| With the world, and U.S. society, under the U.S. war regime, “melting down” in front of our eyes, perhaps literally with the potential for nuclear war today, what better way to spend the “Last Days,” than to read one more lengthy, turgid, email from me? Or JFDI (delete it). So to this fine article by Doug Bandow, let me just add from my own experience in International Law, not as criticism, but merely to expand upon it, that it is not “expansive” enough in its “time horizon.” As with, what was the U.S. doing in Ukraine before 2/22? Relevant like the question of "what was the U.S. doing in North Vietnam before 8/64 is relevant (and in all the many other countries of US regime changes/wars). The answer to which could be a legitimate “defense” to the proposed charges against Putin (which I say not as an "attachment” to Putin but only from the “need” to “see through other’s eyes,” in Hannah Arendt’s words, who would have understood this perfectly, even while most of her fellow citizens were too stupid to during the Cold War. With our determined blindness to any view but our own taking us right over the abyss, under the influence of our “Warfighters,” as our militaritic fanatics who set us on this suicidal/fratricidal/homicidal course correctly call the DOD/CIA fanatics who who wage our wars, including the intentionally less than visible “Low-Intensity Conflict” we’ve been engaged in against Russia since the supposed “end” of the Cold War. Nor is Bandow’s article (not meant as criticism, which it merits cheers for just for raising the questions) expansive enough in its breadth of U.S. war crime culpability, which extend way beyond our “Leaders,” under Nuremberg standards. Which goes to the culpability under Nuremberg standards of so much of our Military-Industrial Complex (which includes all of Ray MacGovern’s “MICIMATT,” much (most/all?) of whom merit a place in a war crime dock for their role in “shaping or influencing” the US “Wars of Aggression,” at least since 2003, which many prominent U.S. citizens culpable of. With all that the U.S. has done to “wage aggressive war,” as a “Crime Against Peace,” under Nuremberg standards, this article might be helpful in understanding the “true nature” of the war crime, and of who else should be charged under this standard: https://academic.oup.com/ejil/article/18/3/477/363585 That includes not only “leaders” as identified by Bandow, but also those who “shape and influence” military action by the U.S. Which immediately includes one-time members of PNAC, with their earliest “incitement” of US Wars of Aggression, to include all of the Mideast, but also Russia and China (whose ideological successors of both parties carry on today, in the Goldwater/Scoop Jackson traditon). And the many “think tanks” and commentators of today with their continuous incitement of war against China/Russia, and the entirety of the so-called “New Right,” which I regularly denounce as war criminals under the Nuremberg standard, as described here from the link above: "There have been suggestions, however, that limiting the category of ‘leader’ to individuals who can control or direct a state's political or military action might unnecessarily restrict the scope of the crime. In July 2002, for example, Colombia submitted a proposed leadership clause that would have extended liability for aggression to those ‘in a position to contribute to or effectively cooperate in shaping in a fundamental manner political or military action by a State’.14 At the 2006 intersessional meeting, a delegate suggested that ‘shape or influence’, and not ‘control or direct’, was the appropriate leadership standard.15 Finally, at the most recent 2007 meeting, Samoa distributed a position paper written by this author that argued in favour of the ‘shape or influence’ standard.16" The ICC doesn’t have exclusive jurisdiction over war crimes. And following what some hope (Gaetz, Hawley, Cotton, Trump, Bannon, Curt Mills, to name just a few of the New Right “conspiring to wage aggressive war against China/Russia [Russia is always an appendage to US war against China, just as the reverse was true during the Cold War, as Daniel Ellsberg showed in The Doomsday Machine]) will be a a US War Against China/Russia (one war, two theatres), there are many in the U.S. who might take notice that they themselves are already culpable for the U.S. war crime of aggression, under the existing Nuremberg standards. Which could be the standard they are judged under should there be an “unsuccessful” war against China/Russia. Though not of the same type as Gen. LeMay recognized that he and fellow U.S. Army Air Corps (the future Air Force) officers would have been charged with had Japan won the war. So would this guy whom Bandow rightly takes notice of: "Yet this is mild compared to the Trump administration’s reaction to the ICC. Led by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a likely Republican presidential candidate, the previous administration imposed sanctions on two ICC prosecutors along with their families, for daring to “investigate US personnel.” Washington treated them like Chinese, Iranian, and Russian violators of human rights.” Without a legal analysis of why this constitutes a war crime in itself, it is sufficient to say that under the Tokyo International Military Tribunal for the Far East, “denial of fair trial rights,” to include legislation criminalizing “enemy resistance,” as with Japan’s “Enemy Airmen’s Act,” and more recently, the U.S. Military Commissions Act’s, of both 2006 and 2009, and U.S. legislation directed at our many “Enemies” of today, all constitute “war crimes.” Which I was able to assert in part in an argument I made at Guantanamo calling for an Art. 5 hearing under Geneva, notwithstanding virtually universal Republican condemnation of the Geneva Conventions, and prevailed on. Which I have no doubt would have been reviewed by CIA overnight before allowing the Judge to issue an Order for one to be held, with them smart enough to know how war crime culpability would reach whoever gave the answer to the Judge, as well as the Judge. To this point of Bandow’s: Europe, often complicit in American wars, is likely to go along with Washington’s proposal to sit in judgment over Russia’s aggression while refusing to subject itself to similar international oversight.” That can be said again, and again. On a visit to Geneva in March 2020 when the so-called “UN Human Rights Council” was meeting there, in the week that Covid was rapidly becoming the cause of shutting down Europe as the week was coming to a close, I asked the awkward question of why the UN/ICC wasn’t investigating and charging US officials with various war crimes. A very prominent IL commentator admitted it was because they were “on the side of the US, against Russia,” in virtually those words. Revealing two things: 1. At least the Europeans weren’t a “neutral, unbiased court,” in determining who to charge with war crimes, or what war crimes to charge, even to dismissing the open criminality of US official’s/CIA/DOD crimes of torture, and 2: they were fully aware that the US was engaged in hostilities with Russia, and were “on our side,” with eyes intentionally averted from US criminality, and always had been. This was the annual UN “Human Rights” meeting in Geneva, with people from Iran attending as well, which means it was crawling with CIA (who maybe took note of my criticism of US policy, but knew no one paid attention to me anyway, except for the Iranian officials :-). This had a disheartening effect on me as well, to come to realize that the “US Conspiracy to Wage Aggressive War,” already “waged” 20+ years by then, even at the risk of it escalating up to nuclear war, included Europeans in the “Common Plan.” Regardless of whether they were motivated by the avalanche of fear mongering the US CIA/DOD/MIC (the short acronym for all it consists of) had been waging as “Information (now “Cognitive”) War,” or perhaps simply having been “bought” in the finest CIA traditions. Regardless, under Nuremberg standards, the war crime docket of US citizens charged with “Crimes Against Peace” would have extended far beyond the numbers charged after WW II, as this article explains (already cited above): And this Law Review article, which I didn’t read very far into yet, but the critical point is quoted below: https://www.californialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/4Mohamed-35.pdf BLUF: "in times of war or crisis, the world indeed turns upside- down, but the world does not turn upside-down on its own. Such transformation is, rather, the product of deliberate and calculated choices by leaders who seek to facilitate, encourage, and nurture violence toward some end, whether personal gain, territorial control, or political domination. Government leaders warn citizens that an enemy population is coming for their land, their jobs, their lives. Commanders tell subordinates that their comrades’ lives are in danger and they should do anything to protect them. Politicians advise constituents that a foreign threat must be annihilated, no matter what.7” With the U.S. now a textbook example of how this is done! P.S. Whatever war crimes Israel is guilty of, which are many, and continuing, Trump made the U.S. fully complicit in each one of them, going far beyond his predecessors. To include “denial of fair trial rights” of Palestinians in their so-called “military court system,” which I recently saw first hand, and attaching our political “Right” fully to their “Right,” (using a euphemism for generic fascism) in working to subvert what little they have of a “Legal Order,” which has on occasion, at least given some very slight relief to the Palestinians, leading to the open hostility of the fascists to it. Just like Obama did with Japan with our government actively helping Abe to “reinterpret” Japan’s “Peace Constitution,” in an early phase of the US war against China/Russia.
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