At a joint press conference with Paul Kagame yesterday, President Bush was asked whether he would be willing to send U.S. troops to Darfur to help stop the systematic violence that is being committed there. Here, in relevant part, was his response:I would say it's like — as I explained to this fellow here — that one of the...
I cast my overseas primary ballot last week for Obama. If only I knew then what I know now -- that Obama is obviously the child of communists and may well be a communist himself. How do I know that? Because, as Lisa Schiffren at the ever-reliable National Review Online explains, he was born of mixed-race parents...
Last week, I argued that the CIA waterboarders would not necessarily be entitled to the defense of entrapment by estoppel even if they relied on the Office of Legal Counsel's insistence that waterboarding was legal. As I pointed out, the defense requires reliance to be reasonable -- and a court cannot simply infer reasonableness from the fact that the...
I think it's safe to say that Marty Lederman has been one of the blogosphere's most passionate, articulate, and persuasive critics of the Office of Legal Counsel's authorization of waterboarding. So I was very surprised to read his latest post on the subject, in which he argues not only that the CIA officers who actually conducted the waterboarding would...
The ICC has a third suspect in custody. Not surprisingly, he's another Congolese rebel:Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui, a Congolese national and alleged former leader of the National integrationist Front (FNI) and currently a Colonel in the National Army of the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo [Forces armées de la RDC/ Armed Forces of the DRC ] (FARDC),...
When I was in grad school, my friends and I loved to play the "alive or dead" game, in which one of us would name an intellectual and the others would then try to guess whether that person was alive or dead. My ace in the hole was always Claude Levi-Strauss, the great structuralist French philosopher. My friends...
If you do, the University of Auckland Faculty of Law is hiring. We're looking to fill two positions, one at the lecturer/senior lecturer level (the equivalent of assistant professor and associate professor with tenure) and one at the associate professor level (the equivalent of a full professor without a chair). We are primarily interested in academics who specialize...
Iraq has redesigned its Saddam-era flag. (The new flag is at left.) Unfortunately, it's already been rejected by both the Sunni Anbar Awakening Council and by the Kurds:"The new flag is done for a foreign agenda and we won't raise it," said Ali Hatem al Suleiman, a leading member of the U.S.-backed Anbar Awakening Council, "If they want...
I've fallen behind in my Rwanda blogging. Here are some of the recent highlights — or lowlights, depending on your perspective:The ICTR announced that it will miss its 2008 deadline for completing its trial phase. According to the Tribunal's spokesman, at least one trial will not be finished by the end of the year. The ICTR...
Because Tobias is far too modest to do it himself, I want to formally announce -- and plug -- the launch of his new group blog, Invisible College. Invisible College rises phoenix-like from the ashes of two predecessors, the group blogs 1948 and The Core. Here is a snippet from the introductory post:By joining forces, we hope to...
The media may have forgotten about the Iraqi High Tribunal now that Saddam is dead and buried, but that doesn't mean its problems have gone away. Case in point — the talented Chief Prosecutor at Saddam's trial, Jaffar al-Moussawi, has been demoted and transferred after criticizing the Tribunal's "financial and ethical corruption" and opposing the execution of Sultan Hashem,...
Well, that was quick. One day after the media reported that a training manual prepared by the Canadian government for its diplomats listed the U.S. as a country where foreigners risk being tortured or abused, Canada quickly backtracked, promising to remove the U.S. — along with Israel — from the list:Canada's foreign ministry, responding to pressure from close allies,...
