Pre-Trial Chamber I of the ICC has summoned Bahar Idriss Abu Garda, a Darfuri rebel leader, to appear before the court to face war crimes charges: Abu Garda, member of the Zaghawa tribe of Sudan, is charged with three war crimes allegedly committed during an attack carried out on 29 September 2007 against the African Union Mission in Sudan (“AMIS”), a...
I realize that it's foolish to expect accuracy from the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, but it has outdone itself with the following statement, part of an editorial lavishing praise on Obama for resurrecting the military commissions: Another red herring is supposedly tightening the admissibility of hearsay evidence. Tribunal judges already have discretion to limit such evidence, and the current rules...
It's certainly not over yet, but it isn't looking good: As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) moves to ease a backlog of executive branch nominations, he suggested on Tuesday that he does not have the votes to bring up President Barack Obama’s pick to run the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. “Right now we’re finding out when to do...
With a few obvious exceptions, I try to avoid directly criticizing scholars with whom I disagree. But I feel compelled to say a few words about a recent Jurist editorial in which a professor, a former Army JAG (a group for whom I have the utmost respect), argues that waterboarding is not torture. (It also argues that a CIA interrogator...
You have got to be kidding: John Yoo has written freelance commentaries for The Inquirer since 2005, however he entered into a contract to write a monthly column in late 2008. I won’t discuss the compensation of anyone who writes for us. Of course, we know more about Mr. Yoo’s actions in the Justice Department now than we did at the...
I am obviously on record as supporting the criminal prosecution of the individuals involved in the CIA's torture regime -- the interrogators who inflicted it, the military and government officials who ordered it, the OLC lawyers who rationalized it. Such prosecutions are, unfortunately, extremely unlikely -- at least in the United States. Moreover, there does not seem to be any...
I rarely have reason to criticize the ACLU, so I feel obligated to respond to Anthony Romero's statement concerning the possibility that Obama's revamped military commissions would continue to admit hearsay under certain circumstances: Romero said allowing hearsay in any U.S. courtroom [would be] a "greater travesty than Bush administration justice." I doubt that any amount of revamping would fix the basic...
I was intrigued by Julian's post on Andrew McCarthy's latest screed for National Review Online, so I read what McCarthy had to say. His argument boils down to this: (1) the Obama administration argues in Demjanjuk that torture is a specific-intent crime; (2) Yoo and Bybee argued in the infamous OLC memos that torture is a specific-intent crime; (3) the...
Invoking the legacy of Nuremberg, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) came out yesterday in support of prosecuting members of the Bush administration responsible for waterboarding. His position on prosecutions is interesting in its own right, but I want to use his comments for a different purpose -- to plug a collection of letters that his father, Thomas Dodd, wrote to his...
Dave Kopel has a post today at The Volokh Conspiracy in which he dusts off John Yoo's argument in the infamous 14 March 2003 memo that a CIA interrogator prosecuted for torture would be able to invoke the defenses of necessity and self-defense. I am not interested in responding to Kopel's post, which grossly mischaracterizes my position on torture prosecutions...
The National Court has reassigned the case from Judge Garzon to Judge Eloy Velasco. CNN says that "Judge Velasco is thought to have little, if any, experience in these kinds of cases." Apparently, CNN has never heard of The Google, because it took me about 30 seconds to learn that, in January, Judge Velasco relied on Spain's universal jurisdiction law...
Despite his checkered past, I'm beginning to like Jacob Zuma, who is set to become the next President of South Africa, more and more: The Sudanese president Omer Hassan Al-Bashir will not be invited to the inauguration ceremony of the South African president-elect Jacob Zuma, according to news reports. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) headed by Zuma has an absolute majority...
