Readers will note that today Opinio Juris has incorporated a new comment feature that allows our readers to help regulate the quality of comments. The comment rating feature allows readers to vote “Yea” or “Nay” to any comment that is posted. After a certain number of negative votes are cast to a comment (we are still testing the...
I wanted to let OJ readers know that I will also be blogging over at Volokh Conspiracy, where Senior Conspirator Eugene Volokh has been kind enough to extend me an invitation. My reason for putting this up here is not so much to announce that, but instead to say that I am not going anywhere from OJ. I...
Karen DeYoung has a very interesting account of the on-going Predator drone campaign in Pakistan, on the front page of the Monday, June 1, 2009 Washington Post, "Al Qaeda Seen as Shaken in Pakistan." The story is sourced to US intelligence and military officials, as well as some Pakistani officials, and recounts how the Pakistani army's campaign to retake the Swat...
This is bizarre on so many different levels: Moazzam Begg, from Birmingham, was captured by the CIA and thrown in jail at Guantanamo Bay in 2003. The 41-year-old, who was released in 2005, will now feature as himself in the game for Microsoft's Xbox 360. In the game, players control a detainee at the camp, which has...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
