US goes from best to worst in championing war crimes justice

In 1945, the US led the world in organizing and prosecuting war crime trials against German and Japanese war criminals. US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson helped draft the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal which created the legal basis for the Nuremberg Trials. Jackson gave devastating opening and closing statements, stressing that war crimes are the most heinous of all crimes. But afterwards, the US turned its back on being the beacon against war crimes. We refused to join the International Criminal Court (ICC), the international, intergovernmental agency created by the Rome Statute at a July, 1998 diplomatic conference. The ICC began operation July 1, 2002, charged with investigating genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression. One hundred twenty-three nations did join, making the ICC a credible agency to carry on the important work the US instituted seventy-five years ago. It has opened 21 investigations and indicted 45 individuals for war crimes. This underscores that such monstrous conduct continues and must be relentlessly pursued.

If ignoring the ICC is unfortunate, attacking its investigations is reprehensible. In March, the ICC opened one on all sides in the 19 yearlong Afghanistan war, including the US. Rather than let justice prevail, the Trump administration launched an economic and legal offensive against the Court. It imposed visa restrictions on ICC officials, including their family members. Additionally, the administration instituted a counter investigation charging the ICC with dishonesty, financial corruption and “malfeasance at the highest levels of the office of the prosecutor”, according to US Attorney General William Barr. Moreover, Barr charged the ICC is “little more than a political tool employed by unaccountable international elites”.

It is more appropriate to cite the US as being an ‘unaccountable international elite’ waging war throughout the Middle East and Africa, killing hundreds of thousands and sending millions on the run from US firepower. You’ve come a long way since Nuremberg, Uncle Sam. Alas, you’re going down a wrong way street to worldwide infamy.

Trump just fine with Confederate traitor named military bases

It took the George Floyd protests to inform most Americans that ten military bases in the South were named for traitorous Confederate generals. Fort Bragg in North Carolina, is likely the most famous. It was named after Gen. Braxton Bragg, a battlefield commander who also served as military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Besides being a traitor, Bragg was a failed general. He was a poor tactician, unable to cooperate with his troops and forced to quit after his resounding defeat at the Battle of Chattanooga.

Defense Secretary Mike Esper and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy want these traitors’ names gone and are seeking bi-partisan congressional support for that overdue action. The President is all in on keeping those infamous names emblazoned on the American story, charging they honor America and won’t be deleted on his watch.

What struck me is they only go back to WWI through the 1940’s. It was a national effort at reconciliation with the South, the Lily White South that is; the black community suffering under Jim Crow be damned. I still remember my 1950’s northern education that taught me Reconstruction was radical, a misguided attempt at social engineering run by cravenous Northerners and their opportunistic Southern colleagues. Written out of that narrative were the thousands of blacks lynched after Reconstruction was ended in the aftermath of the 1876 presidential election.

Trump may tout the names on those bases as honoring our magnificent military. But historically speaking….they’re nothing to brag about.

Trump correct on pandemic

Despite 20,000 new infections daily, including a thousand deaths, President Trump has moved on. Focused solely on re-opening to economy to salvage his collapsing re-election chances, Trump says the virus has been "reduced to ashes". That is true if you mean the hundreds of those daily pandemic dead people being cremated.

Amid rush for police reform don’t neglect economic justice

Police reform for poor, minority communities is huge. Economic justice for those same communities is gargantuan. The explosion of protest over the Floyd George killing has focused on police reform. As one who has been following efforts at police reform for over half a century, I’m cautiously optimistic we will finally address the systematic, structural problems that have sabotaged all previous efforts. Even the regressive GOP, which openly courts the white nationalist wing of their base, is stumbling to board the police reform train. The GOP may be evil, but not totally stupid. They see their poll numbers cratering for November, led by a George Wallace style, racist president, oblivious to the electoral outrage he’s generating with his near psychotic response to collective cries for social and economic justice.

My concern is that we’re almost entirely focused on police reform when staggering poverty, crime, hopelessness in America’s vast urban wastelands is fostered by an inhumane economic polity. This system has essentially been the Heartbeat of America since Ronald Reagan campaigned to end New Deal polity that promoted uplift of all rather than push down by the few. It was such a pervasive model that moderates such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama offered only tempered pushback during their two decades at the helm. Current occupant Trump has brought economic neglect to its zenith. He’s been ravenous to leave the forgotten tens of millions even further behind, funneling America’s treasure to his billionaire donor class and the war party wing of his base demanding nearly a trillion a year to wage endless war. He’s made taking away health care from the needy a signature issue to placate his base. His delusional, failed pandemic response has brought the brunt of its carnage to minority communities. He views slave wages as the penalty for not being born into privilege. He throws the white working class red meat hate issues to keep their allegiance.

If magically, every cop pounding the beat on America’s mean streets became as sweet and loving as Mr. Rogers, life for America’s poor and dispossessed would remain short and bleak. We must bring reform and justice to America’s utterly dysfunctional economic system making America the disgrace of the industrialized world.

US must honor spirit as well as letter of Kellogg-Briand Pact

Back in 1928, US Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand came up with a revolutionary idea to promote world peace. They negotiated a treaty to make war illegal. While that sounds obvious, war was considered the proper, indeed the primary way nations could resolve disputes throughout history. In addition, the victors were allowed to keep the spoils of war, a gross extension of ‘might makes right’. Initially conceived as a bi-lateral treaty between the US and France, Kellogg and Briand pitched their concept to the world community, and quickly signed up 63 nations, most of the world’s countries at the time.

Critics of the Pact derided it as a failure, considering the 14 year cataclysm of world conquest beginning just 3 years later when signatory Japan invaded China. But the Pact was the foundation for the Nuremberg War Crime Trials. Aggressive war would be punished if not prevented, all territorial conquests would be returned to the defeated party, and individual leaders brought to justice, possibly even the hangman. All this emanates from Kellogg-Briand, which since WWII as drastically reduced aggressive wars of conquest.

Sadly, tho still on the books at the State Department, the US has been the most egregious violator of Kellogg-Briand. After WWII the US specialized in avoiding outright war by using covert ops to knock off foreign governments it opposed. This was especially true in Latin America. It often worked as in Guatemala, Guyana, Chile, Nicaragua; but failed miserably in Cuba. The worst example occurred i Iran, over 5,500 from Washington, when TR’s grandson Teddy III orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected ruler Mosaddegh. This kicked off 67 years of damaged relations with the US that periodically still threatens war.

When the US did invade directly as in Vietnam, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, we did so to overthrow hated rulers or insurgents, not to grab territory as forbidden by Kellogg-Briand. In another cruel ‘work around’ Kellogg-Briand, we essentially go to war using crippling economic sanctions to so degrade life for civilians they'll overthrow their rulers on our behalf. It never works but sanctions do sentence tens of millions into poor health, famine, even death.

A third violation of Kellogg-Briand involves selling deadly US military hardware to friendly countries for their wars against neighbors or to subjugate stateless people under their control. Billions in weaponry to Saudi Arabia for their vicious war against Yemen is an example of the former. Enabling Israel’s Apartheid rule over four million Palestinians represents the latter. Neither of these two humanitarian catastrophes could continue without US assistance.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact was the first and still best international agreement to outlaw and prevent war. It would work even better if one of its two founding member states would honor it in the spirit as well as in the letter of its prohibition against war.

Trump Republican support recalls GOP support for McCarthy seventy years ago.

On February 9, 1950, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, a totally unfit public servant, struck gold with a speech before West Virginia Republicans. He charged that 205 commies were infesting the State Department. His fellow Republicans knew he was once again playing the fool, lying viciously to get attention and further his floundering career. But McCarthy had struck gold with the press and the public, vaulting him atop the GOP effort to retake the White House and Congress. Famed political cartoonist Herblock pictured Joe straddling vats of tar, coining the phrase ‘McCarthyism’ to describe the slash and burn political tactics forever associated with McCarthy.

But rather than call out McCarthy’s lies and shun him, GOP leaders gave him free rein to serve as hatchet man in the 1952 election, the dozens, hundreds ruined by his conduct be damned. McCarthy proudly held up a 1952 example of photo shopping to falsely tie Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson to convicted communist perjurer Alger Hiss. McCarthy renamed the liberal wing of the Democratic Party ‘Commiecrats’. It took two more years for McCarthy to so disgrace himself during the Army-McCarthy Hearings that the Senate, in a rare show of bipartisan leadership, censured him.

Seventy years on Republicans are also backing a compulsively lying con man to retain the White House. But unlike just another senator, this Republican support is for a charlatan becoming president. In 2016 they all knew his utter incompetency to govern on many levels. But they choked back their solemn duty, keeping their eye on the prize. And despite his utter failure to confront the twin existential problems of pandemic and racial divide, virtually every Republican leader maintains that support. Only former president George W. Bush and Senator Mitt Romney have bailed on voting for Trump this November, tho others are now straddling the fence. On December 2, 1954, 22 Republicans, half the GOP senators present, voted to censure Joe McCarthy. If anywhere near that percentage of today’s GOP leaders would publicly reject Trump, his re-election chances, possibly even his candidacy, would collapse.

This is one time we need history to repeat itself.