When a former Obama administration legal advisor delivers a tough criticism of the president's prosecution of the war on terror, what do you see? Evidence of the manifest illegality of the White House's drone program? An example of Obama's lack of political will? An invocation of frightening Bush-era legal theories of presidential power?

Welcome to the Rorschach test that is Harold Koh's recent speech to the Oxford Union.

On Tuesday, Koh, until January the chief legal advisor at the State Department, criticized the White House's lack of transparency with regard to its drone program, which Koh said has resulted in "a growing perception that the program is not lawful and necessary, but illegal, unnecessary and out of control." That jab was part of a three-part plan laid out by Koh to extricate the United States from the "Forever War" (1. Disengage from Afghanistan; 2. Close Guantánamo; 3. Discipline drones).

Prior to joining the administration, Koh was an outspoken critic of the Bush administration. But once inside government, he served as one of the chief legal architects of the Obama administration's national security policies, many of which bore a striking resembling to Obama's predecessor's. Now, Koh is firing back -- if rather gently -- at his former employer. But beyond his rather straightforward policy recommendations, it's not entirely clear how to interpret Koh's speech. And the varied responses it provoked offer something of a primer on the current state of thinking about Obama's prosecution of the war on terror.

Over at the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf sees the secrecy surrounding the drone program and Koh's call for its dismantling as proof positive of the program's illegality. In order to "discipline drones," Koh called on Obama to make public the legal rationale for drone strikes and targeting American citizens overseas, clarify its method for counting civilian casualties, and release the threat assessments behind individual drones strikes. Additionally, Koh called on the White House to send its officials before Congress to testify about the program. All in all, sensible reforms aimed at transparency.

But, as Friedersdorf argues, the fact that none of these things -- moves all within Obama's power to carry out -- have happened reveals the drone program's shaky legal basis, if not its outright illegality:

If Koh believes all that is what should happen, then he believes the Obama Administration's current approach is deeply wrongheaded, and not just because of its indefensible dearth of transparency. It is not "consistent with due process" to target American citizens. The way Team Obama counts civilian casualties is not "consistent with international humanitarian law standards." Obama can't demonstrate that its strikes were all directed against imminent threats. Being more transparent about any of those things will in fact be discrediting, not redemptive.

Hence the secrecy.

And although he precedes everything with, "as President Obama has indicated he wants to do," Koh knows that Obama could do everything Koh endorses, but has in fact chosen not to do it.  

Writing for her blog Emptywheel, Marcy Wheeler interprets Koh's argument about how to close Guantánamo as evidence of Obama's lack of political will to finally erase this stain on America's human rights record. In his speech, Koh urged Obama to designate a senior White House official with sufficient weight to close down the prison. But that plan, Wheeler contends, bears remarkable similarities to Obama's failed effort to close Gitmo early in his first term:

Now, I'm all in favor of closing Gitmo and this might be one way to do it. Koh actually improves on the prior plan by admitting the indefinite detainees will have to be released as the war is over, which is legally correct but misapprehends why they're not being released and why we have to have a Forever War to justify keeping them silent and imprisoned forever.

But Koh's map for closing Gitmo also misrepresents why appointing Greg Craig himself to carry out the Gitmo task didn't work. As I traced in real time (see, here, here, and here), to get Obama's ear, Craig had to fight through Rahm Emanuel. And Rahm preferred to sell out Obama's human rights promises in exchange for an eventually failed attempt to appease Lindsey Graham. Rahm won that fight. After Rahm won that battle, he scapegoated Craig. Ultimately, when asked why he left, Craig pointed to Rahm.

It wasn't enough to appoint Greg Craig. Closing Gitmo either required appointing someone with the bureaucratic chops to beat Rahm or someone like him in battle, or someone whom Obama actually entrusts such a battle with. And Holder's fate - where Obama continues to have trust in him even while he ultimately reversed his decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in NYC - shows that's not enough. Heck, Koh stayed on for almost four years, but even battles he presumably thought he had won, like drone rules, he now appears to have lost. Ultimately, then, it's going to take a really shrewd fighter or ... it's going to take the President wanting to invest political capital in these things more than he did three years ago.

Koh's emphasis on the need to close Guantánamo reflects the degree to which the Bush administration's shadow still hangs over the Obama White House -- a fact highlighted in the blog Lawfare commentary on Koh's conception of presidential power. "Look who has discovered inherent presidential powers," Benjamin Wittes observes sarcastically (elsewhere on Lawfare, Steve Vladeck defends Koh against the charge of hypocrisy).

What do you see in this ink blot of a speech?

The State Department isn't too happy about Cody Wilson's 3-D printed gun. In a letter to Wilson dated May 8, the department asked the University of Texas law student to take down 10 designs -- including one for the first fully functional 3-D printed gun -- from his website DEFCAD.org for possibly violating arms export statutes.

In response, Wilson said on Twitter that his website, which is dedicated to sharing 3-D printing blueprints for arms and arms accessories, will go dark. A banner at the top of the site currently reads: "DEFCAD files are being removed from public access at the request of the US Department of Defense Trade Controls. Until further notice, the United States government claims control of the information." (Never mind that the letter, embedded at the bottom of this post, is from the State Department, not the Pentagon.) As Wilson tweeted:

#DEFCAD is going dark at the request of the SOS Department of Defense Trade Controls. Some shapes are more dangerous than others.

— Cody R. Wilson (@Radomysisky) May 9, 2013

The department's Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance is currently conducting a review of the plans posted to Wilson's site. According to the letter, Wilson may be in violation of the Arms Export Control Act (the release of blueprints qualifies as exporting), and his site may have released technical information that is controlled by International Traffic in Arms Regulations. The letter informs Wilson that he also has to explain how his company, Defense Distributed, gained jurisdiction over the technical data for the weapons designs posted to the site.

The development represents a major setback for Wilson, who hoped the site would become a major hub for sharing weapons designs. But he doesn't seem all that concerned. "I still think we win in the end," he told BetaBeat. "Because the files are all over the Internet, the Pirate Bay has it-to think this can be stopped in any meaningful way is to misunderstand what the future of distributive technologies is about."

Here's the letter in full:

Letter from Department of State to Defense Distributed

It's open season in Tehran: For five days beginning on May 7, presidential hopefuls are registering to run for president in the country's June 14 presidential election. And the number of entrants into the rough-and-tumble world of Iranian politics is staggering, with more than 200 candidates signed up as of Thursday. 

So the race must be wide, wide open, right? Not exactly. While nobody's quite sure who the frontrunners are yet, they will most likely be largely loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the Associated Press points out.

That's because the country's 12-member Guardian Council will vet the vast array of candidates between May 12 and May 17, applying a rigorous set of standards to narrow the field way down. In 2009, for instance, only four of 475 names made it through the lightning round. So what, exactly, does the Guardian Council look for in whittling down the candidates? Presidential hopefuls can be disqualified for failing to meet a host of criteria enumerated in Article 115 of the Iranian Constitution.

Like its U.S. counterpart, the Iranian Constitution stipulates that a viable candidate must have Iranian citizenship. Not only does the presidential hopeful need to be a citizen (I found no mention of an age limit), but he also must be of "Iranian origin." Candidates who aren't Shiite Muslims or "religious and political personalities" need not apply.

Some of the constitution's conditions read more like a help-wanted ad. A viable candidate, for instance, must have "administrative capacity and resourcefulness" and no criminal record (incidentally, the latter is not a prerequisite to hold the highest office in the United States). The candidate must demonstrate "trustworthiness and piety" and must have a firm "belief in the fundamental principles of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Those are high bars to clear -- particularly when compared with the low bars to registering. And that means we won't see much more of some of the more colorful aspirants who have already registered or have been floated as candidates . 

On Tuesday, for example, Razieh Omidvar became the first woman this year to throw her hat into the ring. While it is often reported that the constitution explicitly forbids women from running for president, the language is, in fact, a bit more ambiguous. In 2009, the spokesman for the Guardian Council said it "has never announced its opinion on whether a registrant is a man or a woman," suggesting that it is open to interpreting the constitution's language in favor of both male and female participation. Still, Omidvar shouldn't get her hopes up. The spokesman was quick to add, "[w]henever a woman has been disqualified, it has been because she's lacked general competence." 

Then there's Mostafa Kavakebian, a reformist politician who was disqualified by the Guardian Council in 2009 and also registered on Tuesday, even picking green as his campaign color in homage to the Green Movement that arose after the country's disputed presidential election four years ago. While his persistence is admirable, Kavakebian is just as unlikely as Omidvar to make the cut a second time around.

Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, Ahmadinejad's current chief of staff, may be one of the more high-profile contenders. But conservatives in the country, who are locked in a power struggle with Ahmadinejad, predict he will also be knocked off the slate. Though he has yet to register, Ahmadinejad has been grooming Mashaei to take over in what the Guardian describes as a "Putin/Medvedev-style reshuffle."

Meanwhile, Ali Rahimi, a 59-year-old surgeon who graduated from the University of Kentucky, does not seem deterred by the many factors that could keep him out of the running. "I am extremely overqualified,'' he told the Washington Post after registering, "so I want to see what sort of reason they come up with for refusing my candidacy.'' 

If there's a sure bet in this election, it's that Iranian authorities will find one.

Faithful readers of Iran's state-run news outlets might have noticed a lot of hype this week about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's plans to unveil a new Iranian-made surveillance and combat drone -- the country's "most advanced" yet -- called Epic (Hemaseh in Farsi).

Well, it's here. PressTV reports:

The drone was unveiled on Thursday during a ceremony attended by Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi.

"This drone has been built by defense industry experts and is simultaneously capable of surveillance, reconnaissance and missile and rocket attacks," Vahidi said on the sidelines of the ceremony.

"This aircraft with its stealth quality can avoid detection by the enemy," he added.

High altitude and long flight range are two other distinguishing features of the new Iranian UAV.

The news comes amid reports that an Israeli drone made its first fully automated takeoff this week -- and just weeks after Israel shot down a drone of unknown provenance and Iran showcased a new long-range drone on the country's Army Day (see photo above). A report by Iran's Fars News Agency earlier this week claimed that Iran, in fact, is designing and producing 40 different types of drones. As P.W. Singer wrote in a Foreign Policy article on the spread of smaller and smarter drones to other countries:

[W]hen we often talk about a supposed future of drone proliferation, we usually ignore the reality of the present. We already have a market that is global in both its customers, from Australia to Turkey, and in its manufacturers, from American firms like General Atomics and Lockheed to ASN Technology, one of the major makers in China, and ADE of India. 

The Obama administration should "be more willing to discuss international legal standards for use of drones," former State Department legal advisor Harold Koh declared in a speech at Oxford on Tuesday, "so that our actions do not inadvertently empower other nations and actors who would use drones inconsistent with the law."

Seems like the world is way ahead of the White House on this one.

With Pakistani elections looming on May 11, it seems like every day brings a new report about destabilizing attacks in the country. The unrelenting violence, which Pakistan's Express Tribune has dubbed the "Reign of Terror," includes assassinations that have delayed elections in several districts and left a staggering number of casualties. Bloomberg has compiled the most thorough timeline of the attacks and estimates that, in the past month, "at least 118 people have been killed and 494 injured."

Terrorists -- mostly from Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), but also Baluchi separatists -- have pursued politicians in particular, and candidates have been gunned down in the streets. On May 3, Saddiq Zaman Khattak, a parliamentary candidate for the secular Awami National Party (ANP), was shot and killed along with his three-year-old son while returning from Friday prayers in Karachi. Gunmen ambushed ANP candidate Muhammad Islam on April 27, killing his brother in the attack. And Fakhrul Islam, a provincial assembly candidate for the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) party in Hyderabad, was assassinated by the TTP on April 11.

Bombings, some of which have targeted candidates, have also indiscriminately killed their supporters. The deadliest blast killed at least 20 individuals at an ANP rally on April 16. The attacks have targeted election events, but also included car bombings and bomb and grenade attacks on campaign offices and potential polling places. Just today, gunmen abducted Ali Haider Gilani, a provincial assembly candidate for the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and son of former Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, after killing his bodyguards. It is the first time a candidate has been kidnapped in the rash of attacks.

"It is pretty clear that this is the most violent election I have witnessed in 23 years" of election monitoring in Pakistan, Peter Manikas of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs told the Washington Post. "It's a different type of violence in trying to disrupt the election as a whole. It makes everything unsafe."

Early in April, the TTP singled out three political parties -- ANP, MQM, and PPP -- as the targets of their attacks, but in the past week, not even the fundamentalist Jamiat-e-Ulema (JeU) party has been spared. On May 6, a JeU rally was bombed in Kurram, killing 25, though a TTP spokesman was quick to assert that the Taliban didn't oppose the party so much as the candidate, "who they said had betrayed Arab fighters to U.S. agents," according to Reuters. The next day, a suicide bombing in Hangu targeting another JeU rally killed 10. In a new statement quoted by Reuters, TTP leader Hakimullah Mehsud expressed opposition to the political process as a whole, writing, "We don't accept the system of infidels which is called democracy."

The worst violence may in fact be yet to come, as Pakistanis head to the polls this weekend. TTP pamphlets posted in Karachi are warning potential voters to stay home, the Telegraph reports. "If you stay away you will protect yourself," one reads. "If not you are responsible for your fate.... If you go there you will be responsible for the loss of your life and your loved ones." In anticipation of attacks, more than 600,000 security personnel will be on duty for the elections, with five to ten guards at each polling place, according to the Associated Press.

It's a far cry from the atmosphere you'd hope for to mark the first time in Pakistani history that a democratically elected civilian government has finished its term.

Held captive in a dilapidated house in Cleveland for a decade, Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight were allegedly raped and beaten by Ariel Castro, who now faces multiple charges of kidnapping and rape. The harrowing story of the women's captivity and miraculous escape has captivated the United States -- and the world. But just how exceptional a case is it?

Both in the United States and abroad, women are regularly imprisoned, used as sex slaves, and subjected to terrible violence. A 2012 International Labor Organization study found that 4.5 million people around the world are victims of forced sexual exploitation, and that 98 percent of these are women (79 percent of victims were adults, and 21 percent children). The ILO mapped overall forced labor by region in the graphic below:

Still, these statistics only capture sexual exploitation for profit -- not cases in which women are locked up and preyed upon by their captors. There's less data on these types of incidents, but they have certainly cropped up around the world as well.

Take the case of Natascha Kampusch in Austria. Abducted as a 10-year-old in 1998 -- on the first day her mother allowed her to walk to school on her own -- Kampusch grew up in captivity outside Vienna under the stern eye of her master, Wolfgang Priklopil, a communications technician. Kept in a tiny cell at night, Kampusch was subjected to repeated beatings, compelled to do housework half-naked, and kept weak and malnourished. The sexual abuse, she says, was minor; rather, she served as another character in Priklopil's delusions (he saw her as his loyal Aryan companion). They sometimes shared meals, and once went skiing together. Convinced that Priklopil would kill her, himself, and any bystanders if she tried to escape, Kampusch grew too afraid to run away.

On Aug. 23, 2006, however, Kampusch, now 18, was vacuuming Priklopil's car in the driveway of their house when he stepped away to take a phone call. Leaving the vacuum running to mask her escape, Kampusch walked away on an impulse. When Priklopil realized she had escaped, he confessed to his best friend and then stepped in front of a train, killing himself. When Kampusch learned of his death, she says she didn't cry but did get emotional. "He was part of my life," she explained. "That is why in a certain way I did mourn him." Kampusch, who wrote a memoir entitled 3,096 Days in Captivity (a film adaptation is in the works) and briefly hosted a talk show, has expressed interest in becoming a psychologist one day.

Though the Kampusch case received a great deal of attention in Austria, the media frenzy surrounding it paled in comparison with the case of Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his 18-year-old daughter, Elisabeth, in his cellar in Amstetten, Austria in 1984 and used her as his sex slave, fathering seven children with her over the course of the next two decades. Fritzl told his wife Rosemarie that their daughter had run away to join a cult and left three of her children, whom Josef and Rosemarie raised, at their doorstep when she was unable to care for them. Three other children (the seventh died shortly after birth, and was tossed in an incinerator) finally escaped when one had to be taken to the hospital. The three kids -- ages 19, 18, and 5 -- who emerged from Fritzl's cellar in 2008 had never before seen daylight. Fritzl was imprisoned for life in 2009, while the other family members have moved to an undisclosed location and been given new identities, according to AFP.

The sensational nature of the Fritzl case has obscured more common occurrences of women being held for long periods against their will. In 2000, for instance, Japanese police freed Fusako Sano, a 19-year-old woman who had been held for nine years by a man living with his mother and surfaced after visiting a hospital. Earlier this year, Indian police discovered that a 21-year-old woman had been held captive by a group of men for over a year and forced into prostitution.

And these are just some of the cases we know about.

There are a lot of crazy sports out there -- the Ironman triathlon, volcano boarding, and crocodile bungee jumping all come to mind -- and then there's this: The New York Times has a story today about the Battle of the Nations, an insane, full-contact, medieval combat reenactment that ends only when all the participants have been bludgeoned into the ground.

More from the Times:

The Battle of the Nations consists of four fighting formats: 1 on 1; 5 on 5; 21 on 21; and all against all, in which some opposing squads join forces. Winners of each match are decided by which side has the last fighter, or fighters, standing. A combatant bows out when three body parts, which include the feet, are touching the ground. Matches involving fewer fighters are usually over within a couple minutes, while the all-versus-all match can last up to 10 minutes....

Weapons must be blunted. Stabbing or thrusting, which [U.S. team executive officer Jaye] Brooks defined as repeatedly delivering excess force to the same point of contact, is not allowed. Fighters can hit any region in the "kill zone," which excludes the feet, back of knees, groin, back of neck and base of skull. Vertical strikes to the spine and horizontal strikes to the back of the neck are forbidden.

Injuries have included dislodged teeth and broken or severed fingers. In the United States, the athletes also undergo baseline testing to check for the possibility of concussions.

This year's competition will be the United States' second (last year the U.S. team finished 4th out of 14 teams), and it will be looking to knock off top-ranked Russia, which has dominated the sport since its inception in 2009. Here's a video of Russia beating up on the United States in 2012:

So what kind of person tries out for the Battle of the Nations, you ask? Here's what one U.S. team member told the Times: "This is the perfect sport for someone who wishes to participate in one of the roughest sports on earth, has a love of armor and weapons and Western martial arts, and a desire to be as close to being a knight of old as is possible in this modern age."

Who's ready to sign up?