From the Bureau on Investigate Journalism:
Earlier this year the Bureau and the Sunday Times revealed the CIA was deliberately targeting rescuers and funeral-goers in its Pakistan drone strikes. Those controversial tactics have reportedly been revived.
Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur, told a meeting in Geneva on June 21: ’Reference should be made to a study earlier this year by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism… If civilian ”˜rescuers’ are indeed being intentionally targeted, there is no doubt about the law: those strikes are a war crime.’
Incidentally, the Obama administration’s decision to call every male of military age standing near a suspected militant a militant as well, and thus killable, is a war crime too.
And while we’re on the subject of war crimes, how about this blast from the past, from 2007:
As a prosecutor at Nuremberg, Thomas Dodd charged the Nazis with “the apprehension of victims and their confinement without trial, often without charges, generally with no indication of their detention.”
His son, Sen. Chris Dodd, wonders today whether he and his fellow Democrats did enough to stop the United States from violating that same rule of law in the war on terror.
No, Senator. They did not and they still have not.
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