Free Republic

JAPANESE peace campaigners have written to US President Donald Trump urging him to declare the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings a war crime. A copy of the letter from the Society for Requiring the Admission of Historic Responsibility of the US Government for Dropping Atomic Bombs on Japan, dated today was sent to the Morning Star. “This indiscriminate mass killing should not be forgiven, because it was a crime against humanity,” it read, pointing to the 340,000 deaths from the bombings on August 6 and 9 in 1945. But Washington continues to justify the atrocities “with the excuse that they hastened...

FULL TITLE: Eleven-year-old girl hilariously accuses her teacher of WAR CRIMES for punishing the whole class when one pupil is naughty (and she even cites the Geneva Conventions) An 11-year-old girl's genius response on a school feedback form has earned her online fame. Ava, who is the daughter of Mason Cross, was asked to give feedback on her teacher for an end-of-year review and said she took issue with his use of 'collective punishment'. When asked what her teacher could do better, Ava, from Glasgow, wrote: 'Not use collective punishment as it is not fair on the many people who...

12: 30 a.m. Britain, France and the United States have circulated a revised U.N. draft resolution that would condemn the reported use of chemical weapons in northern Syria and demand that all parties provide speedy access to investigators to the sites. It emphasizes that Syria is required to provide investigators with flight plans, logs and information about air operations on April 4 and names of helicopter squadron commanders as well as immediate access to air bases where investigators believe chemical attacks may have been launched.

The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution Friday condemning the unlawful destruction of cultural heritage and warning the Islamic State extremist group, al-Qaida and other combatants that such attacks may constitute war crimes. The resolution approved by the U.N.’s most powerful body expands previous measures which were limited to the illicit trafficking in looted cultural items to fund terrorism, and focused on Iraq and Syria where Islamic State extremists have destroyed ancient sites including Palmyra. The newly adopted measure targets not only IS, al-Qaida and its affiliates but all parties to conflicts. It condemns and urges prosecution of those...

The Islamic State is back with another child-soldier video that is even more depraved than the last “Cubs of the Caliphate” release. This time around, the terror state gives us a small child blowing a chained prisoner’s head off in an abandoned amusement park. The most horrifying sequence in the new video shows a much younger boy — ARA News says he is 4 years old — approaching a prisoner chained to the wall of a dusty old ball pit. The little boy is handed a gun, and he proceeds to pump five rounds into the victim while shrieking, “Allahu...

John Kerry doesn’t come late to the betrayal of friends. He has had considerable practice. In 1971, when he was a young lieutenant just back from Vietnam, where he was a decorated skipper of a Swift Boat patrolling the Mekong River, he appeared before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee to pay his “respects” to the American soldiers, sailors and Marines he fought a war with. Representing all those veterans, he told the senators, he wanted to talk about war crimes he said “were committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”...

A fake video purported to show war ravaged Aleppo days after government forces retook control has led authorities to a group of filmmakers who have been arrested for the ruse in a demolition site in Port Said. Two children an eight-year-old girl, and a 12-year-old boy appeared in the footage. The group confessed to making the video with the intention of distributing it on social media. The filmmaker, his assistants and the parents of two children were detained after officers passing by the site spotted a child covered in what was later revealed to be red paint.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a directive on Wednesday to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Hague. The ICC is meant to be the world's first permanent court and works to prosecute leaders and countries for war crimes, genocide and "crimes against humanity." In 2000, Russia signed the Rome treaty establishing the ICC, but never ratified it. The ICC was established in 1998, and currently has over 100 member states. Like Russia, the US also signed the treaty but declared in 2002 that they had "no intention" of ratifying it. Last Tuesday, the UN General Assembly's Human Rights...

70 Nobel Laureates Endorse Hillary Clinton By ALAN RAPPEPORT OCT. 18, 2016 A group of the world’s leading experts in science, medicine and economics threw their support behind Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, endorsing the Democratic presidential candidate and arguing that her election is crucial for safeguarding freedom and preserving a constitutional government. The forceful endorsement came in a letter signed by 70 Nobel laureates hailing from a variety of fields and making the case that Mrs. Clinton is the candidate who best understands the importance of investing in science and technology at a time when the world faces challenges on...

Russian mercenary Arseniy Pavlov, better known as Motorola, was killed in an explosion in Donetsk, several news agencies reported on Oct. 16. Police in the Kremlin-controlled area were reportedly looking for suspects in the killing. Interfax News Agency, citing a source, said Pavlov was killed when an improvised explosive device detonated in the elevator of his apartment building. Other reports say the Kremlin-backed separatists blame Ukrainian officials for the blast. If his death is confirmed, he becomes the latest in a growing number of assassinations of separatist military leaders in the Donbas. Pavlov was a war hero in the view...

An anti-Israel activist who served as an expert witness on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in a recent terrorism trial was hosted for a meeting with senior White House officials, according to visitor logs released by the Obama administration and media reports.Michael Sfard, an anti-Israel activist who has reportedly been paid by the PLO to serve as an expert witness in terrorism trials against it, met in December 2014 with a senior White House National Security Council (NSC) member for a meeting about the Middle East, according to the logs and reports.Sfard, a lawyer, serves as the legal...

Secretary of State John Kerry accused Russia and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad of committing war crimes in their assault on rebel-held territory, including hospitals and aid workers, and called for an investigation. "Russia and the regime owe the world more than an explanation about why they keep hitting hospitals, medical facilities, children and women," Kerry said before a meeting with French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. "These are acts that beg for an appropriate investigation of war crimes and those that commit these would and should be held accountable for these actions. They're beyond the accidental now, way beyond, years beyond...

The UN Commission of Experts identified 1,600 actual cases of rape in the Bosnian War that took place in the former Yugoslavia over a period of years. In Germany, 2,000 Muslim migrants sexually assaulted 1,200 women in a single night in cities across Germany. The former was considered one of the worst war crimes of the decade. Its perpetrators were bombed and then faced war crimes trials. The perpetrators of the latter received a slap on the wrist. In Cologne, Hassan and Hussein were handed suspended sentences. Hassan, who had demanded that a man hand over two women to him...

The Rape of Nanking and the evil human experiments done by Unit 731 usually come to mind when we think of Japanese war crimes. Unfortunately, those awful incidents weren’t isolated cases. Fueled by racism, fanaticism, and finally desperation as their defeat seemed inevitable, the Japanese in World War II perpetrated several acts on par with Nazi war crimes. 10Laha Airfield MassacreFebruary 1942 This ghoulish event, which killed more than 300 Australian and Dutch POWs, followed the Japanese capture of the Indonesian island of Ambon. Allegedly as an act of reprisal after the Allies destroyed one of their minesweepers, the Japanese...

A 94-year-old former SS sergeant admitted in court Friday that he had served as an Auschwitz death camp guard, apologizing to Nazi Holocaust survivors looking on in a German courtroom that even though he was aware Jews were being gassed and their corpses burned, he did nothing to try to stop it. Reinhold Hanning told the Detmould state court that he had never spoken about his service in Auschwitz from January 1942 to June 1944, even to his family, but wanted to use his trial as an opportunity to set the record straight. "I want to say that it disturbs...

Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a former Air Force pilot who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said on Thursday that Donald Trump is openly advocating war crimes that would cause the soldiers who obeyed his orders to be jailed. “If you’re a private in the field and your major or your colonel orders you to do something that is a war crime, you actually bear responsibility, you can’t say that the colonel made me do it,” said Kinzinger, who is supporting Marco Rubio. “What Donald Trump, as wanting to be president of the United States is advocating, is a war...

And you thought Sidney Blumenthal was shady. Few people have heard of Cody Shearer, the unsanctioned diplomat, private eye, and Clinton flunky whose name surfaced in connection with the so-called intelligence reports Sidney Blumenthal was channeling to Hillary Clinton during her time at the State Department. But this shadowy fixture of the Clinton machine was everywhere in the 1990s — including war-torn Bosnia, where he became the subject of a State Department investigation after he represented himself as an agent of the U.S. government and took cash from a genocidal warlord. Now evidence suggests Shearer, working with his partner Blumenthal,...

Bosnian police arrested a wartime Muslim army commander on Tuesday on charges of failing to prevent crimes committed by foreign Islamic fighters against captive Bosnian Serb soldiers during a 1992-1995 war. The arrest of 63-year-old retiree Sakib Mahmuljin was carried out on orders of the state war crimes prosecutor, the prosecutor's office said in a statement. "The suspect is under investigation for acting in contravention of international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions while serving as a commander of the 3rd Corps of the Army of BiH," it said. Mahmuljin has denied the charges during earlier proceedings. Many Islamic fighters,...

The US reported that North Korea mistreated prisoners of war: soldiers were beaten, starved, put to forced labor, marched to death, and summarily executed. The KPA killed POWs at the battles for Hill 312, Hill 303, the Pusan Perimeter, and Daejeon—discovered during early after-battle mop-up actions by the UN forces. Later, a US Congress war crimes investigation, the United States Senate Subcommittee on Korean War Atrocities of the Permanent Subcommittee of the Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations reported that "... two-thirds of all American prisoners of war in Korea died as a result of war crimes." Although the...

This is graphic, so warnings needed! But this is what they are teaching their kids.