Tom Ricks has been reading the digitized archives of the My Lai investigation: I've been reading My Lai materials for about four weeks now. I haven't said much about the incident on my blog. The more I learn about it, the worse the whole event...
war crimes
This is interesting for a couple of reasons: Nato and the United Nations are cautiously considering a Taliban proposal to set up a joint commission to investigate allegations of civilians.
My main interest in this thread is the proposition that the term "war crimes" has a relatively clear legal meaning, and that there's considerable treaty law, case law, and learned.
Back from vacation and back on the grid. Hmm, what have I missed in the last couple of weeks? 1) Ooh, looks like the BP oil spill is capped for now. At FP, Joshua Keating provides a sobering look of the world’s other worst festering...
Later this year, state parties will get together to revisit the Statute for the International Criminal Court. Definitely on the agenda is clarifying the crime of aggression, which was left.
Apparently Al-Majid's execution by gallows was more "civilized" than that of Saddam Hussein three years ago. No one called him any names.
Why would William Calley ever be invited to speak to a Kiwanis Club?William Calley, the former Army lieutenant convicted on 22 counts of murder in the infamous My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, publicly apologized for the first time this week while speaking in Columbus.“There is...
This story, indicating that the Obama administration is bailing on the idea even investigating whether criminal charges ought to be brought against Bush administration officials who committed war crimes such.
In the comments to the Hiroshima thread below, djw asks an excellent question, in response to justifications for dropping the bomb on Japan because doing so arguably saved many more.
As Jack Balkin points out, for both "legal" and "political" reasons it's unlikely that any U.S. court will prosecute war crimes committed by members of the Bush administration. This circumstance highlights both the moral and practical importance of the question asked recently by Maj. Gen....