Search: self-defense
19 Oct Cassel on the War Against Defense Attorneys
...Stafford also stated in the email that “The interrogator said I told my clients to kill themselves, and word was passed to the three men who did commit suicide.” Smith says flatly that he has no connection at all to the suicides, and he say the Defense Department, in charge of Guantanamo, may be trying to shift blame to him. It’s not only Smith’s ability to represent Gharani that has been destroyed: In the course of the investigation, the Navy has seized more than a thousand pages of documents from...07 Jan Mr. President, Tear Down that Prison
...is attributable to defense challenges, it does seem appropriate to consider whether a General Court-Martial would have in fact been more efficient. The second justification that no longer seems meaningful was the purported need for a “quasi-secret” process to protect evidence and participants. Considering the Department of Defense has willingly provided information about the legal and lay participants in the process, there seems little difference on this point between the Military Commission and the Court-Martial. As for the protection of evidence, the concern was essentially hollow from the outset, as...31 Jul Correcting a Common Misperception of the Espionage Act
...scienter is established. Where there is no occasion for secrecy, as with reports relating to national defense, published by authority of Congress or the military departments, there can, of course, in all likelihood, be no reasonable intent to give an advantage to a foreign government. Notice: the Gorin Court did not limit “bad faith” to obtaining national-defense information with the “intent” to injure the United States; it also considered bad faith obtaining national-defense information while having “reason to believe” that the information could be used to injure the US. Those...27 Mar International Week at SCOTUS: Will They Resolve the Self-Executing Treaty Puzzle?
...area of treaty law is messy for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here. Suffice to say that there is substantial disagreement in the courts, and even more disagreement in the legal academy, as to how and whether to give a treaty self-executing effect. What the Supreme Court might (but probably won’t) do is clarify this very murky and fuzzy area of the law. Or, as is more likely, they may confuse matters even further. *For a defense of Scalia not recusing himself in Hamdan, see here....
17 Feb Symposium on Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force: A Rejoinder
...Covenant or UN Charter. They are meaningful, but what we do with them is more meaningful. When I draw a parallel between self-preservation and self-defence, it is to warn against the effects of extensive interpretations of Article 51. If one believes that the uses and abuses of self-preservation ‘eviscerated any putative rule of non-intervention’, then the book is an invitation to reflect critically on what we are doing now. This brings me to two questions, one by Helal and one by Ingo Venzke: Was the narrative successful in resuscitating confidence...
09 Aug Muddying the Waters: A Reply to Kay and Kern on the Statehood of Palestine and the ICC – Part II
...agreed to allow the PLO, their political representatives, to establish institutions to exercise self-governing powers in the West Bank and Gaza. This was pursuant to the Declaration of Principles (DoP), in which Israel and the PLO agreed that the aim of the negotiations was to establish a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, “for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338”. It was also agreed that the...