Those of you who, like me, missed this year's Federalist Society Symposium on National Security can now watch all of the events on-line here. The event was held April 5 in DC and included a morning panel on terrorist-related detentions, interrogations and trials, a lunchtime address by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and an afternoon panel on potential cybersecurity...
The bankruptcy of the U.S. military-commissions system is currently on full display in the trial of Abd al-Rahim Al-Nashiri. Readers who can stomach the spectacle of a tortured detainee being prosecuted for imaginary war crimes committed at a time when there was no armed conflict between the U.S. and al-Qaeda anywhere in the world can find excellent coverage of the...
The Texas International Law Journal has published its mini-symposium on Karl Chang's article that argues the law of neutrality provides the applicable legal framework for the United States' conflict with al-Qaeda. There are two responses to the article: one by Rebecca Ingber, who is currently a fellow at Columbia Law School; and one by me. Here is the abstract of...
Speaking at a Federalist Society meeting yesterday at Notre Dame Law School, former Ambassador John Bolton addressed what the Obama Administration should do to curtail the threat of Iran. He offered not a single word of praise for the Obama Administration's foreign policy and not a single word of criticism for the Bush Administration, such as its failure to...
Dawood Ismail Ahmed, a Pakistani lawyer and JSD candidate at the University of Chicago, has a very interesting article today at Foreign Policy on Pakistan's opposition to drone strikes. He argues that if Pakistan really wants to put an end to the strikes, which have killed hundreds of innocent Pakistani civilians, it needs to start taking advantage of its options...
Lawfare has published a very interesting guest post by Haridimos Thravalos on whether conspiracy is a war crime. The whole thing is worth a read; here is the intro: In June 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President George W. Bush’s use of military commissions to try suspected members of al-Qaeda in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557...
Jack Goldsmith has an editorial today at Foreign Policy defending the legality of drone strikes. Readers will not be surprised to learn I disagree with his assessment, but exploring our differences is not the point of this post. Instead, I want to acknowledge the precision with which he describes the "unwilling or unable" test for self-defense against a...
In a previous post, I noted that Peter Berkowitz defended the legality of a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program by invoking U.S. practice -- and only U.S. practice. He now has offered another defense of such an attack in response to an editorial by Bruce Ackerman in the L.A Times. Unfortunately, Berkowitz's second article is...
Americans are furious. Officials are out of touch with the rest of us. If we thought about it, we should be angry that officials do not take international law more seriously. That is just another way that the people we send to Washington do not understand what we really need. American workers whose retirement funds hold GM stock should want to...
Scott Peterson has a fantastic timeline at the Christian Science Monitor that catalogs all the times Western countries have predicted Iran's imminent entry into the nuclear club. Some highlights: 1984: Soon after West German engineers visit the unfinished Bushehr nuclear reactor, Jane's Defence Weekly quotes West German intelligence sources saying that Iran's production of a bomb "is entering its...
