Search: self-defense

...have been delegitimized by those who seem to deny Israel's right to self defense. The British Colonel clearly puts these false and exagerated claims into context by comparing the IDF's performance against other armies of the World. He even uses the UK and US, who have undertaken similar operations in populated areas against terrorist militants, as an example. Have the UK or the US been the recipient of such an outcry by so called "legal experts" etc as the IDF/Israel? Funny that they both killed a larger number of civilians...

Cross-posted at Balkinization UPDATE: Thanks to “Anon” in comments for sending along a link to the engrossed text of the military commissions bill passed by the Senate last week. I really hate to interrupt this great discussion about Kal’s even greater book, and hope to get into it myself before week’s out. In the meantime, I thought it worth noting that while most of Congress was focusing on health care, the Senate quietly succeeded late last week in passing its version of the defense authorization bill (S. 1390) containing a...

Jordan "[L]ethal" and "deliberate" targeting can occur many times per hour in the theatre during an international armed conflict or an armed conflict not of an international character. Obama's preference for "near certainty" with respect merely to "drone" targeting is not a requirement under the international laws of war or self-defense. Although the U.S. Constitution should apply with respect to everything the Executive does here or abroad, the question shifts to what does the Constitution require when force is used lawfully under the international laws of war and/or self-defense. For...

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,...

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....

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....

...— 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...