UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations

"Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry" UCLA Human Rights Film Series

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:15:50 PDT

Please join us for a documentary screening and panel discussion of "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry," as part of the UCLA International Human Rights Film Series.

ABOUT THE FILM

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is the inside story of a dissident for the digital age who inspires global audiences and blurs the boundaries of art and politics. First-time director Alison Klayman gained unprecedented access to Ai while working as a journalist in China. Her detailed portrait provides a nuanced exploration of contemporary China and one of its most compelling public figures.

Ai Weiwei is China's most famous international artist, and its most outspoken domestic critic. Against a backdrop of strict censorship and an unresponsive legal system, Ai expresses himself and organizes people through art and social media. In response, Chinese authorities have shut down his blog, beat him up, bulldozed his newly built studio, and held him in secret detention.

The film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry takes an unprecedented look at Ai Weiwei and those close to him, capturing the controversial artist’s forthrightness and unequivocal stance against China’s various forms of oppression.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

YUNXIANG YAN is a professor of Anthropology at UCLA and the Director of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University. His research includes economic anthropology, social change and development, family and kinship, exchange theory, peasant study, and cultural globalization. Some of his work includes The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village (Stanford UP, 1996) and Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999 (Stanford UP, 2003). Yunxiang Yan became a Guggenheim fellow in 2010 and received the Joseph Levenson Prize for the Best Book on Post-1900 China from the Association for Asian Studies in 2005.

ROBERT CHI is currently an Assistant Professor in the UCLA Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and has previously taught at Stony Brook University as well as Tunghai University in Taiwan. Professor Chi’s research focuses on Chinese-language cinemas, including those of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. His recent and ongoing research covers topics such as cinema and public memory, globalization and locality, genres including Chinese opera films and martial arts films, and the cinema of Shaw Brothers. His publications include “Dalu dianying zhong de Taiwan” [Taiwan in mainland Chinese cinema], Zhongwai wenxue [Chung wai literary monthly] (April 2006); “Fotografia, Memoria e Giustizia: La Strage di Nanchino del 1937”, Dopo la Violenza: Costruzioni di Memoria nel Mondo Contemporaneo (Napoli: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2005); and more.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

DAVID KAYE is a faculty member at the University of California Irvine’s School of Law. Prior to joining UCI, he was the founding executive director of UCLA’s International Human Rights Program and its International Justice Clinic, working on projects dealing with accountability for international crimes around the world. For more than a decade, David Kaye served as an international lawyer with the State Department, responsible for issues as varied as human rights, international humanitarian law, the use of force, international organizations, and U.S. foreign relations law. He was a legal adviser to the American Embassy in The Hague, where he worked with the international criminal tribunals and acted as counsel to the United States in several cases before the International Court of Justice and the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal. From 1999 to 2002 he was the principal staff attorney on humanitarian law, handling issues such as the application of the law to detainees in Guantanamo Bay and serving on several U.S. delegations to international negotiations and conferences.

To Get a Truce, Be Ready to Escalate: NY Times Op-Ed by Burkle Center Fellow General Wesley Clark

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:58:00 PDT

President Obama's decision to give Syrian rebels lethal aid, though it might eventually contribute to the overthrow of Mr. Assad, opens an opportunity for concerted diplomacy to end the bloodshed.

By Wesley Clark

June 17, 2013

Following the Obama administration’s conclusion last week that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons, the talk in Washington is all about military assistance to Syria’s rebels. That aid is necessary, but observers have overlooked a crucial point: the American decision to give rebels lethal aid, though it might eventually contribute to the overthrow of Mr. Assad, opens an opportunity for concerted diplomacy to end the bloodshed.

President Obama’s decision to supply small arms and ammunition to the rebels is a step, possibly just the first, toward direct American intervention. It raises risks for all parties, and especially for Mr. Assad, who knows that he cannot prevail, even with Russian and Iranian military aid, if the United States becomes fully engaged. We used a similar strategy against the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo in 1999, where I commanded American forces, and showed that NATO had the resolve to escalate. With a brutal dictator like Mr. Assad, only the knowledge that he cannot prevail will force him to negotiate an exit.

Mr. Obama has sought a diplomatic solution for some time, but has been reluctant to take steps that might lead to military intervention. Rightly so. No one wants more death and disruption in the Middle East, nor another open-ended military commitment — and certainly not the Pentagon. Despite the humanitarian tragedy in Syria, most of the conditions that have allowed previous interventions to succeed are absent. Legal authorization from the United Nations is unlikely, given opposition from Russia and China. Syria’s rebels are fragmented politically and militarily; some are religious extremists with professed ties to Al Qaeda.

What would follow Mr. Assad’s departure is unclear, which is why he has managed to retain support from Shiites and other minorities, besides his own Alawite sect, who fear the consequences of a Sunni-led takeover. Iranian agents, along with their allies from Hezbollah, are involved, as are the Russians, who have a naval port at Tartus.

But inaction is not an option. The bloodletting — more than 90,000 are estimated to have died so far — has deepened the region’s longstanding Shiite-Sunni struggle. It has become a proxy war, with Sunni Arab states backed by the West, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, challenging Iran’s reach to the Mediterranean via a proxy, Hezbollah, and Syria.

The risk of going beyond lethal aid to establishing a no-fly zone to keep Mr. Assad’s planes grounded or safe zones to protect refugees — options under consideration in Washington — is that we would find it hard to pull back if our side began losing. Given the rebels’ major recent setbacks, can we rule out using air power or sending in ground troops?

Yet the sum total of risks — higher oil prices, a widening war — also provide Syria (and its patrons, Iran and Russia) a motive to negotiate. If Mr. Obama can convince Iran that he is serious, and is ready to back up his new promise of aid with additional forces, Iran and Russia will know the risks: Mr. Assad could lose his regime, and most likely his life. Higher oil prices would cost China, which has blocked anti-Syrian initiatives at the United Nations, dearly.

In 1999 in Kosovo, the West used force as leverage for diplomacy. There, a limited NATO air campaign began after diplomatic talks failed to halt Serbian ethnic cleansing. The bombing lasted 72 days, and plans for a ground invasion of Serbia were under way when Mr. Milosevic finally bowed to the inevitable.

Of course, the Middle East is not the Balkans, the Russian government is more confident now than it was then, and Americans are tired after a decade of war. But there are similarities: The Kosovars, too, bickered among themselves, and some were said to be terrorists. The Russians backed Serbia — and at one point suggested that their naval fleet in the Black Sea would intervene. Like Mr. Assad, Mr. Milosevic was rational and calculating — he, too, wanted to survive.

Mr. Assad knows that Mr. Obama can be surprisingly resolute, as in his approval of drone strikes and the military operation to kill Osama bin Laden. While the United States begins to supply the rebels, there is a crucial opening for talks. Russia or China could recalculate and help lead Syria to a real peace process, as Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, a former Russian prime minister, did in Kosovo in 1999. Iran could emerge from a truce with Hezbollah’s power in Lebanon (and its strong links to Iran) intact.

The formula for diplomacy is clear: a cease-fire agreement; a United Nations presence; departure of foreign fighters; disarmament of Syrian fighters; international supervision of Syria’s military; a peaceful exit for Mr. Assad, his family and key supporters; a transitional government; and plans for a new Syria.

The conflict, and the diplomacy needed to end it, are likely to play out simultaneously. All parties will be recalculating their options and risks, so any assurance Mr. Obama gives Americans that he will limit our engagement would reduce the chances of success. This is a nerve-racking time, but the consequences of inaction are too high. Working together, America, Russia and China can halt Syria’s agony and the slide toward wider conflict. Mr. Obama’s decision might be the catalyst to get that done.

Wesley K. Clark, a retired Army general and former NATO supreme allied commander for Europe, is a senior fellow at the Burkle Center for International Relations at the University of California, Los Angeles.

To view the original article in The New York Times click here

The United States and China Need to Overcome Mutual Misunderstandings: Washington Post Op-Ed by Burkle Center Fellow General Wesley Clark

Fri, 7 Jun 2013 16:45:13 PDT

General Clark argues that the US and China need to develop a deeper understanding of each other and form greater cooperation.

By Wesley Clark

June 6, 2013

President Obama’s talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping should mark the United States’ true “pivot” to Asia — and it can’t come soon enough. China is more powerful than many Americans realize, and it is on a trajectory to become even more capable. At the same time, the Chinese may underestimate or misread us. Absent deeper understandings and greater cooperation, that’s a potentially dangerous combination.

I first went to China in 1983, on one of the first official U.S. military visits. In those days, China sought to use the United States as a counterbalance to the threat from the Soviet Union. Traveling to China regularly over the past decade for banking business, I have met top officials and visited enterprises. Unfailingly, I have been welcomed, treated with respect and listened to.

China is a rising power, surging forward economically year after year. Its $8 trillion economy is second only to the United States’ (almost $16 trillion) — but in terms of purchasing power, the two are much closer, and China is growing almost three times faster. Its leaders seem to think their country will soon overtake the United States. They look at U.S. unemployment, slow growth and indebtedness and see a declining economic superpower. The Chinese want their due, and they are growing impatient.

In Xi, who is both president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, the Chinese have a leader who seems comfortable handling the country’s political and economic development as well as its rapidly growing military capabilities. Those include stealth and drone technology; global positioning, anti-missile and anti-satellite capabilities; nuclear missiles; a growing naval capability aimed at the United States; and power-projection forces challenging its Asian neighbors.

It is clear from top-level Chinese diplomatic visits to India and Pakistan this spring and China’s challenges in the South China Sea and near Japan that this generation of leaders will be more assertive. We should listen when they ask why the United States is trying to “contain” China or sends its airplanes to “provoke” Chinese radar. We should take note, too, when Chinese citizens ask why we “like” the Vietnamese and Japanese more than them. In a communist state where the media are controlled, opinions usually start at the top. These are the rumblings that presage a significant challenge.

China’s leaders have a strategy, and they are moving vigorously: procuring natural resources abroad, gathering technology, developing infrastructure, managing urban growth and employment, building a university system and shifting development into China’s interior. Eventually, China will produce more for its markets, protect intellectual property and raise the value of its currency. It will encourage use of the renminbi as a global currency. Its leaders expect to resume China’s historic place at the center of world wealth, culture, technology and power. And, naturally, they are also asserting Chinese sovereignty, using historical claims, the residual antipathies of war and cultural sympathies to push outward — and gain relief from what they see as a too-confining U.S. presence.

Wesley Clark is a retired Army general and former supreme allied commander of NATO. He is a fellow at the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA.

To view the original article on The Washington Post click here

The Bernard Brodie Distinguished Lecture on the Conditions of Peace with Ambassador Ryan Crocker: "The Arab Spring and US Interests"

Thu, 6 Jun 2013 13:22:36 PDT

The UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations proudly presents the 2012-13 Bernard Brodie Distinguished Lecture on the Conditions of Peace featuring Ambassador Ryan Crocker. This event is co-sponsored by the UCLA Program on Central Asia, the UCLA Center for India and South Asia, The UCLA Center for Middle East Development, and the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

RYAN CROCKER is currently the first Kissinger Senior Fellow at Yale University 2012-2013. He also holds an appointment as the James Schlesinger Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia. In August 2013 he will return to his position as Dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.

Ambassador Crocker retired from the Foreign Service in April 2009 after a career of over 37 years but was recalled to active duty by President Obama to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan in 2011. He has served as U.S. Ambassador six times: Afghanistan (2011-2012), Iraq (2007-2009), Pakistan (2004-2007), Syria (1998-2001), Kuwait (1994-1997), and Lebanon (1990-1993). He has also served as the International Affairs Advisor at the National War College, where he joined the faculty in 2003. From May to August 2003, Ambassador Crocker was in Baghdad as the first Director of Governance for the Coalition Provisional Authority and was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs from August 2001 to May 2003. Since joining the Foreign Service in 1971, Ambassador Crocker also has had assignments in Iran, Qatar, Iraq and Egypt, as well as Washington. He was assigned to the American Embassy in Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the bombings of the embassy and the Marine barracks in 1983.

Ambassador Crocker received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, in 2009. His other awards include the Presidential Distinguished and Meritorious Service Awards, the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award (2008 and 2012), the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Civilian Service (1997 and 2008) and for Distinguished Public Service (2012), the Award for Valor and the American Foreign Service Association Rivkin Award for creative dissent. He received the National Clandestine Service’s Donovan Award in 2009 and the Director of Central Intelligence’s Director’s Award in 2012. In 2011, he was awarded the Marshall Medal by the Association of the United States Army. In May 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the establishment of the Ryan C. Crocker Award for Outstanding Achievement in Expeditionary Diplomacy. In July 2012, he was named an Honorary Marine, the 75^th civilian so honored in the 237 year history of the Corps.

ABOUT THE BERNARD BRODIE DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES

Established in 1980, the Bernard Brodie Distinguished Lecture on the Conditions of Peace celebrates the memory of Bernard Brodie as an eminent scholar and teacher. This lecture series provides a special forum for dignitaries and scholars of politics, strategy, warfare, and peace to present their views to the UCLA community and the public.

Sponsor(s): Burkle Center for International Relations, Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, Center for India and South Asia, Center for Middle East Development, Program on Central Asia

Lessons from the “long war” against terror in the Middle East

Tue, 4 Jun 2013 13:13:24 PDT

Ambassador Ryan Crocker repeatedly counseled the United States to practice “strategic patience” over the long term in its pursuit of stability in the Middle East at a lecture at UCLA.

International Institute, June 4, 2013 — Ambassador Ryan Crocker was the featured speaker at the Annual Bernard Brodie Distinguished Lecture on the Conditions of Peace organized by the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations on May 30th. A career foreign service officer for almost four decades and recipient of the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, Crocker has served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon.

Among the priorities that Crocker identified for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East were maintaining the U.S. relationship with Egypt, supporting stability in Afghanistan and engaging with Pakistan to promote a new strategic relationship. “In the Middle East,” remarked Crocker, “you have to be able to do more than one thing at once. . . . So you’ve got three top priorities — let’s see if our attention span will carry that far.”

Modern history of Middle East: A history of western invasions

Crocker began by defining the Middle East as “those countries that stretch from Morocco in North Africa on the west through Arab North Africa (Tunisia, Libya and Egypt), the countries of the Levant (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories), the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and the non-Arab states of [Turkey], Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

What all of these countries share, said Crocker, is the experience of having been occupied by one or more western powers. He cited Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 as a starting point of the modern era in Middle Eastern-western relations. For most Middle Easterners, he continued, “that history is a history of serial western interventions and occupations: the British, the French, the Italians, the Russians.”

This long period of occupation, he continued, has distorted political development in the region. The fact that none of the boundaries in the Middle East were indigenously demarcated, for example, continues to color politics in the region to this day. “So if we ask ourselves, why can’t they get their act together out there?” he said, “Well, we collectively have a significant amount to do with that.”

Imagine, he invited the audience, what the United States might be like if it had endured not just a series of invasions, but occupations — “countries that not only took you over, but then designed your government and economic system for you.”

Lessons from the “long war” on terror

Although historical consciousness is very acute in the Middle East, Crocker noted that the United States is “relentlessly ahistorical” and frequently operates in ignorance of what he called the “ground rules” of the region.

He offered two succinct lessons from what he called the long war on terror, which for him began almost 20 years before September 11, 2001 — when the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon where he was serving was attacked by a suicide bomber in 1983.

Lesson #1: Be careful what you get into. Middle Easterners, said Crocker, know that they can’t beat a Western occupier outright, so they retreat in the face of superior force and outlast the invader.

“Whether it’s the British and Russians in Afghanistan, the French in Morocco and Algeria, the Italians in Libya, the Americans in Lebanon, the Israelis in Lebanon, the Americans in Iraq or Afghanistan — it’s the same pattern,” said the speaker. “Basically, our adversary hasn’t started a fight until long after we think we’ve won the war.”

Once having invaded and run into an unexpected mess, he said, Americans impatiently cut their losses and go home. “Our adversaries count on that,” he noted, “[while] our allies become irritated.”

Lesson #2: Be careful what you propose to get out of. If interventions have consequences, so too, do disengagements, argued Crocker. That is, getting out of an intervention may incur very grave consequences, such as the collapse of Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban three years after the USSR withdrew from the country and stopped supporting the Afghan government —and the Afghan military.

In the case of Iraq in 2007, Crocker believed that withdrawal at that point would have led to a complete collapse of the fledgling Iraqi state, causing him to join forces with U.S. Army General David Petraeus and argue for the troop surge that ultimately followed.

In the case of Afghanistan today, he urged the U.S to continue to support the bilateral strategic partnership over the long run after U.S. troops withdraw in 2014, or risk the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The Arab Spring

Crocker contended that political changes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were only the beginning of a process begun by the Arab Spring that would continue for a long time. Unlike the revolutions of the 1950s, which toppled monarchies, he noted that the kingdoms of the Middle East were doing reasonably well.

“I make this point simply to suggest that we need to be a little humble in our judgments of other people’s political systems. . . . [Y]ou don’t have to be a democracy to stay in touch with your people,” he observed.

Non-state actors are becoming extremely significant in the political sphere in the Middle East, observed Crocker. In some cases, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia and Egypt, they are leaving the shadows to enter politics and govern countries — having no previous experience in such a task.

Armed, hostile non-state actors — particularly but not exclusively Al Qaeda — represent a particularly serious challenge for the region and the United States as a member of the international community, said the speaker. “As bad as things seem today, they are better today than they will be tomorrow,” he predicted.

The case of Syria

Crocker described the war in Syria as a multilayered conflict in which a domestic, essentially sectarian, civil war between Sunnis and Shias was overlaid by a regional proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Qatar on one side (supporting the Syrian rebels), and Iran and the Hezbollah Shia militia of Lebanon (supporting the regime of Bashar al-Assad), on the other.

At the same time, he continued, a civil war within a civil war is raging within the Free Syrian Army (FSA), in which the Islamist jihadi group Jabhat al-Nusra is clashing with other factions and efficiently seizing their weapons. Crocker argued against arming the FSA precisely because such a decision might further empower Jabhat al-Nusra, which he described as the most dangerous and lethal anti-western group in the country.

The speaker commended the Obama administration’s restraint in not rushing to “do something” in Syria that might prove exceedingly dangerous. “Do not send the 101st Airborne into this area,” he cautioned, recalling his first rule: “be careful what you get into.”

Rather than put boots on the ground, he counseled the United States to make the “radical” and “nutty” decision to deploy diplomats instead. He argued that region-savvy, Arabic-speaking diplomats were needed to assess who the opposition actually is on the ground and how the United States might influence these actors. “But right now,” he commented, “we haven’t got a clue and going in blind with guns blazing is not a formula for victory or success.”

Crocker predicted that the government of Bashar al-Assad would persist. Calling the Syrian Alawite regime one of the most ruthless in the region, he claimed it had been preparing for 30 years for precisely the current fight, as it expected eventual consequences from the 1982 massacre in Hama, when the regime of Hafez al-Assad put down a Muslim Brotherhood uprising at the cost of well over 10,000 civilian lives.

Despite the hazards, Crocker encouraged UCLA students to consider entering the Foreign Service. “Diplomacy is most important and can be most effective in the worst conditions,” he commented, “so if you’re a Foreign Service Officer in conditions of war and combat, you’re dealing with issues literally vital to the security of the United States. What you’re doing counts.”

Ambassador Ryan Crocker is currently on leave from his post as dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He is presently at Yale University (as the first Senior Kissinger Fellow) and the University of Virginia (as James Schlesinger Distinguished Visiting Professor).

His lecture was cosponsored by the UCLA Burkle Center, the Asia Institute’s Program on Central Asia, the Center for India and South Asia, the Center for Middle East Development and the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies.

Arnold C. Harberger Lecture on Economic Development with Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University - MULTIMEDIA COVERAGE NOW AVAILABLE

Wed, 5 Jun 2013 16:00:50 PDT

The UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations proudly presents the 2012-13 Arnold C. Harberger Distinguished Lecture on Economic Development featuring Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute and Professor of Sustainable Development, and of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. This event is co-sponsored by the UCLA Anderson School's Center for Global Management, the UCLA Law School's Emmett Center on Climate Change & the Environment and the Environmental Law Center.

Thursday, April 25, 2013
5:00 PM
Korn Convocation Hall, UCLA Anderson School of Management
Los Angeles, CA 90095

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is co-founder and Chief Strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and is director of the Millennium Villages Project. He has authored three New York Times bestsellers in the past seven years: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011).

Professor Sachs is widely considered to be the world’s leading expert on economic development and the fight against poverty. His work on ending poverty, promoting economic growth, fighting hunger and disease, and promoting sustainable environmental practices, has taken him to more than 125 countries with more than 90 percent of the world’s population. For more than a quarter century he has advised dozens of heads of state and governments on economic strategy, in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Sachs is the recipient of many awards and honors, including membership in the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Society of Fellows, and the Fellows of the World Econometric Society. He has received more than 20 honorary degrees, and many awards and honors around the world. His syndicated newspaper column appears in more than 80 countries around the world, and he is a frequent contributor to major publications such as the Financial Times of London, the International Herald Tribune, Scientific American, and Time magazine. Sachs has twice been named among Time Magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders. He was called by the New York Times, “probably the most important economist in the world,” and by Time Magazine “the world’s best known economist.” A recent survey by The Economist Magazine ranked Professor Sachs as among the world’s three most influential living economists of the past decade.

Prior to joining Columbia, Sachs spent over twenty years at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development and the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Sachs received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard.

ABOUT THE ARNOLD C. HARBERGER DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES

In sponsoring the Arnold C. Harberger Distinguished Lecture Series, the Burkle Center for International Relations celebrates Harberger as an eminent scholar and teacher. The lectures provide a special forum for outstanding students of international economics and policy to present their thoughts and research on issues like those that Harberger himself has addressed. Arnold Harberger's pioneering studies on taxation, development, cost benefit analysis, and trade policy have marked him as an economist with incredible breadth, from theory to policy, from the United States to developing countries. Past speakers in the lecture series have included Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate and professor at Columbia University, and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

International Career Panel

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:43:30 PDT

The 2013 International Career Panel hosts Brooke Christopher, Holly Derheim, and Erroll Southers. This panel provides insight about various fields and professions in the international arena, and guide students on how to best prepare for international careers. Alexandra Lieben, Deputy Director of the UCLA Burkle Center, moderated the discussion.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

BROOKE CHRISTOPHER is a Los Angeles native and an Ambassador for Women For Women International, a non-profit whose mission is to rebuild the lives of women survivors of war in Afghanistan, Bosnia, DRC, Iraq, and South Sudan. Brooke has also served as Director of Philanthropy at Enlightened.org, where she created funding and awareness for Virgin Unite, Thirst Relief, and Alicia Keys’ Keep A Child Alive. Brooke started her career in cause marketing as a producer, creating life-affirmative and transformational content for non-profits across television, film, and multi-media platforms. Brooke is Founder of the Sky Canvas Foundation, a Self-Portrait/ Self-Esteem art workshop taught to inner city girls worldwide.

HOLLY DERHEIM serves as the Director of Philanthropy, Western Region, for Heifer International and has been instrumental in implementing Heifer’s new income diversification strategy for the 13 western states. Holly brings over 20 years of experience in non-profit organizational development and fundraising strategizing for a wide range of non-profit entities, as well as consulting with groups who wish to increase their funding sources for non-profit work.

ERROLL SOUTHERS is a former Presidential nominee for Assistant Secretary of the TSA, Governor Schwarzenegger’s Deputy Director in the California Office of Homeland Security and FBI Special Agent. He is the Associate Director of the National Homeland Security Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California (USC) where he developed the Executive Program in Counter-Terrorism and serves as an Adjunct Professor of Homeland Security and Public Policy. Southers is also the Managing Director of the Counter-Terrorism and Infrastructure Protection Division of the international security consulting firm TAL Global. He is the former Chief of Homeland Security and Intelligence for the Los Angeles World Airports Police Department, the nation’s largest.

Arnold C. Harberger Lecture on Economic Development with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University: "What Causes Economic Growth? Two Centuries of Global Evidence"

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:42:40 PDT

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

ABOUT THE ARNOLD C. HARBERGER DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES

Sponsor(s): Burkle Center for International Relations, UCLA Law, Anderson Center for Global Management/CIBER

Congratulations to the 2012-13 Alice Belkin Memorial Scholarship Recipients

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:27:44 PDT

The UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2012-13 Alice Belkin Memorial Scholarship.

These scholarships are intended to reward outstanding minority UCLA graduate students in the field of International Relations who need financial assistance.

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE 2012-13 ALICE BELKIN MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP RECIPIENTS:

IRENE VEGA, PhD Candidate, UCLA Department of Sociology

Irene I. Vega is a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests are in international migration, political sociology, and racial/ethnic boundaries. She is particularly interested in whether and how internal immigration politics impact the United States’ foreign policy toward immigrant-sending countries, especially Latin America. She recently completed a study of the ethnic boundary making strategies of politically conservative Latinos who organize against unauthorized immigration in Arizona and California. Her dissertation will build on this study by mapping the temporal and political indicators of Latinos’ immigration attitudes and documenting how they relate to immigrants with whom they share an ethnic background and racial categorization within the U.S. hierarchy, but not a national experience. Her research has implications for U.S. immigration policy because Latinos represent a formidable force in the American electorate, especially through a powerful ethnic advocacy machine. In the future, she aims to conduct comparative research on international migration and political sociology, especially in countries that do not have a long history of immigration. Upon completion of the Ph.D., Irene will pursue an academic job at a research university with a lively program on international relations, specifically as it relates to immigration and politics.

KRISTEN KAO, PhD Candidate, UCLA Department of Political Science

Kristen Kao is a PhD Candidate in the Political Science Department at UCLA. She first traveled to the Middle East on a Fulbright grant to conduct research in Egypt in 2006. Since then, she has spent a good portion of each year living in the region, culminating in the dissertation fieldwork she is currently conducting in Jordan and Kuwait. Her research seeks to understand the effects of different types of electoral institutions on voting behavior and democratic representation in ethnically divided societies. Specifically, she collects data on electoral outcomes and the formation of voting coalitions on the basis of tribal or religious affiliation to examine voting patterns throughout history. More broadly, she studies ethnic and religious politics, comparative electoral systems, collective action, democratic theory, and politics of the Middle East. She hopes to become a professor and teach at a four-year university.

SIYU CAI, PhD Candidate, UCLA Department of Geography

Siyu was born in China, and he grew up in the U.S.'s most diverse zip code—Seattle's 98118 postal code. This upbringing has led him to pursue a Ph.D. in the Department of Geography at UCLA. His research interest is geographical political economy with a regional focus on China. He has done research on China's regional development, household registration system, and internal migration. Upon graduation, Siyu plans to apply his research agenda, as well as his interest in teaching, in an academic institution. In addition to his passion for the social sciences, Siyu loves the game of basketball.

To learn more about the scholarship program click here.

Burkle Center Fellow Tony Camerino quoted in Al Jazeera article on the US and its use of torture

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:20:25 PDT

Torment, torture and terror: A report concludes that the US tortured detainees, so how will its findings affect the US counter-terrorism policy?

A non-partisan US task force concludes that it is indisputable that the United States tortured detainees; and that the country's highest officials bear responsibility.

The comprehensive 560-page study into US interrogation and detention programmes after 9/11 was produced by an eleven-member panel convened by a group called the Constitution Project.

It was led by a former Republican and member of George W Bush's cabinet; and a former Democrat congressman.

The report will make uncomfortable reading for members of both the Bush and the Obama administrations.

It concludes that "the kind of considered and detailed discussions, involving the president and his top advisors on inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in custody" were unprecedented.

Moreover, the taskforce found 'no firm or persuasive evidence' that torture produced valuable information and that the policy 'damaged the standing of the US'.

The report was undertaken after President Obama refused to support a national commission to investigate the post 9/11 counter-terrorism programmes.

Although it finds an improvement in policy under president Obama, it notes allegations of so-called "proxy" detention and the torture of suspects handed over to US allies in the last few years.

It also questions Obama's executive order that allows what the report calls 'imhumane practices' during interrogation. The commission also calls for the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guanatanamo to be addressed.

And the report raises significant legal questions - as a signatory to the international convention against torture, the US is required to promptly investigate allegations of abuse and compensate the victims.

The Constitution Project's report is billed as the most ambitious, non-partisan attempt yet to assess US detention and interrogation programmes.

It concludes that it is "indisputable" that the US engaged in torture, and that ultimate responsibility lies with the country's most senior officials.

As well as detailing numerous acts of torture, the report also found that the US violated its international legal obligations by engineering what it called "enforced disappearances" and secret detentions.

So why has the report been undertaken now and will its findings make any difference?

Inside Story Americas, with presenter Shihab Rattansi, speaks to guests: Thomas Pickering, a former US ambassador to numerous countries and the United Nations who also served as undersecretary of state for political affairs; Tony Camerino, a former senior military interrogator who conducted or supervised over 1,300 interrogations in Iraq; and Karen Greenberg, director of the Centre on National Security at Fordham University.

"We interviewed well over a 100 people, we saw thousands of pages of documents, there is nothing classified in the report. But it gave us an opportunity to look at torture, to look at rendition, to look at Guantanamo, to look at the behaviour of medical personnel in these particular set of activities, to look at legal people …"

"It gave us an opportunity - we hope to tell the American public - the truth as we found it and as we understood it. And we hope it will impel the United States to take a series of actions ... that will never allow this to happen again."

-Thomas Pickering, Constitution Project Task Force Member

"One of the findings in the report ... is the trickle-down effect, which is that when you have senior leaders in our government, who say that it's ok once in a while to break the rules, and use torture if it saves lives, that has an effect in the field ... [it] had a very catastrophic effect in many different theatres, in Iraq, Afghanistan, at Guantanamo."

- Tony Camerino, Former Senior Military Interrogator

"This is a very strongly worded report ... which starts with: 'The United States tortured'. First of all using the word torture [instead of enhanced interrogation techniques] ... is making a statement .... The report makes it clear that it's not just important to acknowledge that torture happened [but also] to acknowledge that individuals at the highest level of government were involved ... it is not just a backwards looking report, it is very much ... forward looking ... and the moral clarity, the legal clarity [in it] is actually something that we haven’t seen before."

- Karen Greenberg, Director of the Centre on National Security at Fordham University

To view the original Al Jazeera article click here.

"Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" with author Elliott Abrams

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:05:02 PDT

Please join us for a talk by Elliott Abrams, former deputy assistant and deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush, about his new book, "Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." Comments will be provided by Prof. Steven Spiegel, Director of the UCLA Center for Middle East Development. This event is co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Middle East Development and the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This book tells the full inside story of the Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Written by a top National Security Council officer who worked at the White House with Bush, Cheney, and Rice and attended dozens of meetings with figures like Sharon, Mubarak, the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and Palestinian leaders, it brings the reader inside the White House and the palaces of Middle Eastern officials. How did 9/11 change American policy toward Arafat and Sharon's tough efforts against the Second Intifada? What influence did the Saudis have on President Bush? Did the American approach change when Arafat died? How did Sharon decide to get out of Gaza, and why did the peace negotiations fail? In the first book by an administration official to focus on Bush and the Middle East, Elliott Abrams brings the story of Bush, the Israelis, and the Palestinians to life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elliott Abrams is senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, D.C. He served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser in the administration of President George W. Bush, where he supervised U.S. policy in the Middle East for the White House.

Mr. Abrams was educated at Harvard College, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School. After serving on the staffs of Sen. Henry M. Jackson and Daniel P. Moynihan, he was an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration and received the secretary of state's Distinguished Service Award from Secretary George P. Shultz. In 2012, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy gave him its Scholar-Statesman Award.

Mr. Abrams was president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., from 1996 until joining the White House staff. He was a member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom from 1999 to 2001 and chairman of the commission in the latter year, and in 2012 was reappointed to membership for another term. Mr. Abrams is also a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which directs the activities of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He teaches U.S. foreign policy at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

Mr. Abrams joined the Bush administration in June 2001 as special assistant to the president and senior director of the NSC for democracy, human rights, and international organizations. From December 2002 to February 2005, he served as special assistant to the president and senior director of the National Security Council for Near East and North African affairs. He served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy from February 2005 to January 2009, and in that capacity supervised both the Near East and North African Affairs and the democracy, human rights, and international organizations directorates of the NSC.

Sponsor(s): Burkle Center for International Relations, Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, Center for Middle East Development

"Emperor" Starring Matthew Fox and Tommy Lee Jones

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:31:25 PDT

Please join us for a special screening of the film "Emperor." A panel discussion will follow the screening with Producers Yoko Narahashi and Eugene Nomura, Professor Kal Raustiala, and Professor William Marotti.

ABOUT THE FILM

A gripping tale of love and honor forged between fierce enemies of war, Emperor unfolds the story, inspired by true events, of the bold and secret moves that won the peace in the shadows of postwar Japan. The story of Emperor is based on the resonant, real events of 1945, when General MacArthur took control of a shell-shocked Japan on behalf of the U.S and Bonner Fellers worked covertly to investigate the Emperor’s fate while the future of the nation hung in the balance. Entwined with an against-the-odds romance, the story traverses the conflicting loyalties between heart and homeland, between revenge and justice, as the world rebuilds from the ruins of war.

Matthew Fox joins with Academy Award® winner Tommy Lee Jones, newcomer Eriko Hatsune and award-winning Japanese star Toshiyuki Nishida to bring to life the American occupation of Japan in the perilous and unpredictable days just after Emperor Hirohito’s World War II surrender. As General Douglas MacArthur (Jones) suddenly finds himself the de facto ruler of a foreign nation, he assigns an expert in Japanese culture – and psychological warfare – General Bonner Fellers (Fox), to covertly investigate the looming question hanging over the country: should the Japanese Emperor, worshiped by his people but accused of war crimes, be punished or saved? Caught between the high-wire political intrigue of his urgent mission and his own impassioned search for the mysterious school teacher (Hatsune) who first drew him to Japan, Fellers can be certain only that the tricky subterfuge about to play out will forever change the history of two nations and his heart.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

EUGENE NOMURA is a Producer of EMPEROR as well as an actor. His acting career began at the age of fourteen playing the lead in an award winning NHK television drama ‘Kizuna’ (1987). He then received an acting scholarship to the Lee Strasberg Institute and the Actors’ Studio in New York. After returning to Tokyo, Nomura worked on the award winning film ‘800 Two Lap Runners’ (1994) where he was honored with the Kinema Junpo Award and Mainichi Concours Grand Prize for Best Actor. Having worked in over 50 films and 60 major television series in Japan, he also started producing films in 2009. Nomura’s producer credits include THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN(2009), TAJOMARU (2009), SURELY SOME DAY (2010), and TOMATO NO SHIZUKU (2011).

KAL RAUSTIALA is Director of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and Associate Vice Provost of the International Institute and International Studies. A professor at UCLA Law School, he holds a joint appointment with the UCLA International Institute, where he teaches in the Program on Global Studies. Professor Raustiala has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, and was a fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. He serves on the editorial boards of International Organization and the American Journal of International Law, and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

WILLIAM MAROTTI is an Associate Professor at UCLA and teaches modern Japanese history, with an emphasis on everyday life and cultural-historical issues. He is also Chair of the East Asian Studies M.A. Interdepartmental Degree Program. He received his doctorate in 2001 from the University of Chicago’s Department of East Asian Civilizations and Cultures, where he worked with Harry Harootunian, Tetsuo Najita, William Sibley, and Moishe Postone.

YOKO NARAHASHI is a Producer of EMPEROR as well as an accomplished actor, an award winning director of stage and screen, a casting director and a lyricist. Narahashi’s feature film directorial debut THE WINDS OF GOD won her the Japan Film Critics Award for Best New Director. Narahashi has been a casting director for foreign feature film productions since she worked with Director and Producer Steven Spielberg on EMPIRE OF THE SUN in 1987. More recently, Narahashi was Associate Producer and Casting Director for THE LAST SAMURAI, Casting Director for MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, BABEL, THE RAMEN GIRL, and most recently 47 RONIN, starring Keanu Reeves and due for release in 2012.

Sponsor(s): Burkle Center for International Relations, Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies

Are Signature Strikes Legal? Targeted Killings and International Law

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:50:14 PDT

Please join us for a talk with Kevin Heller, Associate Professor of International Criminal Law at Melbourne Law School. This event is co-sponsored with the UCLA School of Law Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project.

ABOUT THE TALK

Although the vast majority of drone attacks conducted by the United States have been signature strikes, scholars have paid almost no attention to their legality under international law. This talk attempts to fill that lacuna. It begins by explaining why a signature strike must be justified under either international humanitarian law (IHL) or international human rights law (IHRL) even if the strike was a legitimate act of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. It then explores the legality of signature strikes under IHL, concluding that although some signature strikes clearly comply with the principle of distinction, others either violate that principle as a matter of law or require evidence concerning the target that the United States is unlikely to possess prior to the attack. Finally, the talk provides a similar analysis for IHRL, concluding that most of the signature strikes permitted by IHL would violate IHRL’s insistence that individuals cannot be arbitrarily deprived of their right to life. To read the paper that this talk is based on, please click here.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Kevin Jon Heller is currently Associate Professor & Reader at Melbourne Law School, where he teaches international criminal law and criminal law. He is also Project Director for International Criminal Law at the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law, a joint project of Melbourne Law School and the Australian Defence Force. He holds a PhD in law from Leiden University, a JD with distinction from Stanford Law School, an MA with honours in literature from Duke University, and an MA and BA, both with honours, in sociology from the New School for Social Research.

Kevin’s book The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law was published by Oxford University Press in June 2011, and Stanford University Press published his edited book (with Markus Dubber) The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law in February 2011. He is a permanent member of the international-law blog Opinio Juris.

On the practical side, Kevin has been involved in the International Criminal Court’s negotiations over the crime of aggression and served from December 2008 until February 2011 as one of Radovan Karadzic's formally-appointed legal associates at the ICTY. His blog post on 18 USC 1119, the foreign-murder statute, is credited with influencing the development of the Obama administration's targeted-killing policy concerning American citizens.

For more information on The UCLA School of Law Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project, please click here.

For directions and parking instructions for the UCLA Law School, please click here.

Sponsor(s): Burkle Center for International Relations, UCLA Law

U.S. drone signature strikes: An often illegal “killing machine”

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:06:18 PDT

Legal scholar Kevin Jon Heller examines the legal and evidentiary justifications for U.S. "signature" strikes—drone attacks that target unknown individuals based on a behavioral pattern—and finds that both frequently fail to meet the requirements of international humanitarian law.

International Institute, UCLA, April 9, 2013—The United States clearly believes that using lethal force against suspected terrorists is legal, said legal scholar Kevin Jon Heller, as long as it conforms with Article 51 of the U.N. Charter (the right of states to defend themselves against armed attack). Heller spoke at a lecture organized by the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and the Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project of the UCLA School of Law.

“Signature strikes,” explained Heller, make up the overwhelming majority of drone attacks carried out by the United States. These strikes target individuals whose identities are unknown, but who exhibit certain patterns of behavior or defining characteristics associated with terrorist activity. In contrast, “personality” strikes target specific, known individuals, such as the strike that killed American-born Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in October 2011.

“It is critically important to understand that an extra-territorial targeted killing potentially violates two different, but equally fundamental, rights under international law,” said Heller. First, it could violate the right of the affected state to territorial sovereignty, as protected under Article 24 of the U.N. Charter. Second, it could violate the targeted individual’s right to life, as protected under Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

Even if a U.S. signature strike can be considered a necessary proportionate response to an armed attack, Heller insisted that this did not mean that the use of deadly force against an individual was legal—a distinction the United States does not seem to understand.

In other words, he continued, the United States must be able to justify both the violation of a state’s right to sovereignty (e.g., citing self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter) and the denial of an individual’s right to life (either under the rules of international humanitarian law if the killing takes place in an armed conflict, or under the rules of international human rights law if it takes place outside of armed conflict).

The United States takes the position that all of its signature strikes are governed by international humanitarian law (IHL) and not international human rights law, a point disputed by Heller. Even so, he said, not all such strikes necessarily comply with IHL.

“To determine the legality of any particular strike, we must ask two interrelated questions,” said the speaker. “Was the particular signature legally sufficient to establish that the victim of the signature strike was targetable? Was the evidence sufficient to determine that the targeted individual was engaged in the signature behavior?” A signature strike is legal only when the answer to both questions is “yes,” argued Heller.

Using these requirements of legal and evidentiary adequacy, the speaker examined several of the some 14 (or more) “signatures” used to justify U.S. drone strikes on unknown individuals. In his view, two types are legally justified: strikes against unknown individuals who are transporting weapons and attacks on known Al Queda compounds.

In the first case, however, he specified that individuals cannot be attacked simply for being armed (for example, nearly all men in Yemen are armed). In the second case, he specified that a compound used primarily for civilian purposes is only legally targetable when it is being used for military purposes.

Using the same criteria, Heller found that three types of signature strikes are never legal because they blatantly violate the evidentiary requirement. These are strikes against:

military-aged males in an area of known terrorist activity (a category that Heller deemed an unfortunate remnant of the Vietnam War);
individuals who “consort” with known militants; and
groups of armed men traveling in trucks in areas currently under the control of Al Queda.

Finally, Heller claimed that one signature — “facilitating terrorist activity” — was inherently neither legally adequate or inadequate, as it depended on how the United States interpreted the conditions in question.

In his view, direct participation in hostilities, gathering military intelligence in enemy territory, acting as a guide for an organized armed group, or providing ammunition during hostilities fulfilled the requirements of legal adequacy for this signature. However, “war-sustaining activities” such as recruitment, propaganda, fighters, financing, or providing fighters food, lodging, or logistical support, did not.

With respect to the evidentiary adequacy of signature strikes, Heller identified two main challenges: lack an international standard for the level of certainty required to target unknown individuals and lack of transparency on the part of the U.S. government. The government won’t make public either the signatures or the evidence it uses to justify signature strikes (asserting that the information is “classified”), he observed, which makes it difficult to judge their legality.

Numerous documented cases of incorrect targeting and the killing of innocent civilians, however, indicate insufficient evidence of a “signature” prior to strikes, said Heller. He noted that the inability of drones to distinguish individuals in very densely populated urban areas or in areas covered with vegetation was also responsible for incorrect targeting.

Heller concluded that the United States was clearly willing to launch signature strikes on the basis of evidence that was anything but definitive. He noted that in order to confirm certain signatures (e.g., behavior indicating that an individual is a member of an armed organized group), individuals need to be tracked over time, based on analysis of communication intercepts and intelligence from human sources.

Yet, signature strikes have overwhelmingly targeted low- and middle-level militants, he continued, who are unlikely to be the object of specific, resource-intensive investigations. Moreover, added Heller, the most controversial signature strikes take place in areas highly unlikely to have signal intercepts or human sources, such as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan and areas of Yemen.

The speaker ended his talk with several key observations. “The belief of the United States that the self-defense clause of the U.N. Charter justifies depriving an individual of his right to life is simply inaccurate," he said. "In addition, the United States appears to have launched drone strikes on the basis of a number of signatures that are either per se unlawful or are only lawful if interpreted in a manner not suggested by U.S. practice. And there are significant questions about whether the United States demands evidence of targetability sufficient to rebut the presumption of civilian status under international humanitarian law.”

Kevin Jon Heller is Associate Professor & Reader at the Law School of Melbourne University, Australia. A permanent member of the international law blog “Opinio Juris,” he is also Project Director for International Criminal Law at the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law, a joint project of Melbourne Law School and the Australian Defence Force. Click here for a copy of the “Journal of International Criminal Justice” article on which his lecture was based.

Burkle Center Director Kal Raustiala is quoted in The Guardian's article on the U.S. Constitution

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:08:10 PDT

Burkle Center Director Kal Raustiala is quoted in The Guardian's article "Charles Krauthammer's false statement about the US Constitution."

Charles Krauthammer's false statement about the US Constitution

By Glenn Greenwald

Charles Krauthammer's Washington Post column this morning, which calls on Congress to enact new legislation authorizing and regulating Obama's drone attacks, is actually worth reading. That's because it highlights the central fact about the Obama legacy when it comes to US militarism, war, and civil liberties. Referencing the monumental shift in how Democrats think about such matters now as compared to the Bush years, he writes:

"Such hypocrisy is the homage Democrats pay to Republicans when the former take office, confront national security reality, feel the weight of their duty to protect the nation — and end up doing almost everything they had denounced their predecessors for doing. The beauty of such hypocrisy, however, is that the rotation of power creates a natural bipartisan consensus on the proper conduct of this war . . .

"Necessity having led the Bush and Obama administrations to the use of near-identical weapons and tactics, a national consensus has been forged. Let's make it open."

That Obama has ushered in a "bipartisan consensus" for these policies - transforming them from the divisive symbols of right-wing extremism into the unchallenged framework of both parties' establishments - is indisputable, one of the most consequential aspects of his presidency.

But Krauthammer's real purpose with this column is to mock and excoriate Rand Paul's anti-drone filibuster. As the New York Times describes today, there is an increasingly acrimonious split in the GOP about the policies of militarism and civil liberties enacted in the 9/11 era, and neocons like Krauthammer are petrified that the (relative) anti-war and pro-due-process stances articulated by Paul will gain traction. Krauthammer notes that, contrary to the claims of many progressives, Paul's opposition was not merely to killing Americans on US soil, but was broader: it was about assassinating citizens without due process anywhere they may be found. Referencing a Washington Post Op-Ed in which Paul declared that "no American should be killed by a drone without first being charged with a crime," Krauthammer writes: "note the absence of the restrictive clause: 'on American soil'". Here's how Krauthammer describes Paul's real purpose in launching the filibuster:

"Paul's unease applies to non-American drone targets as well. His quarrel is with the very notion of the war on terror, though he is normally too smart to say that openly and unequivocally. Unlike his father, who implied that 9/11 was payback for our sins, Paul the Younger more gingerly expresses general skepticism about not just the efficacy but the legality of the entire war."

That Paul became the first US Senator on the Senate floor to utter the name "Abdulrahaman Awlaki" - the 16-year-old US-born citizen killed by a US drone in Yemen - bolsters Krauthammer's claim that the Paul filibuster was about more than just the use of force on US soil, but rather posed a challenge to the War on Terror premises generally. That is precisely why Krauthammer - along with all other neocons and, notably, many Democratic Party Obama-supporters - are desperate to discredit the Paul filibuster and the sentiments it stoked: regardless of Paul's motives, the filibuster called into question both the wisdom and legality of the entire Endless War approach to Terrorism.

But to discredit this, Krauthammer makes a claim about the US Constitution that is so patently false as to be retraction-worthy. He writes (emphasis added):

"Now we're talking about a larger, more controversial issue: the killing-by-drone in Yemen of al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki. Outside American soil, the Constitution does not rule, no matter how much Paul would like it to."

That italicizied claim from Krauthammer - that "outside American soil, the Constitution does not rule" - is a very common assertion and thus widely believed. But it is factually false. And there can be no reasonable dispute about this.

To begin with, think about what it would mean if Krauthammer's claim were true: does anyone think it would be constitutionally permissible under the First Amendment for the US government to wait until an American critic of the Pentagon travels on vacation to London and then kill him, or to bomb a bureau of the New York Times located in Paris in retaliation for a news article it disliked, or to indefinitely detain with no trial an American who travels to Beijing or Lima or Oslo and who is suspected of committing a crime? Anyone who believes what Charles Krauthammer said this morning - "Outside American soil, the Constitution does not rule" - would have to take the patently ludicrous position that such acts would be perfectly constitutional.

But to see how false is Krauthammer's claim, it's unnecessary to engage in that kind of reasoning. The law is crystal clear on this matter. In 1957, the US Supreme Court decided the case of Reid v. Covert in which this exact question was conclusively decided: does the Bill of Rights restrict what the US Government does to US citizens on foreign soil? The Court answered the question as decisively and unambiguously as the English language permits (emphasis added):

"At the beginning, we reject the idea that, when the United States acts against citizens abroad, it can do so free of the Bill of Rights. The United States is entirely a creature of the Constitution. Its power and authority have no other source. It can only act in accordance with all the limitations imposed by the Constitution. When the Government reaches out to punish a citizen who is abroad, the shield which the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution provide to protect his life and liberty should not be stripped away just because he happens to be in another land."

How can any Washington Post editor read what the Supreme Court said and not compel a retraction of Krauthammer's claim?

The Court then cited both the biblical Paul's right to demand as a Roman citizen that his foreign trial be conducted in accordance with Roman law, as well the observations of an English historian that British subjects of the Crown who went to live in settled colonies "take with them all the rights and liberties of British Subjects; all the rights and liberties as against the Prerogative of the Crown, which they would enjoy in this country". About the fact that the US Constitution restricts what the US government can do to citizens on foreign soil, the Court thus explained: "This is not a novel concept. To the contrary, it is as old as government."

Notably, while noting that this principle applies equally to all Constitutional guarantees when the US government acts against a citizen on foreign soil, the Court made clear that of all the rights, the guarantee of a fair trial before the state can punish or kill a citizen is the most central (emphasis added):

"This Court and other federal courts have held or asserted that various constitutional limitations apply to the Government when it acts outside the continental United States. While it has been suggested that only those constitutional rights which are 'fundamental' protect Americans abroad, we can find no warrant, in logic or otherwise, for picking and choosing among the remarkable collection of 'Thou shalt nots' which were explicitly fastened on all departments and agencies of the Federal Government by the Constitution and its Amendments. Moreover, in view of our heritage and the history of the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it seems peculiarly anomalous to say that trial before a civilian judge and by an independent jury picked from the common citizenry is not a fundamental right. . . . Trial by jury in a court of law and in accordance with traditional modes of procedure after an indictment by grand jury has served and remains one of our most vital barriers to governmental arbitrariness. These elemental procedural safeguards were embedded in our Constitution to secure their inviolateness and sanctity against the passing demands of expediency or convenience."

One can debate if one is inclined whether this applies to specific cases such as Awlaki. But Krauthammer's general claim about the law - that "outside American soil, the Constitution does not rule" - is grounded in total ignorance. Writing in 2007 in the Los Angeles Times about Reid v. Covert and the War on Terror specifically, UCLA law professor Kal Raustiala explained: "The shield of the Constitution, the justices stated in reversing a centuries-old legacy, cannot be ignored by the executive branch simply because the accused happens to be abroad."

Aside from the fact that the Washington Post should not be publishing clear factual falsehoods about the state of the law, the reason this matters so much is that distorting the Constitution is the key tactic for inducing public acquiescence to its violations. As I've documented before, many of the War on Terror abuses have been justified with the equally false claim that the US Constitution applies only to US citizens and not to foreign nationals on US soil and US-controlled territory (such as at Guantanamo).

The War on Terror has been and continues to be, above all, a war on the most basic liberties and political safeguards that we're all taught are what distinguishes the US and keeps it free. One major reason that has happened is because patently false claims about those rights have been systematically propagated. Having the Washington Post publish Krauthammer's false claim that "outside American soil, the Constitution does not rule" is a particularly egregious example of that behavior.

Erasing the Jose Padilla case from history

Like so many people who defend Obama's War on Terror policies and mock Paul's filibuster, Krauthammer suggests that the very idea that the US government could treat a US citizen on US soil as an enemy combatant and thus punish them without due process is so absurd as to be paranoid to even raise the question. Does anyone remember the Jose Padilla case: in which the Bush administration, in 2002, detained this US citizen, on US soil; declared him to be an "enemy combatant"; and then proceeded to imprison him for the next 3 1/2 years without charges or trial - all with little public resistance and, ultimately, endorsement from a right-wing court? Was Charles Krauthammer objecting to any of that? Were all of the people now claiming that it's paranoia to think that the US government would use war power theories against a US citizen on US soil marching in the streets in protest over this? The answer is: no.

The US government has already asserted the very theory that many now mock Paul for asking about, and did so with very little resistance, including from the courts. It's true that they did not kill Padilla, but the theory used to imprison him for years without charges - the president is empowered to declare anyone he wants to be an "enemy combatant" without charges and trial and then punish him as such: including US citizens found on US soil - is precisely the theory that would justify targeting US citizens on US soil for an Awlaki-type strike. Indeed, that is the theory invoked to justify the killing of Awlaki, and there is no cogent way to exclude US soil: since the entire globe is a battlefield, the president has the unilateral power to detain or kill anyone he wants, including citizens, without charges. To pretend that this is so beyond the pale of what US political culture would tolerate is to exhibit serious naïveté and/or ignorance of recent history.

To view the original article on The Guardian click here

UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations

"Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry" UCLA Human Rights Film Series

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To Get a Truce, Be Ready to Escalate: NY Times Op-Ed by Burkle Center Fellow General Wesley Clark

The United States and China Need to Overcome Mutual Misunderstandings: Washington Post Op-Ed by Burkle Center Fellow General Wesley Clark

The Bernard Brodie Distinguished Lecture on the Conditions of Peace with Ambassador Ryan Crocker: "The Arab Spring and US Interests"

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Lessons from the “long war” against terror in the Middle East

Arnold C. Harberger Lecture on Economic Development with Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University - MULTIMEDIA COVERAGE NOW AVAILABLE

Thursday, April 25, 2013 5:00 PM Korn Convocation Hall, UCLA Anderson School of Management Los Angeles, CA 90095

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International Career Panel

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Arnold C. Harberger Lecture on Economic Development with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University: "What Causes Economic Growth? Two Centuries of Global Evidence"

ABOUT THE ARNOLD C. HARBERGER DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES

Congratulations to the 2012-13 Alice Belkin Memorial Scholarship Recipients

Burkle Center Fellow Tony Camerino quoted in Al Jazeera article on the US and its use of torture

"Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" with author Elliott Abrams

"Emperor" Starring Matthew Fox and Tommy Lee Jones

ABOUT THE FILM

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Are Signature Strikes Legal? Targeted Killings and International Law

U.S. drone signature strikes: An often illegal “killing machine”

Burkle Center Director Kal Raustiala is quoted in The Guardian's article on the U.S. Constitution

Charles Krauthammer's false statement about the US Constitution

Erasing the Jose Padilla case from history

Thursday, April 25, 2013
5:00 PM
Korn Convocation Hall, UCLA Anderson School of Management
Los Angeles, CA 90095