Legal Policy Board

The Defense Department today released the roster for the Defense Legal Policy Board, a panel chartered earlier this year to provide advice on an array of complex legal policy matters. Former DOD General Counsel Judith Miller will chair the panel, which is launching a review of military justice in combat zones.

"We know that, over the last 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, bad things have happened involving combat excesses and innocent civilians in deployed areas," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta writes in a July 30 memo to the board. "The abuses have been rare among our professional fighting force, but they became huge flash points that threatened to undermine our entire mission and the foundation of our relationship with the host government and its people." For offenses that take place abroad, where U.S. forces are operating alongside civilians, it is "critical that our system of military justice be efficient, fair, dependable and credible," Panetta writes.

The roster and the memo are together here.

Inside the Pentagon broke the news of the board's creation in April. At the time, the Pentagon had no comment on who would serve on the board or the specific matters the panel might address. Speaking to reporters today, DOD General Counsel Jeh Johnson acknowledged the board would likely begin other reviews in the near future, but he declined to be more specific.