In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Kenneth Anderson

03 Feb

(Note:  I'm going to pull down most of this post, although alas it makes Peter's comment not relevant to anything.  Martined over at VC points out a couple of mistakes.  I think I"m going to delete anything but the reference to the news article.  Peter, apologies I've untethered your comment!) The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that the Vatican has refused service of...

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28 Jan

OJ's friend and frequent interlocutor, Ben Wittes (of Lawfare blog, the Brookings Institution, and member of the Hoover Task Force on National Security and Law), has a new book out of Brookings Institution Press, Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor after Guantanamo. It has been out since late December, but I just got a chance to finish reading it. I’m a huge fan, which will surprise no one familiar with my thinking about Ben’s work as well as about Guantanamo policy. Detention policy fatigue has set in and positions have become sclerotic. It’s not a front burner issue for very many people, in the executive, in Congress, or even in the academy or the activist community. That is for a lot of reasons. They include that as the population of Guantanamo has been reduced as well as note taken of former detainees returning to the fight once released, the whole question of detention looks much murkier than it was back in the days when it was a marker of pro-Bush or anti-Bush. It was murky then too, as Ben’s earlier work noted back in those days, but it was seen as clear-cut. The very fact of it being in the Obama administration’s hands has stripped away some of the angelic veneer of “close Guantanamo.” But one striking thing to my mind about the somewhat sidelined debate over Guantanamo and detention policy is the extent to which it feels like the debate is less about figuring out what, realistically, to do going forward, than people inside and outside the administration looking to “position” themselves — what they said before and the policies they are responsible for now, what they said about the Bush administration and what they say about the Obama administration, and how to avoid charges of inconsistency if not hypocrisy. I understand that and certainly would be doing it myself if in a position in which anyone cared what I thought then or now. Reputation and consistency matter, partly for oneself, but also for the important reason that administrations change, and at some point there might well be a Republican administration that also has to deal with Guantanamo and detention. It is important to hold people to consistent positions if only so that policies accepted today because it is Obama do not somehow transmute into grounds for excoriation when it is the President Anderson (Republican, frmr gov. State of Vulcan) administration. The positioning is part of that, and it has an important purpose. As in so many areas of the war on terror since 9/11 — detention and Guantanamo, targeted killing and drone warfare, etc. — we stand in deep need of “institutional settlement.” Sauce for the goose is a vital part of that.  Also, I should add, I don’t mean by this that people can’t or shouldn’t change their minds: of course they should as they think correct.  It’s that if one does, one has to admit to it and, to the extent one can, explain why. But preoccupation with positioning onself in relation to one’s views in other times and settings is only one issue. Too much attention to it makes it hard to look pragmatically at forward looking institutional settlement. This is the vital role played by Ben Wittes, in his institutional work at Brookings and especially the deep databases of information on Guantanamo that his office has developed over the last couple of years, but also in his several books on the topic. The central theme of all that work is centrist and pragmatic: First, that the issues of detention are not going away, because there are people in US government hands that will not be released, nor will they be (successfully) tried. We would have more of them, but because their intelligence value is now outweighed by the problems of holding and interrogating them, we have instead chosen against detaining people any more. That is not quite the same as saying that we have a policy preference for targeted killing; the accurate statement is to say that we have a policy against detention. Second, institutional settlement looking foward has to involve Congress and the Executive, as the two political branches of government, coming together. This is a constant theme for Ben, Jack Goldsmith, Bobby Chesney, and lots of other people (including me, in a short New York Times magazine piece in 2006, “It’s Congress’s War, Too,” which says it all). One of Ben’s lessons is that the current situation looks stable, but it’s not.  It’s just a stalemate. A stalemate in which there is not enough at stake for players in the administration or Congress to spend political capital dealing with things. Things apparently sit; it is more accurate to say that they drift. Below the fold is the book description. Highly recommended.
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15 Jan

In conversation with someone who, as a senior NGO executive in international development and food aid, is well situated to respond on the question of rising commodity prices for food globally.  I asked specifically about the Wall Street Journal news story a few days ago on this topic, which reported: Prices of corn and soybeans leapt 4% Wednesday and wheat gained 1%,...

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14 Jan

Global philanthropy is a topic that invites examination across disciplines, including law, ethics, economics, sociology, political science and more — particularly as activity in the field grows in a globalized world.  So I’d like to welcome a new volume of essays, Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy, edited by Patricia Illingworth, Thomas Pogge, and Leif Wenar (Oxford 2011). Although the title is philanthropy generally, the essays in the book tend to emphasize global and cross border philanthropy, with all the attendant issues of cosmopolitanism, community, etc.  The contributors include major figures such as Jon Elster, Peter Singer, and Alex de Waal.  Like many readers, I  resist edited books, but this one is finely edited and the contributions fit together well.  It would make, for example, a useful book of readings in courses in international relations, law, economics, etc.  I think general readers would find it a coherent volume. I have a contribution in the volume, “Global Philanthropy and Global Governance: The Problematic Moral Legitimacy Relationship Between Global Civil Society and the United Nations.”  I’m afraid it is the outlier essay in the book with respect to the admirable coherence otherwise noted above — the one that least connects to the topic of philanthropy in a specific sense of philanthropists and their ethics.  It is an essay instead fundamentally about the role of NGOs in the global political space, and a challenge to some of the legitimating roles assumed even at this late date for NGOs.  I’ve been making this critique for a long time, of course. Cover flap description, below the fold.
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25 Dec

To all OJers everywhere who celebrate it, Merry Christmas, and to everyone a joyous holiday season.  It is snowing large wet flakes here in DC on Christmas morning.  In my case, my wife and I drove down on Thursday to Chapel Hill, North Carolina and drove my wife's elderly parents up to DC to join us.  Other family have arrived...

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19 Dec

Consider three different takes within the last two weeks on the rise of China and impliedly American decline, with different preoccupations.  The first is historian Paul Kennedy’s take in TNR.  It’s a puzzling admixture of “don’t worry, it’s just a rebalancing that was bound to happen if you take the long view,” and “do worry, because the moves the US is...

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11 Dec

I don't quite mean that, of course.  The total number of "international" law faculty depends on so many different things at any given law school.  What I do mean is to follow on Kevin's post and ask, supposing you are trying to rationally plan out an international law faculty and curriculum, or more practically gradually shape into the future according...

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11 Dec

In this week’s Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell of the WS and FT has an essay specifically on the political economy of the euro-zone crisis, Euro Trashed: Europe’s Rendezvous with Monetary Destiny.  He notes that the European Union is built on a theory of successive crises, and that the euro was foreseen, perhaps intended, to provoke a crisis that would lead toward greater union; he quotes some of its founding fathers to that end.  (I think he might have added the dialectical ideology that underlay that sentiment, but does not.):
As we contemplate the macroeconomic storm that is now passing through Europe, we must bear in mind that this is a storm that the EU’s promoters knew would come. The euro’s designers understood Rahm Emanuel’s philosophy about not letting a crisis go to waste. “Europe will be forged in crises,” the European Community’s founding father Jean Monnet wrote in his memoirs, “and it will be the sum of the solutions brought to these crises.” When the French statesman Jacques Delors laid out his plan for the euro in the late 1980s, he drew a clear trajectory: A common market had made possible a common currency. A common currency would make possible a common government. But how would that happen? After all, if a currency worked well within the existing political arrangements, there would be no reason for those arrangements ever to change. New institutions could result only from the currency’s blowing up. Economic crisis would be the accidentally-on-purpose pretext for replacing a system based on parliamentary accountability with a system based on the whims of a handful of experts in Brussels. Europe’s countries now face the choice of giving up either their newfangled money or their ancient national sovereignties. It is unclear which they will choose.
Toward the end, the essay points out that although Greece is every bit as corrupt and profligate as the newspapers suggest, that was not the case with Spain, nor with Ireland, certainly not in the sense of Greece.  That is, Spain had quite good fiscal management and undertook measures that were thought quite strict at the time to protect its banks from the subprime crisis in the US, while many other European banks were as much a part of it as the US ones.  True, Spain's economy has many structural problems - a sclerotic labor market for those in the protected sectors and, today, unemployment for everyone else. But the adjustment mechanisms by which democratic market societies overcome interest group recalcitrance - monetize the debt and let devaluation lower wages (behind the veil of money, as we Marxists like to say) - were not available to it, having joined the euro.  Spain was overcome by a one-size fits all monetary policy, which to overcome in a democratic society through internal fiscal and regulatory means alone would require superhuman willpower (and perhaps, in the regulatory arrangement of the EU and eurozone at this moment, could not be achieved in any case, on account of too many arbitrage avenues around internal controls, of the kind designed for the purpose of one-size fits all):
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07 Dec

Presswires are reporting that Judge John Bates has dismissed the much-noticed case in which the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights sought to bring suit on behalf of Anwar Al-Aulaqi's father, contesting the ability of the President to target his son, an American citizen hiding abroad in Yemen who the government says is a targetable participant in a terrorist...

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22 Nov

If you are a member of a nation's regular or reserve armed forces (not just the US military), think about submitting a paper to the American Society of International Law's annual Lieber Society Military Prize paper competition.  The submission for the 2011 prize is due by December 31, 2010.  Details below the fold.
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