My friend Jens Ohlin, who teaches at Cornell, has posted an important new essay on SSRN, "The Torture Lawyers." Here is the abstract of the essay, which is forthcoming in the Harvard International Law Journal: One of the longest shadows cast by the Bush Administration’s War on Terror involves the fate of the torture lawyers who authored or signed memoranda approving...
I don't have any deeper insight into the situation than Ken, but there certainly has been pressure on the Prosecutor to investigate Afghanistan for some time -- both because it's not in Africa and because of US/NATO involvement in the armed conflict there. It is important to stress, though, that the OTP has not formally opened an investigation; it is...
Adam has kindly allowed me to post his response -- which first appeared at Making Sense of Darfur -- to my criticism of his claim that domestic trials or a TRC would likely have been better than the IMT. Here it is, in full: Neither truth commissions nor domestic trials are as black and white as Professor Heller’s critique of my...
At the risk of being told again that I am writing in “literary Klingon,” I want to return to the issue of virtual worlds and their real world implications. This time, a virtual world is being considered as a way to assist in the management of an international organization, namely NATO. According to Danger Room: NATO’s got a new plan for training...
Orin Kerr has an interesting post at Volokh noting a story reporting that NSA intercepts were used in the just announced conviction in the UK of terrorists in the liquid-mixing-chemicals case. Orin is right in saying the story deserves more notice than it will probably get. I found it particularly interesting that apparently a reason why the NSA finally signed...
I have been ignoring the latest salvos in David Bernstein's lonely war against Human Rights Watch, because they have not purported to be anything other than character assassination. But his latest effort to discredit Marc Garlasco, HRW's Senior Military Analyst, is so beyond the pale of acceptable discourse that something needs to be said. Here are the relevant paragraphs of...
The Ninth Circuit last week argued that it did not have personal jurisdiction over DaimlerChrysler Corporation AG because it did not have continuous and systematic contacts with the forum. The case of Bauman v. DaimlerChrysler AG arose out of the alleged kidnapping, detention and torture of Argentinian citizens in Argentina by Argentinian state security forces acting at the direction...
[caption id="attachment_9642" align="alignright" width="137" caption=""][/caption] So what resulted from the past few days of G-20 meetings of finance ministers? And, particularly given the long-term conversation here at OJ about transnational networks and global governance, do the meetings offer any data point in that discussion? The principal policy debates at the G-20 meetings were over bonus/compensation issues for bankers (pressed hard by the...
Rachel Irwin of IWPR has published a typically excellent article on the role of victims in Lubanga. (The article quotes me liberally, though, so you shouldn't take my word for that.) A taste: A total of 99 victims represented by seven lawyers are participating in the Lubanga trial at the International Criminal Court, ICC. The lawyers are present in the courtroom...
It's not unusual, I gather (never having worked in government), for the CIA to ask DOJ prosecutors to investigate leaks involving the agency. However, in the circumstances surrounding the current AG Holder decision to appoint a prosecutor to investigate CIA activities, it's perhaps worth noting that the CIA has asked for an investigation into what it apparently regards as a...
David Bernstein and I agree about one thing: Pat Buchanan is a very stupid man. But if Hitler was out to conquer the world — Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia — why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France? Why did he start...
The blog Making Sense of Darfur has been hosting a symposium on Adam M. Smith's book After Genocide: Bringing the Devil to Justice, in which the author argues -- oversimplifying only slightly -- that international criminal trials are always inferior to domestic trials and non-punitive accountability mechanisms. I have neither the time nor the inclination to address the book's claims...
