[ncallaway]

As a westerner, who believes in the rules based order, I would give anything for our leadership which is launching this illegal war to be sent to the Hague.

Our leadership are war criminals, and should be treated as such.

Some, specifically, are war criminals who have committed crimes that carry the death penalty, and should be arrested, tried, and (if found guilty) executed.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I would give anything for our leadership which is launching this illegal war to be sent to the Hague

Simpler: send them to prison at home. There is no world in which the Hague can enforce its law in America without the U.S. government's consent. At that point, skip the extra step and make war crimes actually illegal.

[MomsAVoxell]

The only force that can do anything about this, is the American people.

Which is why they have been subverted and subjugated and all their will usurped.

[krapp]

>Which is why they have been subverted and subjugated and all their will usurped.

But America's armed populace and the stalwart vigilance of its militias are supposed to make that impossible.

Americans were more up in arms (literal and figurative) over Obamacare and Covid lockdowns than anything Trump has done, domestically or abroad. The only rational conclusion is that they're either complicit or else they simply don't care.

[MomsAVoxell]

Americans are the most propagandized peoples on the planet. Those bullets can’t stop information, and there is a massive information war going on to keep the American people divided.

Those who could effectively field a real protest or uprising are either too busy trying to keep their credit cards from defaulting, or are living on the streets addicted to drugs. General strikes? Forget it, America doesn’t have the infrastructure in place (local food sources) to sustain such a thing…

[int_19h]

America's armed populace is a relatively small percentage of its citizenry, and predominantly leans right populist, so...

[krapp]

Populations of far less affluent countries under far more oppressive regimes without a Constitutional right to keep and bear arms and a billion dollar domestic arms industry that flooded their country with more guns than people and a culture of "give me liberty or give me death" have managed it.

The right got Jan. 6th and the left got Portland, so resistance is possible on both sides. In any country that took things half as seriously as the US claims to, Washington DC would look like a war zone. But what are we doing? Twerking in front of ICE in frog costumes?

[int_19h]

> But what are we doing? Twerking in front of ICE in frog costumes?

Once again, the people who are broadly approving of violence as a way to solve problems, and who actually have the guns, are largely supportive of what ICE is doing. Many of them are quite literally itching to pull the trigger on some libs. I've been in the middle of that crowd and seen it all close up. Those people are not the potential solution - they are a part of the problem.

Countries with oppressive regimes see revolutions if the population gets discontent enough that a strong majority wants it, or is at least willing to go along with it. That is certainly not true of US right now.

[mvdtnz]

The American people voted for this man in a free and fair election. No subjugation or subversion needed.

[MomsAVoxell]

This man did not say he was going to bomb anything until after he was voted in, so the American people were - once again - completely duped by their own hubris.

[progval]

> This man did not say he was going to bomb anything until after he was voted in

Except Mexico (https://www.vox.com/policy/363146/trump-policy-war-mexico-tr...) and Iran (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4898919-trump-iran-smi...).

[acdha]

A third of the American people voted for him, based on a campaign which promised a completely different economy than he has delivered (remember when people were pretending Biden had an egg-price level in the Oval Office?) and no foreign wars. It is unreasonable to look at that election and say a plurality voted for this.

[JumpCrisscross]

> American people voted for this man in a free and fair election

Americans voted for a man who promised no foreign wars and, in his first term, was relatively peaceful [1].

[1][ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_policy_of_the_first_Tr...

[UncleMeat]

And the american people can get their shit together and hang him for his crimes.

[MomsAVoxell]

Now this I would like to see, but I have serious doubts it will ever happen. I don’t think the American people have the courage to do something about their heinous, out of control government, personally. Happy to be proven wrong, because it would be a legitimate step to world peace on behalf of the American people, but I seriously doubt they are, as a population, capable of it.

[UncleMeat]

I largely agree with you. Democratic leadership responded to an attempted coup by slow rolling prosecution with the hope that Trump would simply recede from public life and they'd never have to do the hard thing of trying and convicting a former president.

[thrance]

The entire media apparatus is owned by oligarchs: from Fox News to Twitter to Meta, now CNN... All are relaying non-stop right-wing propaganda. There can be no real democracy while information is this captive.

[ncallaway]

> war crimes actually illegal.

To be clear, war crimes are illegal here. They can carry the death penalty.

I think there's a strong case to be made for Pete Hegseth to be executed for his crimes, according to US Law.

But you're right. There's no expectation that the Hague enforce international law without the consent of the US Government. Our government should either try our leaders in our courts, or hand them in manacles and chains to the ICC and The Hague.

But I agree, I don't expect the international community to be able to do this over our objections. It's something we must do.

[JumpCrisscross]

> war crimes are illegal here. They carry the death penalty.

Asking to learn: under what law?

[ncallaway]

18 U.S. Code § 2441 - War crimes

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2441

---

There are also provisions in the UCMJ that are applicable to members of the military

---

(I also had a consequential typo in my earlier post, which I've now edited. I originally wrote they "carry the death penalty", but I meant to write "they can carry the death penalty", and it depends on the specific circumstances of the war crimes committed.)

[JumpCrisscross]

"Murder.— The act of a person who intentionally kills, or conspires or attempts to kill, or kills whether intentionally or unintentionally in the course of committing any other offense under this subsection, one or more persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including those placed out of combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause" [1].

Hmm. Filing this away for 2028 or 2032.

[1] ¶ (d)(1)(D)

[ncallaway]

Yes, if you’re curious the DoD’s own Laws of War manual uses shipwrecked survivors of an attack as “hors de combat” or out of combat.

This is very relevant to the second strike on the Venezuelan boat. I think the original strikes are also war crimes, but the second strike on the shipwrecked survivors is like… beyond all doubt a murder

[CapricornNoble]

>one or more persons taking no active part in the hostilities

Remember when we bombed Yemen and in the Signal chat they laughed about killing a High-Value Target while he was visiting his girlfriend? Sounds like this section would apply for her.

[mdhb]

I don’t think the US is going to be allowed to act outside the ICC for too much longer. All of your former allies are going to insist on it before they will even think about treating your normally again.

The US previously never faced real pressure on this, a new administration would see it as an easy win.

[JumpCrisscross]

> don’t think the US is going to be allowed to act outside the ICC for too much longer

The U.S. is not a signatory. (Most of the world's population isn't subject to ICC jurisdiction [1].)

> All of your former allies are going to insist on it before they will even think about treating your normally again

Nobody is treating the ICC seriously [2].

To be clear, this sucks. But it's America joining China and Russia (and Iran and Israel and India and every other regional power who have selectively rejected the rules-based international order).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Statute

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/27/world/middleeast/france-n...

[dragonwriter]

> The U.S. is not a signatory.

Being a signatory is not required for being subject to ICC jurisdiction, though it is one route to being subject to it, and, in any case, not being a signatory is not an immutable condition. So the upthread suggestion that “All of your former allies are going to insist on it before they will even think about treating your normally again” is not rebutted by observing that the US is not currently a signatory of the Rome Statute.

> But it's America joining China and Russia (and Iran and Israel and India and every other regional power who have selectively rejected the rules-based international order).

No, the US despite rhetorically appealing to it when other countries are involved, has led, not followed, in rejecting the rules-based order when it comes to its own conduct.

[OgsyedIE]

The "allies" would have mass riots and six-digit death tolls (shortly after an initial 3-6 month period of adjustment) without the supplies of LNG, fertiliser and payment clearing services the U.S. exports. America has the rest of the west by the balls, with maybe the exception of Australia and Japan. Nobody will even give the C-levels responsible for Grok arrest warrants for the many serious crimes their product carries out.

[babypuncher]

I hope to god the next administration actually holds the criminals in the current administration accountable. Gerry Ford set a disgusting precedent when he loudly said that those who hold the office of the President should never be be held accountable for their actions.

[OgsyedIE]

He believed that within the limits of the political culture of America introducing accountability would lead to a tit-for-tat cycle of imprisonments and executions by each party against the other under the cover story of accountability, with the possibility of gradual escalation towards an end state of states mobilising armored brigades against each other to siege cities and cleanse target populations. Like the Congo, or Rhodesia. His memoirs are wacky stuff.

[dnautics]

unlikely. trump didnt held obama accountable for all sorts of crazy things that happened during his administration (bombing libya, drone striking a us citizen minor, using USAID to mount a fake vaccination campaign for DNA surveillance in pakistan e.g.). why would the next administration hold trump accountable?

[ModernMech]

The Biden administration was prosecuting Trump though. They didn’t complete the prosecutions because Trump’s strategy to avoid accountability was to be reelected and then shut down the investigations, and that worked. But the fact he was indicted by Jack Smith who very likely could have convicted him goes to show lack of accountability is not for lack of trying.

[woooooo]

Its very much for lack of trying. They had 4 years, we got no epstein files and they slow walked prosecutions to happen during the election, thinking it would help them. It didn't work, here we are.

[dnautics]

i would feel better about that if the biden administration also prosecuted obama. they didn't. besides trump I (nor biden) didnt do any new foreign adventures AFAICT. we had a blissful 8 years of waning US imperialism

[qwytw]

He did prosecute his political opponents like Bolton though for doing exactly what Trump did just on a likely several magnitudes smaller scale...

[orwin]

All this fuckery date from at least bush 2nd. Election mess, with heavy involvement of his brother the governor despite promises to revise, crowds attacking poll workers, war crimes, putting incompetent friends at the head of agencies (remember FEMA response to Katrina? Or the initial response to the subprime crisis?), attacks on science programs and schools, and the use of executive orders to bypass congress. Obama was so tame compared to Bush2.

[29athrowaway]

Europe is not the military power that once was at the beginning of the 20th century... aging populations, economic decline, trade deficits, their former colonies are now independent, they haven't waged war in a while.

[mdhb]

Seems extremely telling that you would phrase things that way.

[29athrowaway]

In the 19th and 20th centuries, a European power could prevail in India, China, Japan, etc.

And in the 21st century? not so much. It is a different world now.

Europe is powerful but the Royal Navy couldn't go today to Hong Kong and seize control of it for example.

And military power influences diplomacy.

[jonathanstrange]

> And military power influences diplomacy.

Negatively. That has always been the problem of the US, it's the reason why they cannot act like the most of the rest of the world. The military has way too much influence on decision making.

[pqtyw]

ICC is a joke though. It can only accomplish anything if the home country of the perpetrator is cooperating. Those allies also have much politically important economic and geopolitical concerns than prosecuting war criminals (unfortunately only small minorities in western countries care about things like that at all)

[vintermann]

No, they wouldn't. Not if they're the Democrats as we know them. They fight tooth and claw against the new normal, until it's the new normal, and then they fight tooth and claw to defend the new normal. There's very little principled opposition to Trump in the corridors of power. There's plenty of opposition, but it's more about which horses have been bet on.

[coffinbirth]

It sadly never happened for the perpetrators of the Iraq/Ukraine/Libya/Afghan/Syria/Yugoslav/... wars. Remember Collateral Murder? And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Also, no one really cared about all the veterans back home, many of whom suffered and still suffer from PTSD. The U.S. truly is the biggest sh*thole on earth.

[ncallaway]

The fact that it didn't happen for the those previous administrations is why it's happening again now.

If those previous administrations had been tried for their various crimes, and the guilty parties were cooling their heels in a jail cell, then we probably wouldn't be seeing this action tonight.

[tonyhart7]

"If those previous administrations had been tried for their various crimes"

and yeah who is gonna charge them ???? US have (arguably) strongest military on earth, who can put justice to them if not themselves ???? and themselves I mean US Gov. which is would never happen since every administration have "blood" in some form and another

[ncallaway]

> and yeah who is gonna charge them ???? US have (arguably) strongest military on earth, who can put justice to them if not themselves ????

It must be us. It must be the American people.

This is (one of) the deepest moral failings of our voting public that we haven’t demanded it of our leadership.

You’re right that our leadership won’t do it unless the people absolutely demand it.

And… well, we haven’t demanded it.

So, the failure to bring them to justice belongs to me, and to every other American citizen that is eligible to cast a ballot.

[JumpCrisscross]

> since every administration have "blood" in some form and another

Trump 45 could have come on board with a clean slate. Hell, Trump 47 started out without too much war-crimey cruft from his first term.

Dude went on a witch hunt and forgot to bring his pitchfork.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The problem is that nearly everyone in the US national security establishment believes that the US should be involved in lots of wars. You may recall how little sympathy Biden got for pulling out of Afghanistan. I genuinely don’t think you could assemble Washington staff with the foreign policy expertise a president requires without ending up with a majority who support bombing Maduro.

[craftkiller]

Withdrawing from Afghanistan may have occurred under Biden, but it was Trump who made the decision to pull out. The only change Biden made was delaying our withdraw by a couple of months.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States%E2%80%93Taliban_...

[ric2b]

Libya was a UN Security Council resolution, doesn't get any more legit than that.

[pqtyw]

To be fair that applies to Maduro to if you count crimes against humanity in general. Certainly applied to Sadam.

So now the question is how to do you capture this leadership without foreign intervention while they are still in power?

Talk is nice... but there is no real mechanism to impose what you are proposing besides this.

[j_maffe]

You do it as part of an international order, i.e. an impartial UN. Though obviously we don't have that yet.

[DrBazza]

The only 'leaders' that end up in the Hague and convicted are those forcibly captured via military action. And those 'orders' declared by the UN can, and be vetoed by China, Russia, USA, UK, and France. Guess which two use their veto all the time?

[pqtyw]

And there are not that many indications that we are moving towards that direction or we can even ever have. I guess that sort of idealism might have existed in the late 40s immediately after the UN was established but it never had a chance.

External or internal (which seems rarely feasible unless the government is highly incompetent) regime change realistically is the only thing that worked.

[aebtebeten]

That sort of idealism existed as late as 1962, but its leading proponent was cancelled in 1963: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482997

[aebtebeten]

Come to think of it, WJC signed the Rome Statute in 2000, but then GWB unsigned it in 2002, which, coincidentally or uncoincidentally, was followed by the first reports of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone... in 2003

[stinkbeetle]

Presumably also the ones who invaded Iraq and occupied Afghanistan, carried out extrajudicial executions, droned weddings, deposed Libya's leader and laid ruin to the country, trafficked arms and money to cartels in South America and ISIS / "JV team" terrorist groups to destroy the Levant Or was that "rules based order"?

I think you've been had with the whole "rules based order thing". You can keep winding the clock back and it's the same thing. Iraq 1, Iran, Vietnam, Korea, Somalia. When exactly would you say this alleged "rules based order" was great?

[cosmicgadget]

Seems like since they're vocally condemning the war criminals, they have neither "been had" nor are inconsistent in any way.

[stinkbeetle]

I don't think you followed the part where they said they believed in the rules based order and I questioned that in a bit of a sarcastic way. It was the entire point of my comment really. There is no "rules based order", the rules based order has always been whatever the wealthy and powerful can do to further enrich themselves and cement their power is the rules, and the order is that they remain on top.

[cosmicgadget]

If you think that is what you accomplished. To me, you simply pointed out exceptions to the rules-based order and in no way proved it is a hoax.

[stinkbeetle]

It's not a hoax, it's an empty platitude designed to fool people into thinking their side is in the right. Unfortunately many people are incapable of ever admitting they have been fooled.

[ncallaway]

Every war criminal should be arrested, and tried. I think they should also be hanged, but they generally don't do executions at the Hague is my understanding.

[stinkbeetle]

Yes, lots of the ruling class should be hanged for a lot of reasons, and they're not going to do it themselves at their Hague.

[drunx]

I think the notion of the comment about westerners is to highlight that as a common person you can believe in rules based order, or you are made to believe in that and live your life by that, however the leaders don't really care about it all that much. They are happy the masses are "ruled" and controlled, but as for their decisions - rules don't always apply.

And in many cases western societies tend to express the idea that inn other, dictatorship countries, people sort of "let the dictators dictate", while "westerners" not.

But I think this current case (and Trump's presidency at large) is an example of how little we can decide or influence. Even in the supposed "democracy".

I wish to believe that voting matters, but Trump showed that you can make people vote for anything if you put massive upfront effort into managing information/missinformation and controlling the minds through populism, etc. Then voting becomes... Powerless. As it has no objective judgement.

And despite possible disagreements some might voice - revolutions don't happen anymore. People can't anymore fight the leaders as leaders hold a monopoly on violence through making sure the army is with them.

Well... We as people lost and losing the means to "control" our leaders. Westerners, easterners - doesn't matter.

[7952]

For non-US countries the solution is to be more independent in terms of foreign policy and defence.

[breppp]

you assume war crimes, but which war crimes?

In general international law is much more lenient than people are willing to believe. e.g. it's legal to kill civilians if you are attacking a military target which is important enough

[JumpCrisscross]

> you assume war crimes, but which war crimes?

Hegseth allegedly double tapping survivors is almost certainly against the Geneva Conventions [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/us/hegseth-drug-boat-stri...

[breppp]

Once they declared it a terrorist organization (which is the problematic side of everything), they can claim these are unlawful combatants and do not have any of the protections of the Geneva convention, like any other war on terror assassination.

So I don't think double tapping is a war crime, any more than bombing a car with terrorists in the first place and that doesn't seem to be regarded internationally as a war crime. However, they could have done better to highlight Venezuela actual involvement with terrorism (which is real but not enough for this) rather than magically declare them terrorists just to not go through Congress

[jonathanstrange]

That "unlawful combatant" designation was invented by the US as an excuse and has always stood on shaky legal grounds even in the US. Other Western countries don't support this legal construction. That being said, the double-tapping was ordinary murder, not a war crime. Every bombing of those ships could have been avoided by boarding them and presenting those drugs as evidence, as the Coast Guard normally does. But that would only have worked if there had been any evidence to start with...

[breppp]

Western countries that had recently used that clause to assasinate terrorists are the US, UK and France. There is no reason to believe other european countries attacked by ISIS would not do the same if needed or if capable.

Regarding double tapping, that's exactly the modus operandi of assassinations, as the UAVs goal is not the car/ship but the people inside.

That said, the Venezuelan case is a huge overreach

[jonathanstrange]

Not a shred of evidence was ever provided that the crewmen of these boats were "terrorists." That alone makes these murders very different from other illegal extrajudicial killings, where this evidence is usually provided or readily available.

That's not to say that I would in any way support extrajudicial killings, in many cases the high civilian/bystander casualties have been completely unsupportable. I just wanted to point out the stark difference between "normal" extrajudicial killings and these murders.

[basisword]

If you need to look for loophole justifications to claim there was no war crime, there was probably a war crime.

[tguvot]

Just like Obama did

https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/flr/vol69/iss1/7/

https://archive.is/ruphc

[int_19h]

War of aggression is itself a crime.

[dragonwriter]

> you assume war crimes, but which war crimes?

There are some credible war crimes accusations (in fact, some pretty flagrant war crimes), but the most critical crime is actually not a war crime, but one precedent to their being a war at all, the crime of aggression.

[breppp]

but unfortunately starting a war is not a crime, unless if you are using "war crimes" as a metaphor for acts of war you deem unethical

[dragonwriter]

Starting a war is generally what is known in modern international law as the crime of aggression (in the language of the Nuremberg Charter, this was, “crimes against peace”, the first listed category of crimes subject to the tribunal, above war crimes and crimes against humanity.)

Rudolph Hess, notably, was convicted and imprisoned for life solely for this crime.

[ponector]

Funny how declaring a war is a crime while shelling cities in another country is not.

[skissane]

This is a bit confused-if you send them to the Hague, they can’t be executed-because neither the ICC nor any ad hoc tribunals located in that city have the death penalty. As an abolitionist state, I doubt the Dutch government would ever consent to a capital trial taking place on their territory.

[DrBazza]

On the other hand, in an alternate reality, this could be preventing a North Korea style dictatorship. Or to flip it, had the USA stayed in South Korea and carried on fighting, it might have prevented North Korea and the Kims and saved literally millions of deaths of North Koreans at the hands of their own government.

What do the Venezuelans actually think about this, given that Maduro rigged the last election in 2024 and denied them their democratic choice?

[KaiserPro]

> Maduro rigged the last election in 2024 and denied them their democratic choice?

Thats probably true, but trump also tried to rig an election, so its not really up to him to unilaterally decide is it? Especially as hes bumchums with putin who shocker, rigs election, killed hundreds of thousands of his own people invading other countries.

> had the USA stayed in South Korea

Korea was a UN action, not US unilateral. but alos hugely costly in everyone's lives

[DrBazza]

The number of deaths due to the Kim dynasty is in the millions, including their kwanliso murder camps and man-made famine, and vastly outnumbers war casualties unfortunately.