"the circumstances in which I came by this object were so morally ambiguous that I cannot quite think of it as theft." Boris Johnson, mayor of London, a war criminal?
posted by patricio on Jun 24, 2008 - 35 comments

Members of Congress are thus on notice that minimum due process guarantees under customary international law must not be denied when Congress attempts to articulate what forms of procedure a military commission should adopt.... Such denials are war crimes.

Can a vote be a war crime?
posted by orthogonality on Sep 16, 2006 - 35 comments

How is life for accused war criminals (see e.g. drag-down list at top) awaiting trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia? Stimulating if they enjoy chess or model ships, according to this brief Slate dispatch. How well do such alleged monsters need to be accommodated?
posted by grobstein on Jan 9, 2006 - 39 comments

Looks like George W Bush's Hague Invasion Act might need amending to become a Madrid Invasion Act, following a Spanish court order for the arrest of three US soldiers in response to the "Palestine Hotel" incident. [newsfilter].
posted by wilful on Oct 19, 2005 - 20 comments

Five years ago, Robert Lilly, a distinguished American sociologist, prepared a book based on military archives. Taken by Force is a study of the rapes committed by American soldiers in Europe between 1942 and 1945. He submitted his manuscript in 2001. But after September 11, its US publisher suppressed it, and it first appeared in 2003 in a French translation. We know from Anthony Beevor about the sexual violence unleashed by the Red Army, but we prefer not to know about mass rape committed by American and British troops. Lilly suggests a minimum of 10,000 American rapes. Contemporaries described a much wider scale of unpunished sex crime. Time Magazine reported in September 1945: "Our own army and the British army along with ours have done their share of looting and raping ... we too are considered an army of rapists."
An Ethical Blank Cheque... So, How Good Was The Good War ? And from the Eastern Front: Uncensored Memories
From Alfredo Perez's Political Theory Daily Review
posted by y2karl on May 11, 2005 - 104 comments

A War Crime or an Act of War?

But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story. ..

This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas. (NYT)
posted by y2karl on Jan 31, 2003 - 34 comments