Zack Bluestone is a third-year student at Harvard Law School, where he is Managing Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and Vice President of the National Security & Law Association. Zack has worked in all three branches of the federal government, including legal internships with the Office of the Chief Prosecutor of Military Commissions at the U.S. Department of Defense, the Office of the President Pro Tempore of the U.S. Senate, and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Federal Courts. Zack graduated summa cum laude from Georgetown University with B.S. in Foreign Service and earned his MBA from the University of Oxford.
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Editor's Note: Welcome back to Water Wars! Following our holiday hiatus, this first edition of the new year will look back at the major events in the Asian Pacific since our last post in late November. Next Friday, we’ll be back to our normal format, with a more detailed and nuanced analysis and commentary of the week's events.
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By week’s end, the major players in the South and East China Sea will have participated in three separate international conferences touching on tensions in the Asian-Pacific. The meetings include the G-20 summit in Turkey, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum in the Philippines, and the ASEAN Summit in Malaysia.
Xi Jinping and Nguyen Phu Trong in Hanoi (Photo: Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images)
Chinese jets release flares over a PLA vessel near the Spratlys (Photo: China Daily/Reuters)
The past few days have witnessed two huge developments in the South China Sea. On Tuesday, the U.S. Navy conducted a long-anticipated freedom of navigation (FON) patrol in the Spratly Islands. Two days later, the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruled that it has jurisdiction to hear the Philippines v. PRC maritime case. Given the magnitude of the arbitral decision and U.S. FONOPS, this week’s post will focus exclusively on these two events.
Because of the unusual length of Sunday’s 9/11 military commission hearing, the write-up of the session
Following a public hearing on Thursday morning, the military commission tasked with trying five Guantanamo detainees for their alleged roles in the 9/11 attacks went dark for back-to-back, closed 505(h) sessions on Thursday and Friday afternoons. The commission reconvened again two days later for a rare Sunday session, which was back on the record.