I hope to have more to say in the next few days about Judge Bates' completely predictable decision to dismiss the ACLU/CCR lawsuit. I just want to flag here what is the most obvious problem with it. Judge Bates claims -- clearly trying to insulate himself from criticism -- that Contrary to plaintiff’s assertion, in holding that the political question...
According to a press release today, the OTP is conducting a preliminary examination into whether two recent North Korean attacks on South Korea qualify as war crimes: The shelling of Yeonpyeong Island on the 23 November 2010 which resulted in the killing of South Korean marines and civilians and the injury of many others; and The sinking of a South...
Needless to say, there’s a much warmer atmosphere at this year’s climate conference in Cancun than last year’s conference in Copenhagen. By all accounts, the Mexicans have done a great job both in preparing the diplomatic groundwork for this year’s meeting and in running the conference during its first week. They certainly have learned the lessons of the last war. ...
It's easy to laugh at the USG for its directives to employees re the handling of Wikileaks cables (as the NYT put it this morning, a case of "shutting the barn door after the horse has left"). The idea that a State Department employee talking about the cables in a Starbucks, much less with her spouse at home, would constitute...
As one of WikiLeaks' defenders, I feel obligated to respond to Roger's post. I have two major disagreements with it. First, I think it significantly overstates the harm caused by WikiLeaks, although it would be equally erroneous to claim that WikiLeaks has caused no harm whatsoever. Second -- and perhaps more important -- it completely ignores the the benefits of...
One of the underlying issues in the Wikileaks controversy is whether Julian Assange is truly that harmful. His defenders, and even some of his critics, maintain that Assange is not that dangerous. I disagree. Diplomacy. Diplomacy will be immeasurably more difficult if what government officials say in secret to one another can never be trusted to remain secret. ...
The Wikileaks episode seems to be turning to the USG's advantage, at least domestically: it's provoking a lot of sympathy for the government as an entity. That's a rare sentiment these days. Leave aside angry calls for Assange's head (almost literally), people are actually feeling sorry for the USG. One way that's being expressed is to compare the government to private...
I suspect this will be a much bigger story than the previous Iraq and Afghanistan disclosures, mostly because there will be something here for everyone. I'm not sure that the State Department looks particularly bad, as Timothy Garten Ash explains. It shouldn't be a revelation to anyone that diplomats sometimes do something that looks like spying. This is much more...
So thinks James P. Rubin in an Op-Ed in today's NY Times. His argument comes in two parts. First, a minority of the Senate plays an obstructionist role, which means that the United States simply doesn't join important treaties: For much of the world, treaty ratification is a simple matter. In parliamentary systems like those in Britain and France, ratification is virtually automatic,...
Gotta say, even though I write about issues of self-determination, secession, and statehood, I didn't expect to read this on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times: At a glance it looked like any small-town fair, with smoke wafting from the barbecue, families gathering around picnic tables, music percolating over loudspeakers and doting parents...
This is a wild tale of self-execution (which, I'm fairly sure, is the first time anyone has used the adjective "wild" to describe the self-execution concept). For years, the Bush Administration sought to get the U.S. Congress to amend the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) to ease licensing restrictions on arms exports to two of the United States' closest allies -- the...
Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski and Ben Wittes -- whom, for the record, I consider a friend -- have been having an interesting and useful dialogue about targeted killing. Here is how Malinowski lays out HRW's position: Our position on targeted killing is that its use can be legally justified so long as it is limited to situations involving a...
