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If you haven't seen the movie Judgement at Nuremberg, you should. It was a movie of the trial of 16 Nazi Justices. One Judge in the dock, Schlegelberger, played by Burt Lancaster, was a good man who had reluctantly served the Nazi Regime until he resigned for reasons of conscience in 1942. He was found guilty. And in the end he agreed the verdict was a just one. This case is referred to by Ayal Rosenberg in GOLDSTONE : A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS. He begins with this introduction of it, The criminal culpability for crimes against humanity of judges enforcing...

JERUSALEM – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday vowed never to allow Israeli leaders or soldiers to stand trial on war crimes charges over their actions during last winter's military offensive in the Gaza Strip, furiously denouncing a U.N. report in a keynote address to parliament. Netanyahu's fiery rhetoric — and his decision to open the high-profile speech with remarks on the report — reflected the deep distress felt among Israeli leaders after a U.N. commission accused Israel of intentionally harming civilians when it launched a massive attack in Gaza to stop years of rocket fire. "This distorted report, written...

Westminster Magistrates court in central London rejected on Tuesday a petition urging the issuance of an arrest warrant for Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the grounds that he committed "war crimes" due his part in IDF Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, last January. The court sided with arguments submitted by the British Foreign Ministry, which stated that the defense minister was a state guest, and therefore was not subject to such lawsuit. Earlier, it was reported that the court postponed the hearing to an unspecified date, but proceedings began less than two hours later. In the first case...

Westminster Magistrates court in central London postponed on Tuesday evening a hearing over whether to issue an arrest warrant for Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the grounds that he committed "war crimes" due his part in IDF Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, last January. In the first case of its kind since the publication of the Goldstone Report, a group of Palestinians had appealed to the court seeking Barak's arrest. Despite the petition, Barak decided not to change his plans for his UK visit, with his bureau releasing a statement saying: "No arrest warrant has been issued, and...

Goldstone has condemned Israel of being guilty of war crimes and perhaps even crimes against humanity. Melanie Phillips argues that the Commission Members are tainted and the Mandate self-serving. I demonstrate that the usual safe guards were not in place to ferret out the truth and that Goldstone's interpretation of the law is really a misinterpretation.

For 30 years, Eli M. Rosenbaum has been hunting Nazi war criminals. Even as the last of them die off, he is not giving up. “There is still time to bring some of these people to justice, and we ought not fail to do that,” said Mr. Rosenbaum, director of the Office of Special Investigations, who arrived at that Justice Department agency as a summer intern in 1979, the year it was created, and became its chief in 1995. ...“It’s a few years more,” Mr. Rosenbaum said of the hunt for the last Nazis. “I don’t think that you will...

PRAGUE — Europe’s leading human rights group began an investigation on Monday into Serb allegations that Serbian civilians were abducted in Kosovo during the Kosovo war of 1998-99 and taken to Albania, where their organs were extracted for sale before they were killed. The inquiry, by the Council of Europe, based in Strasbourg, France, is being led by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator, who previously investigated the existence of alleged secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons in Europe used to interrogate terrorist suspects. The Council said Mr. Marty would meet this week with leading war crimes officials and human rights groups...

Prosecutors in Germany have formally charged alleged Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk with 27,900 counts of being an accessory to murder in World War II. The prosecutors' office in Munich said the charges had been filed on Monday. There was no immediate word on when the trial of the 89-year-old retired car worker, who was deported from the United States in May, might begin. Mr Demjanjuk has denied accusations that he was a guard at the Sobibor death camp and helped murder Jews. He says he was captured by Germans in his native Ukraine while fighting for the Red Army...

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The U.S. military said today that insurgents have capture an American soldier in eastern Afghanistan. Spokeswoman Capt. Elizabeth Mathias said the soldier went missing Tuesday.

The United States is prepared to provide more military observers, police, and civilian staff to beef up the U.N.'s far-flung peacekeeping operations, the U.S. ambassador said Monday. The United Nations has nearly 115,000 troops, police and civilians deployed in 16 peacekeeping missions from Africa and the Mideast to Cyprus, Kosovo, Western Sahara and Haiti, but it has had trouble finding soldiers, helicopters and other key assets for several important operations.

The Dutch Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the war crimes conviction of a businessman for selling chemicals to Saddam Hussein that his regime in Iraq turned into poison gas and unleashed on Kurds and Iranians. ... In May 2007 a Hague appeals court upheld Van Anraat's 2005 conviction for complicity in war crimes and increased his sentence from 15 to 17 years. ... Presiding Judge Leo van Dorst said that from the mid-1980s Van Anraat was Iraq's sole supplier of a chemical called TDG, or thiodiglycol, for its mustard gas production program. "The suspect knew ... the TDG he was...

John Rosenthal writing at Pajamas Media informs us that President Obama will probably make a stop at Dresden while on his second European trip that will climax with a speech in Normandy on June 6 marking the 65th anniversary of D-Day. Rosenthal points out a little misdirection from the administration in that they will also probably schedule a stop at Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp that Obama believes his uncle helped liberate in 1945. The message Obama intends to send by visiting both sites is clear; while the Germans did bad things during World War II, they were also victims...

Obama all of a sudden leaves the door open by way of Eric Holder on going after the Bush Adm., the change could come because this Messiah doesn't like people touching his Halo, which is exactly what Cheney did on Hannity last night.

With the mainstream liberal media distracted by Michelle Obama's $540 shoes and appearance on Sesame Street, President Obama has taken advantage of the situation by committing war crimes in Afghanistan and by abdicating his responsibility in Pakistan. As reported by the Chicago Tribune, in part: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/la-fg-afghanistan-civilians7-2009may07,0,6958477.story?track=rss"Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan - The Red Cross today lent its support to assertions by Afghan officials that dozens of civilians were killed in U.S. bomb strikes this week in an isolated district in western Afghanistan. "Villagers said dozens of people -- including women, children and elderly men -- were killed while sheltering in crowded...

BAGHDAD (AFP) — US security firm Blackwater ended its operations in Iraq on Thursday, closing a controversial era for the company whose guards shot dead 17 civilians in Baghdad in 2007. "The task order for security protection operations held by Blackwater comes to an end today in Baghdad," American embassy spokeswoman Susan Ziadeh said, adding that Triple Canopy will replace it. The US State Department on March 31 awarded Virginia-based Triple Canopy a contract reportedly worth nearly a billion dollars to take over protection of US government personnel in Iraq. Linked agreements such as that for Presidential Airways, part of...

I might have more sympathy and inclination to defend Barack Obama from Peter Brookes’ cartoon in today’s Times of London, but since it echoes an unfair attack launched by Obama himself on his predecessor, I’ll chalk this up to karma. Brookes takes a cheap shot at Obama the US for unintended civilian deaths in a recent raid in Afghanistan, in a tableau usually reserved for George W. Bush:

Human rights organizations and legal scholars are applauding the efforts of Spanish lawyers in seeking the indictment of six former officials of the George W. Bush administration in connection with the torture of detainees at the U.S. military's Guantanamo Bay prison. Some, however, think more should be done at home. Ben Wizner, attorney in the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “The idea of Spain investigating America's treatment of detainees is an embarrassment to us. Once we were the world's leading champions, not only of human rights, but of accountability. We shouldn't be depending on other...

Universal jurisdiction refers to the power of a state to legislate, adjudicate, and punish any individual for war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide committed outside its borders, even when those crimes were not committed against that country or its citizens, and even if the accused is not its citizen. The idea is that anyone who commits such atrocious, internationally condemned crimes will not be able to find shelter or hide from judgment anywhere on the globe. Human rights organizations all over the world have been instrumental in the implementation of universal jurisdiction. This has contributed to the entry of...

Captured enemy combatants presented a problem for the United States from the very beginning of the war. Since the world had not in previous wars dealt with enemies such as these, legal ground had not been firmly established. To his credit President Bush did everything he could to determine the appropriate legal methods and practices that his administration could use. Guantanamo was chosen specifically as a result of seeking an appropriate solution to the problem of housing captured enemy. When those methods were later questioned President Bush cooperated with Congress and the courts to address legal points and get them...

"Here's what I think of the atom bombs. I think if you dropped an atom bomb fifteen miles offshore and you said, "The next one's coming and hitting you," then I would think it's okay. To drop it on a city, and kill a hundred thousand people. Yeah. I think that's criminal."