Free Republic

The genocide trial of Radovan Karadzic went ahead without him Tuesday, with prosecutors branding him "supreme commander" of an ethnic cleansing campaign in the 1992-95 Bosnian war. "This case is about that supreme commander, a man who harnessed the forces of nationalism, hatred and fear to implement his vision of an ethnically separated Bosnia: Radovan Karadzic," prosecutor Alan Tieger told the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Mr. Karadzic, who faces 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, had "ethnically cleansed vast portions of Bosnia and Hercegovina" during the war that claimed some...

If you haven't seen the movie Judgement at Nuremberg, you should. It was a movie of the trial of 16 Nazi Justices. One Judge in the dock, Schlegelberger, played by Burt Lancaster, was a good man who had reluctantly served the Nazi Regime until he resigned for reasons of conscience in 1942. He was found guilty. And in the end he agreed the verdict was a just one. This case is referred to by Ayal Rosenberg in GOLDSTONE : A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS. He begins with this introduction of it, The criminal culpability for crimes against humanity of judges enforcing...

JERUSALEM – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday vowed never to allow Israeli leaders or soldiers to stand trial on war crimes charges over their actions during last winter's military offensive in the Gaza Strip, furiously denouncing a U.N. report in a keynote address to parliament. Netanyahu's fiery rhetoric — and his decision to open the high-profile speech with remarks on the report — reflected the deep distress felt among Israeli leaders after a U.N. commission accused Israel of intentionally harming civilians when it launched a massive attack in Gaza to stop years of rocket fire. "This distorted report, written...

Westminster Magistrates court in central London rejected on Tuesday a petition urging the issuance of an arrest warrant for Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the grounds that he committed "war crimes" due his part in IDF Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, last January. The court sided with arguments submitted by the British Foreign Ministry, which stated that the defense minister was a state guest, and therefore was not subject to such lawsuit. Earlier, it was reported that the court postponed the hearing to an unspecified date, but proceedings began less than two hours later. In the first case...

Westminster Magistrates court in central London postponed on Tuesday evening a hearing over whether to issue an arrest warrant for Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the grounds that he committed "war crimes" due his part in IDF Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, last January. In the first case of its kind since the publication of the Goldstone Report, a group of Palestinians had appealed to the court seeking Barak's arrest. Despite the petition, Barak decided not to change his plans for his UK visit, with his bureau releasing a statement saying: "No arrest warrant has been issued, and...

Goldstone has condemned Israel of being guilty of war crimes and perhaps even crimes against humanity. Melanie Phillips argues that the Commission Members are tainted and the Mandate self-serving. I demonstrate that the usual safe guards were not in place to ferret out the truth and that Goldstone's interpretation of the law is really a misinterpretation.

For 30 years, Eli M. Rosenbaum has been hunting Nazi war criminals. Even as the last of them die off, he is not giving up. “There is still time to bring some of these people to justice, and we ought not fail to do that,” said Mr. Rosenbaum, director of the Office of Special Investigations, who arrived at that Justice Department agency as a summer intern in 1979, the year it was created, and became its chief in 1995. ...“It’s a few years more,” Mr. Rosenbaum said of the hunt for the last Nazis. “I don’t think that you will...

PRAGUE — Europe’s leading human rights group began an investigation on Monday into Serb allegations that Serbian civilians were abducted in Kosovo during the Kosovo war of 1998-99 and taken to Albania, where their organs were extracted for sale before they were killed. The inquiry, by the Council of Europe, based in Strasbourg, France, is being led by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator, who previously investigated the existence of alleged secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons in Europe used to interrogate terrorist suspects. The Council said Mr. Marty would meet this week with leading war crimes officials and human rights groups...

Prosecutors in Germany have formally charged alleged Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk with 27,900 counts of being an accessory to murder in World War II. The prosecutors' office in Munich said the charges had been filed on Monday. There was no immediate word on when the trial of the 89-year-old retired car worker, who was deported from the United States in May, might begin. Mr Demjanjuk has denied accusations that he was a guard at the Sobibor death camp and helped murder Jews. He says he was captured by Germans in his native Ukraine while fighting for the Red Army...

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The U.S. military said today that insurgents have capture an American soldier in eastern Afghanistan. Spokeswoman Capt. Elizabeth Mathias said the soldier went missing Tuesday.

The United States is prepared to provide more military observers, police, and civilian staff to beef up the U.N.'s far-flung peacekeeping operations, the U.S. ambassador said Monday. The United Nations has nearly 115,000 troops, police and civilians deployed in 16 peacekeeping missions from Africa and the Mideast to Cyprus, Kosovo, Western Sahara and Haiti, but it has had trouble finding soldiers, helicopters and other key assets for several important operations.

The Dutch Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the war crimes conviction of a businessman for selling chemicals to Saddam Hussein that his regime in Iraq turned into poison gas and unleashed on Kurds and Iranians. ... In May 2007 a Hague appeals court upheld Van Anraat's 2005 conviction for complicity in war crimes and increased his sentence from 15 to 17 years. ... Presiding Judge Leo van Dorst said that from the mid-1980s Van Anraat was Iraq's sole supplier of a chemical called TDG, or thiodiglycol, for its mustard gas production program. "The suspect knew ... the TDG he was...

Nothing the US did in Iraq could ever constitute a war crime that could be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. This is the view of Richard Goldstone a former chief international war crimes prosecutor and international law expert. "I don't believe that any allegation that I have read or heard against the United States leaders comes anywhere near the sorts of crimes that the ICC has been set up to investigate. Genocide, crimes against humanity, serious war crimes - it just doesn't measure up." Richard Goldstone - chief prosecutor at the war crimes tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda from...

John Rosenthal writing at Pajamas Media informs us that President Obama will probably make a stop at Dresden while on his second European trip that will climax with a speech in Normandy on June 6 marking the 65th anniversary of D-Day. Rosenthal points out a little misdirection from the administration in that they will also probably schedule a stop at Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp that Obama believes his uncle helped liberate in 1945. The message Obama intends to send by visiting both sites is clear; while the Germans did bad things during World War II, they were also victims...

Obama all of a sudden leaves the door open by way of Eric Holder on going after the Bush Adm., the change could come because this Messiah doesn't like people touching his Halo, which is exactly what Cheney did on Hannity last night.

With the mainstream liberal media distracted by Michelle Obama's $540 shoes and appearance on Sesame Street, President Obama has taken advantage of the situation by committing war crimes in Afghanistan and by abdicating his responsibility in Pakistan. As reported by the Chicago Tribune, in part: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/la-fg-afghanistan-civilians7-2009may07,0,6958477.story?track=rss"Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan - The Red Cross today lent its support to assertions by Afghan officials that dozens of civilians were killed in U.S. bomb strikes this week in an isolated district in western Afghanistan. "Villagers said dozens of people -- including women, children and elderly men -- were killed while sheltering in crowded...

BAGHDAD (AFP) — US security firm Blackwater ended its operations in Iraq on Thursday, closing a controversial era for the company whose guards shot dead 17 civilians in Baghdad in 2007. "The task order for security protection operations held by Blackwater comes to an end today in Baghdad," American embassy spokeswoman Susan Ziadeh said, adding that Triple Canopy will replace it. The US State Department on March 31 awarded Virginia-based Triple Canopy a contract reportedly worth nearly a billion dollars to take over protection of US government personnel in Iraq. Linked agreements such as that for Presidential Airways, part of...

I might have more sympathy and inclination to defend Barack Obama from Peter Brookes’ cartoon in today’s Times of London, but since it echoes an unfair attack launched by Obama himself on his predecessor, I’ll chalk this up to karma. Brookes takes a cheap shot at Obama the US for unintended civilian deaths in a recent raid in Afghanistan, in a tableau usually reserved for George W. Bush:

Human rights organizations and legal scholars are applauding the efforts of Spanish lawyers in seeking the indictment of six former officials of the George W. Bush administration in connection with the torture of detainees at the U.S. military's Guantanamo Bay prison. Some, however, think more should be done at home. Ben Wizner, attorney in the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “The idea of Spain investigating America's treatment of detainees is an embarrassment to us. Once we were the world's leading champions, not only of human rights, but of accountability. We shouldn't be depending on other...

Universal jurisdiction refers to the power of a state to legislate, adjudicate, and punish any individual for war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide committed outside its borders, even when those crimes were not committed against that country or its citizens, and even if the accused is not its citizen. The idea is that anyone who commits such atrocious, internationally condemned crimes will not be able to find shelter or hide from judgment anywhere on the globe. Human rights organizations all over the world have been instrumental in the implementation of universal jurisdiction. This has contributed to the entry of...

Captured enemy combatants presented a problem for the United States from the very beginning of the war. Since the world had not in previous wars dealt with enemies such as these, legal ground had not been firmly established. To his credit President Bush did everything he could to determine the appropriate legal methods and practices that his administration could use. Guantanamo was chosen specifically as a result of seeking an appropriate solution to the problem of housing captured enemy. When those methods were later questioned President Bush cooperated with Congress and the courts to address legal points and get them...

"Here's what I think of the atom bombs. I think if you dropped an atom bomb fifteen miles offshore and you said, "The next one's coming and hitting you," then I would think it's okay. To drop it on a city, and kill a hundred thousand people. Yeah. I think that's criminal."

A follow-up to Wednesday night’s Kinsleyan gaffe: He’s sorry, he’s just not sure why he’s sorry. The closest we get to an explanation is that the decision to drop the bomb was “complicated,” but of course that’s why Cliff May brought it up — to draw a parallel with the decision to waterboard terrorists. The moral calculus about how far to go in roughing up jihadis to save how many lives is difficult, as was the calculus about how many lives would be saved in the long run by incinerating Japanese kids in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war....

It comes at about the 5:50 mark. Cliff May asks Stewart whether Truman's use of the atomic bomb was a war crime, Stewart ruminates and then responds with an unequivocal "yes." He's certainly not the only American who would take that view, but it's a useful reminder that the most vocal and popular criticism of the Bush administration's war on terror policies comes from people who, if they were being as honest as Stewart, would also judge Lincoln (suspension of habeas), FDR (internment), and Truman (use of nuclear weapons) as war criminals or tyrants or worse. Stewart repeats the charge...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- then the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence -- was briefed on CIA interrogation techniques including waterboarding when they were begun in 2002. She was among the “Big Eight” present at the briefings -- the Senate and House leaders and chairmen and ranking members on both intelligence committees. Condemning the disclosure of the Justice Department legal opinions that detail the interrogation methods and the reasons they were legal at the time, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mi) wrote in the Wall Street Journal that, “It was not necessary to release details of the...

Remember that sections 8 and 6(b) of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively insulated government officials from liability for many of the violations of the War Crimes Act they might have committed during the period prior to 2006. Moreover, as Marty [Lederman, a Georgetown law professor and Balkinization blogger] has pointed out, there’s a strong argument that a later Justice Department would not prosecute people who reasonably relied on legal advice from a previous Justice Department. Perhaps the Justice Department could argue that the officials’ reliance was unreasonable, but that might be difficult to show.

WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account. The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices. "After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to...

Conyers to hold hearings on 'torture' memos By Jared Allen Posted: 04/21/09 06:07 PM [ET] House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) on Tuesday announced that he will soon hold hearings on the Bush administration’s legal memos justifying the use of numerous enhanced interrogation techniques. Conyers and other Democrats have labeled as torture the techniques explained in the memos, which provide a legal framework for the use of controversial interrogation practices such as waterboarding. President Obama recently declassified the memos written by Bush administration lawyers, which also detail for the first time a number of additional interrogation techniques approved for...

Obama not ruling out interrogation prosecutions 16 mins ago WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama Tuesday refused to close the door on prosecuting authors of Bush-era legal rationales for terror suspect interrogations, after offering immunity to CIA operatives involved. Obama made a distinction between the agents who carried out harsh interrogations permitted by the White House after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the legal officials which justified such methods. "With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general within the parameters...

President Holds Open Door For Prosecutions of Bush Officials For Interrogation Policies, Truth Commission President Obama suggested today that it remained a possibility that the Justice Department might bring charges against officials of the Bush administration who devised harsh interrogation policies that some see as torture. He also suggested that if there is any sort of investigation into these past policies and practices, he would be more inclined to support an independent commission outside the typical congressional hearing process. Both statements represented breaks from previous White House statements on the matter. While the Bush-era memos providing legal justifications for enhanced...

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama left the door open Tuesday to prosecuting Bush administration officials..."

Spanish prosecutors will seek criminal charges against Alberto Gonzales and five high-ranking Bush administration officials for sanctioning torture at Guantánamo. Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast. Their decision is expected to be announced on Tuesday before the Spanish central criminal court, the Audencia Nacional, in Madrid. But the decision is likely to raise concerns with the human-rights community on...

It isn’t quite true these days that, to cite that over-quoted Monty Python sketch, “nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Case in point: Phillipe Sands, a British lawyer with Cherie Blair’s London firm. Last year, he published a book claiming that when the Bush administration came to an end, six of the president’s top-level advisors would face charges in international court. Sure enough, now Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon wants to charge those six senior policy advisors with “giving legal cover” to alleged torture at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. How will Obama respond?...

HANOI, Vietnam -- Sen. John McCain paid a quiet visit to the "Hanoi Hilton" prison where he was held for more than five years during the Vietnam War on Wednesday, making a few deadpan remarks as he made his way through dark corridors and past musty cells. McCain allowed reporters to follow him while he escorted Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina through the prison. -snip-

BAT AYIN, West Bank (AP) — An ax-wielding Palestinian militant went on a rampage Thursday in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, killing an Israeli 13-year-old and wounding a 7-year-old boy before fleeing the area. The attack posed an important test for Israel's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has promised a firm hand against militants and expressed skepticism about prospects for peace. Government spokesman Mark Regev called it a "senseless act of brutality against innocents." Police and military units were searching for the attacker, according to police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld and army officials. Army forces were operating in...

If you wanted to find a single story that summed up everything wrong about the politics of the Arab and Islamic world, it is this little item from the New York Times about the Arab summit meeting in Doha, Qatar. As the Times puts it, the Arabs are divided about everything … except their support for Sudan’s Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the architect of a campaign of rape and murder in Darfur that earned him an indictment from the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. There may be a warrant for al-Bashir’s arrest sitting in...

In one of his last moves before leaving office March 13, then-Navy Secretary Donald Winter quietly awarded 19-term Democratic congressman John Murtha (Pa.) with the service's highest civilian honor. Citing Murtha's "courageous leadership, vision, and loyalty to the men and women of the Department of the Navy," Winter presented the influential chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's defense panel with the Navy's Distinguished Public Service Award, an honor bestowed in "those extraordinary cases where individuals have demonstrated exceptionally outstanding service of substantial and long term benefit to the Navy, Marine Corps, or the Department of the Navy as a whole,"...

The British Paper, The Guardian has committed the equivalent of an Journalistic pogrom. They published a report from a secret, unidentified woman who took a five day trip to Israel and Gaza and supposedly came up with examples of Israeli War Crimes. All the examples are without witnesses proof or context. They even have some convincing footage, in fact it is just as convincing as the Mohamed al Dura video. The British press is famous for spreading rumors of Israel Massacres, they fell for the Jenin hoax hook, line and sinker, they also fell for the disproved "attack" on the...

PARIS — Every time Radovan Karadzic, the onetime Bosnian Serb leader, appears in court on war crimes charges, he has hammered on one recurring claim: a senior American official pledged that he would never be standing there. The official, Richard C. Holbrooke, now a special envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Obama administration, has repeatedly denied promising Mr. Karadzic immunity from prosecution in exchange for abandoning power after the Bosnian war......

ICTY - Tribunal Update Zagreb awarded damages to families of victims killed in detention. Croatia secretly paid 1.8 million kuna (250,000 euro) to the families of people killed in the notorious Lora prison camp in the early 1990s, confirmed officials this week. Lora, a Yugoslav-era naval base in the coastal city of Split, was taken over by Croatian forces in 1991, the start of the Croatian war of independence, as the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, JNA, forces withdrew. From 1992 to 1997, it functioned as a prison camp for mainly Serbian, but also Bosnian and Montenegrin, civilians and prisoners of war,...

March 2009 Update on the racist Arab Muslim [Arab league backed] dictator Al Bashir's arrest warrant for genocide, crimes against humanity     Ban urges Sudan to ensure safety of UN bodies Reuters - [March, 4, 2009]UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Khartoum to cooperate with all UN entities and ensure their safety after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant on Wednesday for Sudan's leader.http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE5234A520090304   World court issues arrest warrant for Sudan's Bashir Christian Science Monitor [Mar. 4, 2009]‎http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0305/p90s01-woaf.html   Court issues war crimes warrant for Sudan's Bashir The Associated Press  [Mar. 4, 2009]‎...charges...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder ruled out the use of "waterboarding" as an interrogation technique for terrorism suspects on Monday, calling it a form of torture that the Obama administration could never condone. Holder's declaration underscored President Barack Obama's break with the former Bush administration's anti-terrorist policies, which were condemned by human-rights groups, civil liberties advocates and U.S. allies abroad. "Waterboarding is torture ... My Justice Department will not justify it, will not rationalize it and will not condone it," Holder, who his heading a review of the treatment of terrorism suspects, said in a speech to...

When discussing war crimes during World War II, two events usually get thrown out as indictments of the Allies: dropping atomic weapons on the Japanese and the raid of Dresden, in which 25,000 people died mostly of the raging fire that swept the German city. Critics accuse the Allies of deliberately attacking a civilian population center with little military value as a payback for Nazi attacks on Britain. This perception gained a lot of credence through Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, his autobiographical tale inspired by his eyewitness experience at Dresden as a POW. Interestingly, though, Germans apparently tend to view...

Germany's war crimes prosecutor issued an impassioned warning Thursday against any further delay in bringing 88-year-old John Demjanjuk to trial for allegedly helping kill 29,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp. Kurt Schrimm, who heads Germany's national office on war crimes in Ludwigsburg, said his staff have already set out a compelling case against Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born man who now lives in the US state of Ohio. Schrimm rejected claims by local German prosecutors that the case was incomplete. Demjanjuk was acquitted in 1993 by the Israeli Supreme Court of charges that he was a guard at the Treblinka death...

International law expert Avi Bell talks about war crimes in Gaza

A Petition to the U.N. on Palestinian Muslims Crimes By Jamie Glazov January 16, 2009 Gabriel: Something simply had to be done to bring attention to what Hamas is doing. Hamas is a religiously driven radical Islamic organization. Westerners simply do not understand, and I believe have a hard time believing, how far radical Muslims are willing to go to accomplish their objectives. That's why so many in the West tend to dismiss the evil of Islamofascism and Islamists' depth of hatred towards the Jews and their commitment to destroy Israel at any cost -- including sacrificing their own children...

Best. Excuse. Ever.Human rights groups argued Wednesday that a detailed probe into Hamas's firing of Kassam rockets at Israeli communities is not necessary, because it constitutes such a "blatant" war crime. By contrast, Israel's actions are more complex, and therefore do require such investigation, they said... said Sarit Micha'eli of B'tselem... "It is quite clear that [Hamas is] attacking and targeting civilians... With Israel things are more complicated because Israel states it does not deliberately target civilians and that it safeguards them. With Israel, you have to investigate each specific incident because even if a civilian is killed in an...

A movement has begun among American college professors to boycott Israeli universities and professors and Israeli culture, over the “oppression” of Palestinians by Israelis. I read some of the press accounts of this academic movement, and decided to investigate its leader. David Lloyd, Professor of English at the University of Southern California, is the leader of this US effort. Anti-Semitism is commonplace in Europe, where such boycotts are old news. The background of Dr. Lloyd doesn’t look that bad on first glance. On his Biographical Sketch, there are only a few hints that the man is off-balance. Half of his...

Israel reacted furiously to a decision by a Spanish judge on Thursday to open a probe of seven former top security officials for alleged war crimes in the 2002 bombing in Gaza that killed top Hamas terrorist Salah Shehadeh and 14 other people. "Someone who calls the assassination of a terrorist a crime against humanity lives in an upside-down world," Defense Minister Ehud Barak said. ... "Shehadeh was responsible for the murder of dozens of Israelis," Dichter told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday night. "We pursued him for a long time. The man was a terrorist responsible for dozens of...

Poll: 44% of Dems Say Bush Guily of War Crimes @ 3:49 pm by Chris Good According to a new poll from Rasmussen, 44 percent of Democrats surveyed said President Bush and his administration were guilty of "war crimes"; 28 percent of Democrats disagreed. Obama has faced calls from liberals to investigate Bush administration actions for potential criminal activity: one of the most popular reader questions posted to Obama's transition website asked whether Obama would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's use of torture and warrantless wiretapping. (Though he suggested in April 2008 that he would consider...