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A year is too long to spend at a crime scene with people shooting at you. Attorney General Eric Holder made an "unannounced" visit with Assistant U.S. Attorneys in Manhattan yesterday about the planned prosecution there of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four additional 9/11 conspirators. Also yesterday, NBC New York spot polling indicated that 82% became furious when word leaked "a federal grand jury in New York is [secretly] now hearing evidence and testimony" as prosecutors seek a federal indictment of the five. Perhaps coincidentally, one 9/11 family member's commentary appeared and offered, "In four years, America can hold Obama...

Sins of the General’s Part 5: Political Equivocation at the BOI http://warchronicle.com/DefendOurMarines/Weimann/SinsOfGenerals_PartFive.htm “Moreover, defense attempts to disqualify Brig. Gen. Lewis Craparotta, the President and senior member of the Board, who during pre-hearing questioning expressed a personal view that investigating every civilian death is the right approach because “that’s the way to protect Marines,” also failed. Defense attorney LtCol Shelburne had challenged the fact that he was sitting on the Board of Inquiry with a pre-existing opinion of what to do in a similar situation as LtCol Chessani.” Folks, if the defense wanted to disqualify General Craparotta at LtCol. Chessani’s BOI,...

Imagine if President Obama went to Oslo next week to receive his Nobel Peace Prize and was arrested for purported war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. This bit of historical irony would be possible under an argument being made by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Mr. Ocampo claims jurisdiction over actions of U.S. troops in Afghanistan because Kabul in 2003 acceded to the Rome Statute, which established the court. He said a preliminary examination already is under way regarding possible American culpability in crimes against humanity.

The attorney general has suggested that those who oppose prosecuting these men here in New York City are afraid – that we somehow don’t have the courage to face Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in court. How dare this man, who didn’t have the decency to notify victims’ families of his decision to bring these monsters here, imply that we lack courage. Courage is carrying on after watching your loved ones die, in real time, knowing that they burned to death, were crushed to death, or jumped from 100 flights high. Courage is carrying on, even as we waited, in some cases...

For decades these petulant little communists have moaned every time America has defended itself, and the rest of the world, from evil. If there was ever any doubt in your mind, that the left hates America and wants it destroyed, this should alleviate those doubts.

Unreal. Team Obama may allow US soldiers to be tried in the Hague for war crimes. The Wall Street Journal reported, via Jihad Watch: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “great regret” in August that the U.S. is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC). This has fueled speculation that the Obama administration may reverse another Bush policy and sign up for what could lead to the trial of Americans for war crimes in The Hague. The ICC’s chief prosecutor, though, has no intention of waiting for Washington to submit to the court’s authority. Luis Moreno Ocampo says...

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed "great regret" in August that the U.S. is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC). This has fueled speculation that the Obama administration may reverse another Bush policy and sign up for what could lead to the trial of Americans for war crimes in The Hague. The ICC's chief prosecutor, though, has no intention of waiting for Washington to submit to the court's authority. Luis Moreno Ocampo says he already has jurisdiction—at least with respect to Afghanistan. Because Kabul in 2003 ratified the Rome Statute—the ICC's founding treaty—all soldiers on Afghan territory,...

Revenge of the Iraqi detainees: Brett Favre jokes Fri Nov 20,2009 By Rick Chandler You think you know how to torture, America? Waterboarding is for schoolchildren. Detainees locked in an internment camp in Iraq are mocking their captors -- members of the Wisconsin National Guard -- with Brett Favre jokes. Evil bastards! It all started when the National Guardsmen began decorating their trucks and other areas of Camp Cropper with Packers colors recently. The prisoners picked up on it, did some research (Wiraqipedia?), and began with the Favre barbs. What goes around comes around, I suppose. I blame Dick Cheney....

The genocide trial of Radovan Karadzic went ahead without him Tuesday, with prosecutors branding him "supreme commander" of an ethnic cleansing campaign in the 1992-95 Bosnian war. "This case is about that supreme commander, a man who harnessed the forces of nationalism, hatred and fear to implement his vision of an ethnically separated Bosnia: Radovan Karadzic," prosecutor Alan Tieger told the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Mr. Karadzic, who faces 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, had "ethnically cleansed vast portions of Bosnia and Hercegovina" during the war that claimed some...

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...