A 95-year-oldBerlin resident has been charged with being an accessory to the murder of over 36,000 people at theMauthausen death camp inAustria duringWorld War Two, theBerlin prosecutor's office said. "During the time of the crime, at least 36,223 people were killed at the Mauthausen concentration camp. "...The prosecutor's office said it was bringing the charges under new laws that allow the prosecution of people involved in theNazi "machinery of death" even if they did not personally kill anyone... the 2011 conviction ofJohn Demjanjuk, a guard atSobibor death camp... established a new precedent that no proof of a specific crime was needed to convict a defendant.
It’s sickening to hearthese clowns repeatedly claim that“Assad murdered 500,000 of his people,” as though the U.S.-backedterrorists have played no role in the killings. I’ve viewed hundreds ofbeheadings and crucifixions online but none committed bySyria troops – all were proudly posted by the hellish filth that we’ve recruited, armed and trained for the past eight years. Major war crimes, like beheading 250 Syrian soldiers after running them across the desert in their underpants, were scarcely mentioned by theMSM.
With each day, thewar crimes mount.Rape.Torture. Extrajudicial executions. Disappearances. Forced deportations. Attacks on schools, hospitals, playgrounds, apartment buildings, grain silos, water and gas facilities...[the atrocities are] not the acts of rogue units. They fit a clear pattern, across every part ofUkraine touched byRussian forces. And they fit a clear pattern withRussia’sprevious actions in conflicts inChechnya,Georgia,Syria, andUkraine starting in 2014."
War crimes are only committed by defeated powers. (But as the Nazislearned in 1945, unemployed war criminals can usually find work with the newhegemonic power.)
Kevin Carson, "The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Capitalism As a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege" (2011)
TheNative population (in the US) suffered a migrant crisis of an incredible kind … where theimmigrants come in with the intention of exterminating and expelling the population... Should they institute war crimes trials...? It would not make a lot of sense. It would make a lot of sense to bring out understanding of what happened, to call forreparations and so on... Is itgenocide? … The Western hemisphere had about 80 million people whenColumbus arrived, and pretty soon about 90 percent of them were gone (killed).
There had been fearful slaughters of soldiers in theFirst World War, and much of the accumulated treasure of the nations was consumed. Still, apart from the excesses of theRussian Revolution, the main fabric ofEuropeancivilisation remained erect at the close of the struggle. When the storm and dust of the cannonade passed suddenly away, thenations despite their enmities could still recognise each other as historic racial personalities. The laws of war had on the whole been respected. There was a common professional meeting-ground betweenmilitary men who had fought one another. Vanquished and victors alike still preserved the semblance of civilised states. A solemn peace was made which, apart from unenforceable financial aspects, conformed to the principles which in thenineteenth century had increasingly regulated the relations of enlightened peoples. Thereign of law was proclaimed, anda World Instrument was formed to guard us all, and especially Europe, against a renewed convulsion. In theSecond World War every bond between man and man was to perish. Crimes were committed by theGermans, under theHitlerite domination to which they allowed themselves to be subjected, which find no equal in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record.The wholesale massacre by systematised processes of six or seven millions of men, women, and children in theGermanexecution camps exceeds in horror therough-and-ready butcheries ofGenghis Khan, and in scale reduces them to pigmy proportions.Deliberate extermination of whole populations was contemplated and pursued by both Germany and Russia in the Eastern war. The hideous process ofbombarding open cities from the air, once started by the Germans, was repaid twenty-fold by the ever-mounting power of the Allies, and found its culmination in the use of the atomic bombs which obliteratedHiroshima and Nagasaki. We have at length emerged from a scene of material ruin and moral havoc the like of which had never darkened the imagination of former centuries. After all that we suffered and achieved, we find ourselves still confronted with problems and perils not less but far more formidable than those through which we have so narrowly made our way.
US national security adviserJohn Bolton announced... that the US will use "any means necessary" to protect its citizens and allies from prosecution by theInternational Criminal Court. "United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court,"
The verdict findingManning guilty ofEspionage Act offenses, however, sends an ominous warning that could deter futurewhistle-blowers from exposing government wrongdoing. It’s important to keep in mind that Manning provided information indicating the U.S. had committed war crimes... AfterWikiLeaks published his documentation of Iraqi torture centers established by the United States, the Iraqi government refusedObama’s request to extend immunity toU.S. soldiers... As a result, Obama had to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. The American public needed to know the information Manning provided. He revealed evidence of war crimes in the"Collateral Murder" video, which depicts a U.S. Apache attack helicopter crew killing 12 unarmed civilians and wounding two children in Baghdad in 2007. The crew then killed people attempting to rescue the wounded. A U.S. tank drove over one of the bodies, cutting it in half. Those actions constitute war crimes under theGeneva Conventions. TheBush administration waged an illegal war in Iraq in which thousands of people were killed. ... Yet it isBradley Manning [andJulian Assange], not the Bush officials ... being prosecuted.
TheTrump administration is seeking extradition ofWikiLeaks founderJulian Assange to the United States for trial on charges carrying 175 years in prison... The treaty between the U.S. and the U.K. prohibits extradition for a “political offense.” Assange was indicted for exposing U.S. war crimes inIraq andAfghanistan. That is a classic political offense. Moreover, Assange’s extradition would violate the legal prohibition against sending a person to a country where he is in danger of being tortured.
WikiLeaks... published nearly 400,000 field reports about theIraq War, which contained evidence of U.S. war crimes, over 15,000 previously unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians, and the systematic murder, torture, rape and abuse by theIraqi army and authorities that were ignored byU.S. forces. In addition,WikiLeaks published theGuantánamo Files, 779 secret reports that revealed the U.S. government’s systematic violation of theGeneva Conventions and theConvention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, by abusing nearly 800 men and boys, ages 14 to 89.
One of the most notorious releases by WikiLeaks was the 2007 “Collateral Murder” video, which showed aU.S. Army Apache helicopter target and fire on unarmed civilians inBaghdad. More than 12 civilians were killed, including twoReuters reporters and a man who came to rescue the wounded. Two children were injured. Then a U.S. Army tank drove over one of the bodies, severing it in half. Those acts constitute three separate war crimes prohibited by theGeneva Conventions and theU.S. Army Field Manual.
If theU.S. government had prosecutedBush administration officials for their war crimes during the “war on terror,” theICC would not now take jurisdiction. But afterBarack Obama said, “Generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards,” his administration refused to prosecute those implicated in thetorture and willful killings of detainees during the Bush administration.
It has often been remarked but seldom remembered that war itself is a crime. Yet a war crime is more and other than war. It is an atrocity beyond the usual barbaric bounds of war. It is legal definition growing out of custom and tradition supported by every civilized nation in the world including our own. It is an act beyond the pale of acceptable actions even in war. Deliberate killing or torturing of prisoners of war is a war crime. Deliberate destruction without military purpose of civilian communities is a war crime. The use of certain arms and armaments and of gas is a war crime. The forcible relocation of population for any purpose is a war crime. All of these crimes have been committed by theU.S. Government over the past ten years in Indochina. An estimated one million South Vietnamese civilians have been killed because of these war crimes. A good portion of the reported 700,000National Liberation Front andNorth Vietnamese soldiers killed have died as a result of these war crimes and no one knows how manyNorth Vietnamese civilians,Cambodian civilians, andLaotian civilians have died as a result of these war crimes.
John Bolton, the national security adviser to the U.S. president, held a speech last September in which he wished death on the International Criminal Court. ... The American security adviser held his speech at a time when The Hague was planning preliminary investigations into American soldiers who had been accused of torturing people in Afghanistan. The American threats against international judges clearly show the new political climate. It is shocking.
What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered, and conducted wars, war criminals? ~Mahatma Gandhi
What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime againstGod andhumanity and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered, and conducted wars, war criminals? War criminals are not confined to theAxis Powers alone.Roosevelt andChurchill are no less war criminals thanHitler andMussolini. Hitler was “Great Britain’s sin”. Hitler is only an answer toBritish imperialism, and this I say in spite of the fact that I hateHitlerism and itsanti-Semitism.England,America andRussia have all of them got their hands dyed more or less red — not merelyGermany andJapan. The Japanese have only proved themselves to be apt pupils of the West. They have learnt at the feet of the West and beaten it at its own game.
Ourgovernments feel threatened byChelsea Manning,Edward Snowden, andJulian Assange, because they arewhistleblowers,journalists, andhuman rightsactivists who have provided solid evidence for theabuse, corruption, and war crimes of the powerful, for which they are now being systematically defamed and persecuted. They are thepolitical dissidents of the West, and their persecution is today’s witch-hunt, because they threaten the privileges of unsupervised state power that has gone out of control. The cases of Manning, Snowden, Assange and others are the most important test of our time for the credibility of Westernrule of law and democracy and our commitment tohuman rights.
Israeli forces’ repeated use of lethal force in theGaza Strip since March 30, 2018, against Palestinian demonstrators who posed no imminent threat to life may amount to war crimes,Human Rights Watch said today. Israeli forces have killed more than 100 protesters in Gaza and wounded thousands with live ammunition... The killings... highlight the need for theInternational Criminal Court to open a formal investigation into the situation inPalestine. Third countries should impose targeted sanctions against officials responsible for ongoing serious human rights violations
TheInternational Criminal Court (ICC's) mandate to investigate war crimes has thus been hampered by the unwillingness of the world’s sole superpower to commit to the organization.... Recent statements...suggest that the United States is now preparing to go to war against the ICC itself, motivated largely by an effort to silence investigations into alleged American war crimes committed inAfghanistan, as well as alleged crimes committed byIsrael during the 2014 war in theGaza Strip....The unwillingness or inability of U.S. courts to seriously investigate war crimes carried out by American citizens is part of why the ICC mandate in Afghanistan has been viewed as an important effort to bring a minimum level of accountability over the conflict.
I would like to talk representing all those veterans and say that several months ago inDetroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed inSoutheast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It's impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit -- the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences inVietnam. But they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told the stories of times that they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in the fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside ofSouth Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
The first instance of a judicial response to atrocity focused onSir Peter von Hagenbach who was charged withmurder and other violations. ... Von Hagenbach defended himself on the grounds that he was just following orders. ~Martha Minow (1474 execution of Hagenbach shown)The aerial weapons team ... dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life, and referred to them as "dead bastards," and congratulated each other on their ability to kill in large numbers. ... For me, this seemed similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass. ~Chelsea Manning
The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seeming delightful blood-lust the aerial weapons team happened to have. They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life, and referred to them as "dead bastards," and congratulated each other on their ability to kill in large numbers. ... For me, this seemed similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass. I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained [in the leaks], it could spark a domesticdebate on the role of themilitary and ourforeign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The first instance of a judicial response to atrocity focused onSir Peter von Hagenbach who was charged withmurder and other violations in a court created by the Archduke of Austria in 1474 specifically to create a legal forum rather than summary execution. Von Hagenbach defended himself on the grounds that he was just following orders to maintain security as governor of a town in the Upper Rhine; thus, his case launched both the legal response to atrocity and the debate over the defense of following orders.
In the last days of the battle against the Islamic State inSyria, ... a large crowd of women and children huddled against a river bank. Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast. As the smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in search of cover. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors. ... A legal officer flagged the strike as a possible war crime that required an investigation. But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike. The death toll was downplayed. ... Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. The Defense Department’s independent inspector general began an inquiry, but the report containing its findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. ... Civilian observers who came to the area of the strike the next day described finding piles of dead women and children.
The story starts March 18, 2019, in a big Air Force combat operations center in Al Udeid in Qatar. And there we have, it almost looks like mission command forNASA. You have banks of computers, big screens, all of them watching the air war against the Islamic State ... on this day, a lot of people in the command center are watching a drone that was flying up overhead. Now, what they saw was a field that was just littered with a tangle of cars and makeshift tents of debris of the leftovers from weeks of combat. But also within there was a lot of people. And the drone hovered over and focused in on a group of women and children who had found refuge down by the river against a steep sand bank. The drone, it lingered for several minutes, slowly circling with its cameras focused on these folks, either sleeping or just laying down low to take cover from whatever combat might be coming. And the people in the operation center were calmly watching this when, suddenly ... an American F-15 attack jet came right through and dropped a large bomb dead center into this group of women and children ... killing nearly all of them.
IfRussia has intelligence thatUkraine is using an otherwise protected civilian target for military purposes, and if a decision is made to attack the target using force deemed proportional to the threat, then no war crime has been committed. Indeed, given whatThe Washington Post has documented, it appears that it is Ukraine, not Russia, which is committing war crimes.
This man was innocent. ... He was walking back to his house, and I shot him in front of his friend and his father. ... We were all congratulated after we had our first kills. ... My company commander personally congratulated me ... the same individual who had stated that whoever gets their first kill by stabbing them to death will get a four-day pass when we return from Iraq. ~ Jon Michael Turner (U.S.M.C.)
What it actually reveals is a far darker, more shameful truth. The truth of aSaudi-led coalition armed byBritain and theUnited States, which from the very start of the conflict in 2015 has sought to usestarvation as a weapon of war. Most obviously, their on-off blockades of any ports and airports controlled by theHouthi rebels have drastically cut supplies of food to aYemini population that relies on imports to eat. But far more insidiously, and in the absence of imports, theSaudi air force has systematically and deliberately destroyed the domestic means of producing and distributing food insideYemen. Their bombs have constantly targeted agricultural land, dairy farms, food processing factories, and the markets where food is sold.
We need accountability for the states and individuals that have caused this crisis, brought us to the brink of afamine that theUN says would be the worst in the past 100 years, and – by usingstarvation as a weapon of war – are in clear breach ofinternational humanitarian law. ... When I askedJeremy Hunt yesterday inparliament why theresolution that will go before thesecurity council today did not mention the need for aninvestigation of all alleged war crimes, and fullaccountability for those responsible, and whether thecrown prince (of Saudi Arabia) had insisted on the removal of thatdemand, he did not answer.
On April 18, 2006, I had my first confirmed killed. This man was innocent. I don’t know his name. I called him “the fat man.” He was walking back to his house, and I shot him in front of his friend and his father. The first round didn’t kill him, after I had hit him up here in his neck area. And afterwards he started screaming and looked right into my eyes. So I looked at my friend, who I was on post with, and I said, “Well, I can’t let that happen.” So I took another shot and took him out. He was then carried away by the rest of his family. It took seven people to carry his body away. We were all congratulated after we had our first kills, and that happened to have been mine. My company commander personally congratulated me, as he did everyone else in our company. This is the same individual who had stated that whoever gets their first kill by stabbing them to death will get a four-day pass when we return from Iraq.
I just want to say that I am sorry for the hate and destruction that I have inflicted on innocent people, and I’m sorry for the hate and destruction that others have inflicted on innocent people. At one point, it was OK. But reality has shown that it’s not..and that until people hear about what is going on with this war, it will continue to happen and people will continue to die. I am sorry for the things that I did. I am no longer the monster that I once was.
The reason why the U.S. Government must be prosecuted for its war-crimes against Iraq is that they are so horrific and there are so many of them, and international law crumbles until they become prosecuted and severely punished for what they did. We therefore now have internationally a lawless world (or “World Order”) in which “Might makes right.” ~ Eric Zuesse
There have been a litany of war crimes. ... Saudi planes, using American munitions, bombed a school bus killing dozens of Yemeni schoolchildren. Second, the U.S. government has responded to these crimes with silences that might seem chastened, but in truth must be classified as defiant, given the bureaucratic maneuvering undertaken to obscure the United States’ unthinking complicity both to outsiders and to itself.
The reason why theU.S. Government must be prosecuted for its war-crimes againstIraq is that they are so horrific and there are so many of them, andinternational law crumbles until they become prosecuted and severely punished for what they did. We therefore now have internationally a lawless world (or “World Order”) in which “Might makes right,” and in which there is really no effectiveinternational law, at all. This is merely gangster “law,” ruling on an international level. ... The seriousness of this international war crime is not as severe as those of theNazis were, but nonetheless is comparable to it. ... On 15 March 2018,Medea Benjamin andNicolas J.S. Davies headlined atAlternet, “The Staggering Death Toll in Iraq” and wrote that “our calculations, using the best information available, show a catastrophic estimate of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion,” and linked to solid evidence, backing up their estimate.
America’s leaders deceived the American public into perpetrating this invasion and occupation, of a foreign country (Iraq) that had never threatened the United States; and, so, this invasion and subsequentmilitary occupation constitutes the very epitome of “aggressive war” — unwarranted and illegal international aggression. ...Hitler, similarly toGeorge W. Bush, would never have been able to obtain the support of his people to invade if he had not lied, or “deceived,” them, into invading and militarily occupying foreign countries that had never threatenedGermany, such asBelgium,Poland andCzechoslovakia. This — Hitler’s lie-based aggressions — was the core of what the Nazis were hung for, and yet America now does it.
