America’s Viceroys: The Military and U.S. Foreign Policy

In 2000, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest wrote a series of articles on the rising importance of the regional com- batant commanders, comparing them to modern-day “proconsuls” whose Roman forebears served as regional governors and commanders in chief of their military forces. Reveron’s Amer- ica’s Viceroys examines this comparison, providing a historical and contempo- rary analysis of contemporary regional combatant commanders and their ris- ing influence in the foreign policy– making arena

Battling Red Tape: Veterans Struggle for Care and Benefits

More than 1.5 million troops have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. 30,000 troops are counted among those wounded in action. But hundreds of thousands of others have suffered injuries not recorded in the official tally, including the many veterans with serious mental health problems. These veterans are overwhelming the military and veterans' health care and disability systems.As a result, hundreds of thousands of wounded troops and veterans are being forced to wait months and even years for medical appointments and disability compensation. Some veterans with serious mental health problems have committed suicide while waiting for counseling, and others have fallen into debt awaiting compensation from the military or Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).A major cause of the delays is the maze of paperwork that troops and veterans must navigate to get care or benefits. The military and the VA have separate health care systems and separate disability benefits systems, each with an exceptionally complicated and confusing bureaucracy.The medical care offered through the Department of Defense (DOD) is some of the most advanced in the world. But some wounded troops are suffering delays in treatment because the military does not use a consistent digital medical records system. Moreover, troops too wounded to continue their service must chaperone complicated paperwork through an arduous and confusing process of medical evaluation. Some veterans' advocates believe the Army is taking advantage of troops' confusion to lower disability ratings and save money. According to the Dole-Shalala Commission tasked with addressing the problems faced by troops at Walter Reed, less than 40% of wounded troops say they are satisfied with the disability evaluation system.For those who have left military service, the Veterans Affairs system can provide health care and benefits. Unfortunately, the transition from the DOD to the VA is far from seamless. Crucial DOD paperwork, including medical records and military service records, regularly gets lost in the shuffle from DOD to VA. Moreover, the transition from top-echelon military hospitals to a local VA facility can mean a reduced standard of care.Changes to VA eligibility rules have restricted access to VA health care and contributed to the 1.8 million veterans who lack health insurance. But even for those veterans with access to the VA system, delays and bureaucratic hurdles are commonplace. High demand has created a huge backlog for mental health treatment, making care "virtually inaccessible" at some clinics, according to at least one high-ranking VA official.The VA disability benefits system is also massively backlogged. There are about 400,000 pending disability claims, including 83,000 that have been waiting six months or more. The average wait-time for a disability claim is 183 days, or about six months. For claims that are appealed, the wait-time skyrockets to 657 days, or almost two years. Despite the backlog, the VA's claims processing staff has not substantially increased. In the meantime, veterans too wounded to work are often unable to support themselves or their families.The public outrage over bureaucratic neglect and shoddy conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center shined a light on the many problems facing wounded troops and veterans. A wide array of recommendations has been made, but whether these solutions will be effectively implemented remains to be seen

Insulating Universal Human Rights from the ‘Ethical Foreign Policy’ Threat

At the heart of the notion of an ethical foreign policy is the assumption that foreign policy can help deliver liberty and security around the globe. Yet, as Conor Gearty has argued, in our contemporary ‘neo-democratic’ world, liberty and security are not the universal goods they are often considered to be. Rather they are selectively granted, and curtailed for those considered a threat to the status quo. Where liberty and security are curtailed, this is often in the name of the universal freedoms that neo-democracies claim to uphold. When the Blair government was elected in 1997, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook announced that British foreign policy must have an ethical dimension. There has been much debate on whether UK foreign policy under the Blair government can be argued to have been ‘ethical’. The focus of debate has tended to be the UK’s military interventions. Far less attention has been paid to the direct role played by UK authorities, through its intelligence services, in human rights violations under the New Labour and subsequent Coalition governments. This paper seeks to further the debate on the ethics of UK foreign policy since 1997. It does so by offering a detailed account of the UK’s involvement in the CIA’s rendition programme, and shows that the UK was far more involved in rendition and secret detention between 2001 and 2010 than was previously assumed. Threaded through the analysis is an account of the various measures taken by the New Labour subsequent Coalition governments to suppress the evidence of UK involvement. We conclude by offering some reflections on the role human rights organisations, litigators, and investigative journalists are increasingly playing in defending the universalism of rights, for publics that rarely appreciate what is really at stake

Lessons Learned, Lessons Lost: Immigration Enforcement\u27s Failed Experiment with Penal Severity

This article traces the evolution of “get tough” sentencing and corrections policies that were touted as the solution to a criminal justice system widely viewed as “broken” in the mid-1970s. It draws parallels to the adoption some twenty years later of harsh, punitive policies in the immigration enforcement system to address perceptions that it is similarly “broken,” policies that have embraced the theories, objectives and tools of criminal punishment, and caused the two systems to converge. In discussing the myriad of harms that have resulted from the convergence of these two systems, and the criminal justice system’s recent shift away from severity and toward harm reduction, this article suggests that the criminal justice system has been more proactive in compensating for its excesses than the immigration enforcement system and discusses the reasons why

Global intelligence, co-operation versus accountability: new facets to an old problem

The most important recent change within the realm of intelligence and security services has been the expansion of intelligence co-operation. The growing connectivity between both foreign intelligence services and also domestic security services means that we might speak - not just of growing international co-operation - but perhaps even of global co-operation. This essay considers the complex interplay of intelligence and globalization since 1989. It argues that there is an obvious tension between a developing global style of co-operative activity and the traditional mechanisms of oversight, which have tended to be national. Accordingly, it moves on to discuss the recent efforts by national, regional and international systems of inquiry to examine issues that involve intelligence co-operation. It suggests that while formal committee-type mechanisms have limited purchase, they are not the only options for oversight in a globalized context

The Practice and Legality of Rendition

“Rendition” is the United States’ policy of sending terrorism suspects to be interrogated in Middle Eastern countries that practice torture. This Article introduces the subject by describing a complaint filed in a lawsuit by Canadian citizen Maher Arar. The United States sent Arar from John F. Kennedy airport to Syria, where he was tortured and was held in a grave-sized cell for nearly a year. Arar alleges that his transfer violated the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (“CAT”). Arar’s lawsuit may be dismissed before the court reaches the substance of his claims. But much of the evidence needed to evaluate his charges is already a matter of public record. This Article attempts to compile that evidence, which has been reported in hundreds of different sources, into single coherent account for the first time. This factual information, important in its own right, is also crucial in addressing the Bush administration’s most common defense of rendition: the argument that before every rendition it obtains diplomatic assurances that a suspect will not be tortured, and these are enough to reduce the odds of torture to under 50 percent and comply with Article 3 of the CAT. Article 3 requires the administration to consider all evidence relevant to the danger of torture before transferring a prisoner. A thorough review of this evidence demonstrates that the odds of torture after a rendition are far greater than fifty percent, and diplomatic assurances do virtually nothing to reduce those odds

Play it Again, Uncle Sam

Tashima, currently a federal judge, relates his experience in a Japanese American internment camp at Poston AZ during WWII. The unjust internment was in part a failure of the federal courts to protect the constitutional rights of American citizens