In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

24 Jan

I am unclear as to one thing in the Executive Order issued by President Obama regarding interrogation practices.  The text of the Executive Order is here.  It provides that the CIA must conform to the Army manual with respect to interrogation techniques, but says (bold-face added): (b)  Interrogation Techniques and Interrogation-Related Treatment.  Effective immediately, an individual in the custody or under...

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23 Jan

NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross has a great interview with P.W. Singer of Brookings (and coordinator of the Obama campaign's Defense Policy Task Force) about his new book concerning battlefield robots, Wired for War.  Ken and others have written extensively about the use of battlefield robots on this blog and elsewhere, so I won't re-hash the various legal, moral,...

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23 Jan

Yesterday Barack Obama signed an Executive Order directing an immediate review of al-Marri's status. "The Review shall expeditiously determine the disposition options with respect to al-Marri and shall pursue such disposition as is appropriate." So what should the Supreme Court do with the al-Marri case now? As I noted earlier this month, Obama essentially has the choice...

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22 Jan

I have a new paper up on SSRN, appearing shortly in the Wayne Law Review, The Assumptions Behind the Assumptions in the War on Terror: Risk Assessment as an Example of Foundational Disagreement in Counterterrorism Policy.  Here is the abstract from SSRN, with apologies from the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion: This 2007 article (based around an invited conference talk at Wayne...

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22 Jan

Just before President Clinton left office and on the last day it was open for signature, the United States signed the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.  The Bush Administration would later, through John Bolton, inform the United Nations that the United States did not intend to ratify the treaty, thereby removing any obligations associated with the U.S. signature...

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21 Jan

Philippe Sands and Dahlia Lithwick have kindly responded to my post about CAT and the prosecution of torture suspects.  Here is their response: We don't believe we are in disagreement on the approach to the obligation under CAT, under Articles 7(1) and (2). The obligation is to "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution". What happens...

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21 Jan

Although a DC resident, I couldn't persuade myself or my wife to brave the crowds or the cold to attend the inauguration yesterday, and instead watched it instead with a group of friends on hdtv.  Leaving aside Chief Justice Roberts fumbling the oath (see last graph in this post for President Obama retaking the oath on January 21), some of...

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21 Jan

The Cable has a short post on Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter taking a leave from Princeton to become the head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff (a post previously held by George Kennan, Paul Nitze and, more recently, by Tony Lake, Dennis Ross, Richard Haass, and Stephen Krasner). Anne-Marie, as many readers of this blog would know, is a prominent international...

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21 Jan

One other added benefit of the upcoming Obama years (and there are likely to be few)  is the end of the dishonest or at least inaccurate charges about the radical nature of the Bush Administration's views on executive powers.  The most annoying one that I've heard a million times from Keith Olbermann but also from otherwise intelligent and respectable constitutional...

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21 Jan

No "citizen of the world" talk today.  I was a little surprised at the fairly pronounced us/them premise of the speech, a worldview still defined by states.  And no nods to international institutions, even as a general proposition.  Of course Obama is the President of the United States (and most Americans certainly expect the national framing), but if I were...

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21 Jan

I admit I am not exactly looking forward to the Obama years. Still, it did warm my heart a bit to hear the new U.S. commander-in-chief endorse the continuation of the war on terrorism in his inaugural speech yesterday.   That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network...

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