I will be back blogging regularly soon, but I want to call readers' attention to a phenomenal new article at the Intercept by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain about how the US government has cynically manipulated public fears of terrorism in order to justify its bombing campaign in Syria. Recall that Samantha Power -- the UN Ambassador formerly known as...
I agree with Jens' excellent post on the importance of the "unwilling or unable" standard to the US justification for legal strikes on non-state actors in Syria. I agree this action may reveal state practice supporting (or rejecting) this legal justification. I am curious whether the UK, France, or other states that may be participating in Syria strikes will embrace this theory....
Mike Lewis has a guest post at Just Security today responding to Ryan Goodman's recent post exploring what the US's claimed "unwilling or unable" test for self-defence against non-state actors means in the context of Syria and ISIS. Ryan, careful scholar as always, rightly points out that the test "remains controversial under international law." Mike doesn't seem to have any such...
Bobby Chesney has responded at Lawfare to my most recent post on the CIA and the public-authority justification. It's an excellent response from an exceedingly smart scholar. I still disagree, but Bobby's post really hones in on the differences between us. I'll leave it to readers to decide who has the better of the argument. I do, however, want to discuss...
In the first part of my response to Bobby, I argued (after meandering around a bit) that Title 50's "fifth function" provision cannot be used to authorise the CIA to kill Americans overseas -- a necessary condition of any argument that the CIA is entitled to a public-authority justification with regard to 18 USC 1119, the foreign-murder statute. (Bobby kindly responds here.) I...
My friend Bobby Chesney has responded at Lawfare to my previous post arguing that Title 50 does not provide the CIA with a public-authority justification to kill Americans overseas. He disagrees with both of the limits on presidential authority to authorise covert action I discussed. I will address the Article II question in a separate post; in this post I want...
As I noted in my previous post, my co-blogger Deborah Pearlstein has suggested that a covert operation authorised by the President under Title 50 of the US Code could function as the CIA's equivalent to the AUMF in terms of its authority to kill an American citizen overseas. Here is what she has argued: Here, even if the AUMF was not meant to...
Today's Jerusalem Post features an article discussing testimony by a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan that purports to demonstrate the IDF takes more care in avoiding civilian casualties than any other army in the world. Here is a snippet: Israel's ratio of civilian to military casualties in Operation Protective Edge was only one-fourth of the average in warfare around the...
As readers are no doubt aware, Libya has descended into absolute chaos. As of now, there is quite literally no functioning central government: Libya’s newly elected parliament has reappointed Abdullah al-Thinni as prime minister, asking him to form a “crisis government” within two weeks even as the authorities acknowledged they had lost control of “most” government buildings in Tripoli. Senior officials and the...
On the record, US officials invariably defend even the most indefensible IDF uses of force in Gaza, most often parroting the Israeli line that the IDF does everything it can to spare civilian lives and that Hamas's use of human shields is responsible for any innocent civilians the IDF does kill. When speaking anonymously, however, those same officials tell a very different...
Reasonable people can disagree about the legal merits of U.S. court judgments against Argentina requiring it to pay holdout creditor hedge funds. But I can’t say the same about Argentina’s recently announced claim against the United States at the International Court of Justice. Based on Argentina’s own description of its legal arguments, I stand by my earlier assessment: Argentina’s international...
Last November, I wrote a post entitled "Terrorism Is Dead, and Britain Has Killed It." I chose that title because I couldn't imagine a conception of terrorism more absurd than the one argued by the British government and accepted by a Divisional Court: namely, that David Miranda's mere possession of documents illegally obtained by Edward Snowden qualified as terrorism under the Terrorism Act 2000. I obviously...
