One of the take-aways from Hillary Clinton's confirmation hearing was the rise of the term "smart power." Sen. Clinton said: "I believe that American leadership has been wanting, but is still wanted," she said. "We must use what has been called smart power, the full range of tools at our disposal -- diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural...
Hold the presses! President-elect Obama will issue an executive order in his first week in office requiring the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay to be closed...
Deborah has already mentioned the bill introduced this week by Rep. John Conyers for a National Commission on Presidential War Powers and Civil Liberties, which has been likened in the popular press to a truth and reconciliation commission. (A draft version of the bill is available here.) I think this is a somewhat inaccurate description. Truth commissions are often focused on understanding...
Those who defend Israel's use of armed force -- in Gaza and elsewhere -- often complain that critics reflexively assume the worst about Israel's intentions. There is more than a grain of truth to that, but Israel doesn't help itself with its inability to admit that faulty intelligence sometimes leads it to make mistakes. Case in point: the attack on...
Philippe Sands gave an extensive interview on NPR's Fresh Air yesterday. Sands is already on record with his view that torture has occurred as a part of U.S. detention policy at GTMO and that high level officials are responsible for these acts. Although I'm not sure he had much new to say, his careful and eloquent arguments make for easy listening. ...
The New York Times has a thoughtful piece by Adam Liptak this weekend on the Obama Administration’s difficult choice in its forthcoming brief in the Supreme Court case of al-Marri v. Pucciarelli. Essentially, the Obama Administration will have to choose between continued detention, deportation to a third country, or prosecution. Each choice is perilous. If...
John Bolton and John Yoo have this op-ed in today's NY Times vaunting Article II treaties over congressional-executive agreements. While conceding the fact of CEAs in the international economic context, the duo argues that going the CEA route for such agreements as the ICC and a successor to the Kyoto protocol "would pose a serious challenge to American principles...
John Pike, of GlobalSecurity.org website, has a provocative op-ed in today's Washington Post (January 4, 2009, B3) arguing that the evolution of battlefield robots might mean robots as the soldiers that do the killing on future battlefields: Within a decade, the Army will field armed robots with intellects that possess, as H.G. Wells put it, "minds that are to our minds...
Nan Hunter has posted on her blog the transcript of a phone conversation from April 23, 1971, between Henry Kissinger and the poet Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was trying to set-up a dialogue among Kissinger (and other Nixon officials) and peace activists. He was concerned that Kissinger might not know how to end the Vietnam War and he said he had some suggestions. (Unfortunately, they're not in the...
Alan Dershowitz published an editorial yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that argues Israel's attacks on Hamas in Gaza are "perfectly proportionate." I have no desire to argue the substance of that point, in part because views on Israel and Palestine are largely impervious to facts or argument (on both sides), but largely because the concept of proportionality is so...
From a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal: "[F]or some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror." The mind reels....
I know, fisking pro-Bashir propaganda is kind of a pointless task, but the article made me mad with its shameless inaccuracy. It's unfortunate that so many Arab readers -- the original article was published in the Al Rai Jordanian Daily -- are exposed to this kind of garbage concerning the ICC and Darfur. Without further ado, the fisking...
