This according to AP: The sentence was handed down Sunday under a plea bargain in which the young Canadian admitted to five war crimes charges, including killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. Under the deal, the judge was limited to the eight-year sentence and had to ignore the recommendation of a military jury that Khadr serve 40...
Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski and Ben Wittes -- whom, for the record, I consider a friend -- have been having an interesting and useful dialogue about targeted killing. Here is how Malinowski lays out HRW's position: Our position on targeted killing is that its use can be legally justified so long as it is limited to situations involving a...
Omar Khadr accepted a plea deal yesterday that called for him to plead guilty to all of the charges against him in exchange for serving one more year at Gitmo and then being repatriated to Canada to serve another seven years in prison. Predictably, the government is claiming that the guilty plea is proof that Khadr is factually guilty; as...
AFP ran an interesting story yesterday about how Palestinians are using their tunnels to smuggle goods into Egypt, in defiance of Israel's ongoing ban on exports from Gaza: But the canvas sacks full of food, beauty products and second-hand clothes that used to be dragged through hundreds of tunnels beneath the border now flow the other way in a...
On Thursday night I had the privilege of participating in a live webinar on targeted killing and Al-Aulaqi held by the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research. The other participants included Yale's Andrew March, Emory's Laurie Blank, and Seton Hall's Jonathan Hafetz. It was a wonderful, wide-ranging discussion, one that focused not only on the international-law aspects of...
Jack Goldsmith has responded to my post about the D.C. Circuit's rejection of co-belligerency in Al-Bihani. It's an interesting response, worth a few additional thoughts. To begin with, it is important to note that Goldsmith does not respond to the substance of the panel's criticism of the idea that state-centered notions of co-belligerency can be applied to non-state actors in NIAC....
[John Dehn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law at the United States Military Academy. The views expressed in this post are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Defense, U.S. Army, U.S. Military Academy, or any other department or agency of the U.S. government] I agree with Kevin that not every wartime decision...
You can find the brief here. I was going to write about the "political question" section, but Ben Wittes beat me to it. Here is what he says (emphasis mine): Fifth, the groups’ arguments that the case does not present a political question are deeply radical and fascinating. For present purposes, consider only some of the main themes...
At Foreign Policy, Bill Egginton, the chair of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins -- and more importantly, my best friend -- has a fascinating article on Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist who just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here is a snippet: [H]is latest book, El sueño del celta, which will be released on Nov....
A while back I wrote a sort post on the violent political economy of rare earth elements, also known as REE's. A recent Congressional Research Service report (.pdf is here) describes the central (and until recently under-reported) role of REE's in the modern economy and national security infrastructure: Some of the major end uses for rare earth elements include use in automotive...
In its motion to dismiss the ACLU/CCR lawsuit, the government argues that the plaintiffs lack standing to bring the lawsuit on al-Aulaqi's behalf, because al-Aulaqi has the option of surrendering to the government and bringing the lawsuit himself: Defendants state that if Anwar al-Aulaqi were to surrender or otherwise present himself to the proper authorities in a peaceful and appropriate manner,...
