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...
The "beautiful game" is what Pele calls soccer (yes, I know, "football" to the rest of the world besides the US). On April 25th, diplomats from the UN, including the Secretary-General, set aside the great game of diplomacy to play a game of soccer at New York's Chelsea Piers to support the non-governmental organization Play31. Play31's website explains that: Play31 was...
It has gone all but unnoticed in the U.S. but Russia has declared victory in its fight against Chechen rebels. Chechnya had become a byword for a place of chaos and random violence perpetrated by all sides, especially since the first Chechen War of 1994-1996. But a recent report by the Times of London concerning Russian black operations in the...
William Ranney Levi's paper on interrogation techniques, Interrogation's Law, is forthcoming in Yale Law Journal, but is up at SSRN. Here is the abstract: Conventional wisdom states that recent U.S. authorization of coercive interrogation techniques, and the legal decisions that sanctioned them, constitute a dramatic break with the past. This is false. U.S. interrogation policy well prior to 9/11 has allowed...
So I'm not exactly surprised that Obama is planning to revive the use of military commissions to try terror suspects, (according to the NYT). The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, which was a target of critics during the Bush administration, including Mr. Obama himself. No doubt there will be some amendment to the Bush commissions,...
In case you haven't seen them already, I wanted to point out that Beth Van Schaack and Hari Osofsky have a couple of posts at IntLawGrrls on yesterday's Koh confirmation hearing....
The Eleventh Circuit earlier this month ruled that Manuel Noriega could be extradited to France following the completion of his sentence in Florida. In Noriega v. Pastrana, Noriega argued that under the Third Geneva Convention he was entitled to automatic and immediate repatriation to Panama as soon as his criminal sentence was complete. However, Section 5 of the...
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...
State Department Legal Adviser nominee Harold Koh's written answers to pre-hearing questions asked by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have been posted online at Senator Lugar's site. The Q&A goes for over 60 pages. I have only skimmed it and so, for now, I will simply point out questions/answers that may be of particular interest to Opinio Juris readers (and of course, I...
And proves he is neither very funny nor even remotely interested in anything resembling intelligent debate: Hypothesize that the Obama administration, or perhaps foreign/international courts, prosecute and convict various officials of the Bush administration. Further assume that the new President who takes office in 2013 or 2017 has promised "I will ensure that the crimes of the previous administration are vigorously...
