Benjamin Ferencz is a 92-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, American combat soldier during World War II, and a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, where he prosecuted numerous Nazi war criminals, including some responsible for the deaths of upward of 100,000 innocent people. [...]
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All of Ferencz's answers are thought-provoking -- including his discussion of how the Nuremberg Principles apply to bin Laden -- but there's one answer he gave which I particularly want to highlight; it was in response to this question: "so what should we have learned from Nuremberg that we still haven't learned"? His answer:
I'm afraid most of the lessons of Nuremberg have passed, unfortunately. The world has accepted them, but the U.S. seems reluctant to do so. The principal lesson we learned from Nuremberg is that a war of aggression -- that means, a war in violation of international law, in violation of the UN charter, and not in self-defense -- is the supreme international crime, because all the other crimes happen in war. And every leader who is responsible for planning and perpetrating that crime should be held to account in a court of law, and the law applies equally to everyone.
These lessons were hailed throughout the world -- I hailed them, I was involved in them -- and it saddens me to no end when Americans are asked: why don't you support the Nuremberg principles on aggression? And the response is: Nuremberg? That was then, this is now. Forget it.
Some of us support the Nuremberg principles, but some think they were simply our due for beating the Nazis and they don't apply to us. Show trials of the vanquished by the victors. Most people haven't a clue what Nuremberg was or meant and couldn't care less.
No decent human being contests that the 9/11 attack was a grave crime. But there are many grave crimes, including ones sanctioned by (or acquiesced to) those leading the chorus of cheers for bin Laden's killing. To much controversy, Noam Chomsky recently wrote: "uncontroversially, Bush's crimes vastly exceed bin Laden's." [...]
His invasion of Iraq caused the deaths of at least 100,000 (and almost certainly more) innocent Iraqis: vastly more than bin Laden could have dreamed of causing. It left millions of people internally and externally displaced for years. It destroyed a nation of 26 million people. It was without question an illegal war of aggression: what the lead prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials -- as Ferencz just reminded us -- called the "the central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holds them all together." And that's to say nothing of the worldwide regime of torture, disappearances, and black sites created by the U.S during the Bush years.
[...] The claims being made about why the killing of bin Laden is grounded in such noble principles would be much more compelling if those same principles were applied to ourselves as well as our enemies. And the imperative to do so, more than anything, was the prime mandate of Nuremberg.
War crimes are war crimes regardless of their magnitude. Whether a war criminal kills 3000 or 100,000, you can only kill him once.
Capturing bin Laden alive would have opened a can of worms that the powers-that-be-and-were in this country simply did not want. Alive, he could speak. I think the guiding principle of the realpolitik in his case was Dead Men Tell No Tales. It's done and I'm fine with it, next case.
The next case oughta be Bush and Cheney and their cohort of warmongering neocon minions. Let me make perfectly clear that I do not want them to be assassinated. We need those bastards alive. We need from them all the debriefing that bin Laden is no longer capable of. Then while they are sitting in prison awaiting trial, we need to confiscate their holdings and return them to the treasury or disburse them to help those they hurt that are still alive. It's not much, just twisting the knife in them a little, minor vengeance if you will, but they'll get to watch their ill-gotten gains disappear.
Then on to due process under the law. They each get a fair and speedy trial and then we hang them. En masse if possible. A formation of ranks of twelve. Hang twelve, "next rank forward". The last object lesson.
We won't learn from that either. Sigh.
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