Last month the Supreme Court rendered its latest installment on the issue of judicial supervision of national security. Winter v. NRDC has received surprisingly little attention, but it strikes me as an important example of judicial deference to the Executive Branch in military affairs. This language in particular is noteworthy: We “give great deference to the professional judgment of...
Chevron wins a big Alien Tort Statute verdict in a case involving its alleged complicity in killings by Nigerian security forces. This is no doubt an important case (though probably not as important at Andrew McCarthy thinks it is -- see "Sovereignty, Vindicated" over at NRO). On the heels of a lower-profile case last year involving Drummond that...
An association of 15 human-rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, and the Save Darfur Coalition, released a devastating report today on the Sudanese government's cynical -- and mendacious -- PR campaign to convince the international community that it is committed to bringing peace to Darfur. Here is a snippet of the executive summary: This report focuses on four...
The Institute for War & Peace Reporting has a must-read article today about how ordinary Darfuris view the OTP's decision to seek arrest warrants for the rebel leaders allegedly responsible for killing 12 peacekeepers in 2007. According to the article -- and all the usual caveats about anecdotal evidence apply -- the response is uniformly negative: Yasir, an IDP (internally displaced...
Remarkable story in today's Wall Street Journal, front page, December 1, 2008, about a Latvian economist arrested and held for several days - not finally charged - for expressing pessimistic sentiment about the stability of the Latvian financial system: How to Combat a Banking Crisis: First, Round Up the Pessimists Latvian Agents Detain a Gloomy Economist; 'It Is a Form of Deterrence' I have stuck...
Violence in Kenya following the disputed 2007 elections left more than 1,300 people dead and more than 500,000 internally displaced. Last month, Kenya's Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence released a 527-page report -- the Waki Report -- that concluded much of the violence was planned and organized by members of Kenya's security agencies, business leaders, politicians, and government officials. ...
Going forward I need to remember that if I'm ever looking for a quick topic about which to blog, I just need to take a look at the latest developments from the UK on surveillance. First there was using ubiquitous surveillance to make art. Now there's surveillance imitating art...
While the attention of the international news is fixed on the Mumbai attacks, I just want to pause to note that there is a growing tide of sectarian violence in Nigeria, which has claimed another 300 lives in the past few days. The strife in Nigeria provides a window into the types of complex ongoing conflicts that combine ethnic tensions,...
Georgetown Security Law Brief blog has a super-useful roundup of what a wide variety of people have said about what to do about detainees at Guantanamo. It goes backwards by date, with op eds, articles, blog posts, all sorts of stuff, including stuff from here at OJ. If you want to know what the state of discussion is as of...
Well, not really Stendhal on Thanksgiving. Stendhal never visited the United States, but that did not inhibit him from expressing a great many opinions about the place (mostly negative observations in the 'nation of shopkeepers' vein), particularly in the entire chapter devoted to love in the United States in that curious book-length essay, On Love. Stendhal was highly skeptical...
Further to Chris's post below, I wanted to announce that Complex Terrain Lab will be hosting, in addition to the event just passed that Chris mentions, an online blog discussion of Antoine Bosquet's The Scientific Way of Warfare, between Friday, December 5 and Monday, December 8. It will feature a number of guest bloggers, including me, and, having read most...
I just came across (a little late I'm afraid) this notice for a program that the Complex Terrain Lab had in London called "BattleSpaces: Feral Cities and the Scientific Way of Warfare." The speakers were Geoff Manaugh of the excellent BLDGBLOG (he has a post on the event here) and Antoine Bousquet, lecturer on international relations at Birkbek College. The...
