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    We tried to save 150 people in Aleppo from 5,000 miles away
    Steven Livingston and Jonathan Drake. 1/9/2017. “We tried to save 150 people in Aleppo from 5,000 miles away.” The Washington Post .Abstract
    Article in The Washington Post by Carr Center Senior Fellow Steven Livingston.

    "With Russian and Syrian forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad’s regime rapidly closing in, the situation for those trapped in eastern Aleppo in the first week of December was growing grimmer by the hour. It was especially dire for the White Helmets, a Syrian first-responders group that had won international acclaim for its humanitarian work, including a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Assad regime held a different view, describing the group as rebels and terrorists.

    On Dec. 8 at 3:30 p.m. in Boston, one of the first messages from the White Helmets to reach researchers at Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative said that “three gas bombs have been dropped in the area within the last two hours and they [the White Helmets] feel they have less than 48 hours to evacuate before they are seized.” The Harvard group was asked to help find an escape route out of Aleppo for the White Helmets and their families, about 150 people in all.

    How could Harvard scholars sitting in Cambridge, Mass., help 150 people find their way out of a war zone? We hoped it could be done with commercial remote-sensing satellites."

    Read the full article in The Washington Post.

    Steven Livingston is a senior fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and a professor at George Washington University.

    Jonathan Drake is a senior program associate with the Geospatial Technologies Project at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

    Mike Pompeo Is Unfit to Lead the CIA If He Doesn't Reject Torture
    Alberto Mora. 1/12/2017. “Mike Pompeo Is Unfit to Lead the CIA If He Doesn't Reject Torture.” The Guardian .Abstract
    Article in The Guardian by Carr Center Senior Fellow Alberto Mora.

    "Among the flurry of confirmation hearings happening this week in the Senate, one in particular will signal whether President-to-be Donald Trump and his administration are, indeed, serious about restoring the failed and discredited Bush-era torture policy.

    Trump’s pick for CIA chief, the US representative Mike Pompeo, will face the Senate intelligence committee and no doubt will be asked about his past support for cruelty. If he fails to renounce torture at his hearing, the Senate should deem Pompeo unfit for the office and vote down his nomination.

    I know what’s at stake from my own experience. I was the navy’s chief lawyer when, in 2002, I learned that detainees held at Guantánamo were being subjected to cruel and unlawful interrogation practices. This wasn’t a case of “bad apples” – it was a case of officials at the highest levels of government choosing to radically reinterpret, distort or violate the law so as to knowingly apply torture. That can’t happen again."

    Read the full Op-Ed in The Guardian.

    Facts Aren’t Enough to Save Liberal Democracy
    Chistopher Robichaud. 1/17/2017. “Facts Aren’t Enough to Save Liberal Democracy.” Niskanen Center .Abstract
    Facts Aren’t Enough to Save Liberal Democracy by Carr Center's Christopher Robichaud.

    "Facts these days are taking a beating in politics. A month or so back, Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes shared on “The Diane Rehm Show” that “[t]here’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, as facts.” She was pilloried in the press over this, not unsurprisingly, though her words, taken at face value, do at least convey a sense of loss over our purported predicament—it’s unfortunate that there aren’t any facts anymore. Unfortunate or not, is she right that truth has left the building?

    Well, no, of course not. We still have death and taxes, if nothing else, two stubborn, non-negotiable facts of modern life. And even if Republicans somehow manage to do away entirely with the latter in the first hundred days of Trump’s presidency, I’m pretty sure we’ll be stuck with our own mortality for at least a little while longer.

    The really real world, in other words, didn’t suddenly slip away during the 2016 election cycle, impressions to the contrary notwithstanding. Be that as it may, it’s hard to deny that something funny is going on."
    Read the full post on the Niskanen Center website.

    How Trump Can Work with Russia to Challenge the Status Quo and to Control ISIS
    Luis Moreno Ocampo. 1/18/2017. “How Trump Can Work with Russia to Challenge the Status Quo and to Control ISIS.” JustSecurity .Abstract
    New article in JustSecurity from Senior Fellow Luis Moreno Ocampo.

    "What should President Donald Trump do if ISIS crashed a plane into the Freedom Tower next September 11, 2017? After 16 years of a so-called “war on terror,” would experts be able to provide the new President with a clear and effective strategy to confront international terrorism? A short answer to the question is no. In 2015, Stephen Walt denounced a massive, collective failure of the entire U.S. foreign-policy establishment including Democrats and Republican to propose new strategies to deal with international terrorism in the Middle East.

    In this essay, I explain, first, the strategic opportunity available through greater US-Russian cooperation and, second, the tools for disrupting ISIS by establishing new international mechanisms—such as a UN Security Council Chief Prosecutor—to go after the group’s leadership and its money."

    Read the full article.

    2017 Jan 27

    Carr Talk & Coffee: "Assessing the impact of new weapons systems on the permissibility of attacks in asymmetrical conflicts."

    10:30am to 11:30am

    Location: 

    Carr Center Conference Room R-219

    Join us for the first Carr Talk & Coffee of the Semester! Students, Faculty, Staff and Fellows come together to discuss pressing human rights issues, and Carr Center Fellows present their latest research.

    Carr Center's Fellow...

    Read more about Carr Talk & Coffee: "Assessing the impact of new weapons systems on the permissibility of attacks in asymmetrical conflicts."
    How to Defend Human Rights in the Trump Era
    John Shattuck. 1/25/2017. “How to Defend Human Rights in the Trump Era.” The Boston Globe.Abstract
    Carr Center's Senior Fellow John Shattuck's latest Op-Ed in the Boston Globe.

    Recent presidents who threatened rights have been reined in. Richard Nixon used the power of the presidency to attack the Constitution and his political enemies, but the House of Representatives voted to impeach him. Ronald Reagan tried to overturn hard-won legislation on the rights of women and minorities, but civil society groups and a bipartisan congressional coalition beat back the attack. George W. Bush introduced the use of torture in violation of domestic and international law, but resistance inside the federal government led to reinstatement of the torture ban.

    Following these examples, a new citizen movement must mobilize the assets of American democracy to protect basic rights and freedoms in the Trump era."

    Read the full Op-Ed in the Boston Globe.

    Law Restricts Trump on Torture - Unless He Ignores It
    Alberto Mora. 1/27/2017. “Law Restricts Trump on Torture - Unless He Ignores It.” Deutsche Welle.Abstract
    New article in Deutsche Welle featuring Carr Center Senior Fellow Alberto Mora.

    Donald Trump has threatened to make good on his campaign pledge to bring back waterboarding and forms of torture "a hell of a lot worse." That would violate international and US law, of course, but could he do it anyway?

    There was a sense that the US was coming to grips with its sins in December 2014, when the Senate completed its report on CIA torture under President George W. Bush in the years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. Months later, on June 16, 2015, when more than 20 Senate Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in a 78-21 vote to ban torture once and for all, there was a sense that the country was even moving forward. There would be no more "rectal feeding" of prisoners in the CIA's secret interrogation centers, no more threats to kill inmates' children or parents, no more people killed by hypothermia after spending hours forced into stress positions on frigid concrete. But 230 miles (385 kilometers) from the US Capitol on that very same June afternoon in 2015, a reality television host was kicking off a scorched-earth campaign at the New York City tower he had named for himself. And in 2017 the United States finds itself debating the limits of official cruelty all over again - though not necessarily the long-settled legality.

    "Torture under international law is categorically prohibited under all circumstances," said Alberto Mora, the Navy's general counsel during the Bush administration and a leading Defense Department opponent of the practices euphemistically referred to as "enhanced interrogation." "This is what's called a nonderogable law, meaning that there is no set of circumstances or extenuating circumstance which would justify the application of torture."

    Read the full article.

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