Nuremburg defense? The Iraq War is illegal under international law.....

[CTLawGuy]

so if we take the Nuremburg defense rule to its extreme (and we would have to), then we'd have to conclude that every soldier who went to Iraq is a war criminal who must be prosecuted and jailed. After all they should have resisted the illegal order to fight in an illegal war. They should have willingly gone to jail with a smile on their faces instead.

Time to start up the paddywagons. We've got a lot of troops to haul off to Leavenworth.... If it's your son or daughter, so sorry! Thanks for your service, now rot in prison! Sorry, no Nuremburg defense allowed! Have a nice day!


(h/t to ProSense for the analogy).
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(and BTW, guards prosecuted at Nuremburg presided over a massive orchestrated effort to commit MASS GENOCIDE of innocent people, genocide that ended up killing 12 million people. Nothing Bush did, and I can't stand him, came even close, EVEN CLOSE, to what was done by the Nazis. So before you compare CIA schlubs who waterboarded a few people (as completely WRONG as that behavior was) to mass murdering Nazis, think about how ridiculous you would sound as the argument flowed forth from your brain and fingers.

If, after so thinking, you ill-advisdely still make the comparison, then fear the specter of Mr. Godwin waving his wand of judgment in your face as he rightly declares you the loser of the argument--his Law prevailing in its mission to prevent idiots from comparing everything to the holocaust.)

[amborin]

1. excellent point!

[Hanse]

2. Strange as it may seem, at some point the Nuremberg defense becomes valid.

They would prosecute the guy who forced the victims into the gas chambers, for example, but they didn't prosecute the guy who shined the boots of the guy who forced the victims into the gas chambers.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

3. That's lunacy. You have justified almost ALL war crimes just to mount a defense of the president

First, either you think every German soldier faced a war crimes trial or you are dismissing Nuremberg as an example in a discussion of the Nuremberg defense... that's kind of funny.

Second, and more substantially, if your Must-Defend-Obama-On-The-Internet compulsion is such that you are defending the Nuremberg defense you might want to assess your values. In your eagerness to mount some knee-jerk defense of a WH policy you have legitimized the execution of the holocaust. Congrats! (And if the policy announced were the opposite you'd doubtless have some sophistry defending the opposite.)

Some one is pulled over for speeding.

There are a million other people in the city speeding at that very moment.

If every speeder were pulled over the entire city would collapse into chaos. And the police force would have to be expanded to a size of millions, with millions of squad cars, and millions of traffic courts.

So unless you want to bankrupt the city and make the roads impassible then no one should ever be pulled over for speeding.

QED... not.

[amborin]

4. the speeding analogy doesn't work

what are you trying to show by using it?

speeding is an independent event, so is getting caught and prosecuted.....all the officer needs is to witness it, or capture it using some technology....

speeding tickets act as a deterrent....there's the risk of getting caught for the infraction....and statistically, speeders stand a fair chance of getting caught at one time or another....

prosecuting cia operatives is totally different sitch....the torture is not really an independent event; it occurred as part of an organizational strategy; the organization as a whole is complicit; and, indicting and prosecuting depends on witnesses, testimony, etc.....

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

5. No

First, war crimes are as deterrence-minded as any law you can name. Perhaps the most deterrence minded of all, since they are usually only enforced after the regime in question has ceased to be.

The speeding analogy is not about the Nuremberg defense... there is no suggestion anyone is being ordered to speed. It's about the nature of law itself in light of the OP's theory that prosecuting any war crime requires prosecuting every soldier in Iraq. It follows from that bizarre logic that no war crime should ever be prosecuted.

[amborin]

6. no, i think most war crimes trials are for retribution, not deterrence

you'd have to look this up

in some scholarly legal articles

[CTLawGuy]

10. prosecution decisions are made with DISCRETION in the real world

in ideologue-land, the rules are different I guess.

It is not I who says that everyone and his mother MUST be prosecuted for this torture stuff. It is the far-left ideologues who are screaming over this. Under their "logic" every soldier who went to Iraq is a war criminal and MUST be prosecuted.

In the real world, only the most egregious speeders are generally prosecuted. The guy going 5 mph over the limit is given a break. I hope those with the highest level of culpability are brought to justice, and if the DOJ believes it is not worth going after the small fish, (and that is ALL they've said) then I trust their decision.

[CTLawGuy]

9. if you have a duty to disobey an illegal order

surely an order to fight in an illegal war is an illegal order. Therefore, under the rule, a soldier must refuse to fight and if he or she does not, that soldier is a war criminal. And according to other logic I have heard, if we don't prosecute every single soldier who refused to disobey the illegal order to go to Iraq, we are breaking international law.

if you want to compare this to Nuremburg, I will listen if you show me where the CIA systematically murdered 12 million civilians.

[depakid]

7. I think you understand that's not how these matters play out

Sometimes reductio ad absurdum is useful and persuasive; other times not.

[moondust]

8. Why wasn't the entire Wehrmacht prosecuted?

And what's all this fuss over John Demjanjuk?