By Declan Hayes
June 29, 2022:
Information Clearing House
--This article
surveys previous war crimes’ trials from
earlier eras to assess today’s plans to put
captured Russian soldiers on trial in Kiev
and Azov militia members on trial in Donbass.
Although all crimes should be appropriately
punished, the examples which follow, which
are in no way exhaustive, show that has
rarely been the case.
The article begins with the Nuremberg
trials before moving on to some of the more
relevant issues those trials, and the Tokyo
ones which followed, gave rise to. It uses
those trials, rather than NATO’s more recent
war crimes in the Arab world, as its
benchmarks to more properly hone in on the
key issues pertaining to NATO’s war crimes
in Ukraine. While just a snap shot, the
article is important as it sets out the main
parameters under which the main perpetrators
in Washington, London, Brussels and Kiev
should, with their entourage, be in the dock
as a first step to being jailed for life.
Nuremberg’s Ground Rules
The Nazi leaders tried at Nuremberg faced
a total of four counts: (1) crimes against
peace: the planning, initiating and waging
of wars of aggression in violation of
international treaties and agreements; (2)
crimes against humanity: conducting the
crimes of extermination, deportation and
genocide; (3) war crimes: the violation of
the rules of war; (4) and, finally, “a
common plan of conspiracy to commit” the
criminal acts listed in the first three
counts. These four counts now form the basis
of any legal discussion of genocide and its
related crimes.
These four counts are also more than
sufficient to indict NATO’s leaders.
Previous articles cited NATO’s think tanks
plotting violating counts one and four. As
my previous articles repeatedly call
attention to NATO’s wars of extermination, I
have little more to say here on why the USA
should be indicted under count two or,
indeed, on count three. There is, in short,
overwhelming grounds to charge NATO’s
political, media, military and industrial
elite along the very same lines adumbrated
above, under which those who faced justice
at Nuremberg were charged.
That is because the Nuremberg proceedings
clarified and reaffirmed the emerging
principles of international law: aggressive
war, such as those which NATO waged in Iraq,
Serbia, Syria, Vietnam, Libya and Yemen,
constitute crimes, for which NATO’s
instigators, heads of state included, are
accountable; and accomplices and accessories
who joined organizations, such as the SS,
the SAS,
the Parachute Regiment, the U.S. Marine
Corps and the Gestapo, knowing of their
criminal purposes, should be held to legal
account.
Count 2 involved crimes against humanity,
including the crimes of extermination,
genocide, murder, enslavement, deportation
or other inhuman acts done against any
civilian population. Any proper
investigation of NATO’s terror campaigns in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Libya
would furnish sufficient grounds to indict
tens of thousands of NATO personnel and
their political overseers as war criminals.
The most authoritative definition of war
crimes, count three, was formulated in the
London Charter of August 8, 1945, which
established the Nuremberg International
Military Tribunal. Under their definition,
war crimes are acts of violence against
civilian populations, prisoners-of-war or,
in some cases, enemy soldiers in the field;
they are committed primarily by military
personnel; they are in violation of the laws
and customs of war; they are not justified
by military necessity; and they often
involve weapons or military methods of
unusual cruelty or devastation. The
Ukrainian Armed Forces and their far right
militias, which Ukraine’s political leaders
deliberately fully incorporated into their
armed forces, stand accused of countless
numbers of such war crimes.
Orders
from On High
Nuremberg not only formalized earlier
conventions but internationalized the crimes
as well. The defense that these crimes had
been legal in Nazi Germany was rejected.
Superior orders, as in the earlier
Major Wirz and
Llandovery Castle cases, were again
rejected as a defense. Because of these
precedents, German generals, German
bureaucrats, German judges and German
economic ministers were all found guilty. As
the German High Command, the Waffen SS and
the Gestapo were condemned as criminal
organizations, the very same should apply to
every NATO force implicated in all of its
Arab Spring, Serbian and Ukrainian genocide
campaigns.
Genocide
The United Nations Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide specifically lists five acts, any
of which intentionally perpetrated against a
national, ethnic, racial or religious
grouping may constitute genocide. Killing
members of the group; causing serious bodily
or mental harm to members of the group;
deliberately inflicting on the group
conditions of life calculated to bring about
its physical destruction in whole or in
part; imposing measures intended to prevent
births within the group or forcibly
transferring children of the group to
another group are each cited as genocidal
mechanisms by that body. The UN has also
decreed that conspiracy, incitement, attempt
and complicity in genocide are also
punishable. Perpetrators may be punished
whether they are constitutionally
responsible rulers, public officials or
private individuals. All transgressors are,
in theory at least, legitimate targets for
retribution.
Given that the deliberate destruction or
emasculation of a society’s leaders, if
perpetrated to cull a community’s
leadership, also constitutes genocide — even
if the majority survives, Poroshenko and
Ukraine’s other leaders who led the
extermination campaign against Ukraine’s
Russian speakers must stand trial and spend
the remainder of their lives in a penal
colony, if found guilty.
Embargoed Japan
On July 21, 1941, Japan signed a
preliminary agreement with the Vichy
government of Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain,
leading to Japan’s occupation of airfields
and naval bases in Indochina. Almost
immediately, the U.S., Britain, and the
Netherlands instituted a total embargo on
oil and scrap metal to Japan— arguably
tantamount to a declaration of war. This was
followed soon after by the United States and
Great Britain freezing all Japanese assets
in their respective countries. Radhabinod
Pal, one of the judges in the post-war Tokyo
War Crimes Tribunal, later argued that the
U.S. had clearly provoked the war with
Japan, calling the embargoes a clear and
potent threat to Japan’s very existence.
These points are noted to posit that NATO’s
prolonged and systematic use of sanctions to
starve Venezuela, Iraq, Syria, Iran and
Russia into submission constitute (1) crimes
against peace; (2) crimes against humanity,
most obviously in the death through
malnutrition of 500,000 Iraqi children; (3)
war crimes; (4) and, finally, “a common plan
of conspiracy to commit” the criminal acts
listed in the first three counts.
Unit
731
Although the Soviets wanted Unit 731,
Japan’s producers of chemical and biological
weapons, charged, the International Military
Tribunal found no evidence that such a unit
even existed. Unit 731 escapes even token
mention in the vast tomes of the Tokyo War
Crimes Tribunal. This is all the more
surprising when we consider that at least
twenty of the twenty-eight major defendants
on trial at Tokyo had direct knowledge of
the unit’s activities. These include
Generals Hideki Tojo and Sadao Araki, former
Prime Ministers Kiichiro Hiranuma and Koki
Hirota and Shumei Okawa, the supremacist
intellectual.
All in all, five thousand Japanese were
arrested after World War II; 2,400 went to
prison; eight hundred and nine were executed
by firing squad; and eight were hanged,
including General Hideki Tojo. Just as in
Germany, most of the arraigned were small
fry. They included 173 Taiwanese and 148
Koreans. Only a small number of high ranking
army and navy officers, no captains of the
war economy and virtually none of the
civilian demagogues in politics, academe and
the media who helped prime Japan’s twin
pumps of racial arrogance and fanatical
militarism were put on trial. No secret
police, no secret society members, no
industrialists faced trial. The enslavement
of Formosans and Koreans was not mentioned,
nor was the issue of the comfort women or
unit 731. At the Tokyo trial, all the
defendants meticulously avoided implicating
Hirohito. The judges even commented that the
emperor was conspicuous by his absence from
the dock. These mistakes should not be
replicated when NATO’s leaders,
industrialists, media enablers and
apologists, past and present, stand trial
for their own bio labs in Ukraine. They must
all swing.
The
Tiger of Malaya
General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Tiger of
Malaya, was hanged in Manila on February 23,
1946. The fate of this officer, a
first-class fighting man, affirmed something
new in the annals of war. For Yamashita did
not die for murder, or for directing other
men to do murder in his name. Yamashita lost
his life not because he was a bad or evil
commander, but simply because he was a
commander, and the men he nominally
commanded had done unspeakably evil things.
He was hanged for simply being Japan’s
nominal boss of bosses in the Philippines
during the Rape of Manila when Imperial
naval troops engaged in an orgy of slaughter
and rape, of beheadings and burnings alive,
of torture and wanton destruction, of the
murders of the helpless — women, babies,
priests and American prisoners of war
included.
Although the war crimes of the Japanese
in Manila deserved retribution — and Homma,
its main architect, was also hanged —
Yamashita deserved justice. The American
officers in charge of his trial did not give
him the opportunity to defend himself and
Time magazine raged and ranted about
Yamashita’s brutality during the Bataan
Death March; Yamashita had been stationed in
Manchuria at the time. The fact that both
Yamashita, who
captured Singapore, easily the biggest
and most ignominious surrender in British
military history, and Homma had both
previously defeated MacArthur probably
decided their fate: the Japanese invaded the
Philippines a fortnight after Pearl Harbor
and, short of polishing up his pompous “I
shall return” speech, MacArthur made little
preparations to repel them. Next time, the
scales of justice must be balanced so all
culpable NATO generals and not just heroic
Iranian and Iraqi generals in Bagdad face
the music.
Japanese Occupation
From 1945 to 1958, U.S. military
personnel were involved in 9,998 reported
crimes and other terror attacks on Japanese
civilians. One of the most notorious of
these occurred on January 1957, when Spc.
3rd Class William S. Girard, a soldier in
the U.S. Army 8th Cavalry Regiment, shot and
killed a Japanese woman. The “incident”
occurred at a target range at Somagahara,
Gunma Prefecture, which locals often
entered, even during live firing exercises,
to collect brass shell casings which they
sold for scrap. Witnesses insisted Girard,
who was on guard duty, baited Naka Sakai, by
tossing empty casings toward her, calling
out in broken Japanese for her to collect
them, and then amusing himself by firing off
empty cartridges from the grenade launcher
on his M1 rifle. One of his shots killed
her. Girard got a three-year sentence,
suspended. But less than a month after his
conviction, Girard and his Japanese wife,
“Candy,” were relocated, with a hero’s
welcome, to the United States. The incident
expedited the closing of army facilities in
Japan’s main islands and led to an increase
of sexual attacks on Okinawans. Because the
tendency of young American occupation troops
to rape and pillage remains a major problem
in Okinawa to this day, just as it has
remained a problem in Iraq, Syria,
Afghanistan and wherever those criminals
congregate, the only solution is to ban
American troops serving overseas. Japan, for
one, and Iraq and Syria, for others, would
welcome such an initiative to cage these
brutes.
Italian Savages
Italy has never atoned for its war crimes
in Spain, in the Balkans and in Africa where
it gassed Ethiopian villagers in a flagrant
breach of the Geneva Convention. Italy,
which helped foment the war, has actually
been brazen enough to put aged Nazis in the
dock – whilst simultaneously engaging in
fresh bouts of criminal adventurism in the
Balkans, Libya and Iraq under the NATO
umbrella. Of more than 1,200 Italians sought
for war crimes in Africa and the Balkans,
not even one has ever faced justice. Webs of
denial spun by the Italian state, the
Vatican, academe and the media have
re-invented Italy as a victim, gulling the
rest of us into acclaiming the Good Italian
long before Captain Corelli strummed his
mandolin, while running his hand up the legs
of peasant Greek girls. Benito Mussolini’s
invading soldiers slaughtered all before
them, they starved infants in concentration
camps and they engaged in genocide. They
were the Americans of their day.
When General Pietro Badoglio, whose
planes strafed Red Cross camps and dropped
280kg bombs of mustard gas into Ethiopian
villages, died of old age in his bed, the
Italians buried the bastard with full
military honors; they even renamed his home
town after him! General Rudolfo Graziani,
aka the butcher of Libya, massacred entire
communities; his crimes included an infamous
assault against the sick and elderly of
Addis Ababa. His men posed for photographs
holding the severed heads of the victims of
Mussolini’s Pax Romana. General Mario
Roatta, known to his men as the black beast,
killed tens of thousands of Yugoslav
civilians in indiscriminate reprisal attacks
and deliberately deprived them of water,
food and basic medicines in the
concentration camps he herded the survivors
into. Successive Italian governments have
steadfastly refused to reveal the location
of stockpiles of mustard gas in Ethiopia and
innocent African children still continue to
die as a result. And Italy and all of NATO
couldn’t care less about those war crimes or
the thousands of other more recent ones that
regularly feature on this site.
Look
Over There
The United States has had to admit its
own war crimes on some very rare occasions.
The best-known such episode involved the
pre-meditated murder of 400 unarmed women,
children and old men by an American company
under the command of Lieutenant William
Calley during the Vietnam war. Calley’s
trial established yet again that whatever
immunity is accorded military acts in war
extends only to conduct that conforms to the
rules of war. The deliberate killing of
civilians by infantrymen, as occurred at My
Lai, is a war crime because it cannot be
excused by the exigencies of war. Lt.
William Calley, Jr. was tried and convicted
by an American military court-martial of
premeditated murder. The Vietcong, had they
captured him, could have legitimately
show-cased him as a war criminal — to
wide-spread Western protests, no doubt.
Calley served just over three years for
ordering and taking part in these murders.
Three other defendants were acquitted.
Marine Private Michael Schwartz was
convicted of killing twelve Vietnamese
villagers in a separate incident at Danang.
When other officers testified that they had
been ordered to kill their prisoners,
Lieutenant James Duffy, another defendant,
was cleared of summarily executing a
prisoner. No compensation was paid to their
victims. Like My Lai, Schwartz was tried,
not by an international court, but, as in
the second Iraq war, by his compatriots, by
his fellow-Americans. In the light of
America’s more recent transgressions against
international law, this merely reinforces
the widely-held notion that America’s hired
guns remain above the law.
Although vested interest groups still
hunt down the lowliest Nazi collaborators,
the mass slaughters of Vietnamese villagers
in 1967 by the elite Tiger Force unit of the
U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division are now
all but forgotten; an earlier investigation
had been closed in 1975, even though it had
established that members of this highly
decorated unit had committed war crimes when
they wantonly massacred hundreds of unarmed
civilians. Given that Senator John Kerry,
the Democratic candidate for the 2004 U.S.
Presidency, freely admits to murdering 21
Vietnamese civilians and that Henry
Kissinger, the former U.S. secretary of
state, was wanted in Belgium and France for
crimes against humanity, it is one rule for
one set of victims and another rule for
America’s victims.
Ukraine in Short
Though the Ukrainian war, like all
others, is hell, that should not excuse the
planners and perpetrators of the unspeakable
war crimes that have been visited upon
Ukraine. Although 21 year old Russian Sgt.
Vadim Shyshimarin may well be, as charged
and so
very rapidly convicted by the corrupt
Kiev regime, a war criminal, I imagine his
was a cock eyed show trial. That is, for
starters, because the CIA’s Radio Free
Europe forced Shyshimarin to emotionally
face off with the widow of a Ukrainian
he allegedly killed, because it would be
more impossible for Shyshimarin to get
appropriate legal aid in Ukraine than it was
for
George Dimitrov to get legal counsel in
Nazi Germany, because of
the sheer speed of the trial and because
(Z)elensky is an even bigger show boater
than Goebbels ever was.
Regarding the proposed trials of those
evacuated to Russian POW camps from Mariupol,
even their own skin, in the form of head to
toe Nazi tattoos, seem to condemn them both
as criminals and as the idiots they are
obviously are. They, however, are not the
real criminals, who are to be found pulling
the strings in Davos, Washington, Brussels
and London.
There is, in the criminal world, an old
saying that, if you do the crime, you should
do the time. Because NATO’s top war
criminals are serial abusers, the only way
we will ever have a lasting peace is if the
Clinton, Bush, Cheney, Epstein, MacCain,
Maxwell, Obama and related organized crime
families are, along with all their enablers,
jailed and the keys metaphorically thrown
away.
Though that is unlikely to happen today
or the day after, what must happen is a
systematic process of gathering and
collating evidence against them and those
who follow them for when the tide turns and
the arc of the moral universe eventually
bends towards justice for us and jail time
for them.