....LMB: "War Crime and Punishment"....

Hey --- that's a great way to encourage the Iraqis to surrender!! Tell them that "Hangin'" George Bush will invoke the death penalty on them. Gotta hand it to the Bushistas ... just when you think they've topped themselves, they do it again!

This shouldn't be too surprising, though.

On page 31 of our new National Security Strategy, the author states that "We will take the actions necessary to ensure that our efforts to meet our global security commitments and protect Americans are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court, whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept."

If "we" won't be tried by the ICC, then "we" certainly won't stand for it doing justly what "we" can do in a manner that promotes our global expansion.

This has been going on for years. Reagan refused to let "us" be tried in the World Court for our terrorism in Nicaragua (Chomsky's 9-11, page 42). Assuming the authority of a greater, diversified system of justice is no great leap past refuting its power, though, it is obviously contradictory and deleterious.

One blinding hypocrisy in all of this is the U.S.'s desire to globalize its economy while ignoring the responsibility to the global community. It is a larger version of a corporation planting a factory in the middle of rural America without caring about how its toxic by-products destroy the surrounding community or how its closing of that one plant disastrously alters the lives in the community. As long as the corporation can afford better lawyers, the community it has hurt will likely lose a lawsuit. (As long as the U.S. acts as though it is the World Court, the world will lose to it.)

Everything evil that the U.S. visits upon places abroad is usually analogous to an evil that the U.S. has visited upon a portion of its citizenry (e.g., foreign occupation: eminent domain).

"We" will never take responsibility for our extra-border actions if "we" never take responsibility for actions in our own backyard--as Wendell Berry more succinctly states in his essay at the following site:

http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/03-2om/Berry.html

WE are the World Court? Cool. Do we get to wear crowns and robes and stuff?
*shaking head, rubbing eyeballs*
This is unbelievable. When did it become acceptable for us (U.S.) to dodge under the social safety net of accountability?
At what point did we knock the chip off our own shoulders and start bitch-slapping the world into shape?
We are turning into the drunken, drooling, Dad that used to come home and beat up Mom for the slightest provocation. And then telling the police to fuck off.

To answer Kate's question of when we started doing these terriblr things. It was around 9am on 9-11-01. Up until that time the whining left wing had our hands tied. 9-11 woke up the giant.
God bless America, and God help our enemies.
Pre-emptive strikes against entities we deem a threat are the only way we will maintain our way of life.

Attaboy, tony! You tell 'em.

I just hope to Christ we get whoever has the nukes before they get us though, huh?

The only problem I see with the preemption door is that it like those wooden swinging doors you always see in saloons in old westerns. They swing both ways and when the guy in the white hat tells the bad guy "After I'm done slapping around this blind guy with no legs I'm coming after you."

That usually gives the other bad guy time to get his double barreled shotgun and sneak up on the good guy while he's stomping the blind legless bad guy.

On wait. With actions like that, maybe he isn't the good guy.

"Pre-emptive strikes against entities we deem a threat are the only way we will maintain our way of life." <-- This is the most selfish and backward thinking that has plagued America today. In the middle ages, (before mid-15th century) when feudal social structure rewarded the nobles with power and autonomy, peasants and small middle-class population suffered severely from social and economic depression. Reformists were suppressed and killed. People who spoke the truth and tried to change the devastating way of life was ex-communicated. History has finally found its way to repeat itself in this century. And, we have Bush to thank for this, including his republican supporters and sympathizers for perpetuating a false sense of reality that we can wage war with anybody we please in the name of oil, power and money.

First of all, I love your site. Thank you for sharing your hard work with us. Secondly, I think the hidden motive for wanting to try US enemies under US law instead of International law is two-fold. 1. It will be easier to win on home turf; and, most importantly, corporations,like Dyncorp, a wholly owned subsidiary of VP Cheney's company Halliburton, gets to build more POW camps like the Camp x-ray (where do they get these names?!) in Cuba and make more profit for our VP who is still receiving deferred compensation from Halliburton. Dyncorp also builds new bases so war is very profitable for Halliburton.