The Duck of Minerva

Defending Hamdan

by Charli Carpenter

24 September 2008, 0012 EDT

Complex Terrain Lab is hosting a series of blog posts on the Salim Hamdan trial by Professor Bryan Glyn Williams this week. Williams acted as an expert witness for the defence of Bin Laden’s driver, and has chronicled his insights about the US military commissions process:

In this five-part series, running each day this week, Brian Williams describes how he became involved in Hamdan’s legal defence. This was a journey of discovery and revelation for Williams, and one in which he came to understand America’s critical responsibility for upholding the values for which the ‘War on Terror’ purports to be fought. Crucially, this case underscores the important role that social science serves in establishing truth and justice in war. All images courtesy of Brian Williams.

The first and second posts in the series are online; more to come. Blog reactions by myself and others will be posted at CTLab in due course. Check it out.

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.

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