I put this first bit together to make it easier to grasp the depth and breadth of this scholarly and legal indictment.
Scholar Names Top US War Criminals
More Than Thirty Top U.S. Officials Guilty of War Crimes
According to the distinguished American international law authority, Francis Boyle, a Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois, Champaign, and the author of numerous books on the subject, “More than 30 top U.S. officials, including presidents G.W. Bush and Obama, are guilty of war crimes or crimes against peace and humanity,” and “legally akin to those perpetrated by the former Nazi regime in Germany.” “In international legal terms, the U.S. government itself should now be viewed as constituting an ongoing criminal conspiracy under international law,” Boyle said in an address Dec. 9th to the Puerto Rican Summit Conference on Human Rights at the University of the Sacred Heart in San Juan. The serial aggressions of the U.S. violate such basic documents of international law as the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, Boyle said. As well, they violate the Pentagon’s own U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 on The Law of Land Warfare, which applies to the President himself as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Armed Forces under Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. U.S. administrations since 9/11 may be charged with “crimes against peace” for their attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, “and perhaps their longstanding threatened war of aggression against Iran,” Boyle said. Boyle said the so-called “targeted killing” of human beings in a non-battlefield situation is “pure murder” under basic principles of Anglo-American common law and international criminal law. And in this case, where these murders are both widespread and systematic, these murders constitute a Crime against Humanity under Article 7(1)(a) of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court. Although the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, Boyle said, “nevertheless President Obama is subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC and its Prosecutor for murdering people in ICC member States.”
Boyle's List of War Criminals:
Civilian
Both presidents since 2001
Their vice-presidents – Dick Cheney and Joseph Biden
Secretaries of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta
Secretaries of State Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and Hillary Clinton
National Security Advisors Stephen Hadley, James Jones, and Thomas Donilon
Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and James Clapper
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Directors George Tenet, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus
Military
Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Some Regional Commanders-in-Chiefs, especially for the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), and more recently, AFRICOM
Chairman General Martin Dempsey, U.S. Army
JCS members including Admiral James Winnefeld Jr.; General Raymond Odierno, Chief of Staff of the Army; General James Amos, Commandant of the Marine Corps; Admiral Jonathan Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations; and General Mark Welsh, Chief of Staff of the Air Force
Central Command heads since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan include Lt. General Martin Dempsey; Admiral William Fallon; General John Abizaid; General Tommy Franks; Lt. General John Allen; and current commander General James Mattis. General Carter Ham of AFRICOM bears like responsibility.
2012 More Than Thirty Top U.S. Officials Guilty of War Crimes
Phi Beta Iota: Absent indictment and conviction, these two lists are notional. However, given the establishment of a commission in Geneva to bring suit against the CIA for extrajudicial drone killings, and the Italian court conviction of CIA employees proven to have participated in rendition for torture (and against the wrong person, to boot), we do anticipate a major wave of anti-US judicial proceedings as well as a smaller wave of vigilante killings of select CIA employees, sadly those most easily identified rather than those that might be most deserving in the eyes of those seeking to “attack” the CIA as an institution. The Secret Service lost a lot of its spirit when it moved to DHS, they are still as good as it gets, and they are useless against a suicidal team. Lot's to think about here.
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