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06 Feb

Following up on the law prof's letter about NSA spying from last week, Andrew McCarthy of National Review Online has dug up a very interesting 1994 memo from Clinton's then-OLC chief Walter Dellinger arguing that the President has the authority to refuse to execute statutes that are unconstitutional. Dellinger's memo is actually not limited to foreign affairs statutes, but with...

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06 Feb

The New York Times has an interesting graphic on the deaths in Iraq in January. According to their report there were 800 total civilian and military deaths in Iraq in January. If my math is correct, with Iraq's population of 26 million, that would be an annualized death rate of 36.9 deaths per 100,000. I was curious how that compared...

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05 Feb

As AG Alberto Gonzales prepares to testify before Congress on the controversial NSA spying letter, the law professor critics of the NSA spying dispute have filed this blistering response to the DOJ's 43-page defense of the warrantless wiretapping. I'm a bit surprised at the letter's sharp tone, but it is a pretty effective letter nonetheless.For a different take, see this...

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05 Feb

A Super Bowl commercial has highlighted government abuse by TSA personnel at our nations' airports. You cannot help but feel sorry for the guy who fell victim to this sort of unauthorized surveillance. Just go to this website and check out the first TV ad....

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04 Feb

Iran's decision to resume uraniam enrichment is precisely what it threatened before the IAEA Board meeting last week. In a letter dated February 2, 2006, Iran firmly requested that the case not be submitted to the Security Council. It included the threat that "I am afraid to warn that if the interlocutors of Iran want to put pressure on the...

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03 Feb

Last week the D.C. District Court ruled that the claims against Sudan for materially supporting the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya may go forward. In Owens v. Sudan, the court ruled that there were sufficient allegations that Sudan materially supported the terrorist attacks to overcome a motion to dismiss. The concise holding is that if you finance terrorism, in...

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03 Feb

The flap over cartoons continues to rock the Muslim world. The BBC has great coverage with a dozen articles addressing the topic. The issue is particularly sensitive and reflects deep cultural and religious differences between Western values of freedom of expression and Islamic values of the holiness of the Prophet Muhammad. Obviously Western media should be more sensitive to depictions...

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03 Feb

Kofi Annan will step down as UN Secretary General this December. The campaign season for his replacement is heating up. By tradition of regional rotation, it's Asia's "turn" to supply the Secretary General (though the region is defined rather broadly to include the Middle East). Richard Holbrooke's op-ed in today's Washington Post reviews the potential candidates:· Surakiart Sathirathai, Thailand's deputy...

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02 Feb

I couldn't resist this news item about today's events at the Security Council. Apparently, some Perm Reps believe in the German university "Akademische Viertel" (academic quarter) rule of promptness: so long as you arrive within fifteen minutes of a scheduled meeting, you are on time. US Ambassador John Bolton, perhaps taking the lead from his President who is known for...

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