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.
Kosovo is to set up a regular standing army, officially defying everyone, including NATO, although the bloc’s objections are only half-hearted. The alliance would prefer that the illegal entity of Kosovo change its constitution in order to create an army. Just amend it, and then you’re free to have one. This stance looks more like connivance than any real opposition to the move.Washington’s position is more or less the same. It supports "the gradual, transparent transformation of the Kosovo Security Force into a multiethnic force in line with NATO standards" as long as it complies with the provisions of Kosovo’s constitution, reflecting that “entity’s multiethnic ...
I was trying to think a few hours ago – after his shameful, outrageous, insane breaking of a solemn international treaty – just who Donald Trump reminded me of. I used to think about the boastful, gung-ho racist Theodore Roosevelt, the ‘Rough Rider’ who enjoyed war (and threats). But Theodore Roosevelt actually did win the Nobel Peace Prize. And then I realised.The political leader who most resembles Trump is the late Colonel Gaddafi of Libya.The parallels are quite creepy. Gaddafi was crackers, he was a vain, capricious peacock of a man, he was obsessed with women, he even had a ghost writer invent a ‘Green Book’ ...
With a general election looming in the United Kingdom and Spain possibly following Greece’s revolt against austerity later this year, we need to think, not just who or what we are voting for, but why we should vote at all.People are suffering from a deficiency which is as unbalancing as a hormone or vitamin deficiency. What we are severely lacking in is democracy. Many of those pondering on the state of politics feel unhappy and somehow depleted. They haven’t yet realised it is democracy that’s lacking because they have believed what so many politicians have told them, over and over ...
In a remarkable book, 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II, the Canadian historian Michael Jabara Carley describes how, at the end of the 1930s, the Soviet Union repeatedly tried, but finally failed, to conclude a pact of mutual security, in other words a defensive alliance, with Britain and France. This proposed arrangement was intended to counter Nazi Germany, which, under Hitler’s dictatorial leadership, had been behaving more and more aggressively, and it was likely to involve some other countries, including Poland and Czechoslovakia, that had reason to fear German ambitions. The protagonist of this ...
This is a long story which extends over fifteen years. NATO first attempted to silence those citizens who were trying to discover the truth about the attacks of 11 September 2001. Then it turned on those who contested the oficial version of the «Arab Springs» and the war against Syria. One thing leading to another, it then attacked those who denounced the coup d’état in Ukraine. Now NATO is behind the accusations by a pseudo-NGO that the people who campaigned for Donald Trump are Russian agents.The attacks of 11 September 2001 were followed by a permanent state of emergency and ...
For the approximately 200 Canadian military trainers currently deployed to Ukraine, it is likely that on the first of January they would have witnessed a torch lit procession. Throughout Kiev and numerous other towns in Western Ukraine, thousands of civilians took to the streets – not to usher in the New Year – but to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of a man named Stepan Bandera.This was not the first time Ukrainian nationalists marched with torches to celebrate Bandera’s birthday, but it was the first time such a spectacle was an officially sanctioned affair.On December 28, 2018, Ukrainian ...
One of the most controversial, influential, and well-known revolutionary organizations in the world was the Irish Republican Army (the IRA) considered to be both patriotic and terrorists.The FeniansIt is of extreme debate the question of its real origin but it is mostly accepted the standpoint that the origins of the IRA are in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (the IRB) or popularly known as the Fenians as it grew out of the Fenian movement.[1] The name is coming from the Irish armed forces in legendary times. The Fenian movement was founded as both the Fenian Brotherhood in the USA by John ...
As of this moment, from the gentrified hipster hellholes in Brooklyn to the pedophile-infested devil-den of Hollywood to Satan-occupied Washington DC, liberals nationwide are wailing, howling, shrieking and blubbering over Barack Obama getting out of the White House. Their tears are gushing like rushing rivers breaking through weak dams in pusillanimous sadness, their little Judaized hearts are breaking into pieces of Gefilte fish because an end has come to the presidency of this man they repetitiously and affectionately refer to as “American’s First ‘Black’ President” who brought “hope and change” not only to the USA but the world at large. ...
The real question is not whether the status of Kosovo and Metohija should be negotiated; the actual questions to be asked are: On which basis? About what? Whom with?The sole legitimate basis is that Kosovo and Metohija is an integral part of Serbia currently placed under UN mandate, pending a Security Council decision ending it. In other words, this is mandate cannot be terminated either by the EU, or NATO, the USA, Germany, or France and, should this idea ever occurred to anyone, Serbia cannot end it, either.International law (the UN Charter, the OSCE Final Act) and the Constitution of ...
Daniel Goldhagen blamed the Holocaust on «the Germans» (by which he meant the German people), and said that they perpetrated the Holocaust because they positively enjoyed murdering «the Jews». But, as has long been well understood by historians (except when they fail to point to it as being a disproof of Goldhagen’s bigoted and indefensible anti-German thesis), Hitler had to work long and hard in order to bring about a consensus, first amongst his own leadership group, and then in the population as a whole, favoring the extermination-option. Hitler, Der Fuehrer, «The Leader», clearly was the catalyst turning the chemical ...
Well, once again, Israeli Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu astounds. One would think that there must be some limit to the bizarre statements that issue from his mouth, but no, we learn again and again that he is willing to push the bizarreness envelope to places where, like the crew of Star Trek’s Enterprise, no one has ever before ventured.His latest flight of fancy even seems to have astonished his worshipful U.S. government, which characterized his statements as ‘inappropriate and unhelpful’, harsh criticism indeed from that bastion of Israeli love. And what is it that Mr. Netanyahu has said? This writer ...
“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants” (Albert Camus 1913-1960)On 1st May 2003, George W. Bush stood in a dinky little flying suit on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and in a super stage managed appearance told the lie of the century: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.” (1)The illegal occupation and decimation of Iraq continued until December 2011. In June 2014 they returned to bomb again ...
Having already violated every tenet of international law in its proxy jihadist war against Syria, including the seizure of one-third of the country, the United States invoked a Non-Law, a Law That Never Was, to justify its missile strikes against fictitious “chemical warfare” facilities. Syrian President Assad “kills his own people,” said Trump, leader of the nation whose police kill more of its “own people” than any country except (fellow white settler state) Brazil, and whose prisons entomb one-quarter of all the world’s inmates. (One out of every eight prisoners on the planet is an African American.)On the Saturday morning ...
This article first published in March 2014 at the very outset of the Ukraine crisis explains the nature of the Kiev proxy regime. we are dealing with a Neo-Nazi government supported by “Western democracy” and the “international community”. According to the New York Times, “The United States and the European Union have embraced the revolution here as another flowering of democracy, a blow to authoritarianism and kleptocracy in the former Soviet space.” ( After Initial Triumph, Ukraine’s Leaders Face Battle for Credibility, NYTimes.com, March 1, 2014, emphasis added).“Flowering Democracy, Revolution”? The grim realities are otherwise. What is a stake is a ...
Croatia's President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic with Croatian diaspora in Canada holding the flag of WWII Nazi-Ustashi Independent State of CroatiaCroatia’s president, the former deputy NATO secretary general for public diplomacy Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, decided to pay homage to Nazis of the Ustasha Nazi puppet regime of Croatia shot by Yugoslav partisans at the end of World War II. Grabar-Kitarovic’s tone deafness in choosing Victory in Europe week to honor dead Nazis shocked the Balkans and the rest of Europe.The Ustasha, along with their Slovenian and Serb loyalists to the Nazi puppet regime, were killed by the partisans under the command of anti-fascist ...
They could be found on the outskirts of Sirte, Libya, supporting local militia fighters, and in Mukalla, Yemen, backing troops from the United Arab Emirates. At Saakow, a remote outpost in southern Somalia, they assisted local commandos in killing several members of the terror group al-Shabab. Around the cities of Jarabulus and Al-Rai in northern Syria, they partnered with both Turkish soldiers and Syrian militias, while also embedding with Kurdish YPG fighters and the Syrian Democratic Forces. Across the border in Iraq, still others joined the fight to liberate the city of Mosul. And in Afghanistan, they assisted indigenous forces in various missions, just as they have ...
The United States the use of force against the sovereign state of Syria is a prima facie violation of international law. It is an act of aggression against the UN Member State in violation of the Charter of the United Nations. It therefore gives Syria the right to react in self-defense or a legal justification for the use of force and it gives any other United Nations Member State the right to act in collective self-defense and to support Syrian action against the US This is the basic understanding of the international legal consequences of the United States use of ...
As the Cold War entered its final act in 1985, journalist Helena Cobban participated in an academic conference at an upscale resort near Tucson, Arizona, on U.S.-Soviet interactions in the Middle East. When she attended what was listed as the “Gala Dinner with keynote speech”, she quickly learned that the virtual theme of the evening was, “Adopt a Muj.” “I remember mingling with all of these wealthy Republican women from the Phoenix suburbs and being asked, ‘Have you adopted a muj?” Cobban told me. “Each one had pledged money to sponsor a member of the Afghan mujahedin in the name ...
Another NATO Intervention?Less than a dozen years after NATO bombed Yugoslavia into pieces, detaching the province of Kosovo from Serbia, there are signs that the military alliance is gearing up for another victorious little “humanitarian war”, this time against Libya. The differences are, of course, enormous. But let’s look at some of the disturbing similarities.A demonized leaderAs “the new Hitler”, the man you love to hate and need to destroy, Slobodan Milosevic was a neophyte in 1999 compared to Muammar Qaddafi today. The media had less than a decade to turn Milosevic into a monster, whereas with Qaddafi, they’ve been ...
According to a report issued on June 6th in German Economic News (Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or DWN), the German government is preparing to go to war against Russia, and has in draft-form a Bundeswehr report declaring Russia to be an enemy nation. DWN says: “The Russian secret services have apparently thoroughly studied the paper. In advance of the paper’s publication, a harsh note of protest has been sent to Berlin: The head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian State Duma, Alexei Puschkow, has posted the Twitter message: ‘The decision of the German government declaring Russia to be an ...
