“war crime is when war I don’t like and the more I don’t like it the war crime-y-er it is” - average person discussing war crimes of modern presidents
For the record, Bush is guilty of legitimate war crimes (sanctioning the torture of PoWs) and crimes against peace (the unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Iraq), and Trump is quite possibly guilty of war crimes (his advocacy of ‘killing the families’ of enemy combatants combined with the fact that he removed the transparency from our drone strike program is… suspicious, to say the least) but shit will leak out from that administration for years to come yet.
Obama and Biden probably do not count as war criminals. Killing enemy combatants is legally unproblematic. However, the acceptance of high collateral damage and relatively low certainty of identification may qualify them, depending on how you see the matter of drone strikes vs. traditional methods. It would be a much tougher sell at the Hague.
EDIT: It was pointed out below that Obama is more likely a war criminal due to the approval of legally dubious ‘double-tap’ drone strikes which presume first responders to militants are militants themselves.
“war crime is when war I don’t like and the more I don’t like it the war crime-y-er it is” - average person discussing war crimes of modern presidents
Literally.
Obama and Biden probably do not count as war criminals
Obama is definitely a war criminal. For the Kunduz hospital strike, or if you think he’s not responsible for that personally, then for his approval of “double tap” drone strikes, where after the first drone strike on people they suspect might be terrorists they would wait for first responders to come help, and then send another strike on them assuming they are also terrorists, despite international law stating they must assume people are non combatants until they can prove otherwise.
Obama is definitely a war criminal. For the Kunduz hospital strike,
I don’t really see how that incident is on him.
or if you think he’s not responsible for that personally, then for his approval of “double tap” drone strikes, where after the first drone strike on people they *suspect might_ be terrorists they would wait for first responders to come help, and then send another strike on them assuming they are also terrorists, despite international law stating they must assume people are non combatants until they can prove otherwise.
Yeah, that’s much more likely to make him a war criminal.
The idea being that as the leader of the country the buck stops with him. But I acknowledged that not everyone will view it that way, and included the other, less debatable example too.
The idea being that as the leader of the country the buck stops with him.
That the buck stops with him doesn’t make him personally responsible for every decision made by people under his command. If that was the case, it would be literally impossible to not be a criminal in any position of power - if GI Joe chooses to drive drunk on a Saturday night, that nets you a DUI. ‘The buck stops here’ means that the president must ultimately take responsibility for the decision-making that comes to his desk. It doesn’t mean “GI Joe’s DUI is your DUI”, it means “When GI Joe’s DUI comes to your desk, what you decide cannot be blamed on anyone else - this is your duty to make the big decisions and own up to what happens.”
In the Kunduz hospital strike, that meant a rare admission of guilt from the US government and reparations. If you think that’s not enough - then the buck stops with Obama. It’s his fault that more was not done in response to the incident. But the strike itself was not ordered or authorized by him, and can’t be reasonably blamed on him simply because he’s the CiC.
whether they’re war criminals isn’t a democratic opinion. there are experts that know the laws and check if the president’s actions go against them.
it’s the same with the vaccine discussion. saying “vaccines make children autistic” has nothing to do with ‘participating in democracy’. the people who are saying this bullshit obviously don’t have the right credentials and therefore can’t make a qualified statement to whether vaccines are safe or not.
Something doesn’t have to be illegal to be criminal. Using such a narrow definition serves to privilege those who write laws for their own benefit and is a crime* against those who are brutalized under systems without legal protections.
*This word is being used with the definition of “A serious offense, especially one in violation of morality.” This is not referring to any laws nor is it suggesting there should be legal punishment for having bad takes.
They didn’t say the presidents were criminals, they said they were war criminals, which does have a specific legal definition based on specific laws. Ones that many world leaders, including us presidents, abuse on a regular basis sure, but whether someone qualifies as a war criminal specifically is very much a legal matter, not just a moral one. That said, you don’t have to be an expert to know laws or accuse people of breaking them, you just need to be an expert to navigate the legal system effectively, which in an ideal world is intended to ensure that the laws are upheld fairly. Unfortunately we don’t live in an ideal world.
Something doesn’t have to be illegal to be criminal. […] This word is being used with the definition of “A serious offense, especially one in violation of morality.”
we’re talking about war crimes not crimes in general. a war criminal is someone who commits war crimes. according to britannica a war crime is a “serious violation of the laws or customs of war as defined by international customary law and international treaties.” this has nothing to do with morality it is pure jurisprudence.
Following the Nuremberg principals they would actually all be war criminals, but of course those principals only apply if they are convenient. So clearly all these people with credentials are massively hypothetical just like everyone else.
And for vaccines: almost no one is educated sufficiently in the field of immunology to judge for themselves if the vaccine is safe, so you are always dependent on trust. And if the government has over and over again shown to be completely untrustworthy, by for example starting a war (where more then two hundred thousand people died) based on lies, or bailing out the perpetrators of the biggest financial crisis in living memory, then who can blame them for not trusting the government when it tells them to trust the vaccine. It’s unfortunate but not unexpected.
Following the Nuremberg principals they would actually all be war criminals
ok let’s just say that you know what you’re talking about and that this is true. why would you hold todays presidents accountable according to laws 80 years in the past? like everyone else, the should be convicted according to todays laws, if they broke them.
almost no one is educated sufficiently in the field of immunology to judge for themselves
yes, this is why you believe the people who know the science, who studied immunology/law
you are always dependent on trust. And if the government has over and over again shown to be completely untrustworthy…
regarding vaccines you don’t have to trust the government, you have to trust the scientists. just because the government (who isn’t trustworthy) trusts them too, doesn’t mean they’re suddenly wrong. as for the war criminal debate this means that if the government says that the presidents aren’t war criminals, you don’t have to believe them. you have to believe the experts who studied law on whether the presidents did something illegal or not.
all I’m saying is that it isn’t an opinion whether someone is a criminal, there are qualified experts who can evaluate this. if you’re not one of those you can’t make a qualified statement on this and if you do you can be called out for it.
I need you to understand that if I call someone out for making an unqualified statement on a legal topic that doesn’t mean that I don’t want people to ‘participate in democracy unless they have the right credentials’. it means that I don’t want people to make statements on legal topics unless they have the right credentials.
A crime is an act against the law, the law is determined by the will of the people (or at minimum it should), so yeah criminality is subject to opinion. You can be pedantic about whether something is a crime if the current laws don’t match your opinion. But again Nuremberg shows that with a sufficiently large crime the chronology of something becoming a law and the moment a crime was committed is not necessarily important. And at least for the Iraq war I would argue this is very much up for debate.
the law is determined by the will of the people […] so yeah criminality is subject to opinion
this doesn’t matter. a judge only cares about somebody’s actions and what the law says about these actions. jurisprudence isn’t democracy. if the majority of people thinks that someone is guilty it doesn’t matter. what matters is if they violated laws and that can only be evaluated by a professional. so if the majority of people thinks that Bush for example is a war criminal it doesn’t matter if he didn’t violate any laws. of course this goes the other way around too: if 99% of people think that he isn’t a criminal, but he violated laws, he is guilty. the majority of people can’t decide whether someone is guilty or not.
of course the majority of people votes the government which passes laws to it’s voter’s liking, so there’s a big intersection between existing laws and the will of the many. but ultimately the judge doesn’t care about all of this. for them it’s simply “does action violate law?”. outside of this question nothing matters.
Something being a war crime or not is a question of morality, someone being your representative or not is a question of preference and interests. Putting educational barriers up on those issues is something that has been done before in history, but I myself would be careful to advocate for Jim Crow Laws.
Americans pay more for healthcare than any other developed nation for worse health outcomes, universal healthcare would simultaneously reinfranchise the working class by removing the restrictive costs of medical care, improve health outcomes and population happiness, and still have spare money for education, all without touching a dime of their military.
They are all war criminals and should all be jailed.
But what would happen to our Shrek movies?
I have no problem living in a timeline where that garbage never existed.
Woah woah, mass presidential imprisonment is acceptable, but hoping for removal of the shrek series in another timeline is just pushing it too far.
What has Biden done to be a war criminal?
“war crime is when war I don’t like and the more I don’t like it the war crime-y-er it is” - average person discussing war crimes of modern presidents
For the record, Bush is guilty of legitimate war crimes (sanctioning the torture of PoWs) and crimes against peace (the unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Iraq), and Trump is quite possibly guilty of war crimes (his advocacy of ‘killing the families’ of enemy combatants combined with the fact that he removed the transparency from our drone strike program is… suspicious, to say the least) but shit will leak out from that administration for years to come yet.
Obama andBiden probably do not count as war criminals. Killing enemy combatants is legally unproblematic. However, the acceptance of high collateral damage and relatively low certainty of identification may qualify them, depending on how you see the matter of drone strikes vs. traditional methods. It would be a much tougher sell at the Hague.EDIT: It was pointed out below that Obama is more likely a war criminal due to the approval of legally dubious ‘double-tap’ drone strikes which presume first responders to militants are militants themselves.
Literally.
Obama is definitely a war criminal. For the Kunduz hospital strike, or if you think he’s not responsible for that personally, then for his approval of “double tap” drone strikes, where after the first drone strike on people they suspect might be terrorists they would wait for first responders to come help, and then send another strike on them assuming they are also terrorists, despite international law stating they must assume people are non combatants until they can prove otherwise.
I don’t really see how that incident is on him.
Yeah, that’s much more likely to make him a war criminal.
The idea being that as the leader of the country the buck stops with him. But I acknowledged that not everyone will view it that way, and included the other, less debatable example too.
That the buck stops with him doesn’t make him personally responsible for every decision made by people under his command. If that was the case, it would be literally impossible to not be a criminal in any position of power - if GI Joe chooses to drive drunk on a Saturday night, that nets you a DUI. ‘The buck stops here’ means that the president must ultimately take responsibility for the decision-making that comes to his desk. It doesn’t mean “GI Joe’s DUI is your DUI”, it means “When GI Joe’s DUI comes to your desk, what you decide cannot be blamed on anyone else - this is your duty to make the big decisions and own up to what happens.”
In the Kunduz hospital strike, that meant a rare admission of guilt from the US government and reparations. If you think that’s not enough - then the buck stops with Obama. It’s his fault that more was not done in response to the incident. But the strike itself was not ordered or authorized by him, and can’t be reasonably blamed on him simply because he’s the CiC.
I get your side of this, I’m not arguing against you dude.
What all US presidents have been doing for a long time
This isn’t answering the question. And suggests you don’t actually know and are just regurgitating rhetoric without actually understanding it.
I’m sure you studied law and are qualified to make this statement
Dear citizen, Please refrain from participating in democracy unless you have the right credentials. Kind regards, The elite
Service guarantees citizenship
whether they’re war criminals isn’t a democratic opinion. there are experts that know the laws and check if the president’s actions go against them.
it’s the same with the vaccine discussion. saying “vaccines make children autistic” has nothing to do with ‘participating in democracy’. the people who are saying this bullshit obviously don’t have the right credentials and therefore can’t make a qualified statement to whether vaccines are safe or not.
Something doesn’t have to be illegal to be criminal. Using such a narrow definition serves to privilege those who write laws for their own benefit and is a crime* against those who are brutalized under systems without legal protections.
*This word is being used with the definition of “A serious offense, especially one in violation of morality.” This is not referring to any laws nor is it suggesting there should be legal punishment for having bad takes.
They didn’t say the presidents were criminals, they said they were war criminals, which does have a specific legal definition based on specific laws. Ones that many world leaders, including us presidents, abuse on a regular basis sure, but whether someone qualifies as a war criminal specifically is very much a legal matter, not just a moral one. That said, you don’t have to be an expert to know laws or accuse people of breaking them, you just need to be an expert to navigate the legal system effectively, which in an ideal world is intended to ensure that the laws are upheld fairly. Unfortunately we don’t live in an ideal world.
we’re talking about war crimes not crimes in general. a war criminal is someone who commits war crimes. according to britannica a war crime is a “serious violation of the laws or customs of war as defined by international customary law and international treaties.” this has nothing to do with morality it is pure jurisprudence.
Following the Nuremberg principals they would actually all be war criminals, but of course those principals only apply if they are convenient. So clearly all these people with credentials are massively hypothetical just like everyone else.
And for vaccines: almost no one is educated sufficiently in the field of immunology to judge for themselves if the vaccine is safe, so you are always dependent on trust. And if the government has over and over again shown to be completely untrustworthy, by for example starting a war (where more then two hundred thousand people died) based on lies, or bailing out the perpetrators of the biggest financial crisis in living memory, then who can blame them for not trusting the government when it tells them to trust the vaccine. It’s unfortunate but not unexpected.
ok let’s just say that you know what you’re talking about and that this is true. why would you hold todays presidents accountable according to laws 80 years in the past? like everyone else, the should be convicted according to todays laws, if they broke them.
yes, this is why you believe the people who know the science, who studied immunology/law
regarding vaccines you don’t have to trust the government, you have to trust the scientists. just because the government (who isn’t trustworthy) trusts them too, doesn’t mean they’re suddenly wrong. as for the war criminal debate this means that if the government says that the presidents aren’t war criminals, you don’t have to believe them. you have to believe the experts who studied law on whether the presidents did something illegal or not.
all I’m saying is that it isn’t an opinion whether someone is a criminal, there are qualified experts who can evaluate this. if you’re not one of those you can’t make a qualified statement on this and if you do you can be called out for it.
I need you to understand that if I call someone out for making an unqualified statement on a legal topic that doesn’t mean that I don’t want people to ‘participate in democracy unless they have the right credentials’. it means that I don’t want people to make statements on legal topics unless they have the right credentials.
A crime is an act against the law, the law is determined by the will of the people (or at minimum it should), so yeah criminality is subject to opinion. You can be pedantic about whether something is a crime if the current laws don’t match your opinion. But again Nuremberg shows that with a sufficiently large crime the chronology of something becoming a law and the moment a crime was committed is not necessarily important. And at least for the Iraq war I would argue this is very much up for debate.
this doesn’t matter. a judge only cares about somebody’s actions and what the law says about these actions. jurisprudence isn’t democracy. if the majority of people thinks that someone is guilty it doesn’t matter. what matters is if they violated laws and that can only be evaluated by a professional. so if the majority of people thinks that Bush for example is a war criminal it doesn’t matter if he didn’t violate any laws. of course this goes the other way around too: if 99% of people think that he isn’t a criminal, but he violated laws, he is guilty. the majority of people can’t decide whether someone is guilty or not.
of course the majority of people votes the government which passes laws to it’s voter’s liking, so there’s a big intersection between existing laws and the will of the many. but ultimately the judge doesn’t care about all of this. for them it’s simply “does action violate law?”. outside of this question nothing matters.
We don’t let the uneducated be surgeons, so why would we ask them how to operate?
Here’s a better idea, educate people properly.
Something being a war crime or not is a question of morality, someone being your representative or not is a question of preference and interests. Putting educational barriers up on those issues is something that has been done before in history, but I myself would be careful to advocate for Jim Crow Laws.
54% of American adults read below a 6th grade comprehension level.
There’s a reason they’re called representatives.
Maybe if America spend their money on education and healthcare instead of war crimes they would not have this problem.
The stupid thing is they could have them all.
Americans pay more for healthcare than any other developed nation for worse health outcomes, universal healthcare would simultaneously reinfranchise the working class by removing the restrictive costs of medical care, improve health outcomes and population happiness, and still have spare money for education, all without touching a dime of their military.
But yes, less war crimes would also be nice.
this high quality discourse is precisely why I come to
redditlemmy. 🙄Sir, this is a Shrek meme
A plus post. where’s the gold button? You’re really making it feel like home here.