The New York Times Poses the Key Question

And I have a lot of buttons

Good Evening:

If your corpse is rotting, it’s probably been too long.

Yes.

He would have sucked.

No.

Cut it off and throw it away. The throwing it away part is important if you really want to get rid of it. Otherwise, it won’t be hangnail any more, but you’ll still have it.

Yes. It causes terrible discoloration to your body’s keratin.

So.

Much.

Worse.

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The ongoing Sol Invictus Sale for #DogShirtDaily subscriptions is one day closer to being conquered. But until the year’s end, you can still get a subscription to #DogShirtDaily—including coveted access to the Greek Chorus—for 50 percent off. You can do this by pressing this button:

You can also give someone a gift subscription for 50 percent off by pressing this button:

Or, in the alternative, you could press this button, which will just waste your time:

Told you.

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Let’s create some other fun buttons.

This button will do exactly as it says:

This button says it will send me a message:

No idea how it plans to do that, but I suppose I will find out.

This button will allow you to share this post:

This button will show you something creepy:

And this button will show you a green rubber duck:

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Today on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Holly Berkley Fletcher, the estimable Eve Gaumond, and I welcomed my friend, the very estimable Ammar Abdulhamid—writer, scholar, poet, dissident, and school-yard nemesis of Bashar al-Assad—to tell us about what’s going on in Syria and what we can expect next. We talked Turkey, Iran, Israel, warlords, transitional government, and everything else hopeful and horrifying:

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Today On Lawfare

The Situation: Advice and Consent Doesn’t Mean Adjourn and Appoint

In my column today, I considered whether the Senate is beginning to push back against several of President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial nominations to senior positions within his administration:

Trump has put Republican senators with a conscience in a genuinely unenviable position. In an era of intense partisanship, he has made into a test of their party loyalty their willingness to publicly vote to confirm a slate of dangerously inappropriate scoundrels to positions of high authority and trust. To refuse to do it at scale would deal a severe blow to Trump’s presidency at an early date, making him a kind of lame duck just at his highest moment of triumphant return. And it would court certain retaliation from a man known for his propensity to retaliate. It would, in short, take real guts. And guts are often the first things to vanish when legislators face collective active problems.

How to Think about the Fall of Assad

Daniel Byman considers how the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria will affect the Middle East and U.S. interests in the region. Byman warns that—though the defeat of the “bloodthirsty dictator” should be celebrated—the new government of Syria under Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani present new and complex dangers:

In some ways, Jolani’s surface moderation is a U.S. policy success. HTS’s rejection of al-Qaeda and external operations was done in part due to U.S. pressure on all Syrian groups to reject any organization with ties to al-Qaeda. Jolani has sought to be removed from U.S. terrorism lists and engage with U.S. regional partners.

Jolani’s actual moderation is unclear. There are legitimate worries that he has a hidden agenda that may be revealed when the group controls Syria. In any event, HTS’s ideology is intolerant, and its control of Syria is authoritarian, with the group detaining journalists and others who criticize its rule.

Congressional Action Could Stymie Executive Clemency for War Crimes

Dan Maurer examines the scope of presidential authority to pardon U.S. military personnel convicted of battlefield misconduct, and outlines how Congress could limit the executive’s “near total control” of U.S. military operations and its ability to officially forgive battlefield misconduct:

But the problem of “war crime clemency” is not just academic. With the U.S. military in a constant state of training and preparation for what it hopes to avoid—a large-scale combat operation with a near-peer competitor that resembles contemporary conflict in Gaza and Ukraine—it is worth the time to remind ourselves that the larger the scale of the conflict in terms of troops, locations, and violence, the greater the probability of “battlefield misconduct” (that which could be prosecuted as a war crime). When Trump takes office as president again, he may be presented with an opportunity to grant clemency to U.S. service members at a much greater volume and frequency than during the less intense but generation-long counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Confusion & Contradiction in the UN ‘Cybercrime’ Convention

Andrew C. Adams and Daniel Podair discuss several troublesome provisions within the United Nations’ draft convention on cybercrime. Adams and Podair highlight the conundrum the draft convention—if ratified—could create for the Justice Department, namely its potential obligation to comply with bad-faith or problematic mutual legal assistance treaty requests from foreign adversaries:

The United States has MLATs with more than 50 foreign nations, which facilitate the cooperation between American and foreign investigative authorities, including the exchange of evidence. All MLATs with foreign states, including with authoritarian governments such as China and Russia, provide the Justice Department with significant latitude to reject requests that would violate American public policy or constitutional principles.

Banking on Influence

In this week’s installment of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Jessica Davis details “foreign interference financing,” a statecraft tool hostile states use money to manipulate other states. Davis argues that multilateral cooperation between countries on countermeasures—such as autonomous sanctions, civil lawsuits, and education—is essential to combating this threat:

Foreign interference financing ranges in complexity: It can involve a relatively simple scheme with straightforward funding or an elaborate network of shell companies, nominees, and cryptocurrency transactions. Understanding the breadth of financing methods—from covert cash flows to digital assets—is essential for developing effective policies and targeted strategies.

Podcasts

On the Lawfare Daily podcast, Kevin Frazier sits down with Kevin Xu to discuss China’s ambitions in artificial intelligence (AI), including China’s current AI capacities, the likely effect of updated export controls on Chinese AI efforts, and the different AI development strategies being deployed by the U.S. and China:

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is an elephant bullying a crocodile. Most species never get an opportunity to bully a crocodile, but this elephant decided to take full advantage of its bulk in order to be an asshole for no reason. For the record, I support this behavior without hesitation and caveat; I’m certain the crocodile did something to deserve it. #TeamElephant. Video from escuerzoresucitado: