Should someone who threatens war crimes and pardons war criminals be allowed to have a Twitter account?

POLL:
If you were @Jack, would you use your power to permanently block future posts from the @Twitter account of @realdonaldtrump* (while archiving past posts for use by prosecutors and historians)?

*impeached

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) January 7, 2020

"It was the old old story of the sacrificial lamb."

Channel 13 in New York broadcast Judgment at Nuremberg on Saturday night. The following scene with Burt Lancaster as German judge Ernst Janning stuck out to me as having some contemporary significance, so I'll simply share it without further commentary.

Morley Safer (November 8, 1931 – May 19, 2016)

Morley Safer retired from 60 Minutes last week and today he passed away. More than his many years on CBS's popular Sunday-night magazine show, he will be remembered for this, one of the most honest and important reports from Vietnam in 1965 when the US war there was still relatively young. LBJ wanted CBS to fire Safer for this unvarnished look at American troops calmly burning the village of Cam Ne. You wonder how many young antiwar activists were created watching this episode of CBS News with their parents in living rooms around America that evening.

They moved into the village and they systematically began torching every house — every house as far as I could see, getting people out in some cases, using flame throwers in others. No Vietnamese speakers, by the way, were among the group with the flame thrower. The trooper with the flame thrower was ordered to zap a particular house, and our cameraman, who's Vietnamese — Ha Thuc Can, this wonderful man — put his camera down and said, "Don't do it! Don't do it!" And he walked to the house and then I went with him, and a sergeant came on up. We heard people crying.

--Morley Safer from Reporting America at War: An Oral History (compiled by Michelle Ferrari)

Reporters were freer to travel and report in 1965, long before the concept of "embedding" in our 21st-century desert wars made television news readers into more predictable flag wavers.

Rest in Peace Morley.

Don't Buy Books By Torture Apologists

In the sorry history of interviews with national security hacks from both political parties, this interview with Michael Hayden, former head of both the NSA and the CIA, on All Things Considered tonight has to stand among the worst of many self-serving book tours.


The interview is fairly uniformly odious, but the worst section is when Hayden recounts his admonition to his CIA successor, Leon Panetta.

I simply said: "Do not use the word 'torture' and 'CIA' in the same sentence ever again. You can object to some of the enhanced interrogation techniques. You can, in your heart of hearts, believe they meet some legal definition of torture. But Leon, you're taking over a workforce that did these things in good faith. They did these things with the assurance of the attorney general that they indeed were not torture. Do not accuse them of felonies."

By this logic, couldn't KGB or Gestapo torturers claim legal cover that they were just following orders from their legitimate Stalinist or Nazi governments? Maybe someone who spent his career embedded in the military and intelligence communities should have been more familiar with the first four Nuremberg Principles.

Principle I

"Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment."

Principle II

"The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law."

Principle III

"The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law."

Principle IV

Main article: Superior Orders "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him".

This principle could be paraphrased as follows: "It is not an acceptable excuse to say 'I was just following my superior's orders'".

If Bush and Cheney are ever brought to justice ...

OK. Please stop laughing, BUT IF George Bush and Dick Cheney are ever brought to justice for war crimes generally, and specifically for the illegal and unjustified destruction of Iraq, then this article in The New York Times today, "Claims Against Saudis Cast New Light on Secret Pages of 9/11 Report," should play at least some role in their prosecution. If they really were classifying parts of the 9/11 commission report in December 2002 that showed actual links to Saudi officials while still ginning up fictional ties between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein to begin their war, then this piece of evidence shouldn't be forgotten at their trial (again, please stop laughing).

This issue isn't even new, as shown by this exchange between Dick Cheney and Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press" on September 14, 2003, when we were only six months into our never-ending war along the Tigris and Euphrates. Cheney was still trotting out discredited Iraqi links and there were already rumors about the Saudi government connections contained in the suppressed sections of the 9/11 Report:

Dick Cheney: ... With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we’ve never been able to develop anymore of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.

Tim Russert: We could establish a direct link between the hijackers of September 11 and Saudi Arabia.

Cheney: We know that many of the attackers were Saudi. There was also an Egyptian in the bunch. It doesn’t mean those governments had anything to do with that attack. That’s a different proposition than saying the Iraqi government and the Iraqi intelligent service has a relationship with al-Qaeda that developed throughout the decade of the ’90s. That was clearly official policy.

Russert: There are reports that the investigation Congress did does show a link between the Saudi government and the hijackers but that it will not be released to the public.

Cheney: I don’t know want to speculate on that, Tim, partly because I was involved in reviewing those pages. It was the judgment of our senior intelligence officials, both CIA and FBI that that material needed to remain classified. ..."

The shorter version? It's perfectly fine if the fictional Czech story of the Iraqi link is somehow "public out there" (with no help from Bush and Cheney, obviously), but the true Saudi link needs to be kept from the public.

Now for the happy musical outro courtesy of Michael Moore and REM who put all of this into a 2004 movie:

Legal Strategy 101 for War Criminals

With the Senate report on CIA torture during the Bush/Cheney years being released today, it's important once again to remember that Administration's intense opposition to United States participation in the International Criminal Court as soon as they came into power in 2001 (long before September 11th of that year). It's almost as if they knew that there might be Americans committing war crimes in the near future.

I couldn't find any lengthy statements from George Bush or Dick Cheney about their principled opposition to a permanent Nuremberg-inspired war crimes court, but I did find an interesting video explanation from the Captain Kangaroo they placed as their recess-appointment ambassador to the United Nations. John Bolton puts the reason the Iraq Warriors objected to the ICC clearly in the following lines delivered about three minutes into this video:

"And yet, the threat of prosecution -- the threat of being accused of being a war criminal -- can have an inhibiting effect. And since there's no accountability for these institutions, it could pose a threat to the United States -- or to the will of American friends and allies -- to take actions that they should undertake for their own self defense." --John Bolton [Emphasis Added]

Isn't that the point of all police and prosecutors and courts? To have an inhibiting effect on potential criminals?



And without American participation in an International Criminal Court, shouldn't even Bolton agree that it's therefore incumbent on American judicial institutions to look into and possibly prosecute the people behind the numerous war crimes listed in the report released today?