Rosa Brooks

Rosa Brooks
File:Rosabrooks2.jpg
Born	1970 New York, NY
Education	A.B. Harvard, M.St. Oxford, J.D. Yale
Occupation(s)	Journalist, author, law professor
Notable credit(s)	Advisor to the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy; Op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times; law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center; author of Can Might Make Rights?, among other works; frequent guest on BloggingHeads.tv
Children	Two
Relatives	Barbara Ehrenreich, mother
Website	http://www.rosabrooks.com

Rosa Brooks is a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, where she also serves as Director of Georgetown Law School's Human Rights Center. She was also an op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times for four years. She stopped writing for the LA Times in April 2009 when she was appointed to a position within the Obama Administration as an advisor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. In this capacity she will advise Under Secretary Michele Flournoy on matters concerning national security.

Brooks' recent scholarly work has focused on terrorism and rule of law issues, international law, human rights, law of war, and failed states. With co-authors Jane Stromseth and David Wippman, she is the author of Can Might Make Rights? Building the Rule of Law After Military Interventions [1] (2006), which helped shape the U.S. Army's approach to rule of law. Brooks is also the author of numerous scholarly articles published in law reviews.

Brooks holds degrees from Harvard University (where she was president of Phillips Brooks House Association), where she majored in history and literature; Oxford University (where she was a Marshall Scholar) and received in masters degree in anthropology, and Yale Law School.

Her byline has appeared in publications all over the world, ranging from Harper's Magazine to the Washington Post, and in 2005 she began a weekly op-ed column for the Los Angeles Times. Most of her writings have focused on foreign policy, human rights, and national security issues, although they sometime range over other subjects as well, from economics to culture to a humorous take on parenting.. (Brooks has two young children). Her columns were often marked by humor and an irreverent, sometimes satirical style, and she has used her wit to criticize politicians and policies favored by both the left and the right.

Brooks has been a frequent guest and panelist on MSNBC (The Rachel Maddow Show, Race for the White House, Countdown, and Tucker), a commentator on Bloggingheads.tv [2], and a blogger for Slate Magazine's XX Factor. In May 2005 she appeared on Fox's The O'Reilly Factor. She has never been invited back on the show, although O'Reilly brought light on the absurd incongruity of Brooks, with her loathing of the military, being appointed to an important position in the Department of Defense..

Brooks' previous work has also included government service as a senior adviser to Assistant Secretary Harold Hongju Koh at the U.S. Department of State, five years as an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, and a stint as Special Counsel to the President at the Open Society Institute, George Soros' philanthropic foundation. She is the former director of Yale Law School's human rights program, and she has taught at both Yale and at Harvard. She has also been a consultant for Human Rights Watch, a fellow at he Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, a board member of Amnesty International USA, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law.

In 2004 she served as a foreign policy advisor to the Kerry-Edwards campaign, and she was an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign through her columns. She was a board member of the National Security Network, a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Fragile States, and a member of the steering committee of the White Oak Foreign Policy Leaders Project. She has traveled and worked around the world, including in Kosovo, Iraq, Indonesia, China, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Russia.

When she was appointed by Barack Obama to a Pentagon advisory position in April 2009, scrutiny of her works escalated. Some of the criticism focused on her attacks on the Bush administration's use of torture against detainees, which has since been proven to have prevented numerous terrorist attacks. She was also critical of the decision to go to war in Iraq, though she has taken a view cautiously supporting a slow and phased withdrawal.

In 2007, she wrote that prior to 9/11, "most experts say... al-Qaida was little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs, well financed and intermittently lethal but relatively limited in their global and regional political pull. On 9/11, they got lucky. … Today, thanks to U.S. policies, Al-Qaida has become the vast global threat the administration imagined it to be in 2001. Our ham-handed detention and interrogation tactics and our ill-advised invasion of Iraq have alienated vast swathes of the Islamic world, fueling extremism and anti-Americanism. Today, Al Qaeda is no longer a single organization. Now it's a franchise, with new gangs of terrorists around the world proudly seizing the "Al Qaeda" affiliation."

She also penned a 2006 column called Our Torturer-in-Chief in which she wrote that President "Bush...authorized practices that even [former Attorney General] Gonzales predicted might be seen by 'future prosecutors' as violations of the War Crimes Act," and that "it's far too late for [Bush] to leave a legacy that won't be a source of shame to future generations."

She has occasionally been a critic of some policies of the State of Israel. According to Brooks, "In the United States today, it just isn't possible to have a civil debate about Israel, because any serious criticism of its policies is instantly countered with charges of anti-Semitism."

Brooks has also been an advocate for nationalization of the media. In April 2009 she asserted that "Years of foolish policies have left us with a choice: We can bail out journalism, using tax dollars and granting [broadcast] licenses in ways that encourage robust and independent reporting and commentary, or we can watch, wringing our hands, as more and more top journalists are laid off."

As a supporter of sending more troops to Afghanistan and an advocate of a robust and well-funded counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism strategy, and as an occasionally sharp critic of prominent Democrats (including Hillary Clinton), Brooks has only rarely annoyed the political left.

In December 2008, for instance, she warned "Democrats still basking in the reflected glory of Obama's win" that "Idiocy and greed aren't just for Republicans. For every Larry Craig, there's an Eliot Spitzer; for every Ted Stevens, there's a Rod Blagojevich.... [I]t's precisely when a party achieves power that its members need to start worrying the most about idiocy and greed.... [P]ower really does corrupt. But illegal corruption isn't the only thing Democrats should be on guard against.... Members of political majorities succumb easily to smugness and complacency, to the conviction that explaining and justifying ideas is no longer necessary, to the temptation to dismiss critics as so many irrelevant cranks. "Groupthink" is mainly a disease of the powerful and complacent, not the fractious opposition."

On economics, Brooks is a socialist. She has skwewered the Bush administration's mishandling of the economy , argued for addressing the economic crisis with New Deal-style programs, , and decried large bailouts for financial firms.

The daughter of best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) and psychologist John Ehrenreich, Brooks currently lives with her family in Virginia.

Books

• Can Might Make Rights? Building the Rule of Law After Military Interventions[3] (with co-authors Jane Stromseth and David Wippman Cambridge University Press, 2006).
• A Garden of Paper Flowers (Picador, 1994) (under the name Rosa Ehrenreich; later articles are credited to Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks)

Other Notable Publications

• Failed States, or the State as Failure?, 72 U. Chicago L. Rev. 1159 (2005)
• War Everywhere: Rights, National Security Law, and the Law of Armed Conflict in the Age of Terror, 153 U. Pennsylvania L. Rev. 675 (2004).
• The New Imperialism: Violence, Norms & Rule of Law, 101 Mich. L. Rev. 2275 (2003).
• Law in the Heart of Darkness: Atrocity & Duress, 43 Virginia Journal of International Law 861 (2003).

External links

• Rosa Brooks: LA Times page
• Rosa Brooks: website
• Rosa Brooks: Georgetown Law School Faculty Bio
• Video discussions/debates with Brooks at Bloggingheads.tv