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...
Disclosure: I am one of Dr. Karadzic's legal associates. This post is offered with his consent. The defense team has just filed its definitive motion arguing that the Karadzic-Holbrooke cooperation agreement -- in which Holbrooke promised Dr. Karadzic that he would not be prosecuted at the ICTY if he cooperated with the international community's efforts to bring peace to the Balkans...
Because I so rarely get to blog about uplifting things, I wanted to pass along the following story, concerning a group of aboriginals who, in 1938 -- when so much of the world was silent -- protested the Nazis' treatment of the Jews during Kristallnacht: William Cooper’s name does not appear on Yad Vashem’s list of the Righteous Among the Nations,...
Anonymous senior official in the Obama administration, 2009: [T]he hearsay rule is not one of those things that is rooted in American values. The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, 1791: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right...
Pre-Trial Chamber I of the ICC has summoned Bahar Idriss Abu Garda, a Darfuri rebel leader, to appear before the court to face war crimes charges: Abu Garda, member of the Zaghawa tribe of Sudan, is charged with three war crimes allegedly committed during an attack carried out on 29 September 2007 against the African Union Mission in Sudan (“AMIS”), a...
I realize that it's foolish to expect accuracy from the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, but it has outdone itself with the following statement, part of an editorial lavishing praise on Obama for resurrecting the military commissions: Another red herring is supposedly tightening the admissibility of hearsay evidence. Tribunal judges already have discretion to limit such evidence, and the current rules...
It's certainly not over yet, but it isn't looking good: As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) moves to ease a backlog of executive branch nominations, he suggested on Tuesday that he does not have the votes to bring up President Barack Obama’s pick to run the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. “Right now we’re finding out when to do...
With a few obvious exceptions, I try to avoid directly criticizing scholars with whom I disagree. But I feel compelled to say a few words about a recent Jurist editorial in which a professor, a former Army JAG (a group for whom I have the utmost respect), argues that waterboarding is not torture. (It also argues that a CIA interrogator...
You have got to be kidding: John Yoo has written freelance commentaries for The Inquirer since 2005, however he entered into a contract to write a monthly column in late 2008. I won’t discuss the compensation of anyone who writes for us. Of course, we know more about Mr. Yoo’s actions in the Justice Department now than we did at the...
I am obviously on record as supporting the criminal prosecution of the individuals involved in the CIA's torture regime -- the interrogators who inflicted it, the military and government officials who ordered it, the OLC lawyers who rationalized it. Such prosecutions are, unfortunately, extremely unlikely -- at least in the United States. Moreover, there does not seem to be any...
I rarely have reason to criticize the ACLU, so I feel obligated to respond to Anthony Romero's statement concerning the possibility that Obama's revamped military commissions would continue to admit hearsay under certain circumstances: Romero said allowing hearsay in any U.S. courtroom [would be] a "greater travesty than Bush administration justice." I doubt that any amount of revamping would fix the basic...
I was intrigued by Julian's post on Andrew McCarthy's latest screed for National Review Online, so I read what McCarthy had to say. His argument boils down to this: (1) the Obama administration argues in Demjanjuk that torture is a specific-intent crime; (2) Yoo and Bybee argued in the infamous OLC memos that torture is a specific-intent crime; (3) the...
