War crimes

A War crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility, such as intentionally killing civilians or prisoners of war; torture; unnecessarily destroying civilian property; deception by perfidy; raping; pillaging; the conscription of child soldiers; committing genocide or ethnic cleansing; the granting of no quarter, despite surrender; and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and  military necessity.

Background and definitions

 * Even though the prohibition of certain behavior in the conduct of armed conflict can be traced back many centuries, the concept of war crimes developed particularly at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, when international humanitarian law, also known as the law of armed conflict, was codified. The Hague Conventions adopted in 1899 and 1907 focus on the prohibition to warring parties to use certain means and methods of warfare. Several other related treaties have been adopted since then. In contrast, the Geneva Convention of 1864 and subsequent Geneva Conventions, notably the four 1949 Geneva Conventions and the two 1977 Additional Protocols, focus on the protection of persons not or no longer taking part in hostilities.
 * United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect "War Crimes: Background"


 * War crimes contain two main elements:
 * A contextual element: “the conduct took place in the context of and was associated with an international/non-international armed conflict”;
 * A mental element: intent and knowledge both with regards to the individual act and the contextual element.
 * In contrast to genocide and crimes against humanity, war crimes can be committed against a diversity of victims, either combatants or non-combatants, depending on the type of crime. In international armed conflicts, victims include wounded and sick members of armed forces in the field and at sea, prisoners of war and civilian persons. In the case of non-international armed conflicts, protection is afforded to persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed ‘hors de combat’ by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause. In both types of conflicts protection is also afforded to medical and religious personnel, humanitarian workers and civil defense staff.
 * United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect "War Crimes: Background"


 * Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Article 8 "War crimes"
 * For the purpose of this Statute, "war crimes" means:
 * (a) Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, namely, any of the following acts against persons or property protected under the provisions of the relevant Geneva Convention:
 * (i) Wilful killing;
 * (ii) Torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments;
 * (iii) Wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health;
 * (iv) Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly;
 * (v) Compelling a prisoner of war or other protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power;
 * (vi) Wilfully depriving a prisoner of war or other protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial;
 * (vii) Unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement;
 * (viii) Taking of hostages.
 * Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Article 8 "War crimes," United Nations, Treaty Series in force on 1 July 2002


 * Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Article 8 "War crimes"
 * For the purpose of this Statute, "war crimes" means:...
 * (b) Other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict, within the established framework of international law, namely, any of the following acts:
 * (i) Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities;
 * (ii) Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives;
 * (iii) Intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping mission in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, as long as they are entitled to the protection given to civilians or civilian objects under the international law of armed conflict;
 * (iv) Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated;
 * (v) Attacking or bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives;
 * (vi) Killing or wounding a combatant who, having laid down his arms or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered at discretion;...
 * (xvi) Pillaging a town or place, even when taken by assault;
 * (xvii) Employing poison or poisoned weapons;
 * (xviii) Employing asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and all analogous liquids, materials or devices; ...
 * (xxi) Committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;
 * (xxii) Committing rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, as defined in article 7, paragraph 2 (f), enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence also constituting a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions;
 * (xxiii) Utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas or military forces immune from military operations;
 * (xxiv) Intentionally directing attacks against buildings, material, medical units and transport, and personnel using the distinctive emblems of the Geneva Conventions in conformity with international law;
 * (xxv) Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions;
 * (xxvi) Conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into the national armed forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities.


 * Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Article 8 "War crimes," United Nations, Treaty Series in force on 1 July 2002

A

 * Bradley Manning's alleged disclosures have exposed war crimes, sparked revolutions and induced democratic reforms...He is the quintessential whistle-blower.
 * Julian Assange quoted in Manning, Snowden and Assange were the ones who took risks to expose crime (1 Aug 2013)


 * A 95-year-old Berlin resident has been charged with being an accessory to the murder of over 36,000 people at the Mauthausen death camp in Austria during World War Two, the Berlin prosecutor's office said. "During the time of the crime, at least 36,223 people were killed at the Mauthausen concentration camp. "...The prosecutor's office said it was bringing the charges under new laws that allow the prosecution of people involved in the Nazi "machinery of death" even if they did not personally kill anyone... the 2011 conviction of John Demjanjuk, a guard at Sobibor death camp... established a new precedent that no proof of a specific crime was needed to convict a defendant.
 * ABC Former Nazi SS guard charged with being accessory to over 36,000 deaths, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, (23 November 2018)

B

 * Today, I announce that following a thorough, independent and objective assessment of all reliable information available to my Office, the preliminary examination into the Situation in Palestine has concluded with the determination that all the statutory criteria under the Rome Statute  for the opening of an investigation have been met. I am satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation into the situation in Palestine... In brief, I am satisfied that (i) war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip ("Gaza")...; (ii) potential cases arising from the situation would be admissible; and (iii) there are no substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice.
 * Fatou Bensouda, Statement of ICC Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, on the conclusion of the preliminary examination of the Situation in Palestine, and seeking a ruling on the scope of the Court’s territorial jurisdiction   (20 December 2019)


 * It’s sickening to hear these clowns repeatedly claim that “Assad murdered 500,000 of his people,” as though the U.S.-backed terrorists have played no role in the killings. I’ve viewed hundreds of beheadings and crucifixions online but none committed by Syria troops – all were proudly posted by the hellish filth that we’ve recruited, armed and trained for the past eight years.  Major war crimes, like beheading 250 Syrian soldiers after running them across the desert in their underpants, were scarcely mentioned by the MSM.
 * Virginia (U.S.) State Senator Dick Black in Has Trump Been Outmaneuvered on Syria Troop Withdrawal? Consortium News,  (3 January 2019)


 * With each day, the war crimes mount. Rape. Torture. Extrajudicial executions. Disappearances. Forced deportations. Attacks on schools, hospitals, playgrounds, apartment buildings, grain silos, water and gas facilities... [the atrocities are] not the acts of rogue units. They fit a clear pattern, across every part of Ukraine touched by Russian forces. And they fit a clear pattern with Russia’s previous actions in conflicts in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine starting in 2014."
 * US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as quoted in

C

 * War crimes are only committed by defeated powers. (But as the Nazis learned in 1945, unemployed war criminals can usually find work with the new hegemonic power.)
 * Kevin Carson, "The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Capitalism As a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege" (2011)


 * The Native population (in the US) suffered a migrant crisis of an incredible kind … where the immigrants come in with the intention of exterminating and expelling the population... Should they institute war crimes trials...? It would not make a lot of sense. It would make a lot of sense to bring out understanding of what happened, to call for reparations and so on... Is it genocide? … The Western hemisphere had about 80 million people when Columbus arrived, and pretty soon about 90 percent of them were gone (killed).
 * Noam Chomsky in Noam Chomsky: How the US “Politically Vulgarizes” Genocide and War Crimes, by Pitasanna Shanmugathas, Truthout  (27 November 2018)


 * There had been fearful slaughters of soldiers in the First World War, and much of the accumulated treasure of the nations was consumed. Still, apart from the excesses of the Russian Revolution, the main fabric of European civilisation remained erect at the close of the struggle. When the storm and dust of the cannonade passed suddenly away, the nations despite their enmities could still recognise each other as historic racial personalities. The laws of war had on the whole been respected. There was a common professional meeting-ground between military men who had fought one another. Vanquished and victors alike still preserved the semblance of civilised states. A solemn peace was made which, apart from unenforceable financial aspects, conformed to the principles which in the nineteenth century had increasingly regulated the relations of enlightened peoples. The reign of law was proclaimed, and a World Instrument was formed to guard us all, and especially Europe, against a renewed convulsion. In the Second World War every bond between man and man was to perish. Crimes were committed by the Germans, under the Hitlerite domination to which they allowed themselves to be subjected, which find no equal in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record. The wholesale massacre by systematised processes of six or seven millions of men, women, and children in the German execution camps exceeds in horror the rough-and-ready butcheries of Genghis Khan, and in scale reduces them to pigmy proportions. Deliberate extermination of whole populations was contemplated and pursued by both Germany and Russia in the Eastern war. The hideous process of bombarding open cities from the air, once started by the Germans, was repaid twenty-fold by the ever-mounting power of the Allies, and found its culmination in the use of the atomic bombs which obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We have at length emerged from a scene of material ruin and moral havoc the like of which had never darkened the imagination of former centuries. After all that we suffered and achieved, we find ourselves still confronted with problems and perils not less but far more formidable than those through which we have so narrowly made our way.
 * Winston Churchill, The Second World War Volume I: The Gathering Storm (1948), ISBN 0-395-41055-X, pp. 15-16


 * US national security adviser John Bolton announced... that the US will use "any means necessary" to protect its citizens and allies from prosecution by the International Criminal Court. "United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court,"
 * US threatens sanctions against International Criminal Court, will close PLO office in Washington, CNN, (11 September 2018)


 * The verdict finding Manning guilty of Espionage Act offenses, however, sends an ominous warning that could deter future whistle-blowers from exposing government wrongdoing. It’s important to keep in mind that Manning provided information indicating the U.S. had committed war crimes... After WikiLeaks published his documentation of Iraqi torture centers established by the United States, the Iraqi government refused Obama’s request to extend immunity to U.S. soldiers... As a result, Obama had to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. The American public needed to know the information Manning provided. He revealed evidence of war crimes in the "Collateral Murder" video, which depicts a U.S. Apache attack helicopter crew killing 12 unarmed civilians and wounding two children in Baghdad in 2007. The crew then killed people attempting to rescue the wounded. A U.S. tank drove over one of the bodies, cutting it in half. Those actions constitute war crimes under the Geneva Conventions. The Bush administration waged an illegal war in Iraq in which thousands of people were killed... Yet it is Bradley Manning [and Julian Assange], not the Bush officials... being prosecuted.
 * Bradley Manning's Revelations Saved Lives, By Marjorie Cohn, U.S. News and World Report, (30 July 2013)


 * The Trump administration is seeking extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States for trial on charges carrying 175 years in prison... The treaty between the U.S. and the U.K. prohibits extradition for a “political offense.” Assange was indicted for exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is a classic political offense. Moreover, Assange’s extradition would violate the legal prohibition against sending a person to a country where he is in danger of being tortured.
 * Marjorie Cohn in Extradition of Assange Would Set a Dangerous Precedent, by Marjorie Cohn], Truthout (17 February 2020)


 * WikiLeaks... published nearly 400,000 field reports about the Iraq War, which contained evidence of U.S. war crimes, over 15,000 previously unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians, and the systematic murder, torture, rape and abuse by the Iraqi army and authorities that were ignored by U.S. forces. In addition, WikiLeaks published the Guantánamo Files, 779 secret reports that revealed the U.S. government’s systematic violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, by abusing nearly 800 men and boys, ages 14 to 89.
 * Marjorie Cohn in Extradition of Assange Would Set a Dangerous Precedent, by Marjorie Cohn], Truthout (17 February 2020)


 * One of the most notorious releases by WikiLeaks was the 2007 “Collateral Murder” video, which showed a U.S. Army Apache helicopter target and fire on unarmed civilians in Baghdad. More than 12 civilians were killed, including two Reuters reporters and a man who came to rescue the wounded. Two children were injured. Then a U.S. Army tank drove over one of the bodies, severing it in half. Those acts constitute three separate war crimes prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual.
 * Marjorie Cohn in Extradition of Assange Would Set a Dangerous Precedent, by Marjorie Cohn], Truthout (17 February 2020)


 * If the U.S. government had prosecuted Bush administration officials for their war crimes during the “war on terror,” the ICC would not now take jurisdiction. But after Barack Obama said, “Generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards,” his administration refused to prosecute those implicated in the torture and willful killings of detainees during the Bush administration.
 * Marjorie Cohn in Team Trump Tried to Bully the ICC Into Dropping War Crimes Probe But Failed, by Marjorie Cohn, Truthout (10 March 2020)


 * It has often been remarked but seldom remembered that war itself is a crime. Yet a war crime is more and other than war. It is an atrocity beyond the usual barbaric bounds of war. It is legal definition growing out of custom and tradition supported by every civilized nation in the world including our own. It is an act beyond the pale of acceptable actions even in war. Deliberate killing or torturing of prisoners of war is a war crime. Deliberate destruction without military purpose of civilian communities is a war crime. The use of certain arms and armaments and of gas is a war crime. The forcible relocation of population for any purpose is a war crime. All of these crimes have been committed by the U.S. Government over the past ten years in Indochina. An estimated one million South Vietnamese civilians have been killed because of these war crimes. A good portion of the reported 700,000 National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese soldiers killed have died as a result of these war crimes and no one knows how many North Vietnamese civilians, Cambodian civilians, and Laotian civilians have died as a result of these war crimes.
 * William Crandell in Winter Soldier Investigation Testimony (31 January 1971)

D

 * The Trump administration has barred International Criminal Court investigators from entering the United States. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Friday that the U.S. will start denying visas to members of the ICC who may be investigating alleged war crimes by the U.S. military in Afghanistan. In September, national security adviser John Bolton threatened U.S. sanctions against ICC judges if they continued to investigate alleged war crimes committed by U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
 * Democracy Now, ACLU: The U.S. Is Acting Like an Authoritarian Regime by Barring ICC Officials Probing War Crimes (19 March 2019)

G

 * What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered, and conducted wars, war criminals? War criminals are not confined to the Axis Powers alone. Roosevelt and Churchill are no less war criminals than Hitler and Mussolini. Hitler was “Great Britain’s sin”. Hitler is only an answer to British imperialism, and this I say in spite of the fact that I hate Hitlerism and its anti-Semitism. England, America and Russia have all of them got their hands dyed more or less red — not merely Germany and Japan. The Japanese have only proved themselves to be apt pupils of the West. They have learnt at the feet of the West and beaten it at its own game.
 * Mahatma Gandhi, Interview given to Ralph Coniston, ‘before April 25, 1945’, reproduced in Collected Works, vol. 79, p. 422-23. Quoted in What Gandhi Says: About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage (2012), by Norman Finkelstein, p. 78.

H

 * Our governments feel threatened by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange, because they are whistleblowers, journalists, and human rights activists who have provided solid evidence for the abuse, corruption, and war crimes of the powerful, for which they are now being systematically defamed and persecuted. They are the political dissidents of the West, and their persecution is today’s witch-hunt, because they threaten the privileges of unsupervised state power that has gone out of control. The cases of Manning, Snowden, Assange and others are the most important test of our time for the credibility of Western rule of law and democracy and our commitment to human rights.
 * PEN America and the Betrayal of Julian Assange, by Chris Hedges, CounterPunch, (December 29, 2021)


 * Israeli forces’ repeated use of lethal force in the Gaza Strip since March 30, 2018, against Palestinian demonstrators who posed no imminent threat to life may amount to war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today. Israeli forces have killed more than 100 protesters in Gaza and wounded thousands with live ammunition... The killings... highlight the need for the International Criminal Court to open a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine. Third countries should impose targeted sanctions against officials responsible for ongoing serious human rights violations
 * Human Rights Watch Israel: Apparent War Crimes in Gaza (June 13, 2018)


 * A Saudi-led coalition airstrike that killed at least 26 children and wounded at least 19 more...in northern Yemen, on August 9, 2018, is an apparent war crime, Human Rights Watch said today. Countries should immediately halt weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and support strengthening a United Nations independent inquiry into violations by all parties to Yemen’s armed conflict.... Witnesses... said there was no evident military target in the market at the time.... Under the laws of war, parties must do everything feasible to verify that targets are valid military objectives. Witnesses said there were no armed men in the market or on the bus, and videos taken on the bus before the attack do not show any fighters or weapons.
 * Human Rights Watch Yemen: Coalition Bus Bombing Apparent War Crime, (2 September 2018)


 * The International Criminal Court (ICC's) mandate to investigate war crimes has thus been hampered by the unwillingness of the world’s sole superpower to commit to the organization.... Recent statements...suggest that the United States is now preparing to go to war against the ICC itself, motivated largely by an effort to silence investigations into alleged American war crimes committed in Afghanistan, as well as alleged crimes committed by Israel during the 2014 war in the Gaza Strip....The unwillingness or inability of U.S. courts to seriously investigate war crimes carried out by American citizens is part of why the ICC mandate in Afghanistan has been viewed as an important effort to bring a minimum level of accountability over the conflict.
 * The U.S. Goes To War Against the ICC to Cover Up Alleged War Crimes in Afghanistan, Murtaza Hussain, TThe Intercept, (12 September 2018)

K

 * I would like to talk representing all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It's impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit -- the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. But they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told the stories of times that they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in the fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
 * John Kerry, Statement Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, delivered 22 April 1971, Washington, D.C.
 * There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell, Ambassador.
 * Sergiy Kyslytsya (2022), speaking to Russian Ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, on 24 February 2022.

M

 * The first instance of a judicial response to atrocity focused on Sir Peter von Hagenbach who was charged with murder and other violations in a court created by the Archduke of Austria in 1474 specifically to create a legal forum rather than summary execution. Von Hagenbach defended himself on the grounds that he was just following orders to maintain security as governor of a town in the Upper Rhine; thus, his case launched both the legal response to atrocity and the debate over the defense of following orders.
 * Martha Minow "What the rule of law should mean in civics education: from the ‘Following Orders’ defence to the classroom" Journal of Moral Education Volume 35, 2006 - Issue 2

P

 * A legal officer flagged the strike as a possible war crime that required an investigation. But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike.
 * How the U.S. Hid an Airstrike That Killed Dozens of Civilians in Syria, By Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt New York Times, (13 November 2021)

R

 * If Russia has intelligence that Ukraine is using an otherwise protected civilian target for military purposes, and if a decision is made to attack the target using force deemed proportional to the threat, then no war crime has been committed. Indeed, given what The Washington Post has documented, it appears that it is Ukraine, not Russia, which is committing war crimes.
 * Scott Ritter, Russia, Ukraine & the Law of War: Crime of Aggression, Part II], [[W:Consortium News|Consortium News], April 1, 2022


 * The first martyr in the American national war of liberation against the British colonialists in the eighteenth century was an African descendant, ; and both slave and free Africans played a key role in Washington’s armies. And yet, the American Constitution sanctioned the continued enslavement of Africans. In recent times, it has become an object of concern to some liberals that the U.S.A. is capable of war crimes of the order of My Lai in Vietnam. But the fact of the matter is that the My Lais began with the enslavement of Africans and American Indians. Racism, violence, and brutality were the concomitants of the capitalist system when it extended itself abroad in the early centuries of international trade.
 * Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 89

T

 * What it actually reveals is a far darker, more shameful truth. The truth of a Saudi-led coalition armed by Britain and the United States, which from the very start of the conflict in 2015 has sought to use starvation as a weapon of war.  Most obviously, their on-off blockades of any ports and airports controlled by the Houthi rebels have drastically cut supplies of food to a Yemini population that relies on imports to eat.  But far more insidiously, and in the absence of imports, the Saudi air force has systematically and deliberately destroyed the domestic means of producing and distributing food inside Yemen. Their bombs have constantly targeted agricultural land, dairy farms, food processing factories, and the markets where food is sold.
 * Emily Thornberry in The famine facing Yemen is a war crime – it must be investigated, The Guardian, (22 November 2018)


 * We need accountability for the states and individuals that have caused this crisis, brought us to the brink of a famine that the UN says would be the worst in the past 100 years, and – by using starvation as a weapon of war – are in clear breach of international humanitarian law...When I asked Jeremy Hunt yesterday in parliament why the resolution that will go before the security council today did not mention the need for an investigation of all alleged war crimes, and full accountability for those responsible, and whether the crown prince (of Saudi Arabia) had insisted on the removal of that  demand, he did not answer.
 * Emily Thornberry in The famine facing Yemen is a war crime – it must be investigated, The Guardian, (22 November 2018)


 * On April 18, 2006, I had my first confirmed killed. This man was innocent. I don’t know his name. I called him “the fat man.” He was walking back to his house, and I shot him in front of his friend and his father. The first round didn’t kill him, after I had hit him up here in his neck area. And afterwards he started screaming and looked right into my eyes. So I looked at my friend, who I was on post with, and I said, “Well, I can’t let that happen.” So I took another shot and took him out. He was then carried away by the rest of his family. It took seven people to carry his body away. We were all congratulated after we had our first kills, and that happened to have been mine. My company commander personally congratulated me, as he did everyone else in our company. This is the same individual who had stated that whoever gets their first kill by stabbing them to death will get a four-day pass when we return from Iraq.
 * Jon Michael Turner (U.S.M.C.) Winter Soldier: U.S. Vets, Active-Duty Soldiers from Iraq & Afghanistan Testify About Horrors of War, Democracy Now (17 March 2008)


 * I just want to say that I am sorry for the hate and destruction that I have inflicted on innocent people, and I’m sorry for the hate and destruction that others have inflicted on innocent people. At one point, it was OK. But reality has shown that it’s not..and that until people hear about what is going on with this war, it will continue to happen and people will continue to die. I am sorry for the things that I did. I am no longer the monster that I once was.
 * Jon Michael Turner (U.S.M.C.) Winter Soldier: U.S. Vets, Active-Duty Soldiers from Iraq & Afghanistan Testify About Horrors of War, Democracy Now (17 March 2008)

U

 * The Prosecutor mandated to oversee the Occupied Palestinian Territory for the International Criminal Court (ICC) stated on Wednesday that her office is keeping “a close eye” on the planned demolition of a Palestinian village in the West Bank by Israeli authorities...“It bears recalling, as a general matter,” said the ICC Prosecutor, “that extensive destruction of property without military necessity and population transfers in an occupied territory constitute war crimes under the  Rome Statute.”
 * West Bank: ‘imminent’ demolition of Palestinian village could be ‘war crime’ – ICC Prosecutor, UN News, (17 October 2018)

Z

 * The United States had become a willing co-combatant in a war without any direction or clear end state... there have been a litany of war crimes... in which Saudi planes, using American munitions, bombed a school bus killing dozens of Yemeni schoolchildren. Second, the U.S. government has responded to these crimes with silences that might seem chastened, but in truth must be classified as defiant, given the bureaucratic maneuvering undertaken to obscure the United States’ unthinking complicity both to outsiders and to itself.
 * Micah Zenko in America Is Committing War Crimes and Doesn’t Even Know Why, Foreign Policy,  (15 August 2018)
 * One of the judges in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial after World War II, Radhabinod Pal... argued that the United States had clearly provoked the war with Japan and expected Japan to act. Richard Minear  (Victors' Justice) sums up Pal's view of the embargoes on scrap iron and oil, that "these measures were a clear and potent threat to Japan's very existence." The records show that a White House conference two weeks before Pearl Harbor anticipated a war and discussed how it should be justified...
 * Howard Zinn in A People's History of the United States, (Full text online) (1980) p. 402


 * The reason why the U.S. Government must be prosecuted for its war-crimes against Iraq is that they are so horrific and there are so many of them, and international law crumbles until they become prosecuted and severely punished for what they did. We therefore now have internationally a lawless world (or “World Order”) in which “Might makes right,” and in which there is really no effective international law, at all. This is merely gangster “law,” ruling on an international level...The seriousness of this international war crime is not as severe as those of the Nazis were, but nonetheless is comparable to it...On 15 March 2018, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies headlined at Alternet, “The Staggering Death Toll in Iraq” and wrote that “our calculations, using the best information available, show a catastrophic estimate of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion,” and linked to solid evidence, backing up their estimate.... On 6 February 2020, BusinessInsider bannered “US taxpayers have reportedly paid an average of $8,000 each and over $2 trillion total for the Iraq war alone”, and linked to the academic analysis that supported this estimate. The U.S. regime’s invasive war, which the Bush gang perpetrated against Iraq, was also a crime against the American people (though Iraqis suffered far more from it than we did).
 * Eric Zuesse, Why U.S. Must Be Prosecuted for Its War Crimes Against Iraq,  The Saker,  (16 May 2020)
 * America’s leaders deceived the American public into perpetrating this invasion and occupation, of a foreign country (Iraq) that had never threatened the United States; and, so, this invasion and subsequent military occupation constitutes the very epitome of “aggressive war” — unwarranted and illegal international aggression... Hitler, similarly to George W. Bush, would never have been able to obtain the support of his people to invade if he had not lied, or “deceived,” them, into invading and militarily occupying foreign countries that had never threatened Germany, such as Belgium, Poland and Czechoslovakia. This — Hitler’s lie-based aggressions — was the core of what the Nazis were hung for, and yet America now does it.
 * Eric Zuesse, Why U.S. Must Be Prosecuted for Its War Crimes Against Iraq, The Saker, (16 May 2020)