Originally published September 23 2005
Columnist draws parallels between WWII crimes defined at Nuremberg and Bush reasons for Iraq conflict
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
According to Knight-Ridder columnist Michael Mandel, the worst war crime defined at the tribunal at Nuremburg was "Crimes Against Peace" -- defined as the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances" -- which, Mandel believes, President Bush has engaged in himself with the war in Iraq.
This month marks the 60th anniversary of the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal, the basic legal document for the trial of the major Nazi war criminals that commenced in November 1945.
In a famous passage from their judgment of the following year, the four judges of the tribunal (American, British, French and Russian) declared the crime of aggressive war to be "the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
The innovation of the crime of aggressive war was in fact denounced by the Nazi defendants as "ex post facto law," but Justice Robert Jackson, America's prosecutor at Nuremberg, had an answer for this: Illegal wars were nothing more than mass murder, and there was nothing ex post facto about the crime of murder.
The crime of aggression is nowhere to be seen in modern international criminal codes, and leading the charge against including it has been the United States itself.
The war in Iraq, for one example, constitutes the quintessential war of aggression, falling very far short, rhetoric apart, of any justification in self-defense or authorization by the Security Council of the United Nations, the only two accepted legal grounds for war in international law.
The U.N. Charter is one of those "international treaties" mentioned in the London Charter of 1945.
Not only does Jackson's definition apply to soldiers as well, but, according to most definitions of murder, it's enough that the criminal knew that his or her unlawful behavior would result in death, whether or not it was meant to.
Under Texas law, for example, a person commits murder if he or she "intentionally or knowingly causes the death of an individual."
It's also murder if the person "intends to cause serious bodily injury and commits an act clearly dangerous to human life that causes the death of an individual."
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