As the long post-9/11 era of U.S. counter-terrorism enters its third decade, it has grown easier to identify distinct genres within the sizable body of work assessing the legal costs of U.S. actions. One body of work has focused squarely on the damage counter-terrorism policies have inflicted on individual civil liberties and human rights, including how expansive surveillance compromised the right to privacy, how torture and abuse undermined the promise of human dignity, how indefinite detention of some individuals violated the right to liberty, and how particular acts of targeted killing violated the right to life. Such policies implicated, and at times transgressed, a long list of prohibitive rules codified in domestic and international law and designed to limit the kinds of things governments can do to people in the name of national security.
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