In association with the International Commission of Jurists

May 2009

31 May

Jack Goldsmith observes in a Washington Post op-ed that when one avenue of national security closes, another is opened up, sometimes with worse collateral consequences for third parties.  As he says: Demands to raise legal standards for terrorist suspects in one arena often lead to compensating tactics in another arena that leave suspects (and, sometimes, innocent civilians) worse off. I think this...

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30 May

Ever since President Obama’s speech last week setting forth the general outlines by which he’ll resolve the mess at Guantanamo Bay, I’ve been trying to get my head around what the Administration will put into the legislation the President has suggested he’s going to work with Congress to get. Parts of that bill are maybe easier to see. For...

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29 May

I want to believe in the Human Rights Council, and I hope its new members -- including the US -- will improve things. But the HRC's "response" to the conflict in Sri Lanka is simply appalling. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the resolution the Council passed praising the Sri Lankan government, which reads like something out...

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29 May

Former State Department Legal Advisor John Bellinger, who is now at Arnold & Porter and also an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has an interesting op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. The U.S. government can and should be a strong voice for redress of human-rights abuses around the world. But these lawsuits, which are being brought under...

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29 May

Today's New York Times leads with the story of Pentagon plans to form a new cybercommand: The Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace, administration officials said Thursday, stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare. The military command would complement a civilian effort to be announced by President Obama on...

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28 May

Professor Thomas M. Franck of NYU passed away on Wednesday afternoon.  (NYU has a page in memoriam, here.) I assume his name is well-known to most, if not all, of the regular readers of Opinio Juris. Suffice it to say that his contributions to the field of international law are staggering, as can be glimpsed from his bio on his faculty page. But a faculty...

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28 May

Second Prize for silliest right-wing comment concerning Sotomayor has to go to Mark Krikorian, who writes for National Review Online: Deferring to people's own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English...

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28 May

Of all the silly right-wing attacks on Sonia Sotomayor, the reaction to her professed love of her native cuisine -- "My Latina identity also includes, because of my particularly adventurous taste buds, morcilla, pig intestines; patitas de cerdo con garbanzo, pigs' feet with beans; and la lengua y orejas de cuchifrito, pigs' tongue and ears" -- has to be the...

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27 May

Most of us now know that it's important to recycle stuff.  And there's a lot of stuff to recycle beyond the morning newspaper -- glass bottles, plastic containers, clothing, batteries, concrete blocks, timber, and, yes, even ships.  But how we recycle may prove just as important as what we recycle.  Or at least that's the premise of the recently concluded International Maritime...

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26 May

That's today, in Australia. It's meant as a sort of continuing apology to Aboriginal peoples in Australia specifically for the practice, lasting up until about 1970, of taking Aboriginal children from their families (known as the "stolen Generations"), but also for the general mistreatment. It's not a holiday but appears to be an official commemoration. My question: could Americans...

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26 May

Following on my previous post, this is a much longer and more complete clip of the waterboarding of talk-radio host Mancow Muller. (Thanks to Roger, who found it on YouTube.) This clip includes an explanation of how waterboarding is done and includes Muller's reactions. I thought the way he explained that it was much worse than he ever would have...

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