The UN Convention on War Crimes should be Applied to the United States
Through Resolution 2391 (XXIII) dated November 26, 1968, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity [...]
Despite the measures taken by the international community to reinforce global security and protect civilians from the relentless increase in the number of armed conflicts, unjustified civilian casualties are not decreasing, and not only in the tinder box that is the Middle East, but also in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and even in Europe.
The rules aimed at protecting the victims of armed conflict, and placing restrictions on the methods and means of warfare, are spelled out in detail in international humanitarian law, which also defines the mechanisms for ensuring compliance with these rules. A significant portion of those that concern international armed conflicts is contained in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Additional Protocol (I) from 1977. It follows from these international legal documents that countries bear the responsibility to thwart violations committed against these treaties, and obliged to suppress any violations of these treaties, and those guilty of them should be tried and punished as criminals. The most serious violations of humanitarian law are defined as “war crimes”, and are listed in both the Geneva Conventions and Protocol (I).
Through Resolution 2391 (XXIII) dated November 26, 1968, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. When adopting this very important transnational document, which pursues the goal of ending impunity for any country that commits war crimes, the UN General Assembly members invoked previously adopted international regulatory acts on this issue.
Existing international legal instruments make it mandatory for states to search for and punish all persons that have committed serious offenses, regardless of their citizenship, the location of the crime, or the statute of limitations.
However, some countries have recently, and inexcusably, started to think of themselves as outside the scope of these international legal documents that they adopted themselves, and allow them to be demonstrably violated. Moreover, as evidenced by numerous published testimony, including in Western media outlets, there is the increasing desire to cover up the war crimes that have been committed in recent decades in the Middle East and Afghanistan by US military service personnel, and those from some of its allies. In addition to showing the desire to evade responsibility for the crimes committed using these tactics, it is becoming obvious that the Pentagon and some of its western military allies has not ensured proper supervision over the activities performed by its combat units, not to mention the actions taken by the armies of mercenaries that Washington actively uses in its reckless military schemes around the world.
A report by the International Criminal Court dated November 14, 2016 stated that the US military and CIA officers could be complicit in torture, encroaching on human dignity, and cruelly treating and raping prisoners. Not only foreign observers, but even former CIA analyst Raymond McGovern compared the methods used in secret US prisons with the actions taken by the Nazi Gestapo. There were at least twenty-five of these prisons in Afghanistan alone; and one of them located on the premises of the Bagram Airfield near Kabul became known as the “Afghan Guantanamo”.
American soldiers have already been repeatedly accused of killing Afghan civilians. According to Amnesty International, between 2009 and 2013 at least 1,800 civilians were killed in international military operations in the country, and only six cases were investigated.
Unfortunately – and to the obvious shame of Washington, which is trying to proclaim that it is allegedly committed to democracy – quite often American military killed Afghans just as a form of entertainment. For example, in March 2011, Rolling Stone magazine published an article about US Marines who shot a teenager in Kandahar Province and then cut off his finger as a “war trophy”. What sparked widespread public outcry was when a grave was discovered in Maidan Wardak Province in the spring of 2013 with the bodies of ten civilians that had been detained before that by the special forces group ODA 3124 – some of then had their skulls pierced and limbs cut off.
According to a report published by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs (a research center at Brown University, USA), the number of Afghan civilians killed in US-led airstrikes has increased by 330% since 2016. According to this report, which came about as part of a project dubbed Costs of War, over the 19-year, US-led war more than 43,000 Afghan civilians have been killed, and out of those thousands have been killed by bombs and bullets from US forces or its NATO allies.
In addition to brutally killing civilians, US soldiers have repeatedly deliberately carried out airstrikes against hospitals. For example, on October 3, 2015, the US Air Force launched a series of bombings on the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz Province, where emergency and intensive care units were located. The raid killed at least 42 people, including 24 patients and 14 MSF staff. The war crime occurred despite the fact that MSF had provided the geographic coordinates of the hospital to US coalition forces and Afghan military officials five days before that, but the bombing raids continued – even for half an hour after Washington and Kabul had been made aware of the incident. This incident is incontrovertible evidence that the United States violated international humanitarian law: the IV Geneva Convention dated August 12, 1949 states that civilian hospitals “cannot, under any circumstances, be the object of attack”.
Yet more evidence of US war crimes in Afghanistan was the extensive amount of material published on December 18 by the American edition of The Intercept about the criminal tactics being employed by the US in the war in Afghanistan. However, despite this material published on the war crimes in Afghanistan directed by the CIA, it was yet again ignored by the American media – and on American social media. These crimes definitely completely fit into the tougher position that in October 2017 by Mike Pompeo, then director of the CIA and now the US Secretary of State, stated that the American intelligence services and military would take – and that they, in his words, “must be aggressive, relentless, and ruthless”.
What calls attention to itself is President Trump’s reaction to these criminal actions, which boiled down to the fact that he dismissed senior military commanders who were trying to restore order to the ranks of the SEALs following their criminal actions. In addition, Donald Trump lifted the ban on using landmines by the US military, and pardoned those soldiers convicted or accused of killing Afghans. And at the end of December, President Trump, before leaving the post of head of state, signed an executive order pardoning four Blackwater PMC militants who staged a bloody massacre on Nisour Square in the Iraqi capital thirteen years ago.
Washington’s inappropriate reaction to the overwhelming evidence of US war crimes that has been published has also essentially boiled down to the fact that in September 2019 the US imposed sanctions against senior officials at the International Criminal Court, in response to its investigation of possible war crimes committed by US troops in Afghanistan. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the court’s efforts “illegal attempts to subordinate Americans to its jurisdiction,” overtly demonstrating to the whole world the disdain US has for international organizations – and back in the day Washington also took part in creating those.
However, the war crimes committed by the United States and its military allies, despite the American administration’s intention to evade international responsibility, should not be forgotten. This, in particular, is called for by the decisions made by the UN General Assembly Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. And its provisions need to be applicable to perpetrators responsible in the United States as well.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
As colonial monuments are being destroyed in the U.S. and Europe, Mount Rushmore so far remains untouched and a news item since U.S. President Donald Trump visited the site on July 4 to commemorate Independence Day. Fireworks and fighter jets dominated a territorial space that is laden with the memory of colonial violence against the indigenous American Indians.A treaty signed in 1868 between the U.S. government and the Sioux people recognised the Black Hills in South Dakota as exclusive to the indigenous. The agreement was toppled in 1874 when gold was discovered in the Black Hills in a mining expedition ...
As work nears completion in the first phase of an ambitious project in Montenegro to develop a highway that will connect the Adriatic port of Bar with Serbia, Western officials and mainstream media are ramping up attacks on the endeavor. Western commentators are united in condemnation, ranging from fear-mongering over China’s role to disparaging the plan’s viability. Consistently, they dismiss it as “the highway to nowhere,” implying foolishness on the part of Montenegro and presenting it as a cautionary tale on the dangers of doing business with China. The theme fits neatly within the framework of Washington’s campaign to economically ...
In the early morning hours of April 1-2 Azerbaijan launched a major military offensive into the disputed region Nagorno-Karabakh (NK) that’s been controlled and defended by NK Armenian forces since the Russian brokered truce ended a bloody three year war in 1994. While Azeri President Ilham Aliyev was flying back to Baku after meeting 24 hours earlier with John Kerry in Washington who claimed “an ultimate resolution” had been reached, Azerbaijan was already once again at war with the NK Armenians.The surprise element combined with the full scale major military operation spearheading a three pronged attack on Nagorno-Karabakh contact line from the southern, ...
Back in the 1990s something happened in central Bosnia-Herzegovina that inspired people to this day and helps explain why that country now has more men fighting in Syria and Iraq (over 300), as a proportion of its population, than most in Europe.The formation of a "Mujahideen Battalion" in 1992, composed mainly of Arab volunteers in central Bosnia, was a landmark. Today the dynamic of jihad has been reversed and it is Bosnians who are travelling to Arab lands."There is a war between the West and Islam," says Aimen Dean, who, as a young Saudi Arabian volunteer, travelled to fight in ...
Only one example of traditional Western liberal democracy's support of the notorious war criminals, bandits, and gangsters:Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]Save
The U.S. government’s plan to conquer Russia is based upon a belief in, and the fundamental plan to establish, “Nuclear Primacy” against Russia — an American ability to win a nuclear war against, and so conquer, Russia.This concept became respectable in U.S. academic and governmental policymaking circles when virtually simultaneously in 2006 a short-form and a long-form version of an article endorsing the concept, which the article’s two co-authors there named “nuclear primacy,” were published respectively in the world’s two most influential journals of international affairs, Foreign Affairs from the Council on Foreign Relations, and International Security from Harvard. (CFR got the more popular ...
A quick review of Ukraine, Zbig’s Grand Chessboard – How the West Was Checkmated is simple – this amazing work should be in everyone’s reading library. Anyone who cares to understand the situation of what has happened, and is happening in Ukraine needs to read this book. It covers the history of the dissolution of the USSR, the resulting creation of Ukraine, and the history of the U.S.’ attempts through various government and non-government organizations (e.g. Soros) towards the first failed colour revolution (Orange, 2004), then on towards the second attempt resulting in the successful installation of the noenazi puppet ...
March 24 [2020] will mark the 21st anniversary of NATO’s occupation of Serbia’s Kosovo province, and so we reaffirm: Kosovo is Serbia. Serbia does not and will not ever recognize Kosovo’s claims of sovereignty. We call on NATO to end its occupation of Kosovo.NATO’s occupation of Kosovo and its increasing militarization of the province is a threat to the world’s common security. Albanian occupation authorities continue their assault on human rights and fundamental freedoms, brutally silencing critics in civil society and the media, and curtailing religious freedom. Hundreds of individuals from Kosovo, including members of the Serb community, have been ...
Ukraine is a virtual US colony – the way it’s been since the Obama regime’s February 2014 coup, replacing democratic governance with fascist tyranny in Europe’s heartland.Ukraine shares a near-1,500 mile land and sea border with the Russian Federation, the longest Western frontier with the country.The regime running things is a hotbed of militarized extremism, waging war on its own people, committing appalling human rights abuses – with full support and encouragement from Washington and key NATO countries.Stop NATO’s Rick Rozoff earlier explained that Ukraine is “the decisive linchpin in plans by the US and its NATO allies to effect ...
Dear Readers, some of you are pushing me to continue with the Las Vegas shooting story while others are asking to know what to make of the release of files pertaining to President Kennedy’s assassination. I appreciate that you are interested and are unsatisfied with official explanations.My answer is that we already know, thanks to exhaustively researched books such as James W. Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable (Simon & Schuster, 2008), far more than is in the released files. My answer is also that it doesn’t matter what we know or what the facts are, the official story will never be changed. ...
March 24, 2018, marks the 19th anniversary of NATO illegal and illegitimate bombing of Yugoslavia, Serbia and its Kosovo, province during 78 days. It has – one is tempted to say: of course – been conveniently forgotten by the West itself.It was masterminded by the United States under Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright after the so-called negotiations between Serbs and Albanians in Rambouillet outside Paris (the parties never met face-to-face).While Clinton may be best remembered for his relations with Monica Lewinsky and his wife, Hillary Clinton, some of us also remember him (and Albright) for bombing Afghanistan, ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]Save
No matter where you grew up in the United States, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the Confederate flag. Perhaps on a bumper sticker or license plate, or hanging outside a home or government building. You may have seen it at school, like 15-year-old Aleah Crawford, when in 2019, she led a protest to ban the rebel flag as part of the dress code. If you haven’t seen it, and don’t know much about it, now is the time to be informed. That’s because this flag has a particularly controversial place in US history.“People find the flag offensive because they ...
In an interview for the German news magazine Zuerst! (April 2015) Srdja Trifkovic considers the significance of Otto von Bismarck’s legacy, 200 years after his birth.Dr. Trifkovic, how would Bismarck react if he could see today’s map of Europe?Trifkovic: He would be initially shocked that the German eastern border now runs along the Oder and Neisse rivers. Otto von Bismarck was a true Prussian. In his view, cities such as Königsberg, Danzig or Breslau were more properly “German” than those in the Rhineland. His first impression therefore would be that Germany has “shifted” to the West, and that an important social and ...
The American Civil War The American Civil War (1861−1865) was a military conflict between the northern and the southern states of the USA which initially started as a political-economic revolt and desire for the independence by the southern states which created their own Confederacy not recognized by Washington. However, very soon the conflict was transformed into the war for the abolition of the slavery within the whole territory of the USA. In the first half of the 19th century, there was an increasing number of personalities mostly from the industrial northern states who called for the abolition of the slavery but ...
In 2015 Bill Gates gave a talk titled “We’re Not Ready for the Next Epidemic” in which, in a remarkable exhibition of understated and uncannily accurate prescience, he reflected on the outbreak of Ebola virus and forecast worse to come. This amazing man told us that “As awful as this epidemic has been, the next one could be much worse. The world is simply not prepared to deal with a disease — an especially virulent flu, for example — that infects large numbers of people very quickly. Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by ...
The American media specializes in fake news. Indeed, since the Clinton regime the American media has produced nothing but fake news. Do you remember the illegal US bombing and destruction of Yugoslavia? Do you remember “war criminal” Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president branded “the butcher of the Balkans,” who was compared to Hitler until Hillary passed the title on to the President of Russia? Milosevic, not Bill Clinton, was arrested and placed on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal. He died in prison, some say murdered, before he was cleared of charges by the International Criminal Tribunal. http://www.globalresearch.ca/milosevic-and-the-destruction-of-yugoslavia-unpleasant-truths-no-one-wants-to-know/5540873 Do you ...
March 2018 marks the 19th anniversary of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia.For over a month Canada has been bombing Yugoslavia. Without a parliamentary resolution, without a declaration of war and without a shred of legality Canadian war planes are attacking the nation that stood at the forefront of the fight against both Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini’s fascists during World War II.The Nuremberg trial ruled that “to initiate a war of aggression… is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime.” Yet this is precisely what Canada and its NATO allies have done.The Canadian government said it was bombing ...
Part IThe historical background of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is going back to 1917 (the Balfour Declaration) and the establishment of the British protectorate over Palestine (the Palestine Mandate) after WWI with its provision for a national home for the Jews, although formally not to be at the expense of the local inhabitants – the Palestinians. Nevertheless, it became in practice the focal problem to keep an appropriate balance between these stipulations to be acceptable to both sides – the Jews and the Palestinians.The people and the landSince the time of the Enlightenment followed by the Romanticism, in West Europe emerged ...
A few months ago I received a message from a professor at the Khomeini Institute for Education and Research in Tehran, Iran, informing me that my 2010 book “War and Empire: The American Way of Life” (London, Pluto Press) had been translated into Farsi. He requested that I write an Introduction for Iranian readers. What follows is that Introduction. Two years ago the Xinhua Peoples’ Press in Beijing, China also published a translation in Mandarin.In the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s 1991 attempt to annex Kuwait, the U.S. deliberately destroyed much of Iraq’s water and sewer infrastructure. The Pentagon even admitted ...
