Capitol Hill Blue Forums Life and Moral Issues Crime & Punishment More than 30 Top U.S. Officials Guilty of WarCrime

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Why am I not surprised ?

Far more priceless art was destroyed or looted when the savage Americans invaded Iraq -- a country half-way around the world where they had no right to be. Ditto brutality. Ditto Afghanistan.

The American Establishment has been working tirelessly for a quarter of a century to create an enemy they can pretend is as great a supposed threat as the old Soviet Union, in order that the Military-Industrial Complex can continue to loot America.

By murdering, rampaging, destroying and torturing for years and years in many countries, the respected leaders of America have had some success in achieving their goal.

It is apparent that what we have here is a myopic view of U.S. involvement in world affairs.

Question: If China were to invade the U.S. because they claim we are violating the rights of our citizens
(which we do on a daily basis, Manning being only the most recent and public case in point) what would your reaction be?
Would you be waving a Chinese flag in the streets?

The Taliban are an organization fighting in their own country. The U.S. are the aggressors, period.
If they commit atrocities against their own people then those people will wage war against them.
Egypt, Libya, indeed the entire Arab Spring, are all examples of what happens when the people rise up against a government they don't want.

As for U.S. war crimes and indiscriminate destruction: the list is too long to not warrant an encyclopedic volume. However, below are just some instances easily found in WikiPedia.
A very incomplete list, since, if one were to include the U.S. sponsored coups that killed untold thousands in
Iran, Chile, Brazil, etc. one would need an entire library.

Start with the obvious:
The quasi-genocide of Native Americans.

Philippine–American War

World War II
Air raids on civilian population
Bombing of Dresden in World War II

During the Second World War, both Axis and Allied aerial forces conducted air raids on civilian populations in Europe and over Japan.

Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The "Canicattì massacre" involved the killing of Italian civilians by Lieutenant Colonel McCaffrey.

The "Dachau massacre" involved the killing of German prisoners of war and surrendering SS soldiers at the Dachau concentration camp.

In the "Biscari massacre", which consisted of two instances of mass murders, U.S. troops of the 45th Infantry Division killed roughly 75 prisoners of war, mostly Italian.

"Operation Teardrop" involved eight surviving captured crewmen from the sunken German submarine U-546 are tortured by US military personnel.

In the aftermath of the Malmedy massacre a written order from Headquarters of the 328th US Army Infantry Regiment, dated 21 December 1944, stated:
"No SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoner but will be shot on sight."

Near the French village of Audouville-la-Hubert 30 German Wehrmacht prisoners were massacred by U.S. paratroopers.

Historian Peter Lieb has found that many US and Canadian units were ordered to not take prisoners during the D-Day landings in Normandy.

According to an article in Der Spiegel by Klaus Wiegrefe, many personal memoirs of Allied soldiers have been willfully
ignored by historians until now because they were at odds with the "Greatest Generation" mythology surrounding World War II.

American soldiers in the Pacific sometimes deliberately killed Japanese soldiers who had surrendered, according to Richard Aldrich (Professor of History at Nottingham University).

U. S. historian James J. Weingartner attributes the very low number of Japanese in U.S. prisoner of war compounds to two important factors, namely (1) a Japanese reluctance to surrender,
and (2) a widespread American "conviction that the Japanese were 'animals' or 'subhuman' and unworthy of the normal treatment accorded to prisoners of war.
The latter reason is supported by Ferguson, who says that "Allied troops often saw the Japanese in the same way that Germans regarded Russians — as Untermenschen" (i.e. "subhuman").

Rape

It has been claimed that some U.S. soldiers raped Okinawan women during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.

Based on several years of research, Okinawan historian Oshiro Masayasu (former director of the Okinawa Prefectural Historical Archives) writes:
Soon after the U.S. Marines landed, all the women of a village on Motobu Peninsula fell into the hands of American soldiers. At the time,
there were only women, children, and old people in the village, as all the young men had been mobilized for the war.
Soon after landing, the Marines "mopped up" the entire village, but found no signs of Japanese forces. Taking advantage of the situation,
they started "hunting for women" in broad daylight, and women who were hiding in the village or nearby air raid shelters were dragged out one after another.

There were also 1,336 reported rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa prefecture after the Japanese surrender.

Secret wartime files made public only in 2006 reveal that American GIs committed 400 sexual offences in Europe, including 126 rapes in England,
between 1942 and 1945.
A study by Robert J. Lilly estimates that a total of 14,000 civilian women in England, France and Germany were raped by American GIs during World War II.
It is estimated that there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war and one historian has claimed
that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common.

Korean War
No Gun Ri Massacre
The No Gun Ri Massacre refers to an incident of mass killing of undetermined numbers of South Korean refugees conducted by U.S. Army forces of the 7th Cavalry Regiment
(and in a U.S. air attack) between 26 July and 29 July 1950 at a railroad bridge near the village of No Gun Ri, 100 miles (160 km) southeast of Seoul.
In 2005, the South Korean government certified the names of 163 dead or missing (mostly women, children and old men) and 55 wounded.
It said many other victims' names were not reported. Over the years survivors' estimates of the dead have ranged from 300 to 500.
This episode early in the Korean War gained widespread attention when the Associated Press (AP) published a series of articles in 1999 that subsequently won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

Vietnam War
The Vietnam War Crimes Working Group Files is a collection of (formerly secret) documents compiled by Pentagon investigators in the early 1970s,
confirming that atrocities by U.S. forces during the Vietnam War were more extensive than had been officially acknowledged.
The documents are housed by the United States National Archives and Records Administration, and detail 320 alleged incidents that
were substantiated by United States Army investigators (not including the 1968 My Lai Massacre).
My Lai Massacre

The My Lai Massacre was the mass murder of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam, almost entirely civilians, most of them women and children, conducted by U.S. Army forces on 16 March 1968.
Some of the victims were raped, beaten, tortured, or maimed, and some of the bodies were found mutilated. The massacre took place in the hamlets of My Lai and My Khe of Son My village during the Vietnam War.

Agent Orange

A panel of legal and political activists calling themselves the International Tribunal of Conscience in Support of the Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange
formed in France have claimed that the use of Agent Orange during Operation Ranch Hand during the Vietnam War was a violation of laws regarding the use of
chemical weapons in the 1907 Hague Convention, the 1927 Geneva Convention, and the 1949 Geneva Convention.
In 2005 a suit filed against the United States and several companies who produced Agent Orange was rejected by a United States District Court in Brooklyn.
The court found that "No treaty or agreement, express or implied, of the United States, operated to make use of herbicides in Vietnam a violation of the laws of war
or any other form of international law until at the earliest April of 1975."
In 2007 the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Court in Brooklyn saying that "Agent Orange and similar U.S. herbicides cannot be
considered poisons banned under international rules of war" and that the lack of large-scale research made it impossible to show what caused illnesses.

Yugoslavia

Amnesty International has condemned the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, which they confirm killed 400 civilians (some sources place this figure at over 1,000 or as high as 5,000)
in what it claims were violations of international law and war crimes, due to deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure and indiscriminate attacks, with lack of precautionary measures taken to prevent civilian casualties.
Human Rights Watch documented approximately 500 civilian deaths as a result of the NATO bombing campaign.


War on Terror

As a reaction to the September 11, 2001 attacks the U.S. Government adopted several controversial measures
(e.g., invading Iraq, applying "unlawful combatant" status to prisoners, conducting "extraordinary renditions", and "enhanced interrogation methods").

Human Rights Watch had claimed in 2005 that the principle of "command responsibility" could make high-ranking
officials within the Bush administration guilty of war crimes allegedly committed during the War on Terror, either with their knowledge or by persons under their control.

A presidential memorandum of September 7, 2002 authorized U.S. interrogators of prisoners captured in Afghanistan to deny the prisoners
basic protections required by the Geneva Conventions, and thus according to Jordan J. Paust, professor of law and formerly a member of the faculty of the Judge Advocate General's School,
"necessarily authorized and ordered violations of the Geneva Conventions, which are war crimes." Based on the president's memorandum, U.S. personnel
carried out cruel and inhumane treatment on the prisoners,[61] which necessarily means that the president's memorandum was a plan to violate the Geneva Convention,
and such a plan constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, according to Professor Paust.

Alberto Gonzales and others argued that detainees should be considered "unlawful combatants" and as such not be protected by the Geneva Conventions
in multiple memoranda regarding these perceived legal gray areas.

Gonzales' statement that denying coverage under the Geneva Conventions "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act"
suggests, to some authors, an awareness by those involved in crafting policies in this area that US officials are involved in acts that could be seen to be war crimes.

On April 14, 2006, Human Rights Watch said that Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could be criminally liable for his alleged involvement
in the abuse of Mohammad al-Qahtani.
On November 14, 2006, invoking universal jurisdiction, legal proceedings were started in Germany – for their alleged involvement of prisoner abuse –
against Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, George Tenet and others.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is seen by some as an amnesty law for crimes committed in the War on Terror by retroactively rewriting
the War Crimes Act and by abolishing habeas corpus, effectively making it impossible for detainees to challenge crimes committed against them.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo has told the Sunday Telegraph he is willing to start an inquiry by the International Criminal Court (ICC), and possibly a trial,
for war crimes committed in Iraq involving British Prime Minister Tony Blair and American President George W. Bush.
Though under the Rome Statute, the ICC has no jurisdiction over Bush, since the USA is not a State Party to the relevant treaty—unless
Bush were accused of crimes inside a State Party, or the UN Security Council (where the USA has a veto) requested an investigation.
However Blair does fall under ICC jurisdiction as Britain is a State Party.

Nat Hentoff wrote on August 28, 2007, that a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the July 2007 report by Human Rights First
and Physicians for Social Responsibility, titled "Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality", might be used as evidence of
American war crimes if there was a Nuremberg-like trial regarding the War on Terror.

Shortly before the end of President Bush's second term, newsmedia in countries other than the U.S. began publishing the views of those who
believe that under the United Nations Convention Against Torture the US is obligated to hold those responsible for prisoner abuse to account under criminal law.
One proponent of this view was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (Professor Manfred Nowak) who,
on January 20, 2009, remarked on German television that former president George W. Bush had lost his head of state immunity and under international law the U.S. would
now be mandated to start criminal proceedings against all those involved in these violations of the UN Convention Against Torture.
Law professor Dietmar Herz explained Nowak's comments by saying that under U.S. and international law former President Bush is criminally responsible for adopting torture as interrogation tool.

Michael Ignatieff, then leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and former director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy said
that the threat of terrorism requires serious and possibly permanent abridgement of civil liberties. He stated that governments are justified in
combating terrorism with "lesser evils", ranging from suspension of civil liberties, through secret uses of executive power, to torture of suspects, as well as targeted killing,
right up to pre-emptive war to destroy terrorist bases and also to prevent the development or deployment of weapons which may be used by terrorists or states that support terrorist aims.

The lack of uniforms exception was used by Yoo and Gonzalez to allow the taking of 'enemy combatants' -- defined as anyone over 16, male, and relatively able bodied, and then removing them to various legitimate and not so, prisons, for torture, questioning, or unlimited and unending imprisonment, because they 'might be' fighting the military that invaded their country.

The exception was also adopted by the rest of the Bush group, and many of them are now not traveling in Europe for fear of arrest for war crimes indictments that have been voted and are legitimate charges that do not have a statute of limitations, due to the underlying murder counts within them.

Now, the unilateral choices involving drones and death may bring many more than 30 to face charges for war crimes.

It sort of makes one wonder about the Peace Prize in prior years, and even the selection of the EU for this year's award.

Slave trade.

I thought of that too! But I didn't think it could be characterized as a war - on second thought, maybe it was!!

I'll take all that gobbledegook to mean you completely support the actions of the Taliban.

There are your primary errors, Pondering, as any reference to the "rules of war" or "the real world" will lose the argument. Those standards are not applicable to this discussion.

Yup - "the real world" are the millions of non military personnel dead, and "rules of war", a logical fallacy, as can be seen by the post above. While there may be "rules", it seems they are not meant to be followed by most (the U.S. being a major offender).

The rules of war do not include the intention rape of civilians, execution of prisoners, wanton destruction of property and the often intentional slaughter of civilians.

I am not naive enough to believe war does not come without a cost but no one is pristine in these situations. I like to think our military is above all that and if that was true Leavenworth would not exist.

I would also like to believe that our use of third parties and client states to do our bidding had a degree of legitimacy but it does not. Zeke managed to leave out - I assume simply because a new server would be needed - our policies in South and Central America starting with the Monroe Doctrine. How the U.S. Managed to get the territory to build the Panama Canal is a great example of our own imperialist expansion.