Quote: "[quote]Quote: "How does war make them criminals?""
Indeed, as a criminal would have to commit a crime, as war tends to be perfectly legal, it stops it from being a crime. Though in a sense of 'moral' crime, then whether war is completely morally wrong all of the time would be up for debate.[/quote]
A war crime is, by definition, the wanton destruction a losing country engages in.
One of the legal defences Germans could initiate at the Nuremburg Trials was if the Allies had committed the same act. That is if a German was brought before the trails, and showed the Allies had done the same crime, instead of those Allied commanders being prosecuted equally, the German was released.
However, crimes for which Germans and Japanese war-criminals were executed for have been repeated by the United States, among other countries. For example bombing farming dykes in North Korea (Germans were executed for doing the same in the Netherlands) and the targeting of rice-paddies to disrupt food production (Japanese were executed for exactly this crime). Each of these acts (among numerous others) were committed by America after the WW2 war-crimes trials. No American was prosectued for them.
When a country is powerful it tends to ignore its own war-crimes. Take the Mai Lai massacre. Hundreds and hundreds (it is thought around half-a-thousand) of unarmed Vietnamese villagers were systematically executed by American troops.
This slow, prolonged, and entirely successful orgy of killing included the gang-rape and murder of children.
It is difficult to imagine a worse war-crime.
Despite overwhelming evidence, and after the failed US cover-up orchestrated in-part by the self-proclaimed "liberal, compassionate, conservative" Colin Powell, only man convicted of murder in relation to this atrocity, William Calley of Charlie Company, was convicted and sentenced to life.
Yet just one day after this verdict President Nixon ordered him released pending appeal. Being a military matter, and not under civil jurisdiction, Commanding General of Fort Benning reduced his sentence to 20 years. The Secretary of the Army in a clemency action commuted confinement to ten years.
However, in all Calley served just over
3 and half months of house arrest in his quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia. Federal judge J. Robert Elliott freed him, pending appeal. That was the extent of his time in confinement (not jail). His conviction was quashed. He now manages a jewelry store.
Of the 26 men (of the entire company) initially charged, Lt Calley's was the only conviction.
My Lai is considered a reversal of the rules of war that were set in the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals. The tribunals set a precedent in history that no one may be excused from reprimand for war crimes because they were ordered to do so, that is "I was only following orders" was not reasonable grounds for war-crimes.
Secretary of the Army Howard Callaway was quoted in the New York Times for stating that Calley's sentence was reduced because Calley honestly believed that what he did was a part of his orders. This is in direct contradiction to the standards set in Nuremberg and Tokyo where German and Japanese soldiers were executed for similar actions.
A war-crime is what losers of wars do. What the soldiers of weak or failed states do.
[LINK REMOVED BY JEKU --- THIS ISN'T THE PLACE FOR THIS KIND OF THING. War can be a bad thing, but feel free to discuss this on a more appropriate forum than a programming one]
