Just Security

> The "Rules Based International Order" is just a euphemism for "Post War US Hegemony". And the rules are "The US state department tells you what to do, and you do it". Sarcasm and hyperbole are fun, but can be misleading. The US-led rules-based international order certainly doesn't always follow the rules, and the US can be a major violator, but the rules have great influence and power. Generally, the US considers it in its interest to have an internation order based on rules, not on military power. But lacking a soveriegn international government, the US's military power has underwritten those rules since WWII. The UN charter is one part of the rules, but international law is based on many institutions and agreements. Here's a great source with leading experts (e.g., top lawyers from the State Department and White House) for anyone who wants to know about it: https://justsecurity.org

For what it's worth, it seems like the actual law that would be involved (so the deliberate legislative choice) does not allow Hegseth to do what he says he wants to do: https://www.justsecurity.org/132851/anthropic-supply-chain-risk-design… So it's not just that there's be a transfer of power to the executive (there is), there's also straight up executive overreach.

Trump is an untrustworthy liar. It is more reasonable to assume the boat was full of migrants on a human smuggling run than anything to do with drugs. Everyone involved in this will eventually need pardons. But this abuse will get much worse before that. The same arguments they use today can be used for extrajudicial murder on land, foreign and domestic. It's just a matter of degree and time. https://www.justsecurity.org/119982/legal-issues-military-attack-carri…

I remember when trump tried very hard to weaponize the justice department against his "enemies" (https://www.justsecurity.org/98703/chronology-trump-justice-department… but people stood up to him and refused, or just delayed acting as long as possible. Trump was very much "handled" by people all levels of government who tried their best to clean up after him, distract him away from his crazy plans, or obstruct him. Even in the the military. In the beginning it was the so-called "axis of adults" that kept things sane. That's all changed since he's spent a considerable amount of time removing anyone who disagrees with him, threatening those who would dare to, installing people who will do what he wants including the judges who have granted him total immunity which he didn't have before. I think we can expect things this time to be very different.

> [democratic nations] generally following international norms and treaties for human rights One would think, but: https://www.justsecurity.org/89781/us-lethal-strikes-program-continues… / https://archive.md/eZUTB > feels pretty clear to me that democratic nations are than authoritarian regimes. Our "feel" is, it is always the other. Never us?

source: https://www.justsecurity.org/79623/crisis-of-command-the-pentagon-the-… According to a report released last month, Christopher Miller, who served as acting Secretary of the Defense on Jan. 6, told the Department’s inspector general that he feared “if we put U.S. military personnel on the Capitol, I would have created the greatest Constitutional crisis probably since the Civil War.” In congressional testimony, he said he was also cognizant of “fears that the President would invoke the Insurrection Act to politicize the military in an anti-democratic manner” and that “factored into my decisions regarding the appropriate and limited use of our Armed Forces to support civilian law enforcement during the Electoral College certification.” So, yes, Miller *intentionally* delayed National Guard deployment.

It's mostly because this isn't true, though lots of people love to wax on about what they think is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. I've heard all kinds of stuff like this over the years, such as "you can't fire a 50 cal at a human" etc. The Geneva Convention says nothing in particular about hollowpoints, so the verbiage has an "interpretation" by DoD about the Rules of Land Warfare that skirts around the issue . See https://www.justsecurity.org/25200/dod-law-war-manual-returns-hollow-p… I know this because I carried hollowpoints while deployed in an anti-terrorism capacity.

Carol Rosenberg at the Miami Herald provides by far the best news coverage of Guantanamo, the trials there, and of this ongoing story. Without her, it seems like much of the activity there would 'die in darkness'. Thank you Carol! (It's hard to find a good link to her coverage in general, but that one looks pretty good.) http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo… Just Security, which has leading professors and experts in the field covering national security and international law, provides the best analysis: https://www.justsecurity.org/46578/gitmo-mess-continues/

A fantastic argument about whether to serve and try to mitigate, or to oppose Trump: The Case Against Serving https://www.justsecurity.org/34404/case-serving-trump/ It's a prominent government attorney and Georgetown professor advising others. It's

I agree about FISA; and Marcy Wheeler has some great stuff to say about Richard Burr's alternate bill and internet collection. [1] However I wouldn't say that 215 is a red herring -- it'll be a significant victory if it sunsets, for reasons Jennifer Granick describes at [2]. [1] https://www.emptywheel.net/2015/05/23/mitch-mcconnell-and-richard-burr… [2] http://justsecurity.org/23149/rand-paul-wyden-surveillance-reform/

The Geneva Convention II hedges a lot wrt submarine warfare - few submarines have the capacity to take on many survivors .. they're already pressed for space. You could ague they had an obligation to notify search and rescue ... at a time when the nearest search and rescue was already alerted and en route. See: https://www.justsecurity.org/133397/sinking-iran-frigate-dena-law-nava… and scroll down to Failure to Rescue IRIS Dena’s Shipwrecked Crew > Exactly this was one of the charges against Admiral Doenitz at Nuremberg. A charge that didn't stick, a practice engaged in by both the British and U.S. submarines In the aftermath of World War II, the issue of rescuing survivors following submarine attacks took center stage during the trial of Admiral Karl Dönitz before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. After Allied attacks on a U-boat attempting to rescue survivors of an ocean liner, the RMS Laconia, Dönitz issued the Laconia Order, which instructed: “All attempts at rescuing members of ships that have been sunk, including attempts to pick up persons swimming, or to place them in lifeboats, or attempts to upright capsized boats, or to supply provisions or water are to cease.” The court held that the order violated the 1936 London Protocol on submarine warfare, which required that the passengers and crew of merchant vessels be placed in safety before a warship could sink them. Yet, because British and U.S. submarines engaged in the same…

The Federal courts have reached this point too. There’s a “presumption of regularity” where the government has historically been seen as a mostly truthful arbiter that would make good faith efforts to follow court orders. So when a judge would ask, “Do you plan to deport these people tonight?” to a government lawyer, if the lawyer replied, “No”, the court wouldn’t intervene because government lawyers obviously wouldn’t just lie to a judge presiding over a lawsuit. Well it turns out that they’re continually lying and being rewarded for it (Emil Bove for one). So courts are now suspending that presumption and ordering explicit actions with strict timelines for updates for basically the first time in modern history. It’s astonishing at how little regard this administration has for the norms and structures that make up our government and how much damage they’re doing to the rule of law. https://www.justsecurity.org/120547/presumption-regularity-trump-admin…

They still have to formally charge them and go through court cases to defend that determination. https://www.justsecurity.org/109012/legal-issues-deportation-palestini… > To prove that an LPR is deportable, the government must convene a “removal hearing” before an immigration judge. At that hearing, government attorneys must prove deportability by “clear and convincing” evidence. A number of provisions define the procedures for conducting removal hearings with some specificity. Under those rules, the government must afford LPRs (as well as others in removal proceedings) notice of the charges against them, a right to confront the evidence against them and present their own evidence in response, and a lawyer if they can afford one. … > While 237(a)(4)(C) itself makes the Secretary of State’s determination central to the question of deportability, no provision of immigration law grants the President, the Secretary of State, or anyone else unilateral authority to “revoke” LPRs of their status—by Executive Order or otherwise. They must follow the procedures described above.

This is a big deal. If you care about your privacy, its not enough to use good op-sec. You need to address the source of the problem: the governent is abusing its power, and it needs to stop doing that This bill is an attempt to fix that. This bill is probably the best hope we currently have of enacting substantive reforms to Section 702, EO 12333, the data broker loophole, and a bevy of other surveillance issues. It even has a section on Cell Site simulators! If you are curious about some of the details of the bill, you can read a one-page summary of the bill [here](https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/government_surveillance_ref… Some highlights: > The Act ends warrantless collection of business records, ensures that the government provides accurate information to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and requires meaningful accountability for violations of the law.* > [The bill] requiring warrants for surveillance of Americans’ location data, web browsing and search records, and by prohibiting the government from purchasing Americans’ data from data brokers. A section-by-section summary of the bill is [here](https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/government_surveillance_ref… Read the full bill [here](https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/government_surveillance_ref… Some more analysis/history…

Russian state makes publicly whatever statements they feel are judicious. Don't trust anything the Kremlin says. Note they accepted Finlands entry to NATO alliance without so much as a whimper. While complete calculus behind the reasons for the invasion may never surface, these offer excellent commentary why more countries joining NATO was not really the real reason for the war. 'Moreover, this is not even primarily about NATO. ... The larger objective is to re-establish Russian political and cultural dominance over a nation that Putin sees as one with Russia, and then follow up by undoing the European rules-based order and security architecture established in the aftermath of World War II. ... If Russia’s main concern had been NATO enlargement, it would have reacted with rhetoric and/or hostile actions in its neighborhood after each step in the NATO expansion process. The largest wave of NATO’s eastward expansion took place in March 2004, when seven Eastern European countries joined, including the formerly Soviet Baltic states. Russia “grumbled,” as the New York Times put it then, by adopting a Duma resolution criticizing the expansion, but no hostile and sustained rhetoric followed about NATO enlargement as a Western plot against Russian interests.'[0] 'Some claim Russia was goaded into acting by the threat of NATO expansion. But Putin himself said in 2004 that 'Russia has no concerns about the expansion of NATO from the standpoint of ensuring security'. Russia,…

Here's a recent episode (he was banned from Twitter for that): "Dmitry Rogozin (Director General of Russia’s Roskosmos State Space Agency, former Deputy Prime Minister) – comments on his Twitter feed and Telegram channel (June 13, 2022) “In general, what has grown up in the place of Ukraine is an existential threat to the Russian people, Russian history, Russian language and Russian civilization. If we do not put an end to them, as, unfortunately, our grandfathers did not do away with them, we will have to die, but end up at an even greater cost to our grandchildren. So let’s get this over with. Once and forever. For our grandchildren.”" https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-aga… He also was a leader of right-wing party Rodina in early 2000s, see more details in Wikipedia: >Under Rogozin, Rodina shifted towards the right wing of Russian politics and became the second largest and one of the country's most successful parties. A number of controversies on Rogozin's policies culminated in it being banned in 2005 from standing for election to the Moscow City Duma for using what was considered as chauvinist slogan 'Let's Clean the Garbage!'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Rogozin#Early_career

Probably the quantity of the locally available fuel. Not to mention that many of the locals were buying their fuel from Iran. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/24/iran-resumes-a-crucial-lifeli… But the corruption involved was just staggering, in all directions. Here's a Kyrgyz guy misappropriating Russian jet fuel and selling it to the US in 2010: https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/12/21/did-an-american-contractor-get-ky… / https://www.justsecurity.org/2726/the-juice-worth-squeeze-kyrgyzstan-f… But of course even the locals couldn't buy fuel without protection money being paid to the Taliban, so that's what the US ended up doing: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/9/11-millionaires-and-corruption-how-u… > According to a Pentagon analysis, 40% of the $108 billion that the Defense Department paid to contractors in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2012 ended up in the hands of either the Taliban, the violent Islamist Haqqani terror network, organized crime rings, transnational drug traffickers or corrupt Afghan officials.

> Biden asked for a prosecutor to be fired because he wasn't investigating the company his crackhead son received large payouts from enough huh? Yes. But it was not only that company. The corrupt prosecutor refused to investigate many corrupt companies and politicians. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/10/03/what-really-ha… > "Shokin played the role of protecting the vested interest in the Ukrainian system," said Carpenter, who traveled with Biden to Ukraine in 2015. "He never went after any corrupt individuals at all, never prosecuted any high-profile cases of corruption." >That demonstrated that Poroshenko's administration was not sincere about tackling corruption and building strong, independent law enforcement agencies, said Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based foreign policy think tank. > In July 2015, Shokin's office became mired in scandal after authorities raided homes belonging to two high-ranking prosecutors. Police seized millions of dollars worth of diamonds and cash, suggesting the pair had been taking bribes. > It became known as the "diamond prosecutors" case. Deputy General Prosecutor Vitaliy Kasko, who said he tried to investigate it, resigned months later, calling the prosecutor's office a "hotbed of corruption" and an "instrument of political pressure." > Shokin's office also stepped in…

>Remember: it's not just about Russians, but the original allegation was that the Trump campaign was involved. That has been very quietly walked back. Well considering that Trump's attorney general William Barr shut down the investigation and is reversing Mueller's charges that is not surprising. So not only was there never a full investigation done but the mediocre investigation we had is being undone. We will never know the truth of Trump's and Putin's secret relationship until a proper investigation is done. Including Trump's finances. https://www.justsecurity.org/69266/barr-is-dismantling-charges-filed-b… https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/05/08/michael-flynn-… https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/politics/trump-russia-justice-de… No one walked back on anything. It was simply not investigated since Republicans (especially people like Mitch McConnell) are putting party over country and not holding the president accountable. DNC has many problems including mediocre security and treating candidates differently and picking favorites but that is not the topic of the discussion. >Every single American should demand that evidence even if they despise Trump. The problem with your entire premise of demanding evidence is that it's a red herring. This is not about producing evidence because any evidence produced you can label as fake or made up or false flag. Once evidence…

As Wyden[1] points out, Congress has nearly no information on what impact the FISA program has. How many Americans are targeted already? The military refuses to answer Congress. How many emails & other collections are swept up? The military refuses to answer to Congress. This bill explicitly allows it's use directly against Americans and declares which circumstances the FBI & other agencies need to use warrants and where these agencies will now be permitted warrantless access to FISA collections. "Abouts" collection has a direct means to being permitted again. Ever use the word Benghazi in an email? Ok, all your communication might be wiretapped from now on. If the FBI ever wants to investigate you for something non terrorism related, something totally unrelated to Benghazi? No problem. Maybe- in some cases- they MIGHT need a warrant. Just Security had a great writeup[2]. This bill is a travesty, especially given that Congress has again and again asked for some information to inform them about how FISA is being used already, and the military has stonewalled and stonewalled and stonewalled. That congress would radically expand these powers, let them now directly target Americans, and would allow the FBI & others access to this program, after being continually rebuffed, AND would make this program unable to be challenged in court- it's the pinnacle of madness. It's complete dereliction of duty by congress, and one of the saddest moments of cowardice in the US Governments…

There are plenty of other explanations, given that it is such a political issue. Well, I don't know. It made a liar out of Obama, and I think that if he thought he could close it he would. I believe it is the US military's best interest- for the well being of any US soldiers that might be caught by the enemy- that the world be assured that torture doesn't work. But I really suspect that the numbers are different from what we hear, and somebody showed Obama an estimate of lives saved from the practice, and he decided that he couldn't be the one to pull the plug. TSA is another case in point. They are expensive and people complain. But if they has techniques that worked they would probably keep them quiet. I saw this kind of deception decades ago. The DIA assured us that certain techniques of getting information (spying) didn't work. It later famously came out that they indeed did, and quite well at that. I hope I'm wrong about this. And I have no inside information. Just a hunch. EDIT: More reading on the subject, for those interested. http://justsecurity.org/20553/new-torture-files-declassified-memos-det…

> see how they have to support any war waged by the US government. They would have had to support the Vietnam war, if were were in that era back. Something does not add up here still. I am so confused by these statements. Microsoft and other private companies do not have to knowingly violate human rights in the service of the US government whether it is war or not. https://www.justsecurity.org/113820/us-corporate-interests-human-right… https://www.state.gov/bureau-of-democracy-human-rights-and-labor/relea…

> According to international law, if the electrical grid directly enables Iran's military, then it is a valid military target. This is not what international law states. The Geneva Conventions forbid direct attacks on civilian assets. Where assets are dual-use, the principle of proportionality applies and your intent cannot be to cause suffering, destroy civilian morale, etc. I think anyone with an ounce of human decency and who isn't playing keyboard warrior saw Trump's threat to destroy "a whole civilization" for what it was, which is why so many military and legal scholars were disturbed by it. For those who actually care about what the law says instead of beating their chests: https://www.justsecurity.org/135797/war-crimes-rhetoric-power-plants-i… https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-hegseth-and-caine-hol…

There was this legal analysis about the Iran war crimes situation posted yesterday by some former military lawyers: https://www.justsecurity.org/135797/war-crimes-rhetoric-power-plants-i… Among other things they link to this: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2441

> Saying things is not a war crime. On the contrary, there appear to be good legal arguments that Hegseth merely saying "no quarter" is, on its own, a war crime: https://www.justsecurity.org/133970/legal-advice-hegseth-no-quarter-hy…

Haha, here's some random AI generated content: At least 225 judges have ruled in more than 700 cases that the administration's mandatory immigration detention policy likely violates the right to due process[1] The Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause generally requires those having federal funds cut off to receive notice and an opportunity for a hearing, which was not provided in many of DOGE's spending freezes[2] (there's more but what's the point) 1. https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal-challenge… 2. https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/many-trump-administration…

Thank you for your comment. I didn't understand, because I thought (and apparently lots of other people do, too) the supply chain risk designation does mean that, because that is exactly what Hegseth said. Surprise, surprise, Hegseth was lying through his teeth. I'm so sick of this lawless, fascist government and their spineless supporters. This article I found after reading your comment explains the true effect of the supply chain risk designation, and why Hegseth's assertion that "effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic" is complete and total bullshit. https://www.justsecurity.org/132851/anthropic-supply-chain-risk-design…

Which I'm sure will work as well as tariffs. Three years to go, good luck to them, slowing them down as proven exceptionally effective. Their efforts will likely die at midterms. https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal-challenge…

They make a quick mention of Turkey. Turkey probably perfected this technique - they've been abusing Interpol this way for years. Many people (e.g. Americans) who have openly criticized Turkey (blog post, Twitter, etc) have found themselves on the Interpol list and in trouble when traveling abroad. https://www.justsecurity.org/87260/after-spotlight-on-red-notices-turk… https://www.csce.gov/statements/authoritarian-abuse-interpol/ https://stockholmcf.org/turkey-among-top-abusers-of-interpols-notice-s…

The Forbes article says ICE acquired mobile cellular surveillance equipment and services under the Biden administration, and there have been IMSI catchers detected at demonstrations for a long time, for example at the Dakota Access Pipeline demonstrations in November, 2016[1]. It's not a new thing. [1] https://www.justsecurity.org/34449/investigating-surveillance-standing…