Ken Anderson and Ben Wittes, two good friends of Dead Drop, are embarking on an intriguing and from my perspective quite welcome new project. They’re writing a book that will pull together all the significant speeches Obama administration officials have given on national security law, and then “weave it all back together, creating a synthetic account of the administration’s views that is worth more collectively than the sum of its parts.”
Called Speaking the Law, it will be “a kind of handbook on the framework for counterterrorism,” using administration officials’ own words as the foundation. “Consider it the White Paper the administration has never issued,” say Ken and Ben.
I suspect Obama administration officials themselves will be among this book’s most avid readers, given the authors’ premise, and that journalists and scholars will find it useful as well:
“There is a myth that the administration has had little to say on the subject of its counterterrorism authorities, especially targeted killing and drones–largely because it has declined to release publicly its Office of Legal Counsel targeted killing memoranda. Part of the point of Speaking the Law is to show how wrong this myth really is. The administration has actually said a huge amount. It’s just that it has said a great deal of it orally, and has broken up its utterances among a number of different statements.”
The authors are publishing the chapters serially online, and then the Hoover Institution will put out a hardcover version when all the work is finished. The introduction and first chapter are available now.
