Americans who defend the legality of the invasion of Iraq almost invariably point to the fact that Britain's Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, also approved the invasion. That argument has always been questionable; rumours have long circulated that Lord Goldsmith did not believe that the invasion was legal, but was pressured by Downing Street into approving it anyway. According to an explosive...
The just-released CFR web publication "Public Opinion on Global Issues" offers one-stop shopping for those looking for public opinion surveys across a range of transnational policy issues. The overview explains how CFR and the Univ. of Maryland consolidated all publicly available opinion polls and provides a few significant findings: The international community confronts a daunting array of transnational threats and challenges...
Several times in the last couple of years I've had the privilege of appearing on panels with Georgetown law professor Vicki Jackson, talking about constitutional comparativism. She is always a pleasure to listen to and engage with on this topic. It's been a hot topic in the last few years, and several OJ'ers have weighed in, including Roger and me....
Let me leave aside for the moment all the leaked memos and stuff. I have a question about Copenhagen that predates all of that. I'm not being snarky - taking on assumption all the climate problems as they have been stated, I do not understand how this exercise manages to overcome the collective action failure problems that have been encountered...
I criticize the Registry regularly, so it's important to acknowledge when it does something right. I blogged a couple of weeks ago about the Registry's indefensible position that Dr. Karadzic's trial had not started, so the defence team was not entitled to any funding until the trial "began" in March. The Registry has now reversed its decision and approved 250...
Where is the Obama administration on the Ottawa Landmines Ban Convention? After some clarifications, it appears that the US is conducting a "broad" review of antipersonnel landmine policy and the Ottawa Convention, while maintaining the previous Bush administration stance on an "interim" basis. This Reuter's story, in the Washington Post, gives some of the ins and outs. Meanwhile, the Cartagena...
Mark Perry has an interesting post, with a super-interesting graph, at his blog Carpe Diem, of long-run changes in regional share of global GDP, using historical data sets from Economic Research Service of the US Department of Agriculture. [caption id="attachment_10690" align="alignnone" width="300" caption=""][/caption] As Perry explains: What might be surprising is that the U.S. share of world GDP has been relatively constant for...
According to news reports, the Trial Chamber justifies its refusal to certify appeal on the ground that it "considers the indictee's motion to be unclear, because it is not clear which aspects of the decision he wants to appeal." In case you haven't read our motion for yourself, here is what it says in para. 9, specifically citing to Seselj: Dr....
The Nation has just published an extensive article documenting the "secret war" Blackwater employees have been conducting in Pakistan. The opening grafs: At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which...
As I note in my post above, Change.org has launched an ambitious new blog, War and Peace. A sampling of recent posts, to give readers a taste of what the blog -- which obviously has a broad mandate! -- covers: "IRA Splinter Faction Nostalgic for the Old Belfast"; "Hey, Russian Media, There Is No 'Number War' in Bosnia-Herzegovina"; "Is the...
Give the Trial Chamber credit, it has at least has stopped pretending that its decisions make any legal sense whatsoever: It said on Monday that Karadzic's appeal request was too vague and premature because at the time of his application, no counsel had been appointed to him. "Granting the application now, and then potentially again on 1 March, 2010 ...
Friday saw the former Attorney General, John Ashcroft, who helped orchestrate placing the supposed “worst of the worst” at Guantanamo, repeat the same two arguments others have made against federal trials of terrorism suspects: they pose a risk of revealing key intelligence and they increase the risk of another terrorism attack. The first argument has little traction in light of past experience in prosecuting terror trials, prosecutorial discretion in presenting evidence, and judicial administration of the trial. The trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is instructive. An increased risk of attack has also been repeated as an argument against terrorist detentions in the United States. How would detaining or prosecuting terrorism suspects in the United States somehow increase the terror threat? Is there any evidence of this? Is the alternative to keep the detainees in Guantanamo, with the hope that terrorist groups might ignore the fact that they are detained by the United States? Such a claim seems wildly implausible. To the extent that U.S. detention practices are widely known, there seems to be no reason to think that detentions and prosecutions at Guantanamo versus detentions in Illinois, for example, alter the risk that terrorists would target the U.S. If the overall desire and capabilities of terrorists to strike U.S. targets would not change merely because of the location of detentions or prosecutions, perhaps it would alter the targeting of a potential attack. This form of NIMBYism seems based on a highly speculative premise (and a dubious moral claim). No doubt, fear is easily manipulated to motivate officials into avoiding even a speculative, and at best marginal, increased risk of attack. But this kind of fear-mongering fails to present a good reason not to prosecute terrorist suspects in U.S. courts.
If the arguments lack merit, why the orchestrated effort to repeat them?
