Just a note to highlight OJ's Twitter feed, which you can find here. We link to posts on the blog, but there's added content in the form of pointers to other items that might be of interest to OJ readers. For those of you that haven't taken up the habit, some serious material is floating around the Twitterverse at the same time...
On the day we mark 100 years of the Peace Palace in The Hague, the US and its allies are readying for a military intervention in Syria with Australia saying it would back military action, even without a Security Council resolution. Action may come within days. China's top paper accused the US of wanting regime change in Syria and likened any military...
Heading the news today is the escalating rhetoric about the planning of a military intervention in Syria, some reporting in the same vein as the 1999 NATO Kosovo bombing campaign, as the US points its finger at the Syrian government for the recent chemical weapons attack (official remarks here). Julian discussed legality of an intervention without Security Council approval. After UN...
It looks like the tragic events surrounding a likely chemical weapons attack in Syria will spark a military intervention by the United States, France, and Britain without the authorization of the U.N. Security Council. We have already heard President Obama publicly state that international law is a factor in the decisionmaking process in the U.S. and the NYT suggests U.S....
UN inspectors will be allowed into the Damascus suburb to investigate an alleged chemical weapon attack that killed approximately 355 civilians last week. Julian mentioned that the US may be looking into military intervention into Syria, a move that Russia is concerned about, warning the US not to repeat past mistakes in the region. Despite Russia's pleas for restraint, in Jordan,...
Mark Bowden’s cover story in this month’s The Atlantic magazine (available here) is one of the best things I’ve seen written on drones in the past several years. The Black Hawk Down author’s descriptions and takeaways on most aspects of the drone program are consistent with my own experience in military aviation and the information I have gathered from human rights organizations, drone operators, military lawyers, senior military, and CIA personnel who have run the drone programs, as well as from senior military policy advisors who were involved in changing the way drones are used.
Perhaps most importantly, his description of the drone operator’s reaction -- one of shock and uncertainty -- to performing a specific mission clearly undermines the widely circulated but exceptionally irresponsible criticism that drones have created a “Playstation mentality” among their operators. An additional fact that the article did not include, but that has been understood (although not widely reported) for several years now, is that drone operators suffer from PTSD-like symptoms at rates similar to -- and sometimes greater than -- those experienced by combat forces on the ground. It turns out that even from 8,000 miles away, taking human life and graphically observing your handiwork is nothing like playing a video game.
Another highlight is his treatment of the question of civilian casualties.
The Second Circuit's decision in Balintulo v. Daimler* (already discussed at length by John Bellinger at Lawfare) is one of the first major U.S.court opinions to apply the Supreme Court's decision in Kiobel. It is pretty much a complete smackdown of the ATS plaintiffs, and for any hopes they might have that the Kiobel decision's bar on extraterritoriality for ATS suits...
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces bombarded rebel-held suburbs of Damascus today, keeping up pressure on the besieged region a day after the opposition accused the army of gassing hundreds in a chemical weapons attack. In response, the U.N. Security Council said it was necessary to clarify the alleged chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of Damascus, but stopped short of explicitly...
Japan will dramatically raise its warning about the severity of a toxic water leak at the Fukushima nuclear plant today, upgrading the threat from a level 1 "anomaly" to a level three "serious incident" on an international scale for radiological releases. The British government, accused of abusing media freedom, has said police were right to detain a journalist's partner if they thought...
The new issue of Foreign Affairs has an article by David Kaye, entitled "Stealth Multilateralism." He begins the piece by describing the point of view of the "sovereigntists," (often conservative Republicans) who view treaty-making as a threat to national sovereignty. (See, for example, this recent post by Peter on sovereigntist views.) After arguing that treaty-making is actually an expression of sovereignty, Kaye...
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Monday he was "deeply disturbed" by the deaths in custody of 37 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and condemned an ambush by Islamist militants that killed 25 Egyptian policemen. A leading diplomat from the U.S. State Department and the U.S. ambassador to Syria will meet with a Russian delegation in The Hague next week to...
