In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

05 May

The video is here. No big surprises. Dellinger's argument is based on the post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force and that under international law "you can kill enemy combatants."  Dellinger explains that drones attacks on other al Qaeda members are legal too. However, regarding drone attacks, I wish he hadn't said that that there was "a policy judgment" to be made...

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04 May

Following up on my previous post, Obama has announced that he will not release photos of Usama bin Laden's body: It is important to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool," said the president. "We don't trot...

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04 May

His name?  John Ashcroft.  Yep, that John Ashcroft: The consortium in charge of restructuring the world’s most infamous private-security firm just added a new chief in charge of keeping the company on the straight and narrow. Yes, John Ashcroft, the former U.S. attorney general, is now an “independent director” of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater. Ashcroft will...

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04 May

Cross-posted at Balkinization In response to my post a few days ago lamenting the post-bin Laden urge to rehash debates about torture’s efficacy, Ben Wittes writes to disagree. “Pearlstein is right, of course, that we will never know with any certainty whether any specific piece of information that the CIA program developed would have been developed had the program used no coercion–or...

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03 May

The United States military sent some of its most highly trained combat experts into Pakistan without asking for Pakistan's permission. They entered Pakistan's airspace in military helicopters specifically equipped to defeat the Pakistani air defenses. According to a national security official in the immediate aftermath of the operation they went there for the sole purpose of killing Osama...

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03 May

[Mary Ellen O’Connell is the Robert and Marion Short Chair in Law and Research Professor of International Dispute Resolution—Kroc Institute. She is a Vice President at the American Society of International Law and the author of author of The Choice of Law Against Terrorism, 4 J. NAT. SEC. L. & POL’Y 2010] In his speech announcing the death of Osama...

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03 May

Often used to model legislative politics, positive political theory (PPT) has core insights that can be applied to the journal submissions process as well. There are important differences between the legislative and editorial processes. Like legislative action, however, editors' deliberations and voting on submissions are a process of aggregating preferences within the constraints of voting rules and other institutional features....

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