Cross-posted from Humanitarian Left.
If so, what is the point of codifying them in the first place? Humiliation of the losing side?
In the nearly decade long struggle to bring charges against those who committed torture under our banner, not even the silly old phrase "it is only a crime if you get caught" applies anymore.
As has been pointed out, President Obama has been right to assert, on a handful of occasions, that certain practices committed during the Bush administration- especially waterboarding- constitute torture.
Our government has not only been exposed by human rights activists over the past ten years, but our president even admits these crimes!
And yet, there remains no visible action to bring those who ordered and carried out crimes against humanity to justice.
Does the body of war crime legislation only pertain to losers? If so, what is the point? Why even bother? The United States is not going to be militarily defeated anytime soon.
American civilians have, by and large, been spared the horrors of war. The mass rape, the decimation of the population, looting, pillaging, wanton destruction, starvation, rampant disease, the loss of essential territory, the cultural loss of heartlands, and all the other unspeakable crimes against humanity that come with warfare.
We have been spared. The nation remains undefeated. An army can lose a battle. It can even withdraw from a war. But when our country is intact, its population burgeoning, its wealth accumulating (and not always just at the top), withdraw can hardly be construed as a loss.
We choose when to end our wars.
And just as the choice to end a war is ours, the choice to prosecute criminals is also in our hands.
The American people are the only ones who can make the decision to investigate, charge, and prosecute the most heinous crimes committed by our government. By choosing to "look forward" rather than pursue justice, what message are we sending to the rest of the world?
The message, it seems, is loud and clear: war crimes only matter if you lose. And you better not lose. Because if you do, well- be ready to lose your head.
It is an admission those of us who believe in the rule of law do not want to make. That might equals right. At the end of the day, those with the power to inflict physical harm are above the law. It means we are not equal under the law.
It means that the law might as well not even exist. Every day we choose not to follow our legal and moral obligation to fight for justice is another day in which the moral foundation underlying the criminalization of war crimes and crimes against humanity crumbles. Since the beginning, these laws have been dogged as being nothing more than tools with which victors humiliate and punish defeated enemies for their failure to win and, thereby, ignore the same actions perpetrated by their side.
If the enforcement of these laws is not equitable, and is not expected to be, then what is preventing the commission of these crimes if victory is assured?
To be clear, this does not make us responsible for crimes against humanity committed elsewhere. But it does send a message that you have nothing to fear as long as you keep winning.
When given the choice- over the past decade- to uphold the law, to face the darkest behaviors known to humanity, our government has repeatedly chosen to choose political expediency over justice.
It is time for us to choose. Do we choose to hold ourselves to a higher standard? Or do we succumb to the dark forces that construe themselves as "reality" and fling aside these laws as childish things?
Either way is more honest than the current paradigm in which we claim to stand for justice and liberty while allowing publicly acknowledged heinous crimes to go unpunished.
I, however, choose the former. It is high time for President Obama to begin the criminal investigation of the crimes committed by our nation. Even if that means resignation and arrest of his person.
After all,
The power of fate is a wonder; dark, terrible wonder.
Neither wealth nor armies, towered walls nor ships,
Black hulls lashed by the salt, can save us from that force.
-Sophocles