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Beyond The Battlefield, Beyond Al Qaeda: The Destabilizing Legal Architecture Of Counterterrorism, Robert M. Chesney

Michigan Law Review

By the end of the first post-9/11 decade, the legal architecture associated with the U.S. government’s use of military detention and lethal force in the counterterrorism setting had come to seem relatively stable, supported by a remarkable degree of cross-branch and cross-party consensus (manifested by legislation, judicial decisions, and consistency of policy across two very different presidential administrations). That stability is certain to collapse during the second post-9/11 decade, however, thanks to the rapid erosion of two factors that have played a critical role in generating the recent appearance of consensus: the existence of an undisputed armed conflict in Afghanistan, …