Rather than deride opponents as the "black helicopter" crowd, the proponents of US ratification of UNCLOS should take seriously the upcoming hearings as a chance to weigh the complex policy choices presented by UNCLOS. Prof. Craig Allen of the University of Washington offers this very sensible and persuasive take at (of all places) Fox News: The decision to ratify a treaty...
The NYT has another big expose today on one of the Obama Administration's secret war, this time detailing the President's authorization of cyberattacks on Iran's nuclear facilities. From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to...
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 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...
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...
Foreign Policy in Focus reports on Europe's immigration dilemma after the Arab Spring. IMF Chief Christine Lagarde has attracted the ire of the Greeks over her comments in a Guardian interview last week that it is payback time. The UN Security Council has condemned Syria over the massacre of at least 108 people in the city of Houla. The Syrian government denies involvement and The Telegraph reports how...
I've been meaning to blog about the 33-year sentence that Pakistan recently imposed on Shakil Afridi, the doctor who secretly worked with the CIA to locate bin Laden. The United States is predictably up in arms over the sentence, with Leon Panetta recently claiming that "[i]t is so difficult to understand and it’s so disturbing that they would sentence...
