In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Foreign Relations Law

02 Mar

The ABA Journal has a cover story about the threat posed to island states by climate change. This is a topic we have discussed on Opinio Juris at various times. Duncan wrote at length about the Maldives; I had a shorter piece here, and there are various references in the midst of other blog posts. The Journal article is long and...

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23 Feb

Readers interested in watching Ben Wittes desperately try to spin British condemnation of the U.S. approach to the war on terror need only check out his post today on Rahmatullah.  As I discussed a couple of months ago, the British Court of Appeals held that Rahmatullah was entitled to be released from U.S. custody because the U.S. had rendered him...

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22 Feb

Various right-wing commentators, Mitt Romney, and dozens of congressmen have demanded that the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, be prosecuted for genocide for advocating (in one debatable translation) the destruction of Israel.  I wonder if they will be quite so passionate about demanding a similar fate for Tucker Carlson, who earlier today openly advocated the destruction of Iran by the...

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21 Feb

My previous post mentioned battlefield robot analogs of dogs, cheetahs, pack animals, even humans. Now behold the synchronized nanobot swarm!  Here's what national security analyst John Robb had to say about the tactical benefits of a battlefield drone swarm: •It cuts the enemy target off from supply and communications. •It adversely impacts the morale of the target. •It makes a coordinated defense extremely difficult (resource allocation is...

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20 Feb

Three quick updates from the "robots and warfare" side of things (largely culled from recent Danger Room posts that caught my eye and I wanted to point out to Opinio Juris readers). I have previously posted about Big Dog, the four-legged beast of burden being developed for use by the U.S. military.  DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is now...

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18 Feb

Wired's Danger Room has a new piece about law enforcement reform and efforts to stabilize Afghanistan. In particular, it focuses on the work of U.S. and Romanian Special Operations Forces in training Afghan law enforcement. Behind the scenes across the embattled country, a special breed of U.S. soldier is working closely with a new style of Afghan police to enforce law and order in...

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11 Feb

That's the conclusion drawn in this blockbuster report -- which, precisely because it is a blockbuster that makes Israel and the MEK's vast number of Democratic and Republican supporters in the U.S. look bad, has been basically ignored in the "liberal" media: Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed,...

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11 Feb

Cross-posted at LieberCode. It is becoming increasingly likely that Russia and China are going to block just about any resolution on Syria coming out of the Security Council, regardless of whether it is meaningful or not.  They aren’t going to support a resolution that seriously denounces the regime, nor are they going to support an ICC...

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10 Feb

By now, most readers have probably seen the following photo, in which Marine snipers in Afghanistan pose in front of a flag with the runes of the SS: I wasn't planning on blogging about the photo, because the insensitivity of the snipers and the awfulness of the symbolism speak for themselves. But then I saw this ridiculous statement by a...

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07 Feb

As most readers likely know, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism recently released a 22,000 word report documenting the disturbing U.S. practice of using drones to target individuals attending funerals or attempting to provide aid to individuals wounded in previous drone strikes.  Here is the report's central conclusion: A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at...

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