National and International Security

In an op-ed published in The Huffington Post on May 5, Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz assessed the decision made by the Obama administration not to release photographs of Osama bin Laden’s dead body for public scrutiny. 

In the Washington Post ‘Opinions’ section on May 5, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried and his son, Suffolk University Philosophy Department Chair Gregory Fried, discussed the killing of Osama bin Laden. The authors argued that torture apologists are undermining what the pair call a “great victory” for the U.S. by calling into question the circumstances under which bin Laden was felled during the firefight in his compound in Pakistan—a “risible” notion, by the authors’ standards.

HLS Lecturer on Law Juan Zarate ’97 was interviewed in the Washington Post today on national security threats after Osama bin Laden's death. From 2005 to 2009, Zarate served as the deputy assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism and was responsible for developing and implementing the U.S. Government’s counterterrorism strategy and policies related to transnational security threats.

Speaking to students at a lecture sponsored by the Harvard Law School Advocates for Human Rights on March 9, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Gene Sharp discussed various elements of an effective nonviolent struggle and addressed the recent demonstrations in the Middle East in light of his research.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst responsible for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971, addressed a Harvard Law School audience last week in a discussion of WikiLeaks, the organization that publishes classified documents submitted by whistleblowers worldwide. Once called “the most dangerous man in America,” Ellsberg, who will turn 80 on April 7, engaged in a dialog with Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School, about why states keep secrets and the consequences of this secrecy.

Following a vote of the Harvard Law School faculty, Gabriella Blum LL.M. '01 S.J.D. '03, a specialist in the laws of war and conflict resolution, has been promoted from assistant professor to professor of law—a tenured faculty position.

In a recent op-ed in Slate, Professor Jack Goldsmith makes the case for why President Obama's campaign of air and sea strikes against Libya is constitutional.  Goldsmith says that while he agrees with "many of the arguments from critics of the intervention that  President Obama acted imprudently in committing American forces to a conflict with an ill-defined national security justification,"  he does not believe that the military action is unconstitutional. Goldsmith's op-ed, "War Power," appeared in the March 21, 2011 edition of Slate. A former assistant attorney general in the Bush Administration, Goldsmith is the author of "The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgement Inside the Bush Administration" (New York : W.W. Norton & Company 2007).

Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 has released an article detailing U.S. government and news media censorship of WikiLeaks after the organization released the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and U.S. State department diplomatic cables in 2010. Among his key conclusions: The government overstated and overreacted to the WikiLeaks documents, and the mainstream news media followed suit by engaging in self-censorship. Benkler argues further that there is no sound Constitutional basis for a criminal prosecution of WikiLeaks or its leader, Julian Assange.

War between Israel and Iran is not inevitable, argued Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, in an event sponsored by the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School last week. 

The United States’ response to the 9/11 attacks has altered the legal landscape. That premise was outlined by William K. Lietzau, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy, in his keynote address at a conference titled  “Understanding Detention and Predicting Prosecutions: Legal Challenges and Legislative Options Ten Years After 9/11.” The conference, sponsored by the National Security and Law Association, took place on February 4 at Harvard Law School and featured panel discussions focusing on prosecutions and detentions in the aftermath of 9/11.

Standing on principles shaped at HLS, Steven Goldberg ’72 wins a landmark ruling in a case involving one of the most controversial initiatives surrounding the War on Terror. For Goldberg the case exemplifies overreach at the highest level of government.

Assistant Professor Gabriella Blum LL.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’03 is a specialist in the laws of war. Professor Philip Heymann ’60 is an expert in domestic law enforcement. With these different backgrounds, they decided to teach a course together on counterterrorism.

In his first tour of duty in Iraq, in 2007, Marine Capt. Courtney Walsh LLM ’11 was one of two defense attorneys who represented Marines in Al Anbar Province charged with a range of infractions, from disciplinary violations to serious crimes tried in a court-martial.

As a little girl in Berkeley, Calif., U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Sylvaine Wong LL.M. ’11 became enamored of the Navy when her dad took her each year to “Fleet Week” to clamber aboard aircraft carriers and visit other military craft.

For the first three months his battalion was stationed in Al Anbar Province in Iraq in early 2007, the situation was “highly kinetic,” recalls U.S. Marine Captain Siddhartha Velandy LL.M. ’11, with the Marines either under relentless attack or aggressively patrolling in order to create a secure environment.

Steven Schartup ’13 in a U.S. Army veteran who did two tours of duty in Iraq, one involving combat, and another couple of months in Kosovo in a peacekeeping operation.

It was between his junior and senior years at Princeton, in the summer of 2004 when the war in Iraq was not very old, that Graham Phillips ’13 decided to enlist in the U.S. Army.

U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Susan McGarvey LL.M.’ 11 was in the courthouse when Saddam Hussein was on trial for the Anfal Campaign, the genocide of Kurds that he ordered in the late 1980s.

As a U.S. Army intelligence officer stationed in Baghdad in 2006 and 2007, Ian Gore ’13 was a targeting officer, responsible for building “target packets” against enemy combatants: working with locals to find out who the enemies were, compiling evidence against them, explaining to the unit commander why a particular person should be arrested and detained, and describing the goals that would be achieved.

Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith co-wrote an op-ed with Benjamin Wittes for the Nov. 19, 2010 edition of The Washington Post titled “Ghailani verdict makes stronger case for military detentions.” The piece addresses debate over the Obama administration’s policy to try former Guantanamo detainees in civilian court.

Prominent legal and political scholars explored the relationship between terrorism, diplomacy and law in a panel discussion in early October in light of “Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists” (2010), a book written by Harvard Law School Professor Philip Heymann ’60 and Associate Professor Gabriella Blum LL.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’03.