Paul Handley — US threatens to arrest ICC judges who probe war crimes

"We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the US financial system, and we will prosecute them in the US criminal system," Bolton said.

"We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans."

This is the perfect example of a dominance-submission model that is characteristic of the instinctual behavior of brutes contrasted starkly with the rationality characteristic of human beings, especially in those that subscribe to Western liberalism and Western values. 

This is a throw-back in term of evolutionary theory, a type of atavism.

Here John Bolton, the national security advisor who is not elected and not accountable to anyone but the president, is speaking for the United States. This suggests the question, who actually is POTUS now anyway?

Yahoo
US threatens to arrest ICC judges who probe war crimes
Paul Handley, AFP

UPDATE:

The Hague-based court said it was an independent and impartial institution with the backing of 123 countries.
“The ICC, as a court of law, will continue to do its work undeterred, in accordance with those principles and the overarching idea of the rule of law,” it said in a statement.

Reuters

International court says it is undeterred after Bolton threatens U.S. sanctions

"France, with its European partners, supports the International Criminal Court, both in its budgetary contribution and in its cooperation with it," Foreign ministry spokeswoman Agnes von der Muhll said in a statement.

"The court must be able to act and exercise its prerogatives without hindrance, independently and impartially, within the legal framework defined by the Rome Statute," it said....

Business Insider

After Trump threats, France stands by International Criminal Court

John Rappoport — US shipped biowar materials to Iraq

Joh Rappoport reminds us of some history.

John Rappoport's Blog
US shipped biowar materials to Iraq

John Rappoport

Philip Giraldi — Why Each US President Ends Up As Ruthless Interventionist These Days

In the wake of last week’s cruise missile attack on Syria, there was a joke going around the internet saying that it doesn’t matter who Americans vote for, they always wind up getting John McCain as President of the United States. The humor derives from the fact that the past three presidents all ran for office committed to reducing America’s interventionism overseas but once in office they reversed course and expanded US military commitments worldwide, turning them into facsimiles of John McCain, who has never seen a war he didn’t like....

Pundits see the process whereby all new presidents turn into hawks as evidence of the pervasiveness of the Deep State in US foreign policy, but as the Deep State operates largely in the open in the United States, it might also be referred to as the Establishment consensus. The persistence of the Establishment view in what has become increasingly a national security state is largely due to the fact that there is little pushback against it.

The media is fully on board and Congress, which should be serving as a brake on presumed presidential prerogatives to go to war, benefits substantially from the bloated budgets and other emoluments that derive from American imperialism. Defense and related budgets grow in spite of the lack of any real threat and the public is fed a steady diet of fear by the media and government regarding fabricated threats to US national security.…

Establishment politics has meant that the United States is now a rogue nation defined by its propensity to go to war. America’s bombing of Syria is illegal, immoral, ineffective and dishonest.

Strategic Culture Foundation
Why Each US President Ends Up As Ruthless Interventionist These Days
Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer, now Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest

David Lindorff — President Trump’s War Crime is Worse than the One He Accuses Assad of

The single most important thing that happened Friday night when the US military on President Trump’s orders launched a wave of over 100 cruise missiles against Syria was that once again the US violated the most profound international law of war: initiating a war of aggression against a nation that posed no threat, imminent or otherwise, to the US or its allies.

Called a “Crime against Peace,” this violation (whose perpetrators, under the precedent set in the Nuremberg Trials that followed World War II, can face capital punishment), is considered worse than any other war crime because, as US Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson explained in his argument at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals, a war of aggressionis “not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”...

That goes for May and Macron, too.

The American, British and French people should horrified and ashamed. This is sinking too the lowest level, commonly associated with Hitler and the Nazis. 

Nuremberg not only condemned them but also made an example of them as a warning to future leaders. 

Trump, May, and Macron ignored the message.

This puts senior officials and military of the US, UK and France at legal jeopardy along with their leaders. The Nuremberg defense of following orders was rejected and a precedent established. They all know this, and ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Counterpunch
President Trump’s War Crime is Worse than the One He Accuses Assad of

David Lindorff

See also at Counterpunch

Donald Trump, Theresa May, and Emmanuel Macron are war criminals.

They’re certainly not the first war criminals to hold positions of power in their countries.

Every living former US president with the possible — possible — exception of Jimmy Carter has a lot to answer for, as do Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, et al....

Trump Isn’t the First War Criminal President. He Should be the Last.
Thomas Knapp

Kevin Gosztola — Who’s Who Of American War Criminals And Torture Apologists Endorse Gina Haspel For CIA Director

The narrative now is "Assad cannot be allowed to normalize use of chemical weapons."

The US has already normalized the use of torture and illegal aggression.

Firedoglake
Who’s Who Of American War Criminals And Torture Apologists Endorse Gina Haspel For CIA Director

Kevin Gosztola | managing editor of Shadowproof Press and producer and co-host of the weekly podcast, "Unauthorized Disclosure"

Philip Giraldi on the Good Friday massacre at Gaza

And Nikki Haley at the U.N. has also used the U.S. veto to block any independent inquiry into the violence, demonstrating once again that the White House team is little more than Israel’s echo chamber. America’s enabling of the brutal reality that is today’s Israel makes it fully complicit in the war crimes carried out against the helpless and hapless Palestinian people....

It's significant that Col. Lang choose to repost this at his place considering that Giraldi has been ostracized for daring to criticize Israel previously.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Giraldi on the Good Friday massacre at GazaCol. W. Patrick Lang, US Army (ret.)

At the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lang was the Defense Intelligence Officer (DIO) for the Middle East, South Asia and counter-terrorism, and later, the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. At the DIA, he was a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service. He participated in the drafting of National Intelligence Estimates. From 1992 to 1994, all the U.S. military attachés worldwide reported to him. During that period, he also briefed President George H. W. Bush at the White House, as he had during Operation Desert Storm.

He was also the head of intelligence analysis for the Middle East for seven or eight years at that institution. He was the head of all the Middle East and South Asia analysis in DIA for counter-terrorism for seven years. For his service in the DIA, Lang received the Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Executive. — Wikipedia

See also

Common Dreams
Where Every Bullet Landed
Abby Zimet

Patrick Cockburn — It’s time we saw economic sanctions for what they really are – war crimes

The record of economic sanctions in forcing political change is dismal, but as a way of reducing a country to poverty and misery it is difficult to beat. UN sanctions were imposed against Iraq from 1990 until 2003. Supposedly, it was directed against Saddam Hussein and his regime, though it did nothing to dislodge or weaken them: on the contrary, the Baathist political elite took advantage of the scarcity of various items to enrich themselves by becoming the sole suppliers.…

There is nothing very new in this. Economic sanctions are like a medieval siege but with a modern PR apparatus attached to justify what is being done. A difference is that such sieges used to be directed at starving out a single town or city while now they are aimed at squeezing whole countries into submission....

Non-combatants bear the brunt of economic warfare. This is not "collateral damage." A civilian population is targeted intentionally in the expectation of fomenting internal strife that will weaken the regime, and ideally spark revolt.

Independent (UK)

It’s time we saw economic sanctions for what they really are – war crimes

Patrick Cockburn

Zachary Keck — Report: Americans Support Use of Nuclear Weapons If It Saves Lives of U.S. Military

As Sagan and Valentino note, the results speak for themselves. “The main conclusions of these survey experiments are clear,” they write. “The majority of the U.S. public has not internalized either a belief in the nuclear taboo or a strong noncombatant immunity norm. When faced with realistic scenarios in which they are forced to contemplate a trade-off between sacrificing a large number of U.S. troops in combat or deliberately killing even larger numbers of foreign noncombatants, the majority of respondents approve of killing civilians in an effort to end the war.”

The results do strongly suggest the nuclear taboo and norm against targeting civilians have not taken hold, at least among the American public.…

Perhaps the most important lesson of the survey is that it is imperative to cultivate strong, far-sighted leaders to guide the country abroad. After all, respondents suggested they were willing to support a president’s decision even if it was not their preferred choice. The need for far-sighted leadership is especially pressing at a time when improved accuracy is giving America the ability to use smaller nuclear bombs that cause far less civilian casualties. In the wrong hands, these bombs could be tempting to use, even though doing so would let the nuclear cat out of the bag, with uncertain and potentially catastrophic repercussions.  

The National Interest
Report: Americans Support Use of Nuclear Weapons If It Saves Lives of U.S. Military
Zachary Keck

Todd E. Pierce — The U.S. Hypocrisy of ‘Human Rights’

Failing to prosecute war crimes is in itself a war crime under international law, and, to use the words of the “Office of Global Criminal Justice,” the opposite of its mission to “expose the truth,” and “judge those responsible.” But taking matters a step further, the U.S. government has designed a legal procedure to deny protection and assistance to victims. This is exactly what leaders of countries that are in line for U.S.-sponsored regime change are routinely accused of doing by the Office of Global Criminal Justice.… 

That was what German military and Gestapo officers said of the prisons they worked in when they went on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg. Most common as their legal defense against war crime charges was that the defendants were only following “superior orders,” in German, “Befehl ist Befehl” (“orders are orders”) — a tactic now known as the Nuremberg defense. In other words, the earlier generation of war criminals effectively claimed their actions were “within their scope of employment.” That defense didn’t work at Nuremberg for Germans, but it works now for U.S. officials in U.S. courts.

The closing the Office of Global Criminal Justice just makes official what has been U.S. policy since 9/11. If it is true that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then the U.S. government has showered tribute upon vice with the hypocrisy of the Office of Global Criminal Justice. If it closes, it means we won’t even pay tribute anymore to virtue, preferring to fully embrace vice in a display of our “authenticity.” And that may be the one example where the “Office of Global Criminal Justice” fulfills its mission to “expose the truth.”

Takes people with no honor and no shame. In other words, low life. And fish rot from the head.

Consortium News
The U.S. Hypocrisy of ‘Human Rights’
(Ret.) Maj. Todd E. Pierce, former Army judge advocate general defense attorney at Guantanamo Bay detention center, Cuba

This article originally appeared at The American Conservative at http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/tillerson-mulls-closing-of-war-crimes-office/

See also

PBS’ Anti-Russia Propaganda Series

Rick Sterling

Stephan Richter — The liberal international order: Just who shredded it?

Smackdown.

To see where we are — the United States needs to take a look at it's recent past.…

The truth is that it wasn’t Putin — or even Trump now — as much as George W. Bush and his reckless foreign policy cowboys — remember Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, all names that should live in infamy — who did most of the shredding of that liberal international order.

They committed acts of war that were clearly criminal in nature. Their only saving grace was — and is — that they have a U.S. passport.

Otherwise, they would all find themselves in the dock at the ICC in The Hague, where indeed they belong.…

Still, Obama did not break with his predecessor’s Bush league approach. Deliberately obscure mandates in Iraq simply changed topic, gone were the torture memos, in where drone strike memos.

Put yourself into the shoes of a Russian or Chinese policymaker for a moment – and ask any one of these four questions:

Salon
The liberal international order: Just who shredded it?
Stephan Richter | the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Globalist

Publius Tacitus — Donald Trump Is An International Law Breaker

Donald Trump's decision to launch cruise missile strikes on a Syrian Air Force Base was based on a lie. In the coming days the American people will learn that the Intelligence Community knew that Syria did not drop a military chemical weapon on innocent civilians in Idlib. Here is what happened:

****

Donald Trump will most likely not finish his term as President. He will be impeached, I believe, once Congress is presented with irrefutable proof that he ignored and rejected intelligence that did not support the myth that Syria attacked with chemical weapons.

Strong stuff. SST is a venue featuring former military and intel personnel.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Donald Trump Is An International Law Breaker

Publius Tacitus

Iraqi officials said Wednesday that they had removed nearly 300 bodies from the site of an apparent airstrike in west Mosul, the largest civilian death toll since the battle against Islamic State began more than two years ago and among the deadliest incidents in decades of modern warfare.

More bodies were being removed Wednesday as the U.S.-led coalition investigated whether it was responsible, Iraqi officials blamed Islamic State, and the injured continued to suffer....

Los Angeles Times
Nearly 300 died in Mosul airstrike, making it one of the deadliest attacks on civilians in recent memory

Molly Hennessy-Fiske | Contact Reporter

David Filipov and Anne Gearan — Russia condemns U.S. missile strike on Syria, suspends key air agreement

“President Putin considers the American strikes against Syria an aggression against a sovereign government in violations of the norms of international law, and under a far-fetched pretext,” Peskov told reporters.

Nuremberg redux? Trump and his cohort, political, intel and military, are only the latest. The trials should include Bush/Cheney and then Obama and include all those involved in illegal aggression and torture as a policy, which are among the most serious war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It should also extend to the leaders, political, military and intel, of US vassals involved, and Tony Blair in particular.

I would also like to see Zbigniew Brzezinski in the dock of proposing arming radical Islamists in the Carter Administration, and Jimmy Carter should answer, too. And Bill Clinton and his cohorts, including NATO cohorts that signed on, for unilaterally attacking Serbia.

 Those found guilty should be accorded the punishment accorded the Nazis and the Japanese for their war crimes.

The damage attributable to minor players accuse of war crimes like Milosevic, Hussein, Gaddafi and Assad pales in comparison with that the above people have wrought.

The Washington Post
Russia condemns U.S. missile strike on Syria, suspends key air agreement

David Filipov and Anne Gearan

Viktor Astafyev — Russian MOD fires back at CIA director: "America invented the scorched earth tactic"

Earlier, the CIA Director John Brennan has accused Russia of using "scorched earth" policy in Syria, noting that the United States would never have operated in this manner in any armed conflict.

"What Russia did in Syria, using the "scorched earth" tactics, which led to the destruction and the deaths of thousands of civilians, the USA would never do in any of military conflicts," - said Brennan in an interview with PBS.

The article reviews evidence showing that scorched earth has been US policy since WWII — use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, carpet bombing with B-52s, use of Agent Orange in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and many more.

Oh, and about that torture.

Fort RussRussian

MOD fires back at CIA director: "America invented the scorched earth tactic"
Viktor Astafyev, Russian RT - Translated by Kristina Kharlova

RT — 'War crimes of torture': ICC prosecutor signals charges against US armed forces, CIA

The US may have committed war crimes of torture, cruel treatment and rape, when it interrogate dozens of people in Afghanistan between 2003 and 2014, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor said.…

RT
'War crimes of torture': ICC prosecutor signals charges against US armed forces, CIA

Robert Parry — Good Deaths in Mosul, Bad Deaths in Aleppo

US double-standard, because "exceptionalism." The larger title is. US, good; Russia, China, Iran and anyone else the US elite disagrees with, bad.

Meanwhile, Americans are distracted by pussy and booty.

Consortium News
Good Deaths in Mosul, Bad Deaths in Aleppo

Robert Parry

Reuters
Islamic State said to use human shields as coalition advances on Mosul

The United Nations has said the Mosul battle could leave as many as 1 million people homeless.

"There's a chance, maybe a significant chance, that it's going to be fewer people than we expect, but of course it would be dangerous to assume that," the senior State Department official said.

Reuters
For U.S. and Obama, Mosul campaign is calculated risk

RT
‘Get out, Erdogan!’ Huge demo in Baghdad protests Turkey’s Iraq presence

Nadia Prupis — New Documents Show US Knew Helping Saudis in Yemen Could Be War Crime

Officials doubted Saudi military could target Houthi militants without hurting civilians or destroying infrastructure, Reuters reports

Common Dreams
New Documents Show US Knew Helping Saudis in Yemen Could Be War Crime
Nadia Prupis, staff writer

James Petras Website — Barbarism in Words and Deeds, plus The Intercept on CIA Torture.

Who are the barbarians here?

James Petras Website
Barbarism in Words and Deeds
James Petras | Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Also

The Intercept
Former CIA Detainees Describe Previously Unknown Torture Tactic: A Makeshift Electric Chair
Alex Emmons

Paul R. Pillar — Trump Hypes a New ‘War on Terror’

Donald Trump has urged a new “war on terror” that brings back torture and seeks revenge on terrorists’ families, but another problem with the Republican nominee’s approach is his exaggeration of the danger, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

Consortium News
Trump Hypes a New ‘War on Terror’

Paul R. Pillar

Harper on the 28 pages

Timing is everything, and the timing of George Bush's decision to classify the 28 page chapter is a perfect case in point. In December 2002, when the President banned the publication of the chapter, the Administration was in the final phases of planning the invasion of Iraq. The two "reasons" given for the plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein were: He was amassing weapons of mass destruction, and he had been behind 9/11.

Had the chapter been published, it would have been near impossible for Bush and Tony Blair to get away with the Iraq invasion. It would have been like FDR announcing he was declaring war against China, not Japan after Pearl Harbor.

The issues behind the evidence of Saudi involvement in 9/11--whether at the very top of the regime and the Monarchy, as former Joint Inquiry co-chairman Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) insists, or at some mid-level where Al Qaeda sympathizers had resources to pour into the 9/11 plot--are still with us, and will not be laid to rest by the release of the 28 pages.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Harper on the 28 pages
Col. W. Patrick Lang, US Army (ret.), former military intelligence officer at the US Defense Intelligence Agency

Gilbert Doctorow — Brexit, the Chilcot Report and why we must prosecute our own war criminals

If we as a nation are to learn anything from the human tragedy we have sponsored in the Middle East over the past thirteen years, up to the ongoing civil war in Syria which our proxies among Gulf States enflame, then we must prosecute the war criminals In high office, whatever their party affiliation.

Why We Should Prosecute Our Own War Criminals.

Une parole franche
Brexit, the Chilcot Report and why we must prosecute our own war criminals

Gilbert Doctorow | European Coordinator of The American Committee for East West Accord Ltd.