This is the 11th story in our series looking back on a quarter century of journalism by Consortium News.
This is an exact copy of how the article appeared on Consortium News on March 16, 2006.
Consortium News at 25, Germany, History, International, Iraq, Legal, Until This Day--Historical Perspectives on the News
Americans guilty of war crimes may never see the inside of a court room however other actions may make them wish they never committed their crimes. History has a long memory!!
Well, it would have been up to one person to call for an investigation and prosecute any illegal actions pertaining to the invasion – Barack Obama. Nobody in the Bush administration would have done it, and it was something that Obama talked about alot in his speeches in his campaign to be president.
Law is only applied to the USA “enemies”, are they real, or no. Historically, the USA loves to create enemies. It’s the king of wars.
sadly, we still entertain notions of war crimes, meaning that mass murders can be conducted in legal ways…that’s the disease right there: all we have to do is make rules for how to slaughter human beings according to a scholarly and civilized rule book written by our most gifted and trained in the humanities experts and then wipe out as many humans as we need to in a completely legal way…hello? how about a geneva convention to write up rules of child rape, wife beating, or maybe the only thing to get “civilized” people upset: pet murdering?
Germany was only doing the politcal economic business of capital, as were its enemies, except for russia which played the greates role in the defeat of “evil” nazi capitalism..anti-democratic capitalism is in the business of war and it will take democratic communism to bring about peace and global sanity before it destroys humanity.
It has been clear for several decades that Nuremberg was not a precedent. It was- and this is very difficult to actually write out- victor’s justice, which is exactly what the Nazis and their sympathizers said it was then. The US has been “projecting power” around the world ever since in violation of the spirit of the legal terms of the international order it was instrumental in creating post World War II; and its clear provisions at least since Reagan told the World Court to drop dead re: Nicaragua vs. US. Other more informed readers may have much earlier examples. International law is simply a weapon for the empire when it is invoked by it, and it is a useless farce for those the empire opposes.
Interesting, but how is it possible to prosecute the US when it already dominates the world? If Hitler and the Germans had won the war there wouldn’t have been a Nuremberg Trial. Principles are morals and just but power trumps all.