The Lawfare Podcast

On Thursday, October 20th, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled once again on the case of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Guantanamo detainee convicted by a military commission for inchoate conspiracy to commit war crimes. In a divided and inconclusive en banc decision, the D.C. Circuit affirmed Bahlul’s conviction, overturning the court’s decision vacating the conviction last June, in which a three-judge panel held that Bahlul could not be convicted of the domestic law offense of conspiracy as a war crime because Article III of the Constitution only permits military commission trials of offenses against the international laws of war. The Lawfare Podcast has covered the twists and turns of Bahlul’s case in the past, and now we’re back once more with Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas School of Law and Bob Loeb, a partner at Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe and the former Acting Deputy Director of the Civil Division Appellate Staff at the Department of Justice.

 

Direct download: Episode_194.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:04pm EST

On October 19th, Samuel Moyn, Professor of Law and History at Harvard University, closed out a one-day conference on “The Next President's Fight Against Terror” at New America with a talk on “How Warfare Became Both More Humane and Harder to End.” He argues that we’ve moved toward a focus on ending war crimes and similar abuses rather than a focus on preventing war’s outbreak in the first place. And in his view, the human rights community shares culpability for this problem. It’s an issue that will be of great consequence as the next president takes office amidst U.S. involvement in numerous ongoing military interventions across the globe.

Direct download: Episode_193.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:47am EST

When audio dropped last Friday of Donald Trump boasting of attacks on women, the news quickly eclipsed another, just-as-important election story released right alongside it: reports that the United States government had decided to formally lay the blame for the recent hacking of Democratic Party information at the Kremlin's feet. In any other year, Russia's apparent attempts to interfere with the U.S. presidential election would be the biggest story of the moment. Thankfully, we at Lawfare were able to bring in our own Jack Goldsmith and Susan Hennessey to talk about Russia's hacking and leaking, its apparent probing and scanning of state-level electoral systems, and the U.S. government's confusion regarding what on earth to do about it.

Direct download: Episode_192.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:35pm EST

Stephanie Leutert, the Mexico Security Initiative Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Lawfare's Beyond the Border series, joined Benjamin Wittes on this week's podcast to talk about the epidemic of violence plaguing Mexico and Central America. Despite the crisis going on immediately to our south, those of us in the United States who work and think on national security issues rarely consider this violence as relevant to national security. But Stephanie argues that we should.

Direct download: Episode_191.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:22pm EST

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