The judicial farce continues:An appeals court has upheld the 19-year prison sentence of a Rwandan human rights activist on genocide-related charges, failing to address the errors of a lower court judgment that violated Rwandan law and fair trial standards, Human Rights Watch said today. [snip] The law that established gacaca requires judges who have had a past conflict with an accused to...
Further to my earlier post -- and Jacob Katz Cogan's lengthy elaboration on it -- Colombia announced today that it would not compete for custody of Juan Carlos Ramirez Abadia if the U.S. seeks his extradition. Whether the U.S. will do so remains to be seen. ...
Many thanks to Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule for agreeing to participate in this online symposium about their book "Terror in the Balance." As Julian put it, "their analysis is helpful for advancing the debate over balancing national security and individual rights" and may well "inspire critics to shift their efforts from complaining about the current administration and executive...
The State Secrets Privilege. I know little about this doctrine and defer to Bobby’s superior expertise. I will just make a simple point that will by now be familiar. The state secrets privilege, like the other rules we have discussed, reflects a tradeoff between liberty (or some other value at stake in a particular case) and security....
I appreciate Adrian’s thoughtful response to my post on military detention, and would now like to shift gears to a distinct topic of at least equal current significance: the state secrets privilege (“SSP”). We could have a whole symposium on this issue alone, no doubt. In fact, we had one a few months ago over at my usual...
As many of our readers might have guessed, I generally agree with the approach and conclusions of the Posner/Vermeule book so I have little to add in criticism. Let me jump in therefore to explain why I think their approach is not just correct, but, perhaps more importantly, why their analysis is helpful for advancing the debate over balancing...
Bobby Chesney’s post about military detention asks all the right questions and I agree with the first several steps in his analysis of those questions. I want to record some questions or quibbles about the later steps in his analysis, however. It is true that Hamdi baldly forecloses “indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation,” but it is...
Chapter seven in "Terror in the Balance" has an interesting discussion of censorship as part of the war on terror. As Posner and Vermeule note, the Bush administration has not utilized this tool to fight terrorism, although the United Kingdom has. I agree with most of what Posner and Vermeule say about censorship. Certainly when you read about...
I’d like to steer the discussion toward the question of military detention for a moment. Military detention has been and continues to be the subject of extensive litigation, and it therefore presents a series of occasions implicating the deference thesis. Eric and Adrian discuss the matter from several angles, including one that strikes me as particularly important: procedural safeguards (i.e.,...
As I read Posner and Vermeule's latest — and very interesting — posts, two questions occurred to me. Perhaps they would be gracious enough to answer them. First, Posner writes that "in terms of overall competence in the execution of the war-on-terror, the Bush administration has been reasonably successful. We know that al Qaeda and its affiliates and epigones remain...
In Terror in the Balance, we put aside the view that there is an absolute moral prohibition on coercive interrogation necessary to save third-party lives. For one thing, we claimed, it is very hard to find moral philosophers who defend that view; most waffle, in the end, by adopting some variant of the view that there is a "catastrophe"...
I wanted to respond to a key section of Posner and Vermeule’s book rejecting absolute prohibitions of torture. They argue that very few moral philosophers have held to the position that coercive interrogation is absolutely impermissible as a violation of rights rooted in human dignity or autonomy. As discussed in the previous post, they suggest that an absolute...
