Hello and welcome to episode one of the National Security Law Podcast, brought to you by the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. I'm Bobby Chesney.

And I'm Steve Lottet. We are both professors here at the University of Texas School of Law. We've been friends for a long time and Mets fans for even longer.

And we've been thinking for a while that we ought to put together a podcast given how important the issues are in our area,

given how often they come up and given how much of the public discourse, Bobby, is folks shouting at each other and tweeting past each other.

It's true. You often can hear really loudly what one side thinks and really loudly what the other side thinks. What you don't often hear is two people who do often disagree talking civilly to one another about exactly where they might disagree. And lo and behold, we often find the disagreement isn't so wide after all. And so the aim of the podcast is to provide a timely and up-to-date review by some law-oriented observers of national security developments who are coming at it from slightly different perspectives, but with a lot of mutual respect. And so that's what we're aiming for on the podcast.

Eventually also we're hoping to have, you know, some production values, maybe some music.

Overrated. Maybe a name that's a little more interesting than the National Security Law Podcast.

It's descriptive. It works for Stuart Becker and the cyber law podcast. It ought to work for us.

I don't know how I feel about a rule where if it works for Stewart Baker, it works for us, but...

It works for Stuart Baker, it works for us. It works for me. All right. So the reason why we're actually jumping onto the airwaves now when we're sort of the not

quite ready for primetime players is as we record this podcast on Wednesday afternoon, January

25th, we're at the end of an interesting news day in the world of national security law,

highlighted by a really significant story this

morning, first broken by the New York Times as Charlie Savage, soon reported elsewhere by the

Washington Post and other outlets, about a purported draft executive order that President Trump

is considering that's titled, so far as we can tell,

the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants.

Now it's worth stressing that between when that story broke this morning

and when we're recording this podcast,

the White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer

has said from the podium of the White House briefing room

that this document is, quote quote not a White House document

...