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Search: self-defense

17 Jan

...from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values… This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic...
17.01.05 | |

01 Apr

AI or more traditional process automation components.  There are other important risk evaluation parameters to consider when assigning AI-enabled weapon systems to the unacceptable, high, or medium risk categories. These include whether the system is platform-centric (entirely self-contained), network-centric (the final engagement decision is made at a node external to the platform itself), or part of an intelligent swarm; lethality (non-lethal or lethal); level of autonomy (remotely controlled, semi-autonomous, fully autonomous, or fully autonomous and capable of online learning); intent (primarily offensive or defensive); reversibility (reversible or irreversible effects); and...
01.04.24 | |

03 Dec

...diplomats may respond to WikiLeaks’ disclosures by self-censoring and by avoiding written communications. But it is difficult to believe that WikiLeaks will have any significant or lasting effect on the US’s ability to engage in diplomacy with friendly or unfriendly governments; after all, this is hardly the first time in U.S. history that diplomatic secrets have been disclosed. Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, said it best a couple of days ago: Let me just offer some perspective as somebody who’s been at this a long time. Every other government...
03.12.10 | |

01 Nov

...Judy Garland), in violation of Nazi racial purity laws. When the prosecutor (played by Richard Widmark) introduces the footage of the Nazi death camps, it prompts an emotional and eloquent objection from Janning’s defense counsel (played by Maximillian Schell, who won a best actor Oscar for his performance). Janning accuses the prosecution of trying to implicate Janning—and by necessity, the German people as a whole—in the full horrors of the Holocaust without any evidence connecting them to the mass exterminations. That the film gives such an important role to defense...
01.11.23 | |

19 Jan

Samuel Morison, Appellate Defense Counsel with the Office of the Chief Defense Counsel, Department of Defense, has posted a superb new esssay on SSRN entitled “Accepting Sosa‘s Invitation: Did Congress Expand the Subject Matter Jurisdiction of the ATS in the Military Commissions Act?” Here is the abstract: The Alien Tort Statute (ATS) provides a federal forum for aliens to seek tort damages for certain violations of customary international law, including war crimes. In Sosa, the Supreme Court admonished the lower courts to exercise caution when creating new causes of action...
19.01.12 | |

30 Nov

...— Saddam’s former Defense Minister — secretly assisted Kurdish efforts to overthrow Saddam: “Personally, I will not support executing Sultan Hashim,” he said at a news conference in Sulaimaniyah, a city in the autonomous Kurdish region 160 miles northeast of Baghdad. “If the court will carry out its verdicts without referring them to the presidency council that is something else,” he said. “But if they will refer them, then we will register reservations these verdicts.” He said the reservations would include executing former Iraqi army officers because many of them...
30.11.07 | |

20 Mar

Indian defense ministry’s annual air show. Do you: (a) buy expensive gifts for New Delhi’s generals; (b) treat the press to Kingfishers and samosas; (c) produce a Bollywood-esque video featuring bare-midriff girls, flower-draped missiles, and the catch phrase “dinga dinga dee?” Unfortunately for us, Israeli arms-maker Rafael chose C. Which means we may have just found the most atrocious defense video of all time… I don’t know if there’s a real substantive point here. Who am I fooling? I don’t have a substantive point here. Just check out the video....
20.03.09 | |

23 Apr

conform to a demanding application of constitutional law and international law.” The bottom line is that I am not fully in a position to judge, but neither really are those students who chose to express their views as they did, nor are the academics who were asked and chose to sign the petition. Petitions that purport to know what is unknowable and not in the public domain are neither good individual defenses, nor are they robust defenses that advance the protection of human rights in the United States or elsewhere....
23.04.15 | |

17 Dec

Steve testified yesterday about WikiLeaks in front of the House Judiciary Committee. Here is a snippet of his testimony, which discussed five major flaws in the Espionage Act: Second, the Espionage Act does not focus solely on the initial party who wrongfully discloses national defense information, but applies, in its terms, to anyone who knowingly disseminates, distributes, or even retains national defense information without immediately returning the material to the government officer authorized to possess it. In other words, the text of the Act draws no distinction between the leaker,...
17.12.10 | |

15 May

...minus operational details. As U.S. Legal Adviser, Harold Koh offered the most well-known defense of drone strikes at the 2010 meeting of the American Society of International Law. Other government interpretations of the domestic and international legal bases for U.S. behavior followed, including speeches by the White House counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, in 2011 and 2012, Jeh Johnson, the General Counsel of the Defense Department, and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. By (partially) lifting the veil of secrecy surrounding these strikes, it became possible to have a broader conversation about...
15.05.15 | |