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Philip Alston's report on targeted killings, delivered to the United Nations' Human Rights Council this week, has received a lot of attention for being the first big takedown of the United States' clandestine drone program.

Alston makes a measured and reasoned legal attack on the general use of targeted killings by governments against non-state actors, but he specifically criticizes the American drone campaign in the Middle East, expressing doubt that the U.S. can claim to be in an armed conflict with Al-Qaeda and concluding that, "[o]utside the context of armed conflict, the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal." 

But Howard Koh, the top Obama administration official to attempt a public legal defense of the use of drones, has invoked America's "armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces" as a justification for taking out individual fighters and leaders. So who's right when everybody's wrong?

Before I round up the latest facts about confessed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, 30, I want to address one particularly intriguing paragraph from the New York Times' Tuesday profile of the financial analyst-turned-wannabe jihadi:

George LaMonica, a 35-year-old computer consultant, said he bought his two-bedroom condominium in Norwalk, Conn., from Mr. Shahzad for $261,000 in May 2004. A few weeks after he moved in, Mr. LaMonica said, investigators from the national Joint Terrorism Task Force interviewed him, asking for details of the transaction and for information about Mr. Shahzad. It struck Mr. LaMonica as unusual, but he said detectives told him they were simply "checking everything out."

We all know that one's nationality can automatically arouse suspicion and trigger surveillance these days, but counterterrorism officers interviewing the guy who bought Shahzad's house, in 2004, four years after Shahzad immigrated from Pakistan and was already well into his university studies here? Doesn't it seem like they'd need a pretty good reason to be that interested?

(Updated below)
First of all, Majlis readers, I'd like to make a bit of an apology for our lackadaisical blogging over here in recent days. As many of you know, Gregg landed in Doha late last week to begin working for Al-Jazeera English, so he is understandably wrapped up in administrative paperwork, not to mention acclimating to the "unseasonably cool" 93-degree Gulf heat. Rest assured, he'll be back in fighting form soon.

Meanwhile, as many of you probably don't know, I too will be heading off to Doha this summer to join Gregg at Al-Jazeera. We'll both be on staff, reporting for their website, but you can expect that our asinine Middle East analysis and commentary will continue, here at the Majlis or elsewhere. So please excuse our scatterbrains in the meantime.

With that out of the way, let's take a look at the most recent news emerging about Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American who has reportedly confessed to trying to detonate a car bomb in New York City's Times Square.

Pakistani airstrikes killed nearly 100 "suspected militants" in two northwest districts on the border with Afghanistan on Saturday in an effort to continue to battle insurgents after hard-fought campaigns to the south.

One of the strikes occurred near the town of Bezoti, in the Orakzai district, where militants had tried to capture a military stronghold during a midnight attack on Friday.

Armed men attacked a Pakistani government checkpoint near the U.S. consulate in Peshawar yesterday, leaving three local guards and four attackers dead. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), associated with the Mehsud clan and Hafiz Gul Bahadur, claimed responsibility.

After the jump, new video from Britain's Channel 4 (via the New York Times' Lede Blog):

When Pakistani Attorney General Anwar Mansoor became his country's top law enforcement officer in December, it was a tough moment: That month, Pakistan's Supreme Court struck down the two-year-old "National Reconciliation Ordinance," which had thrown legal cover over potentially hundreds of the country's elite for crimes ranging from corruption to murder between 1986 and 1999.

The Court, led by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, also ordered the revival of a raft of cases that had been abandoned at the onset of the ordinance, putting Pakistan's power brokers -- some still serving in government -- in potential jeopardy.

Mansoor, it appears, was unable to push through the opposition that would naturally rise up in opposition to such investigations.

Airport security procedures implemented after the Christmas Day "underpants" bombing attempt that subjected travelers from 14 countries to mandatory extra screening will be scrapped in favor of a more "intelligence-based" system, the New York Times' Jeff Zeleny reported on Thursday.

The questionable new security practice, thrown into place after the Obama administration was embarrassed by its inability to prevent Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding a U.S.-bound plane with explosives sewn into his briefs, affected mostly Muslim travelers.

As the United States plays a lethal game of drone chess in the skies above Pakistan's semi-lawless northwestern tribal areas, and the government of the country attempts to plot out an end game where it retains influence in Afghanistan, a restive, decades-old independence movement is growing bolder and angrier in Pakistan's large, energy-rich Balochistan province, Madiha Tahir reports in the National's Review.

A tribal militia, or lashkar, has battled Taliban fighters in Pakistan's northwest Kurram Agency this week, killing 37, ahead of a massive tribal gathering on Saturday in Peshawar to decide how best to deal with the Taliban.

A U.S. drone fired three to five missiles at a "militant compound" near the village of Datta Khel in Pakistan's North Waziristan province today, killing at least eight suspected pro-Taliban fighters.

When the U.S. Transportation Security Administration in January instituted mandatory airport pat-downs and bag searches for citizens of 14 countries -- all but two of them in the Middle East and all but one majority Muslim -- you knew it was just a matter of time before the institutionalized racial profiling caused an outcry.

On Sunday, a group of Pakistani lawmakers who had been invited to visit the United States and meet with Obama administration bigwigs refused to go through the additional screening in Ronald Reagan National Airport on their way to a flight to New Orleans, according to the New York Times. Pakistan is on the of the 14 countries whose citizens have been selected for more scrutiny. The legislators returned to Pakistan, where they've been hailed for their actions.

There's scant information on the wires this morning, but NBC News and the AP are both reporting that a U.S. drone fired at least two missiles at a house in Miram Shah in Pakistan's North Waziristan province on Monday.

The AP reported three dead and one wounded, while NBC said five were killed and four wounded in the attack. Neither outlet reported their identities, though the Washington Post said that three foreigners were among the dead.

Also in Pakistan today, a car bomb struck a police building in Lahore where security forces interrogate "high-value suspects," killing 13 people and wounding 61, including civilians. The Tehrik-e-Taliban claimed responsibility and said that the attack "was to avenge drone attacks and military operations in the tribal areas.

The New America Foundation's "dronology" tag-team of Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann released a new paper on the U.S. drone campaign in northwest Pakistan last week, and the accompanying Web page devoted to tracking all strikes since 2004 is the most exhaustive open source account of the drone war I've yet seen.

The Google Map documenting six years of strikes, sourced from publicly accessible press accounts, is highly useful, but the news value of the new NAF report is Bergen and Tiedemann's conclusion that the rate of civilian deaths from drone attacks is somewhere around 32 percent.

A drone missile strike in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan on Wednesday killed Mohammed Qari Zafar, a Taliban commander wanted for planning a 2006 bombing at the U.S. consulate in Karachi, which left diplomat David Foy and three Pakistanis dead, according to Pakistani officials.

Zafar was the operational commander of the Fedayeen-e-Islam, "an alliance between the Pakistani Taliban, the anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, and Jaish-e-Mohammed," according to Bill Roggio of the Long War Journal.

Wednesday's strike was the 18th of the year and the 19th since a Dec. 30 suicide bomber struck a CIA team in Khost, Afghanistan, killing seven officers who were involved in planning operations against the Taliban in Pakistan's border regions. The Obama Administration is on pace for around 115 strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan this year.

Over the weekend, Pakistan's Supreme Court blocked two judicial nominees proposed by President Asif Ali Zardari after Zardari passed over the man who had been favored by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. At issue in the dispute is whether the president must confer with the chief justice before making judicial nominations, an area in which there is some legal disagreement, according to the Washington Post.

And yet here's Pakistani political analyst Hasan Askari, talking to the AFP (via Dawn): "If the Supreme Court goes ahead and tries to pull [Zardari] down, then perhaps the system will collapse ... and perhaps there will not be constitutional government in Pakistan."

Is it me, or does every seemingly technical bureaucratic maneuver in Pakistan now come loaded with tons of questionable baggage?

Apologies for taking a day to cover the roadside bombing of a U.S. convoy in Pakistan, but sometimes good things come to those who wait: in this case, a Jeremy Scahill article in the Nation that provides some nice context to the first-ever U.S. military deaths in the country.

A swarm of U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles launched what may have been the heaviest single bombardment in the history of the pilotless drone program today in Pakistan's North Waziristan province.

"Up to eight US drones fired some 18 missiles at multiple militant targets in Datta Khel village," a senior security official told the AFP. The report didn't say if the official was American or Pakistani. The attack "was the heaviest ever in terms of the number of missiles fired," according to Reuters. It left at least 10 suspected militants dead, including three foreigners, though that toll could rise.

Today's attack in Datta Khel, the stronghold of Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur, is the 13th drone strike in Pakistan or Afghanistan this year and the 14th since a Dec. 30, Taliban-led suicide bombing killed seven CIA agents at a Forward Operating Base in the Afghan town of Khost. So far in 2010, the United States has launched a drone attack around once every two-and-a-half days.

Pakistani tribesmen in Miranshah claimed on Wednesday to have shot down another U.S. drone, according to Press TV and other Web sites. If true, it would be the second such incident in five days: A drone crashed in the same area of North Waziristan on Sunday, and local reports said tribesmen were congratulating each other for shooting it down.

Meanwhile, there have been no reports of drone missile strikes in Afghanistan or Pakistan for a week -- a marked drop-off following an early January blitz. Between Dec. 30, when a suicide bomber struck a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan, and Jan. 19, the date of the most recent drone attack, the United States was launching drone strikes almost every other day.

As the Jan. 28 London conference on Afghanistan approaches, the government of President Hamid Karzai is playing up its ambitious new plan to lure "moderate" Taliban fighters away from the Islamist movement and toward reintegration with Afghan civil society.

But bringing the Taliban in from the cold and securing the movement's political participation is fraught with obstacles, including the potential recalcitrance of perceived hardliners such as Mullah Mohammed Omar and the need to balance the desires of various and competing power centers, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, Karzai's own government and the U.S. military.

A U.S. drone aircraft fired multiple missiles into a former religious school in North Waziristan on Thursday, killing a handful of suspected Taliban militants and likely injuring Hakimullah Mehsud, the man who has led the Tehrik-e-Taliban in Pakistan (TTP) for the past five months.

The attack took place near the town of Razmak in North Waziristan, a division of the semi-autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where America is now concentrating its efforts against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The strike on Mehsud was the eighth of the year in Afghanistan and Pakistan and was preceded by two on Wednesday that killed 13 people in the Helmand province of Afghanistan.

There was also a ninth strike on Friday, again in North Waziristan, killing five suspected militants, according to the AFP. At this rate, the United States is on pace to launch 195 drone strikes in 2010, a vast increase over any previous year.