SF Examiner: America's war criminals

[Say_What]

Check out the LONG list of Kissinger atrocties. He's now wanted in three countries.

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When Slobodan Milosevic, the former President of Yugoslavia, appears before the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague, he ought not stand alone. General Wesley Clark (retired), commander of the NATO air war against Serbia, should be up there with him. And since there is no statute of limitations on war crimes or crimes against humanity, it would seem in order to bring former Senator Bob Kerrey and Henry Kissinger to the docket as well.

The first of these defendants will probably stand trial. The next three will be unlikely ever to see the inside of an international court of justice, but all have almost certainly violated the 1949 Geneva Convention. And in Clark and Kerrey's case, the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice. As for Kissinger, the rap sheet is as long as your arm and the butcher bill almost beyond reckoning.

Let's start with Clark. The Geneva Convention prohibits bombing that is not clearly justified by military necessity, and the protocols specifically bar targets that have a civilian function. But NATO aircraft bombed railway stations, bridges, power stations, communication networks, factories, petrochemical refineries, warehouses, sewage and water-treatment plants, hospitals and schools, killing almost 2,000 civilians in the 78-day bombing campaign. In the words of Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Study, "The NATO bombing violated specific rules of war. Our government has committed war crimes by bombing civilian infrastructures."

This past April, U.S. troops helped arrest Dragan Obrenovic, the Bosnian Serb commander of the brutal assault on Srebrenica in July 1995, and hauled him to The Hague for trail. The White House said the arrest was an "essential step in consolidating the peace and promoting the rule of law in Bosnia." Agreed. Now let's put Clark alongside him.

http://www.examiner.com/opinion/default.jsp?story=OPhallinan0706w