Syria has claimed that anti-government forces carried out the massacre in Houla in order to spur other nations into intervening. The UN and other nations have expressed concern that Syria is on the brink of a sectarian civil war. Russia and the US have been trading accusations about the situation in Syria. Anne-Marie Slaughter at FP posits that Syria is not a problem from hell...
Will there be a serious legal blowback to the NYT's article on US Drone Strike war, detailing President Obama's personal involvement in the "kill list"? The Iranian propaganda machine is already revving up its engines, but is there going to be a more serious legal and moral reaction akin to the Bush Administration's war on terror interrogation and surveillance policies? To...
BBC has a video report of another poison attack in Afghanistan girls' school rooms, allegedly carried out by the Taliban. A Yemeni Nobel laureate claims the US drone strikes in her country are ineffective as they are hitting mainly civilians rather than militants. The Washington Post also reported that the drone strikes were sparking anger and creating more sympathy for al-Qaeda...
The shoe has finally dropped. Ever since the Invictus Memo was released to the public we knew that the Ecuadorian Plaintiffs were considering twenty-seven different countries to enforce the $18.2 Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron. With Chevron's far-flung assets, it was plausible that the Plaintiffs would choose to enforce the judgment in countries with close ties to Ecuador and...
So reports The Guardian: Liberia's former president, Charles Taylor, has been sentenced to 50 years in jail for being "in a class of his own" when committing war crimes during the long-running civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone. Judges at a UN-backed tribunal in The Hague said his leadership role and exploitation of the conflict to extract so-called "blood diamonds" meant he...
The Special Court for Sierra Leone sentenced Charles Taylor to 50 years today following his conviction for 11 counts of war crimes. He will get six-years' credit for the time he has served since being in custody in The Hague. The ICC Appeals Chamber has unanimously rejected the Prosecution's appeal on the Pre-Trial Chamber I's decision declining to confirm the charges...
Given my basic cynicism toward just about everything, I'm difficult to shock. But I was certainly shocked to learn that Yale University is allowing Gen. Stanley McChrystal to teach a course that enrolled students have to agree in writing not to discuss. Here is Gian Gentile, a professor at West Point, criticizing the course in The Atlantic: Enter retired...
I originally thought it was a story in The Onion, but once again truth is stranger than fiction: Top international prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, best known for pursuing war criminals, has been nominated as chief investigator at FIFA, soccer's scandal-plagued governing body, with a brief to probe match-fixing and corruption. FIFA's executive committee is due to discuss the appointment of a chief investigator...
Of all the items to capture blogospheric attention this Memorial Day weekend – one of the few times a year in the States when more than a handful of popular news outlets focus on what it means for our military and our country that we have been at war for more than a decade – MSNBC pundit Chris Hayes’ remarks...
The current ICC Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has been nominated by FIFA to head an ethics investigation into the organization's match-fixing and corruption issues. Charles Taylor will be sentenced tomorrow in The Hague. You can watch the sentencing live with links provided on the Court’s website. Also in The Hague tomorrow, the ICC will release the judgment on the Prosecution's appeal in the...
I’ll look forward to digesting today’s lengthy, front-page article along with my colleagues. In the meantime, one snippet: It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the...
On past Memorial Day weekend celebrations I have posted various speeches and photos in memory of our fallen heroes. For this Memorial Day weekend, I thought I would offer you a different perspective and present one of the best anti-war poems ever written. The poem "The Battle of Blenheim" by Robert Southey was assigned in my younger son's...
