I believe I’ve now read most of the leading reviews of Cheney’s memoirs, though I am only partway through In My Time. (Lawfare’s Rafaella Wakeman provides a helpful roundup of the reviews.) Of the reviews, though appearing after Rafaella's roundup (so not included there), Victor Davis Hanson’s is the most interesting and worth reading (it is posted over at the Hoover Institution’s...
Ruling in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Judge Rosemary Collyer said records about the use of drones could be withheld under the rubric of “intelligence sources and methods.” She rejected the ACLU’s arguments that lethal drones aren’t really involved in acquiring intelligence. “At first blush, there is force to Plaintiffs’ argument that a ‘targeted-killing program is not an intelligence program’ in the most strict and traditional sense,” Collyer wrote, before concluding: “The Court has no reason to second-guess the CIA as to which programs that may or may not be of interest implicate the gathering of intelligence.”Gerstein goes on to note that this ruling does not address other agencies of the government, such as State, which do not have these specific exemptions related to intelligence; without having done an exhaustive survey of FOIA cases, however, I would be surprised if something that the CIA could withhold on intelligence exemptions could be got sideways from other federal agencies. Perhaps I'm wrong.
Apparently, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is blocking the nomination of Dean Janet Levit, of University of Tulsa Law School, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The Daily Oklahoman reports: Oklahoma City attorney Mike Turpen, a longtime Democratic Party fundraiser with ties to the White House, said Coburn told him in July that Levit was not going to receive his...
Our esteemed guest blogger Michael Scharf and my Washington College of Law colleague Paul Williams brought out a very interesting volume from Cambridge UP last year, Shaping Foreign Policy in Times of Crisis: The Role of International Law and the State Department Legal Adviser. Over at Lawfare, Jennifer Daskal, friend to many of us from her days at Human Rights...
Like many Americans, especially those of us living or working in New York City at the time, I have very personal and powerful memories of the September 11, 2001 attacks. I will spare our readers my own reminiscences, however, and stick to something a little more relevant to this blog's subject matter: the international law of armed conflict. While many pundits...
I've received a number of emails arguing that I do not take seriously enough the CMCR's analogy between conspiracy and the crime of membership in a criminal organization. The obvious response is that: (1) criminal membership is not a war crime; (2) the elements of conspiracy and criminal membership are completely different; (3) the tribunals on which the CMCR relied...
I've been attending (and will be speaking) at a conference at Case Western Reserve University Law School in Cleveland entitled "International Law in Crisis." You can catch the webcast here. A brief description below. 2011 is shaping up to be one of the most turbulent years in history. This timely symposium is designed to examine both the application of international law...
From Siobhan Gorman (of the Wall Street Journal's national security team) a nicely done retrospective on the rise of the drones as part of strategy, technology, law, ethics and philosophy. It's a reasonably short piece, quotes the Very Great Bobby Chesney, and gives a good sense of the history of how it came about, linking policy and strategy, all in...
As part of an series of "mea culpa" posts by various post 9/11 players over at the Lawfare blog, Jack Goldsmith recounts how his views on lawyering within the government's national security complex have changed, from skepticism to acceptance. On the use of law by those seeking to constrain the government's discretion from the outside: I started the decade in ...
My bad for not mentioning this some time ago, but tomorrow, Thursday, 12 noon, we at Washington College of Law, American University, will have Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, as keynote speaker. He will be followed by a panel that will include myself and my colleague Steve Vladeck — but more important than either Steve or...
Please forgive the recent interruption to my guest blogging tenure. I currently live in New Jersey. We sought refuge from Hurricane Irene in a cabin in the Adirondacks – sans internet access. Interesting times. Earlier this summer, Opinio Juris hosted an excellent discussion of an important new book, International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court, a well-edited collection of essays about...
Turkey-Israel relations have hit a new low after the release of the U.N. Report on the Flotilla. Actually, Turkey seems to be the one most angry with the report, and it is taking it out on Israel, by demanding an apology and expelling Israel's ambassador. Turkish bluster also seems to have manifested itself in an empty, meaningless threat to take...
