Suchergebnisse

So I would be remiss if I didn't begin this panel by just pausing for a moment over the name of it, which is "International Law and the Trump Administration," and if that doesn't bring a smile to your lips in some form, I think we may as well pack up and go home.

A review essay on a book by Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday, 2008).

Nine democracies and the problems of detention, surveillance, and interrogation / Mark. H. Gitenstein -- Administrative detention : integrating strategy and institutional design / Matthew C. Waxman -- Long-term terrorist detention and a U.S. National Security Court / Jack Goldsmith -- Optimizing criminal prosecution as a counterterrorism tool / Robert M. Chesney -- Better rules for terrorism trials / Robert S. Litt and Wells C. Bennett -- Refining immigration law's role in counterterrorism / David A. Martin -- Modernizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act : progress to date and work still to come / David S. Kris -- National security issues in civil litigation : a blueprint for reform / Justin Florence and Matthew Gerke -- Looking forward, not backward : refining U.S. interrogation law / Stuart Taylor Jr. and Benjamin Wittes -- Targeted killing in U.S. counterterrorism strategy and law / Kenneth Anderson

Benjamin Wittes issues a persuasive call for greater coherence, clarity, and public candor from the American government regarding its detention policy and practices, and greater citizen awareness of the same. In Detention and Denial, he illustrates how U.S. detention policy is a tangle of obfuscation rather than a serious set of moral and legal decisions. Far from sharpening focus and defining clear parameters for action, it sends mixed signals, muddies the legal and military waters, and produces perverse incentives. Its random operation makes a mockery of the human rights concerns that prompt

In asserting that the Supreme Court decisions in the enemy combatant cases can be viewed as a rebuke of Bush administration policies & simultaneously a victory for the administration, the performance of the courts, the administration, Congress, & the civil liberties & human rights groups that have opposed the administration's policies with respect to the forging of a new enemy combatant regime is assessed. It is argued that, thus far, the enemy combatant cases stand as a kind of case study of the consequence of abandoning to the adversarial litigation system a sensitive policy debate centered on powerful & legitimate constitutional concerns. Demonstrated is how nuance was lost, flexibility & imagination in envisioning an appropriate regime were jettisoned, & the courts were left to split the difference between polar arguments & which should not have defined the terms of the discussion. Further, it is contended that this need not have happened. M. Ruben

Examines how Eighth Amendment jurisprudence went awry & how to correct it. Attention is given to how badly the US Supreme Court has foundered & how unacceptable the outcome should be no matter how one views the results; Justice Scalia's alternative to the court's path is assessed & found unviable, being both somewhat weaker than the justice contends as an original matter & at odds with the court's entire history of interpretation of the amendment. A more textually rigorous approach to the amendment is briefly outlined. M. Ruben

Sketches a vision of a judicial review in the "war on terror" to argue that judicial review has a more substantial place in the war than the George W. Bush administration allows. In the case of interrogation, judicial review should be designed for the narrow purpose of holding the executive to clearly articulated legislative rules rather than the vague standards of international legal instruments. Habeas corpus is the wrong legal mechanism to accomplish effective judicial oversight about detention & interrogation policies & tactics. The better mechanisms would be a system of statutorily authorized direct appeals from administrative actions concerning detention & convictions by military commission. Overseas interrogation tactics would then fall under judicial-not executive-review. References. J. Harwell