The quaint and obsolete Nuremberg principles

[The Northerner]

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. He gave a fascinating (and shockingly articulate) 13-minute interview yesterday to the CBC in Canada about the bin Laden killing, the Nuremberg principles, and the U.S. role in the world. Without endorsing everything he said, I hope as many people as possible will listen to it.

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.

Read more: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/05/13/nuremberg/index.html

[PDJane]

1. It saddens me, too.

[emilyg]

2. k/r

[grasswire]

3. I did not know until yesterday that Japanese war crimes were largely...

....unaddressed because of the horror of Hiroshima and the internment of Japanese-Americans. But the war crimes of the Japanese should not have been set aside, should they? The concept of "Bushido" allowed the Japanese military to treat POWs with impunity. My uncle was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, among other medals, for his valor on the island of Corregidor. He was a POW for years, and never spoke of his experiences to his family.

[Sirveri]

6. The Japanese should have been punished. The same with the Allies and the Soviets.

We burned entire cities to the ground. Leveled Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagisaki, etc etc etc. Russian treatment of POW's was barbaric to put it mildly. Yet the only ones who were punished were the losers, and even then we only really punished the Germans. Justice is cathartic, we need it, we need redemption for our crimes. But as is life, the winners make the rules, the losers just have to follow them.

[14thColony]

7. It might seem that way

Because the Allies' main equivalent of Nuremberg, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo, only executed seven Japanese leaders in total. But of 5,700 Japanese tried across the Far East (not just in Tokyo) by all the Allies, nearly 1,000 were sentenced to death and nearly 3,000 to prison for some length of time. How many of those were in reality executed I don't know, but I bet it was a lot. China alone executed 149.

[MadHound]

19. Another little known fact about the lack of Japanese war crimes trials,

Part of the deal for not going ahead with such trials was that the Japanese turned over all the medical information, including information derived from human experimentation, to the US.

[coalition_unwilling]

4. Excellent article. Full article deserves a read. K&R - n/t

[howard112211]

5. Good article. K&R

[TheKentuckian]

8. Those principles have been replaced by convenience, chants, and a bump in the polls.

[readmoreoften]

11. +1

[msanthrope]

17. Um, this prosecutor got his witness statements by threatening to shoot civilians. He bragged about

it.

See post 14 below.

I don't think he should throw stones.

[slipslidingaway]

9. Great piece ...

"...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.

Yet the very same country -- and often the very same people -- collectively insisting upon the imperative of punishing civilian deaths (in the bin Laden case) has banded together to shield George Bush from any accountability of any kind. Both political parties -- and the current President -- have invented entirely new Orwellian slogans of pure lawlessness to justify this protection (Look Forward, Not Backward): one that selectively operates to protect only high-level U.S. war criminals but not those who expose their crimes..."

[Canuckistanian]

10. I heard that interview

He knew his opinions would be unpopular in America, but he felt compelled to say them.

[readmoreoften]

12. He's just a right-wing paid infiltrator who wants a President Palin.

Duh.

[Electric Monk]

13. LOL

:applause:

[msanthrope]

16. No. He's just a hypocritical prosecutor who likes to forget his own actions at Nuremberg. See post

# 14.

Of course Glen Greenwald uses him---

And don't get me started on Katyn Forest.

[msanthrope]

14. The same Ben Ferencz who got witness statements for Nuremberg by threatening to shoot civilians???

Ferencz, who today is 85 and lives in New York, cautions against making sweeping armchair moral judgments. "Someone who was not there could never really grasp how unreal the situation was," he says. "I once saw DPs beat an SS man and then strap him to the steel gurney of a crematorium. They slid him in the oven, turned on the heat and took him back out. Beat him again, and put him back in until he was burnt alive. I did nothing to stop it. I suppose I could have brandished my weapon or shot in the air, but I was not inclined to do so. Does that make me an accomplice to murder?"

Ferencz -- who went on to a distinguished legal career, became a founder of the International Criminal Court and is today probably the leading authority on military jurisprudence of the era -- cannot specifically address Weiss's actions. But he says it's important to recall that military legal norms at the time permitted a host of flexibilities that wouldn't fly today. "You know how I got witness statements?" he says. "I'd go into a village where, say, an American pilot had parachuted and been beaten to death and line everyone one up against the wall. Then I'd say, 'Anyone who lies will be shot on the spot.' It never occurred to me that statements taken under duress would be invalid."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/21/AR2005072101680_5.html

This is Glen Greenwald's moral authority?????

Nice revisionist history, Glen....and don't get me started on the political cover he gave Stalin during Nuremberg regarding the Katyn Forest Massacre....

[coalition_unwilling]

20. Revisionist history? WTF are you referring to? Greenwald isn't

creating any revisionist history with regards to Ferencz and the aftermath of World War II.

Respond to Greenwald's substance, please:

Yet the very same country -- and often the very same people -- collectively insisting upon the imperative of punishing civilian deaths (in the bin Laden case) has banded together to shield George Bush from any accountability of any kind. Both political parties -- and the current President -- have invented entirely new Orwellian slogans of pure lawlessness to justify this protection (Look Forward, Not Backward).

[msanthrope]

22. Oh yes, he is--

Ferencz, as Chief Prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen set of trials helped the Soviets and Stalin create the revisionist lie that the Katyn Forest Massacre was perpetrated by the Nazis. The Nuremberg indictments themselves were manipulated to include Katyn charges.

It wasn't done by the Nazis. It was the Soviets. (Later admitted by the Soviets in 1990.)

Ferencz and others later defended the manipulation of the Nuremberg indictments by suggesting that they had evidence that the Einsatzgruppen was involved--and they kept that lie up, for decades, even after the 1952 Congressional inquiry that established that this was a Soviet atrocity.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-katyn-massacre/

Funny how Glenn Greenwald thinks that a man who threatened civilians in order to get statements is a moral authority. Funnier, too, that he cites a man who put people to death as someone who we ought to listen to regarding OBL.

[coalition_unwilling]

23. Greenwald wrote an op-ed piece, not a work of history. You can

take issue with Greenwald's use of Ferencz in the op-ed piece but you can't accuse Greenwald of 'revisionist history' for so doing.

You are still not engaging with Greenwald's point. We have imposed summary justice upon OBL, dealing a perhaps mortal death blow to due process, but we allow Bush and the Bush Junta to skate. Care to comment?

[msanthrope]

24. I didn't notice FDR, Stalin, or Churchill in the dock at Nuremberg--so to take Glen's cited, moral

authority--the Nuremberg Trials, and Benjamin Ferencz in particular, one should have the victors punish war crimes with the death penalty, just as Mr. Ferencz did.

That is what Mr. Greenwald seems to be saying by referring to the glories of Mr. Ferencz's work at Nuremberg.


Now, don't blame me if Glen dirtied up his own point by picking a Stalinist apologist--although to be fair, we were Allies at the time, and the Allies were all too willing to manipulate the Katyn indictments to keep Stalin happy. Yes--Nuremberg should be a shining example to us all, eh? Justice at the end of a rope for many--and OBL got it at the end of a bullet.

More navel-gazing. The next time Mr. Greenwald does so, he might make sure that his moral example didn't collect evidence at the end of a gun...

[coalition_unwilling]

27. You are still not engaging the central question: it was right and

proper for OBL to be executed without even the benefit of a trial first, but George Bush and principal figures of his Junta walk around free men and women with no fear of justice, summary or otherwise?

[msanthrope]

28. I answered your question using Glen's example.

Nuremberg didn't view the killing of Yamamoto as a crime. Didn't seek redress against anyone for Dresden.

If you use the principles of Nuremberg, as Greenwald suggests, then the victors should be allowed to determine what is a crime, who is to be punished, and how. Is this the Justice that Greenwald wants for OBL?

Further,the political manipulation of the Katyn indictments at Nuremberg points up another flaw in Greenwald's appeal to moral authority--Green wald seems to yearn for a Justice that never was.

This yearning is not unlike the yearning social conservatives have for the falsely halcyon days of the 1950s. Greenwald's made a piss-poor historical analogy in his attempt to Obama-bash, but it will generally work since most of his followers seem woefully ignorant of the past they yearn for.

[defendandprotect]

15. kr

[Overseas]

18. K&R.

I have also wondered countless times just what happened to America's upholding the Nuremberg Principles.

And grew up with the injunction against a first strike by our country. Pre-emptive war was off the table.

[MadHound]

21. What do you expect from a country that sheltered such war criminals,

And put them in high government positions, dictating Cold War policy.

[sabrina 1]

25. "the supreme international crime"

Wars of aggression, he is right of course, and at least half this country agreed with that, but not so much anymore.

It saddens me too ~

:kick:

[WillyT]

26. HUGE K & R !!!

:kick:

[malaise]

29. K & R n/t