In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Benjamin Wittes on the AQ7 Ad

24 Mar

The excitement over the AQ7 ad put out by Liz Cheney's organization has died down, but Ben Wittes has this piece up in The New Republic extending the letter that he drafted, and to which I earlier linked, signed by a group of conservative and centrist folks criticizing it.  I was one of the signers, and wound up sticking up by own very lengthy comment about it over at Volokh.  I didn't link here at the time, as I thought the tone a little waspish for OJ, but with Ben's article in TNR, I'll change my mind and link to it (it's long and the title is "No Righteous Gentile Award, Please"). I suppose the key point for Ben and me, in somewhat different ways, is that we have each received much praise from folks on the left for defending Obama lawyers such as Neal Katyal or Jen Daskal.  No one objects to praise, or at least I don't, but much of it was a little misplaced.  The praise tended to be as though, in order to defend the Obama lawyers, we had somehow changed our minds about the Bush lawyers.  Whereas, for Ben and for me, each in somewhat different ways, the issue was the same.  We defended Katyal and Daskal because we had defended the Bush lawyers and thought the same principle applied.  I also followed up with an response to conservatives such as Andy McCarthy who attacked the Wittes letter; it too was fairly waspish in tone.  What with health care reform, and lots of other things on the agenda, the discussion is moving on, but it has been an important one, and at least among conservatives, a clarifying one. From the opening of Ben Wittes's essay:
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22 Mar

In case you haven't seen it, make sure to check out Jane Mayer's demolition of Marc Thiessen's book-length apologia for torture, "Courting Disaster."  As her review demonstrates, it's much easier to defend torture when you distort nearly everything. UPDATE: This, I think, is the money quote: The publication of “Courting Disaster” suggests that Obama’s avowed determination “to look forward, not...

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22 Mar

Today's Financial Times has a story on how unhappy U.S. businesses have become about Chinese government restrictions interfering with their access to Chinese markets.  So, one can understand how U.S. exporters would welcome news that the United States and China are getting closer to including a Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT).  And, let's be clear, this would be the mother-of-all BITs, given...

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22 Mar

Bangladesh has ratified the Rome Statute, making it the 111th member of the International Criminal Court.  Bangladesh was the first country in South Asia to sign the Statute, which it did on July 17, 1998.  I don't know what explains the 12-year gap between signature and ratification; if any readers know, please chime in below. Bangladesh's ratification will have immediate dividends. ...

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19 Mar

Our friends at the University of Amsterdam's Center for International Law have asked us to announce the European Science Foundation's upcoming conference, The Responsibility to Protect: From Principle to Practice.  Here is the description of the conference, which sounds like it's well worth attending: Five years after its acceptance by the 2005 World Summit, it is time to consider the...

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18 Mar

Japan triumphs in a big way at the CITES meeting in Doha, as the U.S. proposed ban on bluefin tuna trade goes down 20-68. The rejection of the bluefin proposal was a clear victory for the Japanese government, which had vowed to go all out to stop the measure or else exempt itself from complying with it. Japan, which consumes nearly...

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18 Mar

I am not a huge fan of restrictive and protectionist trade policy, but I can't offer any serious legal quarrel with the recently proposed Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment Act by the growing anti-trade bloc in the U.S. Congress.  As Lori Wallach from Public Citizen notes, the Act offers a radically new approach to U.S. trade policy.  The Act explicitly...

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16 Mar

Sure there is some dispute about settlements in East Jerusalem, or something, but here are some international law disputes that really matter. At CoP15, or the 15th Meeting of the Parties to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species - currently going on in Doha, parties are discussing: resuming (or not resuming) the trade in ivory and imposing a...

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