against governmental abuses, Wittes argues that the essential problem is that the Bush administration did not seek—and Congress did not write—new laws to authorize and regulate the tough presidential actions this war would require. In a line of argument that is sure to spark controversy, Wittes reveals an administration whose most significant failure was not that it was too aggressive in the substance of its action, but rather that it tried to shoulder the burden of aggressiveness on its own without seeking the support of other branches of government. Using startling new empirical research on the detainee population at Guantánamo Bay, Wittes avers that many of the administration’s actions were far more defensible than its many critics believed and actually warranted congressional support. Yet by resisting both congressional and judicial involvement in its controversial decisions, the executive branch ironically prevented both of those branches from sharing in the political accountability for necessary actions that challenged traditional American notions of due process and humane treatment.

Boldly offering a new way forward, Wittes concludes that the path toward fairer, more accountable rules for a conflict without end lies in the development of new bodies of law covering detention, interrogation, trial, and surveillance. Sure to discomfort and ignite debate, Law and the Long War is the first nonideological argument about a controversial issue of vital importance to all Americans.

Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror

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The Government Accountability Office (GAO) today sustained the Boeing Company’s protest of the Department of the Air Force’s award of a contract to Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation for KC-X aerial refueling tankers. Boeing challenged the Air Force’s technical and cost evaluations, conduct of discussions, and source selection decision.

“Our review of the record led us to conclude that the Air Force had made a number of significant errors that could have affected the outcome of what was a close competition between Boeing and Northrop Grumman. We therefore sustained Boeing’s protest,” said Michael R. Golden, the GAO’s managing associate general counsel for procurement law. “We also denied a number of Boeing’s challenges to the award to Northrop Grumman, because we found that the record did not provide us with a basis to conclude that the agency had violated the legal requirements with respect to those challenges.”

The GAO recommended that the Air Force reopen discussions with the offerors, obtain revised proposals, re-evaluate the revised proposals, and make a new source selection decision, consistent with the GAO’s decision. The agency also made a number of other recommendations including that, if the Air Force believed that the solicitation, as reasonably interpreted, does not adequately state its needs, the Air Force should amend the solicitation prior to conducting further discussions with the offerors; that if Boeing’s proposal is ultimately selected for award, the Air Force should terminate the contract awarded to Northrop Grumman; and that the Air Force reimburse Boeing the costs of filing and pursuing the protest, including reasonable attorneys’ fees. By statute, the Air Force is given 60 days to inform the GAO of the Air Force’s actions in response to GAO’s recommendations.

GAO Sustains Boeing Bid Protest: Agency Recommends Air Force Reopen the Bid Process

The U.S. sheep industry is complex, multifaceted, and rooted in history and tradition. The dominant feature of sheep production in the United States, and, thus, the focus of much producer and policy concern, has been the steady decline in sheep and lamb inventories since the mid-1940s. Although often described as an industry in decline, this report concludes that a better description of the current U.S. sheep industry is an industry in transition.

Changes in the Sheep Industry in the United States: Making the Transition from Tradition

In response to The Spy Who Blogged Me, from the May issue of The Walrus:

Niedzviecki asks why nobody seems to care, and it’s partly that these systems have been implemented in an incremental, technocratic manner, outside ordinary democratic processes, and therefore off the radar of the public and even elected representatives. But as he indicates, there is also widespread apathy about, if not outright acceptance of, increased surveillance in Western countries, none of which have seriously debated the full implications. With the recent speed of change, we are still too busy playing with these toys. We haven’t figured out whether any of them actually makes us safer, nor at what point their potential benefits outweigh the harm they wreak on our democratic way of life.Citizens are the proverbial frog swimming in water the state is slowly bringing to a boil. We thought we learned something with the case of Maher Arar. Sadly, it will take a lot of John Smiths being detained, rendered, denied jobs or mobility across the border, or linked to crimes they did not commit before a critical mass of citizens wakes up to the fact that we are living in a society where the freedoms we once took for granted are subject to new regimes of permission, and where any of us — Muslim or not — could be swept off the street based on a flawed “risk assessment.”

The Walrus » Letters » July/August 2008

How we learned to stop worrying and love surveillance

The Spy Who Blogged Me

Observing government surveillance of individual citizens from her perch in Quebec, human-rights lawyer Webb wonders how long democracy can survive when power-hungry officials are able to persecute innocent men and women as well as the occasional terrorist. Webb focuses her criticism on the governments of Canada and the United States, but persuasively documents international cooperation on illegal, or at least immoral, high-tech information gathering. Webb devotes substantial space to the National Security Agency of the U.S and its monitoring of international telephone traffic despite apparent lawlessness and ethical violations. Webb also writes in detail about how governments, following the lead of the Bush administration, use "terrorism" as an excuse to "serve agendas that go far beyond security from terrorism--namely the suppression of dissent, harsh immigration and refugee policies, increased law enforcement power," and the consolidation of political power within governments and in exerting control over national populations. Dense writing makes the book difficult to follow at times, and the alarmist tone is, well, alarming. But it does ring true.

Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World

Trillions and Zillions of Ideas.

Consciousness is a Ball.

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

David Lynch, on Ideas (and TM)

Nicholas Carr:

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Security and stability in the 21st century have little to do with traditional power politics, military conflict between states, and issues of grand strategy. Instead they revolve around the disruptive consequences of globalization, declining governance, inequality, urbanization, and nonstate violent actors. The author explores the implications of these issues for the United States. He proposes a rejection of “stateocentric” assumptions and an embrace of the notion of the New Middle Ages characterized, among other things, by competing structures, fragmented authority, and the rise of “no-go” zones. He also suggests that the world could tip into a New Dark Age. He identifies three major options for the United States in responding to such a development. The author argues that for interventions to have any chance of success the United States will have to move to a trans-agency approach. But even this might not be sufficient to stanch the chaos and prevent the continuing decline of the Westphalian state.

From the New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age: The Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy