For decades, U.S. administrations have engaged in linguistic gymnastics to avoid applying international law to Israel. Now, with the fig leaf of the two-state solution gone, President Obama must confront this tangle of double standards and double talk, says Marjorie Cohn.
After World War II, there was hope that core principles of international law and human rights would become universal, but increasingly these standards have suffered from selective application and propagandistic manipulation, causing a loss of credibility in these key precepts, as Lawrence…
Exclusive: The U.S. government likes international law when it serves Washington’s purposes, but not when it constrains U.S. desires to use military force. Then, the rules are bent, ignored or subjected to novel lawyering, as President Obama is doing with airstrikes…
Official Washington honors international law when it’s politically useful, such as in condemning a global adversary, but then dismisses it as useless if it gets in the way of some desired U.S. action. This “international law a la carte” undermines…
Exclusive: The U.S. news media regularly engages in selective outrage, piously denouncing some adversary for violating international law yet hypocritically silent when worse abuses are committed by the U.S. or allied governments, as the New York Times has shown again,…
Even as the Obama administration continues to ignore the worst crimes of George W. Bush’s presidency including torture and aggressive war authorities in Poland are investigating its alleged hosting of a CIA “black site” prison. An inquiry that may be the best hope…
After a decade of “war on terror” rhetoric and President Obama’s failure to reverse many of George W. Bush’s extrajudicial policies the U.S. public has come to accept that American “exceptionalism” puts the nation beyond the reach of international law,…
Though the World War II victors promised that the Nuremberg principles would apply not just to the Nazis but to everyone, today’s reality is that international law follows two standards: a lenient one for the West and its friends and a stringent…
In 1773, when the British blockaded Boston in retaliation for “terrorist” acts against agents of the Crown, the Thirteen Colonies decried this collective punishment of Massachusetts, setting the stage for the Revolutionary War. However, 238 years later, the United States…