But I’m not the one who wrote up and enacted an item of United States legislation known as the War Crimes Act which mandates the death penalty for precisely the sort of crimes we are talking about. That was done by the “Robbespierres” of the U.S. Congress. I’m merely advocating the application of existing law.

If you think the War Crimes Act is a lousy piece of legislation, I’m happy to hear your arguments. If on the other hand, the point is that United States officials, (you know, the people who actually HAVE shed “buckets of blood” in this world) ought to be immune from the law, that’s also your prerogative. Obviously, many disagree, particularly the survivors of My Lai, Haditha, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib and all the other U.S. torture chambers, the Iraq war overall (a stupendous war crime), and so forth.

Famous author and Charles Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has just released a book calling for Bush to be tried for murder. He says the case is exceptionally strong and as prosecutor, he would seek the death penalty. (Bugliosi has never lost a murder case.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/business/media/07bugliosi.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=bugliosi&st=cse&oref=slogin

Former Reagan admin Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts happens to have a fine article today speaking to the topic of American hypocrisy concerning war crimes:

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07162008.html

the failure to execute Harry Truman laid the groundwork for the subsequent half-century of genocide

I’m always amused by uber-leftists like you who seem to believe that the law exists in some sort of exalted palace and that it must be interpreted as absolute & immutable. People like you remind me of the Robbespierres of the world. Seeking to attain universal justice through shedding buckets of blood.

Unfortunately, law in reality exists in a real & imperfect world. It is applied the best and most consistent way possible. Perfect justice is never done. I don’t think our Founding Fathers ever foresaw executing the nation’s chief executive and I’m not surprised it’s never happened. I’m so thankfully absolutists like you will never control the levers of power.

I sympathize with many of the crimes you speak about & acknowledge their severity. I don’t acknowledge yr remedy as being either possible or desirable.

Ditto for Bob Kerry, who revealed his participation in a massacre in Indochina in which he murdered civilians and slit the throat of an elderly man. No indictment. No nothing. He wasn’t even forced to step down as Dean of the (supposedly progressive) New School in New York. The matter has long since been forgotten, (though presumably, the memory remains indelible for the residents of Thanh Phong village).

Such is the society we have created, one viewed by the civilized world with appropriate revulsion.

I would say in particular, that the failure to execute Harry Truman laid the groundwork for the subsequent half-century of genocide by the United States. Once you declare that the deliberate incineration of two civilian population centers with atomic weapons is not a war crime, you basically say that there is no such thing as a war crime so far as the U.S is concerned. This is precisely the premise we have operated under since WWII, (with predictably horrifying results).

Israel, of course, takes a somewhat different approach. They have simply legalized war crimes such as house demolitions, assassinations, use of human shields, targeting of civilians, destruction of infrastructure essential to life, expulsions and torture. The Bush administration, apparently inspired by this can-do spirit, has sought to bring the law into consonance with longstanding US policy, declaring the Geneva Conventions “quaint”, legalizing wars of aggression, denial of habeas corpus, torture and what have you.

Well, I’ll be damned. You’re right. Which shows yet another judgment of Chomsky’s with which I disagree.

http://www.chomsky.info/talks/1990—-.htm

As I say, the point is uncontroversial, just as my claim that Teddy Roosevelt, an architect of major genocide, was clearly deserving of the death penalty, unless one follows Roosevelt’s view that these particular victims of slaughter were non-people and therefore deserving of their fate.

Teddy Roosevelt’s exterminationist mindset is of a piece with McCain’s, so they are legitimate soul mates. Roosevelt’s horrific book “Winning the West” ought to be placed alongside fellow white supremacist Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf and indeed, Hitler was a great admirer of Roosevelt’s sick degeneracy, as John Toland makes clear in his excellent Hitler biography:

“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa And for the Indians in the Wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination-by starvation and uneven combat-of the ‘Red Savages’ who could not be tamed by captivity. (John Toland, “Adolf Hitler” Vol II, p 802, Doubleday & Co, 1976)

Of course, nearly every US president after WWII should have been executed, if one follows the law and applies the principle of universality. Chomsky made this point and it’s rather uncontroversial if one examines the record of criminal behavior and compares this with the prescribed punishment for such behavior according to established law.