Thursday, October 18, 2007
Opening Address of Robert Jackson at Nuremberg Trials
International Military Tribunal
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Opening address for the United States of America
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Robert H. Jackson
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Representative and Chief of Counsel for the United States of America
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May It Please Your Honors,
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The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power ever has paid to Reason.
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This Tribunal, while it is novel and experimental, is not the product of abstract speculations nor is it created to vindicate legalistic theories. This inquest represents the practical effort of 4 of the most mighty of nations, with the support of 14 more, to utilize international law to meet the greatest menace of our times aggressive war. The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. It is a cause of this magnitude that the United Nations will lay before Your Honors.
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In the prisoners' dock sit 20-odd broken men. Reproached by the humiliation of those they have led almost as bitterly as by the desolation of those they have attacked, their personal capacity for evil is forever past. It is hard now to perceive in these miserable men as captives the power by which as Nazi leaders they once dominated much of the world and terrified most of it. Merely as individuals, their fate is of little consequence to the world.
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What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world after their bodies have returned to dust. They are living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names. Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.
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What these men stand for we will patiently and temperately disclose. We will give you undeniable proofs of incredible events. The catalog of crimes will omit nothing that could be conceived by a pathological pride, cruelty, and lust for power. These men created in Germany under the “Fuhrerprinzip” a National Socialist despotism equaled only by the dynasties of the ancient East. They took from the German people all those dignities and freedoms that we hold natural and inalienable rights in every human being. The people were compensated by inflaming and gratifying hatreds toward those who were marked as scapegoats. Against their opponents, including Jews, Catholics, and free labor, the Nazis directed such a campaign of arrogance, brutality, and annihilation as the world has not witnessed since the pre-Christian ages. They excited the German ambition to be a “master race” which of course implies serfdom for others. They led their people on a mad gamble for domination. They diverted social energies and resources to the creation of what they thought to be an invincible war-machine. They overran their neighbors. To sustain the “master race” in its war-making, they enslaved millions of human beings and brought them into Germany, where these hapless creatures now wander as displaced persons. At length bestiality and bad faith reached such excess that they aroused the sleeping strength of imperiled civilization. Its united efforts have ground the German war-machine to fragments. But the struggle has left Europe a liberated yet prostrate land where a demoralized society struggles to survive. These are the fruits of the sinister forces that sit with these defendants in the prisoners’ dock.
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In justice to the nations and the men associated in this prosecution, I must remind you of certain difficulties which may leave their mark on this case. Never before in legal history has an effort been made to bring within the scope of a single litigation the developments of a decade, covering a whole continent, and involving a score of nations, countless individuals, and innumerable events. Despite the magnitude of the task, the world has demanded immediate action. This demand has had to be met, though perhaps at the cost of finished craftsmanship. In my country, established courts, following familiar procedures, applying well-thumbed precedents, and dealing with the legal consequences of local and limited events, seldom commence a trial within a year of the event in litigation. Yet less than eight months ago today the courtroom in which you sit was an enemy fortress in the hands of German SS Troops. Less than eight months ago nearly all our witnesses and documents were in enemy hands. The law had not been codified, no procedures had been established, no tribunal was in existence, no usable courthouse stood here, none of the hundreds of tons of official German documents had been examined, no prosecuting staff had been assembled, nearly all the present defendants were at large, and the four prosecuting powers had not yet joined in common cause to try them. I should be the last to deny that the case may well suffer from incomplete researches and quite likely will not be the example of professional work which any of the prosecuting nations would normally wish to sponsor. It is, however, a completely adequate case to the judgment we shall ask you to render, and its full development we shall be obliged to leave to historians.
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Before I discuss particulars of evidence, some general considerations which may affect the credit of this trial in the eyes of the world should be candidly faced. There is a dramatic disparity between the circumstances of the accusers and of the accused that might discredit our work if we should falter, in even minor matters, in being fair and temperate.
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Unfortunately, the nature of these crimes is such that both prosecution and judgment must be by victor nations over vanquished foes. The world-wide scope of the aggressions carried out by these men has left but few real neutrals. Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. After the first World War, we learned the futility of the latter course. The former high station of these defendants, the notoriety of their acts, and the adaptability of their conduct to provoke retaliation make it hard to distinguish between the demand for a just and measured retribution and the unthinking cry for vengeance which arises from the anguish of war. It is our task, so far as humanly possible, to draw the line between the two. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspiration to do justice.
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At the very outset, let us dispose of the contention that to put these men to trial is to do them an injustice entitling them to some special consideration. These defendants may be hard pressed but they are not ill used. Let us see what alternative they would have to being tried.
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More than a majority of these prisoners surrendered to or were tracked down by forces of the United States. Could they expect us to make American custody a shelter for our enemies against the just wrath of our Allies? Did we spend American lives to capture them only to save them from punishment? Under the principles of the Moscow Declaration, those suspected war criminals who are not to be tried internationally must be turned over to individual governments for trial at the scene of their outrages. Many less responsible and less culpable American-held prisoners have been and will be turned over to other United Nations for local trial. If these defendants should succeed, for any reason, in escaping the condemnation of this Tribunal, or if they obstruct or abort this trial, those who are American-held prisoners will be delivered up to our continental Allies. For these defendants, however, we have set up an International Tribunal and have undertaken the burden of participating in a complicated effort to give them fair and dispassionate hearings.
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That is the best known protection to any man with a defense worthy of being heard.
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If these men are the first war leaders of a defeated nation to be prosecuted in the name of the law, they are also the first to be given a chance to plead for their lives in the name of the law. Realistically, the charter of this Tribunal, which gives them a hearing, is also the source of their only hope. It may be that these men of troubled conscience, whose only wish is that the world forget them, do not regard a trial as a favor. But they do have a fair opportunity to defend themselves a favor which these men, when in power, rarely extended even to their fellow countrymen.
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Despite the fact that public opinion already condemns their acts, we agree that here they must be given a presumption of innocence, and we accept the burden of proving criminal acts and the responsibility of these defendants for their commission.
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When I say that we do not ask for convictions unless we prove crime, I do not mean mere technical or incidental transgression of international conventions. We charge guilt on planned and intended conduct that involves moral as well as legal wrong. And we do not mean conduct that is a natural and human, even if illegal, cutting of corners, such as many of us might well have committed had we been in the defendants’ positions. It is not because they yielded to the normal frailties of human beings that we accuse them. It is their abnormal and inhuman conduct which brings them to this bar.
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We will not ask you to convict these men on the testimony of their foes. There is no count of the indictment that cannot be proved by books and records. The Germans were always meticulous record keepers, and these defendants had their share of the Teutonic passion for thoroughness in putting things on paper. Nor were they without vanity. They arranged frequently to be photographed in action. We will show you their own films. You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices as these defendants reenact for you, from the screen, some of the events in the course of the conspiracy.
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We would also make clear these we have no purpose to incriminate the whole German people. We know that the Nazi Party was not put in power by a majority of the German vote. We know it came to power by an evil alliance between the most extreme of the Nazi revolutionists, the most unrestrained of the German reactionaries, and the most aggressive of the German militarists. If the German populace had willingly accepted the Nazi program, no stormtroopers would have been needed in the early days of the Party and there would have been no need for concentration camps or the Gestapo, both of which institutions were inaugurated as soon as the Nazi gained control of the German state. Only after these lawless innovations proved successful at home were they taken abroad.
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The German people should know by now that the people of the United States hold them in no fear, and in no hate. It is true that the Germans have taught us the horrors of modern warfare, but the ruin that lies from the Rhine to the Danube shows that we, like our Allies, have not been dull pupils. If we are not awed by German fortitude and proficiency in war, and if we are not persuaded of their political maturity, we do respect their skill in the arts of peace, their technical competence, and the sober, industrious, and self-disciplined character of the masses of the German people. In 1933, we saw the German people recovering prestige in the commercial, industrial, and artistic world after the set-back of the last war. We beheld their progress neither with envy nor malice. The Nazi regime interrupted this advance. The recoil of the Nazi aggression has left Germany in ruins. The Nazi readiness to pledge the German word without hesitation and to break it without shame has fastened upon German diplomacy a reputation for duplicity that will handicap it for years. Nazi arrogance had made the boast of the "master race" a taunt that will be thrown at Germans the world over for generations. The Nazi nightmare has given the German name a new and sinister significance throughout the world which will retard Germany a century. The German, no less than the non-German, world has accounts to settle with these defendants.
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The fact of the war and the course of the war, which is the central theme of our case, is history. From September first, 1939, when the German armies crossed the Polish frontiers, until September 1941, when they met epic resistance at Stalingrad, German arms seemed invincible. Denmark and Norway, the Netherlands and France, Belgium and Luxembourg, the Balkans and Africa, Poland and the Baltic states, and parts of Russia all had been overrun and conquered by swift, powerful, well-aimed blows. That attack upon the peace of the world is the crime against international society which brings into international cognizance crimes in its aid and preparation which otherwise might be only internal concerns. It was aggressive war, which the nations of the world had renounced. It was war in violation of treaties, by which the peace of the world was sought to be safeguarded.
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This war did not just happen it was planned and prepared for over a Long period of time and with no small skill and cunning. The world has perhaps never seen such a concentration and stimulation of the energies of any people as that which enabled Germany 20 years after it was defeated, disarmed, and dismembered to come so near carrying out its plan to dominate Europe. Whatever else we may say of those who were the authors of this war, they did achieve a stupendous work in organization, and our first task is to examine the means by which these defendants and their fellow conspirators prepared and incited Germany to go to war.
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In general, our case will disclose these defendants all uniting at some time with the Nazi Party in a plan which they well knew could be accomplished only by an outbreak of war in Europe. Their seizure of the German state, their subjugation of the German people, their terrorism and extermination of dissident elements, their planning and waging of war, their calculated and planned ruthlessness in the conduct of warfare, their deliberate and planned criminality toward conquered peoples all these are ends for which they acted in concert; and all these are phases of the conspiracy, a conspiracy which reached one goal only to set out for another and more ambitious one. We shall also trace for you the intricate web of organizations which these men formed and utilized to accomplish these ends. We will show how the entire structure of offices and officials was dedicated to the criminal purposes and committed to use of the criminal methods planned by these defendants and their co-conspirators, many of whom war and suicide have put beyond reach.
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It is my purpose to open the case, particularly under count one of the indictment, and to deal with the common plan or conspiracy to achieve ends possible only by resort to crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. My emphasis will not be on individual barbarities and perversions which may have occurred independently of any central plan. One of the dangers ever present is that this trial may be protracted by details of particular wrongs and that we will become lost in a wilderness of single instances. Nor will I now dwell on the activity of individual defendants except as it may contribute to exposition of the common plan.
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The case as presented by the United States will be concerned with the brains and authority back of all the crimes. These defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers, the inciters and leaders, without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with the agonies and convulsions of this terrible war.
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[Here follow discussions on the lawless road to power, the consolidation of Nazi power, the battle against the working class, the battle against churches, crimes against the Jews, terrorism and preparation for war, experiments in aggression, war of aggression, conspiracy with Japan, and crimes in the conduct of war.]
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The Law of the Case
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The end of the war and capture of these prisoners presented the victorious Allies with the question whether there is any legal responsibility on high-ranking men for acts which I have described. Must such wrongs either be ignored or redressed in hot blood? Is there no standard in the law for a deliberate and reasoned judgment on such conduct?
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The charter of this Tribunal evidences a faith that the law is not only to govern the conduct of little men, but that even rulers are, as Lord Chief Justice Coke put it to King James, under God and the law. The United States believed that the law long has afforded standards by which a juridical hearing could be conducted to make sure that we punish only the right men and for the right reasons. Following the instructions of the late President Roosevelt and the decision of the Yalta conference, President Truman directed representatives of the United States to formulate a proposed international agreement, which was submitted during the San Francisco conference to Foreign Ministers of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the Provisional Government of France. With many modifications, that proposal has become the charter of this Tribunal.
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But the agreement which sets up the standards by which these prisoners are to be judged does not express the views of the signatory nations alone. Other nations with diverse but highly respected systems of jurisprudence also have signified adherence to it. These are Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Australia, Honduras, and Panama. You judge, therefore, under an organic act which represents the wisdom, the sense of justice, and the will of 18 governments, representing an overwhelming majority of all civilized people.
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The charter by which this Tribunal has its being embodies certain legal concepts which are inseparable from its jurisdiction and which must govern its decision. These, as I have said, also are conditions to the grant of any hearing to defendants. The validity of the provisions of the charter is conclusive upon us all, whether we have accepted the duty of judging or of prosecuting under it, as well as upon the defendants, who can point to no other law which gives them a right to be heard at all. My able and experienced colleagues believe, as do I, that it will contribute to the expedition and clarity of this trial if I expound briefly the application of the legal philosophy of the charter to the facts I have recited.
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While this declaration of the law by the charter is final, it may be contended that the prisoners on trial are entitled to have it applied to their conduct only most charitably if at all. It may be said that this is new law, not authoritatively declared at the time they did the acts it condemns, and that this declaration of the law has taken them by surprise.
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I cannot, of course, deny that these men are surprised that this is the law; they really are surprised that there is any such thing as law. These defendants did not rely on any law at all. Their program ignored and defied all law. That this is so will appear from may acts and statements, of which I cite but a few. In the Fuehrer’s speech to all military commanders on November 23, 1939, he reminded them that at the moment Germany had a pact with Russia, but declared, “agreements are to be kept only as long as they serve a certain purpose.” Later on in the same speech he announced, “violation of the neutrality of Holland and Belgium will be of no importance.”( Doc.89-PS, pp. and 11.) A top-secret document entitled, “Warfare as a Problem of Organization” dispatched by the Chief of the High Command to all Commanders on April 9, 1938, declared that “The normal rules of war toward neutrals may be considered to apply only on the basis whether operation of rules will create greater advantages or disadvantages for belligerents.?Doc.-211, p.?8 of translation.) And from the files of the German Navy Staff we have a “Memorandum on Intensified Naval War” dated October 5, 1939, which begins by stating a desire to comply with international law. “However” it continues,“if decisive successes are expected from any measure considered as a war necessity, it must be carried through even if it is not in agreement with International Law.” Doc.-184, p..) International law, natural law, German law, any law at all was to these men simply a propaganda device to be invoked when it helped and to be ignored when it would condemn what they wanted to do. That men may be protected in relying upon the law at the time they act is the reason we find laws of retrospective operation unjust. But these men cannot bring themselves within the reason of the rule which in some systems of jurisprudence prohibits ex-post-facto laws. They cannot show that they ever relied upon international law in any state or paid it the slightest regard.
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The third count of the indictment is based on the definition of war crimes contained in the charter. I have outlined to you the systematic course of conduct toward civilian populations and combat forces which violates international conventions to which Germany was a party. Of the criminal nature of these acts at least, the defendants had, as we shall show, clear knowledge. Accordingly, they took pains to conceal their violations. It will appear that the defendants Keitel and Jodl were informed by official legal advisers that the orders to brand Russian prisoners of war, to shackle British prisoners of war, and to execute commando prisoners were clear violations of international law. Nevertheless, these orders were put into effect. The same is true of orders issued for the assassination of General Giraud and General Weygand, which failed to be executed only because of a ruse on the part of Admiral Canaris, who was himself later executed for his part in the plot to take Hitler’s life on July 20,
1944.
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The fourth count of the indictment is based on crimes against humanity. Chief among these are mass killings of countless human beings in cold blood. Does it take these men by surprise that murder is treated as a crime?
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The first and second counts of the indictment add to these crimes the crime of plotting and waging wars of aggression and wars in violation of nine treaties to which Germany was a party. There was a time, in fact I think the time of the first World War, when it could not have been said that war-inciting or war-making was a crime in law, however reprehensible in morals.
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Of course, it was under the law of all civilized peoples a crime for one man with his bare knuckles to assault another. How did it come that multiplying this crime by a million, and adding firearms to bare knuckles, made a legally innocent act? The doctrine was that one could not be regarded as criminal for committing the usual violent acts in the conduct of legitimate warfare. The age of imperialistic expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries added the foul doctrine, contrary to the teachings of early Christian and international-law scholars such as Grotius, that all wars are to be regarded as legitimate wars. The sum of these two doctrines was to give war-making a complete immunity from accountability to law.
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This was intolerable for an age that called itself civilized. Plain people, with their earthy common sense, revolted at such fictions and legalisms so contrary to ethical principles and demanded checks on war immunity. Statesmen and international lawyers at first cautiously responded by adopting rules of warfare designed to make the conduct of war more civilized. The effort was to set legal limits to the violence that could be done to civilian populations and to combatants as well.
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The common sense of men after the first World War demanded, however, that the law’s condemnation of war reach deeper, and that the law condemn not merely uncivilized ways of waging war but also the waging in any way of uncivilized wars--wars of aggression. The world’s statesmen again went only as far as they were forced to go. Their efforts were timid and cautious and often less explicit than we might have hoped. But the 1920’s did outlaw aggressive war.
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The reestablishment of the principle that there are unjust wars and that unjust wars are illegal is traceable in many steps. One of the most significant is the Briand-Kellogg pact of 1928, by which Germany, Italy, and Japan, in common with practically all the nations of the world, renounced war as an instrument of national policy, bound themselves to seek the settlement of disputes only by pacific means and condemned recourse to war for the solution of international controversies. This pact altered the legal status of a war of aggression. As Mr. Stimson, the United States Secretary of State, put it in 1932, such a war “is no longer to be the source and subject of rights. It is no longer to be the principle around which the duties, the conduct and the rights of nations revolve. It is an illegal thing. ... By that very act, we have made obsolete many legal precedents and have given the legal profession the task of reexamining many
of its codes and treatises.”
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The Geneva protocol of 1924 for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, signed by the representatives of 48 governments, declared that “war of aggression constitutes ... an international crime.” The Eighth Assembly of the League of Nations in 1927, on unanimous resolution of the representatives of 48 member nations, including Germany, declared that a war of aggression constitutes an international crime. At the sixth pan-American conference of 1928, the 21 American republics unanimously adopted a resolution stating that war of aggression constitutes an international crime against the human species.”
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A failure of these Nazis to heed, or to understand the force and meaning of, this evolution in the legal thought of the world is not a defense or a mitigation. If anything, it aggravates their offense and makes it the more mandatory that the law they have flouted be vindicated by juridical application to their lawless conduct. Indeed, by their own law “had they heeded any law” principles were binding on these defendants. Article of the Weimar Constitution provided that “The generally accepted rules of international law are to be considered as binding integral parts of the law of the German Reich.”(Doc.?050-PS.) Can there be any doubt that the outlawry of aggressive war was one of the generally accepted rules of international law in 1939?
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Any resort to war to any kind of a war is a resort to means that are inherently criminal. War inevitably is a course of killings, assaults, deprivations of liberty, and destruction of property. An honestly defensive war is, of course, legal and saves those lawfully conducting it from criminality. But inherently criminal acts cannot be defended by showing that those who committed them were engaged in a war, when war itself is illegal. The very minimum legal consequence of the treaties making aggressive wars illegal is to strip those who incite or wage them of every defense the law ever gave, and to leave war-makers subject to judgment by the usually accepted principles of the law of crimes.
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But if it be thought that the charter, whose declarations concededly bind us all, does contain new law I still do not shrink from demanding its strict application by this Tribunal. The rule of law in the world, flouted by the lawlessness incited by these defendants, had to be restored at the cost to my country of over a million casualties, not to mention those of other nations. I cannot subscribe to the perverted reasoning that society may advance and strengthen the rule of law by the expenditure of morally innocent lives but that progress in the law may never be made at the price of morally guilty lives.
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It is true, of course, that we have no judicial precedent for the charter. But international law is more than a scholarly collection of abstract and immutable principles. It is an outgrowth of treaties and agreements between nations and of accepted customs. Yet every custom has its origin in some single act and every agreement has to be initiated by the action of some state. Unless we are prepared to abandon every principle of growth for international law, we cannot deny that our own day has the right to institute customs and to conclude agreements that will themselves become sources of a newer and strengthened international law. International law is not capable of development by the normal processes of legislation for there is no continuing international legislative authority. Innovations and revisions in international law are brought about by the action of governments designed to meet a change in circumstances. It grows, as did the common law, through decisions reached from time to time in adapting settled principles to new situations. The fact is that when the law evolves by the case method, as did the common law and as international law must do if it is to advance at all, it advances at the expense of those who wrongly guessed the law and learned too late their error. The law, so far as international law can be decreed, had been clearly pronounced when these acts took place. Hence I am not disturbed by the lack of judicial precedent for the inquiry we propose to conduct.
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The events I have earlier recited clearly fall within the standards of crimes, set out in the charter, whose perpetrators this Tribunal is convened to judge and punish fittingly. The standards for war crimes and crimes against humanity are too familiar to need comment. There are, however, certain novel problems in applying other precepts of the charter which I should call to your attention.
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The Crime Against Peace
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A basic provision of the charter is that to plan, prepare, initiate, or wage a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances, or to conspire or participate in a common plan to do so is a crime.
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It is perhaps a weakness in this charter that it fails itself to define a war of aggression. Abstractly, the subject is full of difficulty, and all kinds of troublesome hypothetical cases can be conjured up. It is a subject which, if the defense should be permitted to go afield beyond the very narrow charge in the indictment, would prolong the trial and involve the Tribunal in insoluble political issues. But, so far as the question can properly be involved in this case, the issue is one of no novelty and is one on which legal opinion has well crystallized.
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One of the most authoritative sources of international law on this subject is the Convention for the Definition of Aggression signed at London on July , 1933 by Rumania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Turkey, the Soviet Union, Persia, and Afghanistan. The subject has also been considered by international committees and by commentators whose views are entitled to the greatest respect. It had been little discussed prior to the first World War but has received much attention as international law has evolved its outlawry of aggressive war. In the light of these materials of international law, and so far as relevant to the evidence in this case, I suggest that an“aggressor” is generally held to be that state which is The first to commit any of the following actions:
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(1) Declaration of war upon another state;
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(2) Invasion by its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another state;
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(3) Attack by its land, naval, or air forces, with or without a declaration of war, on the territory, vessels, or aircraft of another
state;
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(4) Provision of support to armed bands formed in the territory of another state, or refusal, notwithstanding the request of the invaded state, to take in its own territory all the measures in its power to deprive those bands of all assistance or protection.
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And I further suggest that it is the general view that no political, military, economic, or other considerations shall serve as an excuse or justification for such actions; but exercise of the right of legitimate self-defense, that is to say, resistance to an act of aggression, or action to assist a state which has been subjected to aggression, shall not constitute a war of aggression.
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It is upon such an understanding of the law that our evidence of a conspiracy to provoke and wage an aggressive war is prepared and presented. By this test each of the series of wars begun by these Nazi leaders was unambiguously aggressive.
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It is important to the duration and scope of this trial that we bear in mind the difference between our charge that this war was one of aggression and a position that Germany had no grievances. We are not inquiring into the conditions which contributed to causing this war. They are for history to unravel. It is no part of our task to vindicate the European status quo as of 1933, or as of any other date. The United States does not desire to enter into discussion of the complicated pre-war currents of European politics, and it hopes this trial will not be protracted by their consideration. The remote causations avowed are too insincere and inconsistent, too complicated and doctrinaire, to be the subject of profitable inquiry in this trial. A familiar example is to be found in the “Lebensraum“ slogan, which summarized the contention that Germany needed more living space as a justification for expansion. At the same time that the Nazis were demanding more space for the German people, they were demanding more German people to occupy space. Every known means to increase the birth rate, legitimate and illegitimate, was utilized. “Lebensraum” represented a vicious circle of demand from neighbors more space, and from Germans more progeny. We do not need to investigate the verity of doctrines which led to constantly expanding circles of aggression. It is only the plot and the act of aggression which we charge to be crimes.
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Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions. It may be that the Germany of the 1920’s and 1930’s faced desperate problems, problems that would have warranted the boldest measures short of war. All other methods persuasion, propaganda, economic competition, diplomacy were open to an aggrieved country, but aggressive warfare was outlawed. These defendants did make aggressive war, a war in violation of treaties. They did attack and invade their neighbors in order to effectuate a foreign policy which they knew could not be accomplished by measures short of war. And that is as far as we accuse or propose to inquire.
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The Law of Individual Responsibility
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The charter also recognizes individual responsibility on the part of those who commit acts defined as crimes, or who incite others to do so, or who join a common plan with other persons, groups, or organizations to bring about their commission. The principle of individual responsibility for piracy and brigandage, which have long been recognized as crimes punishable under international law, is old and well established. That is what illegal warfare is. This principle of personal liability is a necessary as well as logical one if international law is to render real help to the maintenance of peace. An international law which operates only on states can be enforced only by war because the most practicable method of coercing a state is warfare. Those familiar with American history know that one of the compelling reasons for adoption of our Constitution was that the laws of the Confederation, which operated only on constituent states, were found ineffective to maintain order among them. The only answer to recalcitrance was impotence or war. Only sanctions which reach individuals can peacefully and effectively be enforced. Hence, the principle of the criminality of aggressive war is implemented by the charter with the principle of personal responsibility.
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Of course, the idea that a state, any more than a corporation, commits crimes is a fiction. Crimes always are committed only by persons. While it is quite proper to employ the fiction of responsibility of a state or corporation for the purpose of imposing a collective liability, it is quite intolerable to let such a legalism become the basis of personal immunity.
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The charter recognizes that one who has committed criminal acts may not take refuge in superior orders nor in the doctrine that his crimes were acts of states. These twin principles working together have heretofore resulted in immunity for practically everyone concerned in the really great crimes against peace and mankind. Those in the lower ranks were protected against liability by the orders of their superiors. The superiors were protected because their orders were called acts of state. Under the charter, no defense based on either of these doctrines can be entertained. Modern civilization puts unlimited weapons of destruction in the hands of men. It cannot tolerate so vast an area of legal irresponsibility.
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Even the German Military Code provides that “If the execution of a Military order in the course of duty violates the criminal law, then the superior officer giving the order will bear the sole responsibility therefor. However, the obeying subordinate will share the punishment of the participant: (1) if he has exceeded the order given to him, or (2) if it was within his knowledge that the order of his superior officer concerned an act by which it was intended to commit a civil or military crime or transgression.(Reichsgesetzblatt 1926, no.7, p.?78, art.7.)
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Of course, we do not argue that the circumstances under which one commits an act should be disregarded in judging its legal effect. A conscripted private or an enlisted man on a firing squad cannot expect to hold an inquest on the validity of the execution. The charter implies common-sense limits to liability just as it places common-sense limits upon immunity. But none of these men before you acted in minor parts. Each of them was entrusted with broad discretion and exercised great power. Their responsibility is correspondingly great and may not be shifted to that fictional being, “the state” which cannot be produced for trial, cannot plead, cannot testify and cannot be sentenced.
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The charter also recognizes a vicarious liability, which is recognized by most modern systems of law, for acts committed by others in carrying out a common plan or conspiracy to which a defendant has become a party. I need not discuss the familiar principles of such liability. Every day in the courts of countries associated in this prosecution, men are convicted for acts that they did not personally commit but for which they were held responsible because of membership in illegal combinations or plans or conspiracies.
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The Political, Police, and Military Organizations
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Accused before this Tribunal as criminal organizations are certain political and police organizations which the evidence will show to have been instruments of cohesion in planning and executing the crimes I have detailed. Perhaps the worst of the movement were the Leadership Corps of the N.S.D.A.P., the Schutzstaffeln or SS the Sturmabteilungen or SA and the subsidiary formations which these include. These were the Nazi Party leadership, espionage, and policing groups. They were the real government, above and outside of any law. Also accused as organizations are the Reich Cabinet and the Secret State Police, or Gestapo, which were fixtures of the Government but animated solely by the Nazi Party.
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Except for a late period when some compulsory recruiting was done in the SS, membership in all these militarized formations was voluntary. The police organizations were recruited from ardent partisans who enlisted blindly to do the dirty work the leaders planned. The Reich Cabinet was the governmental facade for Nazi Party government, and in its members legal as well as actual responsibility was vested for the entire program. Collectively they were responsible for the program in general; individually they were especially responsible for segments of it. The finding which we ask you to make, that these are criminal organizations, will subject members to punishment to be hereafter determined by appropriate tribunals, unless some personal defense ?such as becoming a member under threat to person, or family, or inducement by false representation, or the like be established. Every member will have a chance to be heard in the subsequent forum on his personal relation to the organization, but your finding in this trial will conclusively establish the criminal character of the organization as a whole.
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We have also accused as criminal organizations the High Command and the General Staff of the German armed forces. We recognize that to plan warfare is the business of professional soldiers in every country. But it is one thing to plan strategic moves in the event war comes, and it is another thing to plot and intrigue to bring on that war. We will prove the leaders of the German General Staff and of the High Command to have been guilty of just that. Military men are not before you because they served their country. They are here because they mastered it, along with these others, and drove it to war. They are not here because they lost the war but because they started it. Politicians may have thought of them as soldiers, but soldiers know they were politicians. We ask that the General Staff and the High Command, as defined in the indictment, be condemned as a criminal group whose existence and tradition constitute a standing menace to the peace of the world.
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These individual defendants did not stand alone in crime and will not stand alone in punishment. Your verdict of “Guilty” against these
Organizations will render prima facie guilty, as nearly as we can learn, thousands upon thousands of members now in custody of United States forces and of other armies.
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The Responsibility of This Tribunal
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To apply the sanctions of the law to those whose conduct is found criminal by the standards I have outlined is the responsibility committed to this Tribunal. It is the first court ever to undertake the difficult task of overcoming the confusion of many tongues and the conflicting concepts of just procedure among divers systems of law, so as to reach a common judgment. The tasks of all of us are such as to make heavy demands on patience and good-will. Although the need for prompt action has admittedly resulted in imperfect work on the part of the prosecution, four great nations bring you their hurriedly assembled contributions of evidence. What remains undiscovered we can only guess. We could, with witnesses, testimony, prolong the recitals of crime for years, but to what avail? We shall rest the case when we have offered what seems convincing and adequate proof of the crimes charged without unnecessary accumulation of evidence. We doubt very much whether it will be seriously denied that the crimes I have outlined took place. The effort will undoubtedly be to mitigate or escape personal responsibility.
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Among the nations which unite in accusing these defendants the United States is perhaps in a position to be the most dispassionate, for, having sustained the least injury, it is perhaps the least animated by vengeance. Our American cities have not been bombed by day and by night, by humans and by robots. It is not our temples that have been laid in ruins. Our countrymen have not had their homes destroyed over their heads. The menace of Nazi aggression, except to those in actual service, has seemed less personal and immediate to us than to the European peoples. But, while the United States is not first in rancor, it is not second in determination that the forces of law and order be made equal to the task of dealing with such international lawlessness as I have recited here.
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Twice in my lifetime, the United States has sent its young manhood across the Atlantic, drained its resources, and burdened itself with debt to help defeat Germany. But the real hope and faith that has sustained the American people in these great efforts was that victory for ourselves and our Allies would lay the basis for an ordered international relationship in Europe and would end the centuries of strife on this embattled continent.
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Twice we have held back in the early stages of European conflict in the belief that it might be confined to a purely European affair. In the United States, we have tried to build an economy without armament, a system of government without militarism, and a society where men are not regimented for war. This purpose, we know now, can never be realized if the world periodically is to be embroiled in war. The United States cannot, generation after generation, throw its youth or its resources onto the battlefields of Europe to redress the lack of balance between Germany’s strength and that of her enemies, and to keep the battles from our shores.
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The American dream of a peace-and-plenty economy, as well as the hopes of other nations, can never be fulfilled if those nations are involved in a war every generation so vast and devastating as to crush the generation that fights and burden the generation that follows. But experience has shown that wars are no longer local. All modern wars become world wars eventually. And none of the big nations at least can stay out. If we cannot stay out of wars, our only hope is to prevent wars.
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I am too well aware of the weaknesses of juridical action alone to contend that in itself your decision under this charter can prevent future wars. Judicial action always comes after the event. Wars are started only on the theory and in the confidence that they can be won. Personal punishment, to be suffered only in the event the war is lost, will probably not be a sufficient deterrent to prevent a war where the war-makers feel the chances of defeat to be negligible.
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But the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law. And let me make clear that, while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn, aggression by any other nation, including those which now sit here in judgment. We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law. This trial represents mankind’s desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law To statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world’s peace and to commit aggressions against the rights of their neighbors.
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The usefulness of this effort to do justice is not to be measured by considering the law or your judgment in isolation. This trial is part of the great effort to make the peace more secure. One step in this direction is the United Nations Organization, which may take joint political action to prevent war if possible, and joint military action to insure that any nation which starts a war will lose it. This charter and this trial, implementing the Kellogg-Briand pact, constitute another step in the same direction juridical action of a kind to insure that those who start a war will pay for it personally.
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While the defendants and the prosecutors stand before you as individuals, it is not the triumph of either group alone that is committed to your judgment. Above all personalities there are anonymous and impersonal forces whose conflict makes up much of human history. It is yours to throw the strength of the law back of either the one or the other of these forces for at least another generation. What are the real forces that are contending before you?
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No charity can disguise the fact that the forces which these defendants represent, the forces that would advantage and delight in their acquittal, are the darkest and most sinister forces in society dictatorship and oppression, malevolence and passion, militarism and lawlessness. By their fruits we best know them. Their acts have bathed the world in blood and set civilization back a century. They have subjected their European neighbors to every outrage and torture, every spoliation and deprivation that insolence, cruelty, and greed could inflict. They have brought the German people to the lowest pitch of wretchedness, from which they can entertain no hope of early deliverance. They have stirred hatreds and incited domestic violence on every continent. These are the things that stand in the dock shoulder to shoulder with these prisoners.
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The real complaining party at your bar is civilization. In all our countries it is still a struggling and imperfect thing. It does not plead that the United States, or any other country, has been blameless of the conditions which made the German people easy victims to the blandishments and intimidations of the Nazi conspirators.
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But it points to the dreadful sequence of aggressions and crimes I have recited; it points to the weariness of flesh, the exhaustion of resources, and the destruction of all that was beautiful or useful in so much of the world and to greater potentialities for destruction in the days to come. It is not necessary among ruins of this ancient and beautiful city, with untold members of its civilian inhabitants still buried in its rubble, to argue the proposition that to start or wage an aggressive war has the moral qualities of the worst of crimes. The refuge of the defendants can be only their hope that international law will lag so far behind the moral sense of mankind that conduct which is crime in the moral sense must be regarded as innocent in law.
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Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of international law, its precepts, its prohibitions, and most of all its sanctions, on the side of peace so that men and women of good-will in all countries may have leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the law.
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1 Excerpts from the address delivered at the Palace of Justice, Nurenberg, Germany, on Nov.21, 1945.
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Opening address for the United States of America
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Robert H. Jackson
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Representative and Chief of Counsel for the United States of America
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May It Please Your Honors,
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The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power ever has paid to Reason.
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This Tribunal, while it is novel and experimental, is not the product of abstract speculations nor is it created to vindicate legalistic theories. This inquest represents the practical effort of 4 of the most mighty of nations, with the support of 14 more, to utilize international law to meet the greatest menace of our times aggressive war. The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. It is a cause of this magnitude that the United Nations will lay before Your Honors.
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In the prisoners' dock sit 20-odd broken men. Reproached by the humiliation of those they have led almost as bitterly as by the desolation of those they have attacked, their personal capacity for evil is forever past. It is hard now to perceive in these miserable men as captives the power by which as Nazi leaders they once dominated much of the world and terrified most of it. Merely as individuals, their fate is of little consequence to the world.
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What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world after their bodies have returned to dust. They are living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names. Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.
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What these men stand for we will patiently and temperately disclose. We will give you undeniable proofs of incredible events. The catalog of crimes will omit nothing that could be conceived by a pathological pride, cruelty, and lust for power. These men created in Germany under the “Fuhrerprinzip” a National Socialist despotism equaled only by the dynasties of the ancient East. They took from the German people all those dignities and freedoms that we hold natural and inalienable rights in every human being. The people were compensated by inflaming and gratifying hatreds toward those who were marked as scapegoats. Against their opponents, including Jews, Catholics, and free labor, the Nazis directed such a campaign of arrogance, brutality, and annihilation as the world has not witnessed since the pre-Christian ages. They excited the German ambition to be a “master race” which of course implies serfdom for others. They led their people on a mad gamble for domination. They diverted social energies and resources to the creation of what they thought to be an invincible war-machine. They overran their neighbors. To sustain the “master race” in its war-making, they enslaved millions of human beings and brought them into Germany, where these hapless creatures now wander as displaced persons. At length bestiality and bad faith reached such excess that they aroused the sleeping strength of imperiled civilization. Its united efforts have ground the German war-machine to fragments. But the struggle has left Europe a liberated yet prostrate land where a demoralized society struggles to survive. These are the fruits of the sinister forces that sit with these defendants in the prisoners’ dock.
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In justice to the nations and the men associated in this prosecution, I must remind you of certain difficulties which may leave their mark on this case. Never before in legal history has an effort been made to bring within the scope of a single litigation the developments of a decade, covering a whole continent, and involving a score of nations, countless individuals, and innumerable events. Despite the magnitude of the task, the world has demanded immediate action. This demand has had to be met, though perhaps at the cost of finished craftsmanship. In my country, established courts, following familiar procedures, applying well-thumbed precedents, and dealing with the legal consequences of local and limited events, seldom commence a trial within a year of the event in litigation. Yet less than eight months ago today the courtroom in which you sit was an enemy fortress in the hands of German SS Troops. Less than eight months ago nearly all our witnesses and documents were in enemy hands. The law had not been codified, no procedures had been established, no tribunal was in existence, no usable courthouse stood here, none of the hundreds of tons of official German documents had been examined, no prosecuting staff had been assembled, nearly all the present defendants were at large, and the four prosecuting powers had not yet joined in common cause to try them. I should be the last to deny that the case may well suffer from incomplete researches and quite likely will not be the example of professional work which any of the prosecuting nations would normally wish to sponsor. It is, however, a completely adequate case to the judgment we shall ask you to render, and its full development we shall be obliged to leave to historians.
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Before I discuss particulars of evidence, some general considerations which may affect the credit of this trial in the eyes of the world should be candidly faced. There is a dramatic disparity between the circumstances of the accusers and of the accused that might discredit our work if we should falter, in even minor matters, in being fair and temperate.
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Unfortunately, the nature of these crimes is such that both prosecution and judgment must be by victor nations over vanquished foes. The world-wide scope of the aggressions carried out by these men has left but few real neutrals. Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. After the first World War, we learned the futility of the latter course. The former high station of these defendants, the notoriety of their acts, and the adaptability of their conduct to provoke retaliation make it hard to distinguish between the demand for a just and measured retribution and the unthinking cry for vengeance which arises from the anguish of war. It is our task, so far as humanly possible, to draw the line between the two. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspiration to do justice.
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At the very outset, let us dispose of the contention that to put these men to trial is to do them an injustice entitling them to some special consideration. These defendants may be hard pressed but they are not ill used. Let us see what alternative they would have to being tried.
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More than a majority of these prisoners surrendered to or were tracked down by forces of the United States. Could they expect us to make American custody a shelter for our enemies against the just wrath of our Allies? Did we spend American lives to capture them only to save them from punishment? Under the principles of the Moscow Declaration, those suspected war criminals who are not to be tried internationally must be turned over to individual governments for trial at the scene of their outrages. Many less responsible and less culpable American-held prisoners have been and will be turned over to other United Nations for local trial. If these defendants should succeed, for any reason, in escaping the condemnation of this Tribunal, or if they obstruct or abort this trial, those who are American-held prisoners will be delivered up to our continental Allies. For these defendants, however, we have set up an International Tribunal and have undertaken the burden of participating in a complicated effort to give them fair and dispassionate hearings.
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That is the best known protection to any man with a defense worthy of being heard.
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If these men are the first war leaders of a defeated nation to be prosecuted in the name of the law, they are also the first to be given a chance to plead for their lives in the name of the law. Realistically, the charter of this Tribunal, which gives them a hearing, is also the source of their only hope. It may be that these men of troubled conscience, whose only wish is that the world forget them, do not regard a trial as a favor. But they do have a fair opportunity to defend themselves a favor which these men, when in power, rarely extended even to their fellow countrymen.
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Despite the fact that public opinion already condemns their acts, we agree that here they must be given a presumption of innocence, and we accept the burden of proving criminal acts and the responsibility of these defendants for their commission.
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When I say that we do not ask for convictions unless we prove crime, I do not mean mere technical or incidental transgression of international conventions. We charge guilt on planned and intended conduct that involves moral as well as legal wrong. And we do not mean conduct that is a natural and human, even if illegal, cutting of corners, such as many of us might well have committed had we been in the defendants’ positions. It is not because they yielded to the normal frailties of human beings that we accuse them. It is their abnormal and inhuman conduct which brings them to this bar.
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We will not ask you to convict these men on the testimony of their foes. There is no count of the indictment that cannot be proved by books and records. The Germans were always meticulous record keepers, and these defendants had their share of the Teutonic passion for thoroughness in putting things on paper. Nor were they without vanity. They arranged frequently to be photographed in action. We will show you their own films. You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices as these defendants reenact for you, from the screen, some of the events in the course of the conspiracy.
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We would also make clear these we have no purpose to incriminate the whole German people. We know that the Nazi Party was not put in power by a majority of the German vote. We know it came to power by an evil alliance between the most extreme of the Nazi revolutionists, the most unrestrained of the German reactionaries, and the most aggressive of the German militarists. If the German populace had willingly accepted the Nazi program, no stormtroopers would have been needed in the early days of the Party and there would have been no need for concentration camps or the Gestapo, both of which institutions were inaugurated as soon as the Nazi gained control of the German state. Only after these lawless innovations proved successful at home were they taken abroad.
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The German people should know by now that the people of the United States hold them in no fear, and in no hate. It is true that the Germans have taught us the horrors of modern warfare, but the ruin that lies from the Rhine to the Danube shows that we, like our Allies, have not been dull pupils. If we are not awed by German fortitude and proficiency in war, and if we are not persuaded of their political maturity, we do respect their skill in the arts of peace, their technical competence, and the sober, industrious, and self-disciplined character of the masses of the German people. In 1933, we saw the German people recovering prestige in the commercial, industrial, and artistic world after the set-back of the last war. We beheld their progress neither with envy nor malice. The Nazi regime interrupted this advance. The recoil of the Nazi aggression has left Germany in ruins. The Nazi readiness to pledge the German word without hesitation and to break it without shame has fastened upon German diplomacy a reputation for duplicity that will handicap it for years. Nazi arrogance had made the boast of the "master race" a taunt that will be thrown at Germans the world over for generations. The Nazi nightmare has given the German name a new and sinister significance throughout the world which will retard Germany a century. The German, no less than the non-German, world has accounts to settle with these defendants.
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The fact of the war and the course of the war, which is the central theme of our case, is history. From September first, 1939, when the German armies crossed the Polish frontiers, until September 1941, when they met epic resistance at Stalingrad, German arms seemed invincible. Denmark and Norway, the Netherlands and France, Belgium and Luxembourg, the Balkans and Africa, Poland and the Baltic states, and parts of Russia all had been overrun and conquered by swift, powerful, well-aimed blows. That attack upon the peace of the world is the crime against international society which brings into international cognizance crimes in its aid and preparation which otherwise might be only internal concerns. It was aggressive war, which the nations of the world had renounced. It was war in violation of treaties, by which the peace of the world was sought to be safeguarded.
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This war did not just happen it was planned and prepared for over a Long period of time and with no small skill and cunning. The world has perhaps never seen such a concentration and stimulation of the energies of any people as that which enabled Germany 20 years after it was defeated, disarmed, and dismembered to come so near carrying out its plan to dominate Europe. Whatever else we may say of those who were the authors of this war, they did achieve a stupendous work in organization, and our first task is to examine the means by which these defendants and their fellow conspirators prepared and incited Germany to go to war.
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In general, our case will disclose these defendants all uniting at some time with the Nazi Party in a plan which they well knew could be accomplished only by an outbreak of war in Europe. Their seizure of the German state, their subjugation of the German people, their terrorism and extermination of dissident elements, their planning and waging of war, their calculated and planned ruthlessness in the conduct of warfare, their deliberate and planned criminality toward conquered peoples all these are ends for which they acted in concert; and all these are phases of the conspiracy, a conspiracy which reached one goal only to set out for another and more ambitious one. We shall also trace for you the intricate web of organizations which these men formed and utilized to accomplish these ends. We will show how the entire structure of offices and officials was dedicated to the criminal purposes and committed to use of the criminal methods planned by these defendants and their co-conspirators, many of whom war and suicide have put beyond reach.
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It is my purpose to open the case, particularly under count one of the indictment, and to deal with the common plan or conspiracy to achieve ends possible only by resort to crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. My emphasis will not be on individual barbarities and perversions which may have occurred independently of any central plan. One of the dangers ever present is that this trial may be protracted by details of particular wrongs and that we will become lost in a wilderness of single instances. Nor will I now dwell on the activity of individual defendants except as it may contribute to exposition of the common plan.
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The case as presented by the United States will be concerned with the brains and authority back of all the crimes. These defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers, the inciters and leaders, without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with the agonies and convulsions of this terrible war.
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[Here follow discussions on the lawless road to power, the consolidation of Nazi power, the battle against the working class, the battle against churches, crimes against the Jews, terrorism and preparation for war, experiments in aggression, war of aggression, conspiracy with Japan, and crimes in the conduct of war.]
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The Law of the Case
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The end of the war and capture of these prisoners presented the victorious Allies with the question whether there is any legal responsibility on high-ranking men for acts which I have described. Must such wrongs either be ignored or redressed in hot blood? Is there no standard in the law for a deliberate and reasoned judgment on such conduct?
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The charter of this Tribunal evidences a faith that the law is not only to govern the conduct of little men, but that even rulers are, as Lord Chief Justice Coke put it to King James, under God and the law. The United States believed that the law long has afforded standards by which a juridical hearing could be conducted to make sure that we punish only the right men and for the right reasons. Following the instructions of the late President Roosevelt and the decision of the Yalta conference, President Truman directed representatives of the United States to formulate a proposed international agreement, which was submitted during the San Francisco conference to Foreign Ministers of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the Provisional Government of France. With many modifications, that proposal has become the charter of this Tribunal.
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But the agreement which sets up the standards by which these prisoners are to be judged does not express the views of the signatory nations alone. Other nations with diverse but highly respected systems of jurisprudence also have signified adherence to it. These are Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Australia, Honduras, and Panama. You judge, therefore, under an organic act which represents the wisdom, the sense of justice, and the will of 18 governments, representing an overwhelming majority of all civilized people.
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The charter by which this Tribunal has its being embodies certain legal concepts which are inseparable from its jurisdiction and which must govern its decision. These, as I have said, also are conditions to the grant of any hearing to defendants. The validity of the provisions of the charter is conclusive upon us all, whether we have accepted the duty of judging or of prosecuting under it, as well as upon the defendants, who can point to no other law which gives them a right to be heard at all. My able and experienced colleagues believe, as do I, that it will contribute to the expedition and clarity of this trial if I expound briefly the application of the legal philosophy of the charter to the facts I have recited.
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While this declaration of the law by the charter is final, it may be contended that the prisoners on trial are entitled to have it applied to their conduct only most charitably if at all. It may be said that this is new law, not authoritatively declared at the time they did the acts it condemns, and that this declaration of the law has taken them by surprise.
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I cannot, of course, deny that these men are surprised that this is the law; they really are surprised that there is any such thing as law. These defendants did not rely on any law at all. Their program ignored and defied all law. That this is so will appear from may acts and statements, of which I cite but a few. In the Fuehrer’s speech to all military commanders on November 23, 1939, he reminded them that at the moment Germany had a pact with Russia, but declared, “agreements are to be kept only as long as they serve a certain purpose.” Later on in the same speech he announced, “violation of the neutrality of Holland and Belgium will be of no importance.”( Doc.89-PS, pp. and 11.) A top-secret document entitled, “Warfare as a Problem of Organization” dispatched by the Chief of the High Command to all Commanders on April 9, 1938, declared that “The normal rules of war toward neutrals may be considered to apply only on the basis whether operation of rules will create greater advantages or disadvantages for belligerents.?Doc.-211, p.?8 of translation.) And from the files of the German Navy Staff we have a “Memorandum on Intensified Naval War” dated October 5, 1939, which begins by stating a desire to comply with international law. “However” it continues,“if decisive successes are expected from any measure considered as a war necessity, it must be carried through even if it is not in agreement with International Law.” Doc.-184, p..) International law, natural law, German law, any law at all was to these men simply a propaganda device to be invoked when it helped and to be ignored when it would condemn what they wanted to do. That men may be protected in relying upon the law at the time they act is the reason we find laws of retrospective operation unjust. But these men cannot bring themselves within the reason of the rule which in some systems of jurisprudence prohibits ex-post-facto laws. They cannot show that they ever relied upon international law in any state or paid it the slightest regard.
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The third count of the indictment is based on the definition of war crimes contained in the charter. I have outlined to you the systematic course of conduct toward civilian populations and combat forces which violates international conventions to which Germany was a party. Of the criminal nature of these acts at least, the defendants had, as we shall show, clear knowledge. Accordingly, they took pains to conceal their violations. It will appear that the defendants Keitel and Jodl were informed by official legal advisers that the orders to brand Russian prisoners of war, to shackle British prisoners of war, and to execute commando prisoners were clear violations of international law. Nevertheless, these orders were put into effect. The same is true of orders issued for the assassination of General Giraud and General Weygand, which failed to be executed only because of a ruse on the part of Admiral Canaris, who was himself later executed for his part in the plot to take Hitler’s life on July 20,
1944.
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The fourth count of the indictment is based on crimes against humanity. Chief among these are mass killings of countless human beings in cold blood. Does it take these men by surprise that murder is treated as a crime?
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The first and second counts of the indictment add to these crimes the crime of plotting and waging wars of aggression and wars in violation of nine treaties to which Germany was a party. There was a time, in fact I think the time of the first World War, when it could not have been said that war-inciting or war-making was a crime in law, however reprehensible in morals.
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Of course, it was under the law of all civilized peoples a crime for one man with his bare knuckles to assault another. How did it come that multiplying this crime by a million, and adding firearms to bare knuckles, made a legally innocent act? The doctrine was that one could not be regarded as criminal for committing the usual violent acts in the conduct of legitimate warfare. The age of imperialistic expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries added the foul doctrine, contrary to the teachings of early Christian and international-law scholars such as Grotius, that all wars are to be regarded as legitimate wars. The sum of these two doctrines was to give war-making a complete immunity from accountability to law.
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This was intolerable for an age that called itself civilized. Plain people, with their earthy common sense, revolted at such fictions and legalisms so contrary to ethical principles and demanded checks on war immunity. Statesmen and international lawyers at first cautiously responded by adopting rules of warfare designed to make the conduct of war more civilized. The effort was to set legal limits to the violence that could be done to civilian populations and to combatants as well.
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The common sense of men after the first World War demanded, however, that the law’s condemnation of war reach deeper, and that the law condemn not merely uncivilized ways of waging war but also the waging in any way of uncivilized wars--wars of aggression. The world’s statesmen again went only as far as they were forced to go. Their efforts were timid and cautious and often less explicit than we might have hoped. But the 1920’s did outlaw aggressive war.
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The reestablishment of the principle that there are unjust wars and that unjust wars are illegal is traceable in many steps. One of the most significant is the Briand-Kellogg pact of 1928, by which Germany, Italy, and Japan, in common with practically all the nations of the world, renounced war as an instrument of national policy, bound themselves to seek the settlement of disputes only by pacific means and condemned recourse to war for the solution of international controversies. This pact altered the legal status of a war of aggression. As Mr. Stimson, the United States Secretary of State, put it in 1932, such a war “is no longer to be the source and subject of rights. It is no longer to be the principle around which the duties, the conduct and the rights of nations revolve. It is an illegal thing. ... By that very act, we have made obsolete many legal precedents and have given the legal profession the task of reexamining many
of its codes and treatises.”
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The Geneva protocol of 1924 for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, signed by the representatives of 48 governments, declared that “war of aggression constitutes ... an international crime.” The Eighth Assembly of the League of Nations in 1927, on unanimous resolution of the representatives of 48 member nations, including Germany, declared that a war of aggression constitutes an international crime. At the sixth pan-American conference of 1928, the 21 American republics unanimously adopted a resolution stating that war of aggression constitutes an international crime against the human species.”
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A failure of these Nazis to heed, or to understand the force and meaning of, this evolution in the legal thought of the world is not a defense or a mitigation. If anything, it aggravates their offense and makes it the more mandatory that the law they have flouted be vindicated by juridical application to their lawless conduct. Indeed, by their own law “had they heeded any law” principles were binding on these defendants. Article of the Weimar Constitution provided that “The generally accepted rules of international law are to be considered as binding integral parts of the law of the German Reich.”(Doc.?050-PS.) Can there be any doubt that the outlawry of aggressive war was one of the generally accepted rules of international law in 1939?
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Any resort to war to any kind of a war is a resort to means that are inherently criminal. War inevitably is a course of killings, assaults, deprivations of liberty, and destruction of property. An honestly defensive war is, of course, legal and saves those lawfully conducting it from criminality. But inherently criminal acts cannot be defended by showing that those who committed them were engaged in a war, when war itself is illegal. The very minimum legal consequence of the treaties making aggressive wars illegal is to strip those who incite or wage them of every defense the law ever gave, and to leave war-makers subject to judgment by the usually accepted principles of the law of crimes.
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But if it be thought that the charter, whose declarations concededly bind us all, does contain new law I still do not shrink from demanding its strict application by this Tribunal. The rule of law in the world, flouted by the lawlessness incited by these defendants, had to be restored at the cost to my country of over a million casualties, not to mention those of other nations. I cannot subscribe to the perverted reasoning that society may advance and strengthen the rule of law by the expenditure of morally innocent lives but that progress in the law may never be made at the price of morally guilty lives.
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It is true, of course, that we have no judicial precedent for the charter. But international law is more than a scholarly collection of abstract and immutable principles. It is an outgrowth of treaties and agreements between nations and of accepted customs. Yet every custom has its origin in some single act and every agreement has to be initiated by the action of some state. Unless we are prepared to abandon every principle of growth for international law, we cannot deny that our own day has the right to institute customs and to conclude agreements that will themselves become sources of a newer and strengthened international law. International law is not capable of development by the normal processes of legislation for there is no continuing international legislative authority. Innovations and revisions in international law are brought about by the action of governments designed to meet a change in circumstances. It grows, as did the common law, through decisions reached from time to time in adapting settled principles to new situations. The fact is that when the law evolves by the case method, as did the common law and as international law must do if it is to advance at all, it advances at the expense of those who wrongly guessed the law and learned too late their error. The law, so far as international law can be decreed, had been clearly pronounced when these acts took place. Hence I am not disturbed by the lack of judicial precedent for the inquiry we propose to conduct.
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The events I have earlier recited clearly fall within the standards of crimes, set out in the charter, whose perpetrators this Tribunal is convened to judge and punish fittingly. The standards for war crimes and crimes against humanity are too familiar to need comment. There are, however, certain novel problems in applying other precepts of the charter which I should call to your attention.
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The Crime Against Peace
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A basic provision of the charter is that to plan, prepare, initiate, or wage a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances, or to conspire or participate in a common plan to do so is a crime.
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It is perhaps a weakness in this charter that it fails itself to define a war of aggression. Abstractly, the subject is full of difficulty, and all kinds of troublesome hypothetical cases can be conjured up. It is a subject which, if the defense should be permitted to go afield beyond the very narrow charge in the indictment, would prolong the trial and involve the Tribunal in insoluble political issues. But, so far as the question can properly be involved in this case, the issue is one of no novelty and is one on which legal opinion has well crystallized.
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One of the most authoritative sources of international law on this subject is the Convention for the Definition of Aggression signed at London on July , 1933 by Rumania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Turkey, the Soviet Union, Persia, and Afghanistan. The subject has also been considered by international committees and by commentators whose views are entitled to the greatest respect. It had been little discussed prior to the first World War but has received much attention as international law has evolved its outlawry of aggressive war. In the light of these materials of international law, and so far as relevant to the evidence in this case, I suggest that an“aggressor” is generally held to be that state which is The first to commit any of the following actions:
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(1) Declaration of war upon another state;
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(2) Invasion by its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another state;
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(3) Attack by its land, naval, or air forces, with or without a declaration of war, on the territory, vessels, or aircraft of another
state;
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(4) Provision of support to armed bands formed in the territory of another state, or refusal, notwithstanding the request of the invaded state, to take in its own territory all the measures in its power to deprive those bands of all assistance or protection.
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And I further suggest that it is the general view that no political, military, economic, or other considerations shall serve as an excuse or justification for such actions; but exercise of the right of legitimate self-defense, that is to say, resistance to an act of aggression, or action to assist a state which has been subjected to aggression, shall not constitute a war of aggression.
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It is upon such an understanding of the law that our evidence of a conspiracy to provoke and wage an aggressive war is prepared and presented. By this test each of the series of wars begun by these Nazi leaders was unambiguously aggressive.
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It is important to the duration and scope of this trial that we bear in mind the difference between our charge that this war was one of aggression and a position that Germany had no grievances. We are not inquiring into the conditions which contributed to causing this war. They are for history to unravel. It is no part of our task to vindicate the European status quo as of 1933, or as of any other date. The United States does not desire to enter into discussion of the complicated pre-war currents of European politics, and it hopes this trial will not be protracted by their consideration. The remote causations avowed are too insincere and inconsistent, too complicated and doctrinaire, to be the subject of profitable inquiry in this trial. A familiar example is to be found in the “Lebensraum“ slogan, which summarized the contention that Germany needed more living space as a justification for expansion. At the same time that the Nazis were demanding more space for the German people, they were demanding more German people to occupy space. Every known means to increase the birth rate, legitimate and illegitimate, was utilized. “Lebensraum” represented a vicious circle of demand from neighbors more space, and from Germans more progeny. We do not need to investigate the verity of doctrines which led to constantly expanding circles of aggression. It is only the plot and the act of aggression which we charge to be crimes.
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Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions. It may be that the Germany of the 1920’s and 1930’s faced desperate problems, problems that would have warranted the boldest measures short of war. All other methods persuasion, propaganda, economic competition, diplomacy were open to an aggrieved country, but aggressive warfare was outlawed. These defendants did make aggressive war, a war in violation of treaties. They did attack and invade their neighbors in order to effectuate a foreign policy which they knew could not be accomplished by measures short of war. And that is as far as we accuse or propose to inquire.
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The Law of Individual Responsibility
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The charter also recognizes individual responsibility on the part of those who commit acts defined as crimes, or who incite others to do so, or who join a common plan with other persons, groups, or organizations to bring about their commission. The principle of individual responsibility for piracy and brigandage, which have long been recognized as crimes punishable under international law, is old and well established. That is what illegal warfare is. This principle of personal liability is a necessary as well as logical one if international law is to render real help to the maintenance of peace. An international law which operates only on states can be enforced only by war because the most practicable method of coercing a state is warfare. Those familiar with American history know that one of the compelling reasons for adoption of our Constitution was that the laws of the Confederation, which operated only on constituent states, were found ineffective to maintain order among them. The only answer to recalcitrance was impotence or war. Only sanctions which reach individuals can peacefully and effectively be enforced. Hence, the principle of the criminality of aggressive war is implemented by the charter with the principle of personal responsibility.
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Of course, the idea that a state, any more than a corporation, commits crimes is a fiction. Crimes always are committed only by persons. While it is quite proper to employ the fiction of responsibility of a state or corporation for the purpose of imposing a collective liability, it is quite intolerable to let such a legalism become the basis of personal immunity.
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The charter recognizes that one who has committed criminal acts may not take refuge in superior orders nor in the doctrine that his crimes were acts of states. These twin principles working together have heretofore resulted in immunity for practically everyone concerned in the really great crimes against peace and mankind. Those in the lower ranks were protected against liability by the orders of their superiors. The superiors were protected because their orders were called acts of state. Under the charter, no defense based on either of these doctrines can be entertained. Modern civilization puts unlimited weapons of destruction in the hands of men. It cannot tolerate so vast an area of legal irresponsibility.
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Even the German Military Code provides that “If the execution of a Military order in the course of duty violates the criminal law, then the superior officer giving the order will bear the sole responsibility therefor. However, the obeying subordinate will share the punishment of the participant: (1) if he has exceeded the order given to him, or (2) if it was within his knowledge that the order of his superior officer concerned an act by which it was intended to commit a civil or military crime or transgression.(Reichsgesetzblatt 1926, no.7, p.?78, art.7.)
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Of course, we do not argue that the circumstances under which one commits an act should be disregarded in judging its legal effect. A conscripted private or an enlisted man on a firing squad cannot expect to hold an inquest on the validity of the execution. The charter implies common-sense limits to liability just as it places common-sense limits upon immunity. But none of these men before you acted in minor parts. Each of them was entrusted with broad discretion and exercised great power. Their responsibility is correspondingly great and may not be shifted to that fictional being, “the state” which cannot be produced for trial, cannot plead, cannot testify and cannot be sentenced.
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The charter also recognizes a vicarious liability, which is recognized by most modern systems of law, for acts committed by others in carrying out a common plan or conspiracy to which a defendant has become a party. I need not discuss the familiar principles of such liability. Every day in the courts of countries associated in this prosecution, men are convicted for acts that they did not personally commit but for which they were held responsible because of membership in illegal combinations or plans or conspiracies.
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The Political, Police, and Military Organizations
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Accused before this Tribunal as criminal organizations are certain political and police organizations which the evidence will show to have been instruments of cohesion in planning and executing the crimes I have detailed. Perhaps the worst of the movement were the Leadership Corps of the N.S.D.A.P., the Schutzstaffeln or SS the Sturmabteilungen or SA and the subsidiary formations which these include. These were the Nazi Party leadership, espionage, and policing groups. They were the real government, above and outside of any law. Also accused as organizations are the Reich Cabinet and the Secret State Police, or Gestapo, which were fixtures of the Government but animated solely by the Nazi Party.
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Except for a late period when some compulsory recruiting was done in the SS, membership in all these militarized formations was voluntary. The police organizations were recruited from ardent partisans who enlisted blindly to do the dirty work the leaders planned. The Reich Cabinet was the governmental facade for Nazi Party government, and in its members legal as well as actual responsibility was vested for the entire program. Collectively they were responsible for the program in general; individually they were especially responsible for segments of it. The finding which we ask you to make, that these are criminal organizations, will subject members to punishment to be hereafter determined by appropriate tribunals, unless some personal defense ?such as becoming a member under threat to person, or family, or inducement by false representation, or the like be established. Every member will have a chance to be heard in the subsequent forum on his personal relation to the organization, but your finding in this trial will conclusively establish the criminal character of the organization as a whole.
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We have also accused as criminal organizations the High Command and the General Staff of the German armed forces. We recognize that to plan warfare is the business of professional soldiers in every country. But it is one thing to plan strategic moves in the event war comes, and it is another thing to plot and intrigue to bring on that war. We will prove the leaders of the German General Staff and of the High Command to have been guilty of just that. Military men are not before you because they served their country. They are here because they mastered it, along with these others, and drove it to war. They are not here because they lost the war but because they started it. Politicians may have thought of them as soldiers, but soldiers know they were politicians. We ask that the General Staff and the High Command, as defined in the indictment, be condemned as a criminal group whose existence and tradition constitute a standing menace to the peace of the world.
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These individual defendants did not stand alone in crime and will not stand alone in punishment. Your verdict of “Guilty” against these
Organizations will render prima facie guilty, as nearly as we can learn, thousands upon thousands of members now in custody of United States forces and of other armies.
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The Responsibility of This Tribunal
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To apply the sanctions of the law to those whose conduct is found criminal by the standards I have outlined is the responsibility committed to this Tribunal. It is the first court ever to undertake the difficult task of overcoming the confusion of many tongues and the conflicting concepts of just procedure among divers systems of law, so as to reach a common judgment. The tasks of all of us are such as to make heavy demands on patience and good-will. Although the need for prompt action has admittedly resulted in imperfect work on the part of the prosecution, four great nations bring you their hurriedly assembled contributions of evidence. What remains undiscovered we can only guess. We could, with witnesses, testimony, prolong the recitals of crime for years, but to what avail? We shall rest the case when we have offered what seems convincing and adequate proof of the crimes charged without unnecessary accumulation of evidence. We doubt very much whether it will be seriously denied that the crimes I have outlined took place. The effort will undoubtedly be to mitigate or escape personal responsibility.
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Among the nations which unite in accusing these defendants the United States is perhaps in a position to be the most dispassionate, for, having sustained the least injury, it is perhaps the least animated by vengeance. Our American cities have not been bombed by day and by night, by humans and by robots. It is not our temples that have been laid in ruins. Our countrymen have not had their homes destroyed over their heads. The menace of Nazi aggression, except to those in actual service, has seemed less personal and immediate to us than to the European peoples. But, while the United States is not first in rancor, it is not second in determination that the forces of law and order be made equal to the task of dealing with such international lawlessness as I have recited here.
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Twice in my lifetime, the United States has sent its young manhood across the Atlantic, drained its resources, and burdened itself with debt to help defeat Germany. But the real hope and faith that has sustained the American people in these great efforts was that victory for ourselves and our Allies would lay the basis for an ordered international relationship in Europe and would end the centuries of strife on this embattled continent.
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Twice we have held back in the early stages of European conflict in the belief that it might be confined to a purely European affair. In the United States, we have tried to build an economy without armament, a system of government without militarism, and a society where men are not regimented for war. This purpose, we know now, can never be realized if the world periodically is to be embroiled in war. The United States cannot, generation after generation, throw its youth or its resources onto the battlefields of Europe to redress the lack of balance between Germany’s strength and that of her enemies, and to keep the battles from our shores.
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The American dream of a peace-and-plenty economy, as well as the hopes of other nations, can never be fulfilled if those nations are involved in a war every generation so vast and devastating as to crush the generation that fights and burden the generation that follows. But experience has shown that wars are no longer local. All modern wars become world wars eventually. And none of the big nations at least can stay out. If we cannot stay out of wars, our only hope is to prevent wars.
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I am too well aware of the weaknesses of juridical action alone to contend that in itself your decision under this charter can prevent future wars. Judicial action always comes after the event. Wars are started only on the theory and in the confidence that they can be won. Personal punishment, to be suffered only in the event the war is lost, will probably not be a sufficient deterrent to prevent a war where the war-makers feel the chances of defeat to be negligible.
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But the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law. And let me make clear that, while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn, aggression by any other nation, including those which now sit here in judgment. We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law. This trial represents mankind’s desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law To statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world’s peace and to commit aggressions against the rights of their neighbors.
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The usefulness of this effort to do justice is not to be measured by considering the law or your judgment in isolation. This trial is part of the great effort to make the peace more secure. One step in this direction is the United Nations Organization, which may take joint political action to prevent war if possible, and joint military action to insure that any nation which starts a war will lose it. This charter and this trial, implementing the Kellogg-Briand pact, constitute another step in the same direction juridical action of a kind to insure that those who start a war will pay for it personally.
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While the defendants and the prosecutors stand before you as individuals, it is not the triumph of either group alone that is committed to your judgment. Above all personalities there are anonymous and impersonal forces whose conflict makes up much of human history. It is yours to throw the strength of the law back of either the one or the other of these forces for at least another generation. What are the real forces that are contending before you?
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No charity can disguise the fact that the forces which these defendants represent, the forces that would advantage and delight in their acquittal, are the darkest and most sinister forces in society dictatorship and oppression, malevolence and passion, militarism and lawlessness. By their fruits we best know them. Their acts have bathed the world in blood and set civilization back a century. They have subjected their European neighbors to every outrage and torture, every spoliation and deprivation that insolence, cruelty, and greed could inflict. They have brought the German people to the lowest pitch of wretchedness, from which they can entertain no hope of early deliverance. They have stirred hatreds and incited domestic violence on every continent. These are the things that stand in the dock shoulder to shoulder with these prisoners.
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The real complaining party at your bar is civilization. In all our countries it is still a struggling and imperfect thing. It does not plead that the United States, or any other country, has been blameless of the conditions which made the German people easy victims to the blandishments and intimidations of the Nazi conspirators.
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But it points to the dreadful sequence of aggressions and crimes I have recited; it points to the weariness of flesh, the exhaustion of resources, and the destruction of all that was beautiful or useful in so much of the world and to greater potentialities for destruction in the days to come. It is not necessary among ruins of this ancient and beautiful city, with untold members of its civilian inhabitants still buried in its rubble, to argue the proposition that to start or wage an aggressive war has the moral qualities of the worst of crimes. The refuge of the defendants can be only their hope that international law will lag so far behind the moral sense of mankind that conduct which is crime in the moral sense must be regarded as innocent in law.
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Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of international law, its precepts, its prohibitions, and most of all its sanctions, on the side of peace so that men and women of good-will in all countries may have leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the law.
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1 Excerpts from the address delivered at the Palace of Justice, Nurenberg, Germany, on Nov.21, 1945.
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On Admadinejad
It was so amazing to see that pathetic spectacle at Columbia from the sycophantic President onward. It was what my mother used to call "Lynch Mob Discourse".
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First of all, from a pure intelligence point of view, when you make caricatures of your supposed enemy, when you isolate the supposed enemy from speaking, you cut yourself off from vital intelligence about intentions and capabilities that saves lives in possible war and/or may prevent war altogether.
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Secondly, Columbia University has had all sorts of very odious dictators and outright war criminals like Kissinger speak and never once, before the guy has even spoken, had the president of Columbia denounce him with personal attacks and even caricature/denounce/assert what he was about to say in advance of the person even actually saying it.
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Thirdly, at an educational institution, supposedly about debates between contenting points of view, why not turn it into a learning moment? On the Nazi Holocaust for example, first get him to say what he actually and really thinks and feels--not a presumed caricature of it--and then counter any errors or historical revisionism with concrete data, pictures, witnesses, experts etc on the spot. But let us really get real here. Holocaust denial can take various forms and not just the form of an assertion that the Nazi Holocaust did not occur. Another form is to diminish or rank-order the victims (or even Holocausts and genocides themselves)--just as the nazis did--into those worthy of remembrance and those not. So not only did the Nazi Holocaust occur, but it included not only Jews, but Sinti-Roma (so-called "Gypsies") Homosexuals, Trade Unionists, Communists, Socialists, Peoples of Conscience and Faith, Slavic Peoples, Disabled, POWs--alll were targets of Naziism for extermination and no one group of victims is more or less important than any other. It was nazis that rank-ordered human beings into "Leben su wertes leben" or life unworthy of life (and sufferings unworthy of remembrance versus those worthy of remembrance). It does not diminish respect for the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust to mention and remember all victims and indeed all Holocausts--indeed that itself is very Jewish. And it is true that some Zionists cynically use the Nazi Holocaust for their own polemical and political purposes just as it is a matter of historical fact that some Zionists outright collaborated with Nazis seeing a harmony of interests between Nazis who wanted Jews gone from Europe and Zionists who wanted some Jews (not all Jews--not socialists, not old, not secular Jews) in Palestine.
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Fourthly, the rest of the world is really sick of US hypocrisy, bullying, posturing and arrogance and just naked imperialism and terrorism. It simply undermines rather than enhances the "national security" of the U.S. and the security of the whole world. Here the U.S., the only nation to actually use nuclear weapons, and the only nation to outright threaten use of nuclear weapons against poor nations without nuclear weapons (China, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba), saying nothing about Israel (with a declared 'Samson Option" to take out the whole world if threatened )or Pakistan or Britain or France or other nations, yet summarily declaring that Iran is lying about intending to build nuclear weapons, and indeed really intends nuclear weapons, and that the U.S., acting outside the UN if necessary, will stop Iran with another preemptive war of the kind that Nazis were hanged for at Nuremberg. Another form of Holocaust denial is to deny the binding precedents of Nuremberg and that they apply to us as well as others.
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Fifthly all these idiots with signs saying Ahmadinejad is another Hitler diminsh the real evil and massive carnage of Hitler and thus promote another form of Holocaust denial or equivocation. In fact, if you look at Ahmadinejad's personal history, as an intelligence officer in the 7 1/2 year Iraq-Iran War that Iraq started and conducted with U.S. urging and assistance, that cost over 1 1/2 million casualties, during which the U.s. gave Saddam Hussein satellite intelligence they did not even give the Israelis, then frankly Ahmadinejad had probably more reasons to be angry and call the U.S. a terrorist State than the reverse.
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Sixthly, the Iranians are not stupid. given the demographics of Iraq, with 65% of the population Shiite, they have more of a vested interest in truly free elections in Iraq (not the case in the elections that brought in the present government as Islamacist political parties were forbidden from running in the election) than in the present carnage in Iraq that is causing spillover and destabilizing effects in the whole region as well as on them directly next door. Those who say they have the "evidence" that Iran is fomenting and arming the insurgency are the ones who said they had the "evidence" of WMD and 9-11 from Saddam Hussein.
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Seventh, if Ahmadinejad is so cazy and evil, then that is precisely when he should be given the most open forum with enough rope to hang and self-impeach himself. Let us all see up-close what has been alleged about him. Censorship comes from those usually too stupid, cowardly, uneducated and unprincipled to answer that which they purport--always under the best of rationales--to answer. No, what the U.S. government is afraid of is that maybe the guy might just make some sense. Maybe a caricature has been made of him by those who are the real terrorists, Holocaust deniers, tyrrants etc. And I just love it that Ahmadinejad's homophobic remarks are criticized by real homophobes in the Republican party who play that card for their frightened moron base whenever possible.
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In his "The Russia House" the central character is an Englishman named Barley Scott Blair who is a drunken cynic against blind nationalism and who has inherited and pissed away a publishing house that publishes some Russian works. While on a drunken spree at a dacha in Russia that he has his own love for and illusions about, he says:
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"If there is to be hope, we must all 'betray' our country; we have to save each other because all victims are equal and none is more equal than others. It is everyone's duty to start the avalanche. Nowadays you have to think like a hero just to behave like a merely decent human being."
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Or as Tom Paine put it: "The world is my country; all men [sic] are my bretheren; and doing good is my religion."
-
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First of all, from a pure intelligence point of view, when you make caricatures of your supposed enemy, when you isolate the supposed enemy from speaking, you cut yourself off from vital intelligence about intentions and capabilities that saves lives in possible war and/or may prevent war altogether.
-
Secondly, Columbia University has had all sorts of very odious dictators and outright war criminals like Kissinger speak and never once, before the guy has even spoken, had the president of Columbia denounce him with personal attacks and even caricature/denounce/assert what he was about to say in advance of the person even actually saying it.
-
Thirdly, at an educational institution, supposedly about debates between contenting points of view, why not turn it into a learning moment? On the Nazi Holocaust for example, first get him to say what he actually and really thinks and feels--not a presumed caricature of it--and then counter any errors or historical revisionism with concrete data, pictures, witnesses, experts etc on the spot. But let us really get real here. Holocaust denial can take various forms and not just the form of an assertion that the Nazi Holocaust did not occur. Another form is to diminish or rank-order the victims (or even Holocausts and genocides themselves)--just as the nazis did--into those worthy of remembrance and those not. So not only did the Nazi Holocaust occur, but it included not only Jews, but Sinti-Roma (so-called "Gypsies") Homosexuals, Trade Unionists, Communists, Socialists, Peoples of Conscience and Faith, Slavic Peoples, Disabled, POWs--alll were targets of Naziism for extermination and no one group of victims is more or less important than any other. It was nazis that rank-ordered human beings into "Leben su wertes leben" or life unworthy of life (and sufferings unworthy of remembrance versus those worthy of remembrance). It does not diminish respect for the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust to mention and remember all victims and indeed all Holocausts--indeed that itself is very Jewish. And it is true that some Zionists cynically use the Nazi Holocaust for their own polemical and political purposes just as it is a matter of historical fact that some Zionists outright collaborated with Nazis seeing a harmony of interests between Nazis who wanted Jews gone from Europe and Zionists who wanted some Jews (not all Jews--not socialists, not old, not secular Jews) in Palestine.
-
Fourthly, the rest of the world is really sick of US hypocrisy, bullying, posturing and arrogance and just naked imperialism and terrorism. It simply undermines rather than enhances the "national security" of the U.S. and the security of the whole world. Here the U.S., the only nation to actually use nuclear weapons, and the only nation to outright threaten use of nuclear weapons against poor nations without nuclear weapons (China, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba), saying nothing about Israel (with a declared 'Samson Option" to take out the whole world if threatened )or Pakistan or Britain or France or other nations, yet summarily declaring that Iran is lying about intending to build nuclear weapons, and indeed really intends nuclear weapons, and that the U.S., acting outside the UN if necessary, will stop Iran with another preemptive war of the kind that Nazis were hanged for at Nuremberg. Another form of Holocaust denial is to deny the binding precedents of Nuremberg and that they apply to us as well as others.
-
Fifthly all these idiots with signs saying Ahmadinejad is another Hitler diminsh the real evil and massive carnage of Hitler and thus promote another form of Holocaust denial or equivocation. In fact, if you look at Ahmadinejad's personal history, as an intelligence officer in the 7 1/2 year Iraq-Iran War that Iraq started and conducted with U.S. urging and assistance, that cost over 1 1/2 million casualties, during which the U.s. gave Saddam Hussein satellite intelligence they did not even give the Israelis, then frankly Ahmadinejad had probably more reasons to be angry and call the U.S. a terrorist State than the reverse.
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Sixthly, the Iranians are not stupid. given the demographics of Iraq, with 65% of the population Shiite, they have more of a vested interest in truly free elections in Iraq (not the case in the elections that brought in the present government as Islamacist political parties were forbidden from running in the election) than in the present carnage in Iraq that is causing spillover and destabilizing effects in the whole region as well as on them directly next door. Those who say they have the "evidence" that Iran is fomenting and arming the insurgency are the ones who said they had the "evidence" of WMD and 9-11 from Saddam Hussein.
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Seventh, if Ahmadinejad is so cazy and evil, then that is precisely when he should be given the most open forum with enough rope to hang and self-impeach himself. Let us all see up-close what has been alleged about him. Censorship comes from those usually too stupid, cowardly, uneducated and unprincipled to answer that which they purport--always under the best of rationales--to answer. No, what the U.S. government is afraid of is that maybe the guy might just make some sense. Maybe a caricature has been made of him by those who are the real terrorists, Holocaust deniers, tyrrants etc. And I just love it that Ahmadinejad's homophobic remarks are criticized by real homophobes in the Republican party who play that card for their frightened moron base whenever possible.
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In his "The Russia House" the central character is an Englishman named Barley Scott Blair who is a drunken cynic against blind nationalism and who has inherited and pissed away a publishing house that publishes some Russian works. While on a drunken spree at a dacha in Russia that he has his own love for and illusions about, he says:
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"If there is to be hope, we must all 'betray' our country; we have to save each other because all victims are equal and none is more equal than others. It is everyone's duty to start the avalanche. Nowadays you have to think like a hero just to behave like a merely decent human being."
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Or as Tom Paine put it: "The world is my country; all men [sic] are my bretheren; and doing good is my religion."
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Billary's Style: M.O. of a Con Artist
Many years ago I was brought to Hawaii on a job as a consulting economist. While working there, I ran into an individual that was a consummate con artist and proud of it. In addition to applying his skills to popping as many women into the sack as possible, he was also adept at conning people out of money and material things.
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I asked him to run me though his bag of tricks and basically it came down to what most politicans do all the time and what co-enablers/dependents Bill and Hillary (Billary) and Bush do routinely. And he even quoted Groucho Marx's aphorism that: "The two keys to success are honesty and sincerity; and if you can fake those, the sky's the limit".
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What he told me is the key is in eye contact, focus, absolute certainty, some details and assertion as if to disagree is to brand oneself dumber than a rock.
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He said most people do not lie often or easily. And when they do, they give "tells" (a poker player's term for subtle signs someone is bluffing or lying or perhaps is elated at having good cards); they give telltale signs overtly of what is going on internally. Eyes twitch, skin reddens, hands go into a prayer position, eyes move upward to the right, breathing changes, etc; all signs that an interrogator looks for.
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Now with pathological liars, sociopaths, psychopaths and con artists, they have no visible "tells". They can look at you straight-faced and not only lie, but with such certainty and force that one is led to believe that this person, who must be like me, a fellow human, simply could not be lying as he gives no signs and is so certain in ways that no one lying could do.
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Remember Clinton's famous "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms Lewinsky; I did not ask anyone to lie" as he looked forcefully into the camera and waived that crooked finger and then said "now I have to get back to work for the American people." He was so categorical, so assertive, and on public TV, I thought at the time that either he is a stone cold psychopath, or, he has hidden any evidence so well he is so confident it will never be discovered, or he really is innocent.
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Because most people think others are like them in terms of what motivates them as well as what they are or are not capable of, the con artists and politicians use that for their own advantage. So a chickenhawk, a pampered preppy punk, a momma's boy like Bush, can put on some military gear, a swagger, look straight into the camera and with a few buzz words all of a sudden his positives on national security rise in the polls. Notice that Bush only makes his fumbles, tortured syntax and vocabulary when he is trying to fake compassion or belief in anything other than outright fascism. When he is doing his Bush the hawk, Commander/Decider in Chief here to "protect" you bit, he does not make the same mistakes and tortured syntax. Billary understand the same concept and use it all the time. Watch both Bill and Hillary and their eyes sometimes; they use their eyes: widened, forceful, intense, and various theatrics to push the image of I am in command not only of their situation, but of the facts and the truth and someone as certain as I am simply could not be lying or not in command because the average person would not be able to project as I do were he/she not similarly in command of the truth and facts.
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So Hillary does her strident, look straight into the camera, I am ready to be Commander in Chief and I studied under the best routine and a lot of really stupid, duped or uneducated in the ways of the con buy it. I mean how is it possible for a damn speech, written by some flunky, not even the candidate's own words, cause an immediate movement in the polls on that person's national security bona fides or economic policies or whatever?
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Hillary has one thing more going for her. Dick Morris' concept of triangulation and the notorious single-issueism, myopia and naked selfishness of many of the U.S. population. Just as the apex of a triangle is above the right and left ends of the base of a triangle, neither left nor right, neither Republican nor Democrat, so these opportunistic pols know how to play the single-issue game and many self-absorbed Americans enable them.. Give the animals a little red meat (something on their pet issue) and add hatred of the alternative, and most people will hold their noses on the other pet single issues of others that the position of the candidate favors but they do not. That is what is going on with this amendment on Iran.
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And why is not one journalist asking those who keep talking about their experience in the Senate why they keep touting experience in a Congress that has lower approval ratings than even Bush? What do these bastards even really do? Think about it. The position papers etc are all written by briefers and staff. They really just go around, speak from talking points, wear suits, grandstand and demagogue on the floor of the Senate or House, make speeches written by others, collect lobbyist money and schmooze a lot.
-
-
I asked him to run me though his bag of tricks and basically it came down to what most politicans do all the time and what co-enablers/dependents Bill and Hillary (Billary) and Bush do routinely. And he even quoted Groucho Marx's aphorism that: "The two keys to success are honesty and sincerity; and if you can fake those, the sky's the limit".
-
What he told me is the key is in eye contact, focus, absolute certainty, some details and assertion as if to disagree is to brand oneself dumber than a rock.
-
He said most people do not lie often or easily. And when they do, they give "tells" (a poker player's term for subtle signs someone is bluffing or lying or perhaps is elated at having good cards); they give telltale signs overtly of what is going on internally. Eyes twitch, skin reddens, hands go into a prayer position, eyes move upward to the right, breathing changes, etc; all signs that an interrogator looks for.
-
Now with pathological liars, sociopaths, psychopaths and con artists, they have no visible "tells". They can look at you straight-faced and not only lie, but with such certainty and force that one is led to believe that this person, who must be like me, a fellow human, simply could not be lying as he gives no signs and is so certain in ways that no one lying could do.
-
Remember Clinton's famous "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms Lewinsky; I did not ask anyone to lie" as he looked forcefully into the camera and waived that crooked finger and then said "now I have to get back to work for the American people." He was so categorical, so assertive, and on public TV, I thought at the time that either he is a stone cold psychopath, or, he has hidden any evidence so well he is so confident it will never be discovered, or he really is innocent.
-
Because most people think others are like them in terms of what motivates them as well as what they are or are not capable of, the con artists and politicians use that for their own advantage. So a chickenhawk, a pampered preppy punk, a momma's boy like Bush, can put on some military gear, a swagger, look straight into the camera and with a few buzz words all of a sudden his positives on national security rise in the polls. Notice that Bush only makes his fumbles, tortured syntax and vocabulary when he is trying to fake compassion or belief in anything other than outright fascism. When he is doing his Bush the hawk, Commander/Decider in Chief here to "protect" you bit, he does not make the same mistakes and tortured syntax. Billary understand the same concept and use it all the time. Watch both Bill and Hillary and their eyes sometimes; they use their eyes: widened, forceful, intense, and various theatrics to push the image of I am in command not only of their situation, but of the facts and the truth and someone as certain as I am simply could not be lying or not in command because the average person would not be able to project as I do were he/she not similarly in command of the truth and facts.
-
So Hillary does her strident, look straight into the camera, I am ready to be Commander in Chief and I studied under the best routine and a lot of really stupid, duped or uneducated in the ways of the con buy it. I mean how is it possible for a damn speech, written by some flunky, not even the candidate's own words, cause an immediate movement in the polls on that person's national security bona fides or economic policies or whatever?
-
Hillary has one thing more going for her. Dick Morris' concept of triangulation and the notorious single-issueism, myopia and naked selfishness of many of the U.S. population. Just as the apex of a triangle is above the right and left ends of the base of a triangle, neither left nor right, neither Republican nor Democrat, so these opportunistic pols know how to play the single-issue game and many self-absorbed Americans enable them.. Give the animals a little red meat (something on their pet issue) and add hatred of the alternative, and most people will hold their noses on the other pet single issues of others that the position of the candidate favors but they do not. That is what is going on with this amendment on Iran.
-
And why is not one journalist asking those who keep talking about their experience in the Senate why they keep touting experience in a Congress that has lower approval ratings than even Bush? What do these bastards even really do? Think about it. The position papers etc are all written by briefers and staff. They really just go around, speak from talking points, wear suits, grandstand and demagogue on the floor of the Senate or House, make speeches written by others, collect lobbyist money and schmooze a lot.
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Dan Rather and the Poison Pill
This is a missive I posted on Sept. 21, 2004 right after the Rather story broke. In some ways it is Karma Time for Dan Rather for all those years that, by his own admission, he went along to get along and get promoted, he did not ask penetrating questions, he fawned all over those in power and said they deserved the benefit of the doubt etc.
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This was posted on a site for scholars that I used to post on once in awhile. It is still on their website.
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Tue, 21 Sep 2004 12:07:36 The Poison Pill
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It is an old intelligence game--"the poison pill"--that works the reverse of the old "salting the mine" (planting a bit of gold to make a barren mine look potentially fertile). When a story is getting out of hand and causing a threat to elements of one's own base (e.g. National Guard and Reserve Troops possibly getting turned off with the preppy moron's favored treatment when he was sort of in the Texas Guard), you plant some documents that appear authentic and are potentially quite damaging to your own cause; let the scoop-obsessed media run with it for awhile, then pull the plug at a propitious moment showing that the planted documents are forgeries thus "poisoning" not only the documents but the whole story as well. The whores (with all due respect to "sex workers") in the media, whose own spiral of SUCKcess in media requires access to get the next scoop, in order to get more exposure, in order to become a bigger name, in order to get even more expanded access... will apologize all over the place for having ben sucked in with forged documents and the story then shifts to the forged documents not what the documents were about and whether or not the CONTENT of those documents was correct or who indeed passed those documents in the first place.
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During the 1980 election the same thing was done with the October Surprise story. When the evidence mounted that Reagan-Bush had cut a deal with elements in Iran to keep American hostages until after the election to deny Carter an electoral victory, and when "respected" analysts like Gary Sick were joining in so that it became more than just another "conspiracy theory", up stepped Richard Brenneke (who had real bona fides as a former CIA Contract pilot and indeed a pilot for Poppy Bush) to say that he had flown Bush 41 to a secret meeting in Paris that Bush claimed he never attended. It all looked very lethal and damaging for Bush 41 until, supposedly to research the story, a novice reporter was given access to Brenneke's personal papers, including gas receipts, and, voila, this novice reporter, "discovers" a gas receipt showing Brenneke in Orergon on the day he claimed to have flown Poppy Bush to Paris. The story explodes, Brenneke is thoroughly discredited, and all of a sudden the WHOLE story, irrefutable facts and all, is discredited and consigned to the realm of nut case "conspiracy theory."
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The CBS story about Bush's illustrious Guard "service" is nothing more than but a replay of this previous "poison pill" scenario with a compliant mainstream press and a lot of really dumb people falling into line and taking their eyes of the irrefuatable facts and their real implications.
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This was posted on a site for scholars that I used to post on once in awhile. It is still on their website.
-
Tue, 21 Sep 2004 12:07:36 The Poison Pill
-
It is an old intelligence game--"the poison pill"--that works the reverse of the old "salting the mine" (planting a bit of gold to make a barren mine look potentially fertile). When a story is getting out of hand and causing a threat to elements of one's own base (e.g. National Guard and Reserve Troops possibly getting turned off with the preppy moron's favored treatment when he was sort of in the Texas Guard), you plant some documents that appear authentic and are potentially quite damaging to your own cause; let the scoop-obsessed media run with it for awhile, then pull the plug at a propitious moment showing that the planted documents are forgeries thus "poisoning" not only the documents but the whole story as well. The whores (with all due respect to "sex workers") in the media, whose own spiral of SUCKcess in media requires access to get the next scoop, in order to get more exposure, in order to become a bigger name, in order to get even more expanded access... will apologize all over the place for having ben sucked in with forged documents and the story then shifts to the forged documents not what the documents were about and whether or not the CONTENT of those documents was correct or who indeed passed those documents in the first place.
-
During the 1980 election the same thing was done with the October Surprise story. When the evidence mounted that Reagan-Bush had cut a deal with elements in Iran to keep American hostages until after the election to deny Carter an electoral victory, and when "respected" analysts like Gary Sick were joining in so that it became more than just another "conspiracy theory", up stepped Richard Brenneke (who had real bona fides as a former CIA Contract pilot and indeed a pilot for Poppy Bush) to say that he had flown Bush 41 to a secret meeting in Paris that Bush claimed he never attended. It all looked very lethal and damaging for Bush 41 until, supposedly to research the story, a novice reporter was given access to Brenneke's personal papers, including gas receipts, and, voila, this novice reporter, "discovers" a gas receipt showing Brenneke in Orergon on the day he claimed to have flown Poppy Bush to Paris. The story explodes, Brenneke is thoroughly discredited, and all of a sudden the WHOLE story, irrefutable facts and all, is discredited and consigned to the realm of nut case "conspiracy theory."
-
The CBS story about Bush's illustrious Guard "service" is nothing more than but a replay of this previous "poison pill" scenario with a compliant mainstream press and a lot of really dumb people falling into line and taking their eyes of the irrefuatable facts and their real implications.
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Why Law--International and Otherwise?
Why did someone not have the guts to ask Shieffer how do you "KNOW" what Iran has or doesn't have and what Iran INTENDS or does not intend? And then ask him so what? So what if Iran were persuing nuclear weapons? Where does ANY nation that has--and especially that has actually used and threatened the use of nuclear weapons have any authorty, under basic logic or international law, to threaten and actually attack another for pursuing the same weapons under the same logic of deterrence?
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I swear I in my travels and living outside the U.S. for over twenty years, I have never seen any nation with as many really dumb, stupid (we are all ignorant about different things but stupid means wants to stay ignorant and take active measures to do so), intellectually smug and uncurious, and just plain mean, selfish and arrogant people as in this country.
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But remember what Britain once in was (an empire so vast geographically thus on which the sun never sets)and what Britain is now: a little two-bit nation with an inbred dysfunctional monarchy unable to hang on to even Northeren Ireland.
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Why we have law--international and otherwise? Without it all you have is Darwin Day with the most vicious, most predatory, most ruthless ruling until, like "The Fastest Gun in the West" who is no longer "the fastest", one highly armed and vicious predator is replaced by another even more armed and more vicious. Of course predators, always think they they are immune and no one can beat them; they do not have a concept that the very laws they mock and break today, they will one day invoke and beg to have enforced for their own survival.
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According to the book The Samson Option by Seymour Hersh, Israel has about 200 nukes, full ABC (Atomic, Biological and Chemical) capabilities (at Nes Ziiyona near Tel Aviv according to former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky) and they threaten that if their existence is threatened, they will light off all 200 nukes and take down the whole temple (the whole planet--The Samson Option).
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Want to hear something very interesting and true? Use this when you get accused of being an anti-Semite by one of the big mouths who call any critics of Israel or Zionism anti-Semites.
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Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent and author of several books on Mossad, used to have a radio show called "Spy Talk" in Tuscon. Well on one of his shows he was discussing the U.S.S. Liberty incident during the Seven Day War when Israel attacked the USS Liberty, an NSA survillance ship the Israelis knew well, and after sinking it in three separate attacks, also strafing the waters over 40 minutes to try to make sure all crew were dead. Why? According to James Bamford's "Body of Secrets" a definitive book on NSA (along with his Puzzle Palace) and made with assistance of NSA after Bamford and his book "The Puzzle Palace" had first been blacklisted by them, the Israeli troops under the command of Ariel Sharon, had lined up and executed a bunch of Egyptian POWs Nazi "Einsatzgruppen" style, and the Liberty had picked up radio transmissions of the war crimes going on and the Israelis thought only the Liberty had heard them and could be taken out to destrroy th evidence. The Israelis did not know that an NSA EC-121 was also picking up the same broadcasts.
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Well I called in to the show with what I just relayed and Ostrovfsky agreed that this had happened. Before going into Mossad, he had been a Commander in the Israeli Navy. I then raised the issue that while Israel was selling cluster bombs and training the fascist forces of Pinochet of Chile and his DINA in interrogation techniques, the chief advisor on "internal security" for Pinochet was none other than Walter Rauff, the architect of the first Nazi mobile gas vans, sentenced to death in absentia in 1946 and a wanted Nazi war criminal, and one of the heads of the infamous ODESSA the organization for aiding nazi war criminals and setting up a "Fourth Reich" someday.
-
Well Ostrovsky got into it and did me one better. It seems that when he was in Mossad, he saw evidence, that in 1949, at an Israeli naval base, training Israeli commandos was none other than "Hitler's Commando", who put down the July 20th 1944 assasination plot against Hitler, a head of the ODESSA, onetime wanted nazi war crimninal until CIA put him on their payroll, an active and totally committed nazi until his death, Otto Skorzeny. I about crapped when I heard that.
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So yes, what goes for any one country goes for all. If any one nation can have nuclear weapons then all, regardless of type of system, have precedent and authority for the same. If one nation can launch a preemptive attack with genocidal intent, then all nations have precedent and license. Otherwise we say authority of law is situational and binding on the weak or systems WE do not endorse or like, but NOT on the strong and that are like US and that we endorse. And of course that is exactly what nazis said and say.
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And what is so tragic, and such an ugly desecration to the memory of the Nazi Holocaust and its victims, Jewish and non-Jewish, is when descendents of the victims of Nazis act like Nazis and even collaborate--under the banner of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"--not only with neo-nazis, but actual wanted nazi criminals from that very Holocaust they cynically use for their own propaganda to cover their own forms of fascism and hubris.
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Interestingly the most rabid and most uncritical supporters of Israeli exclusionism from all being demanded of other nations, including by them, are guilt-ridden Zionists outside of Israel (not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews) of the "Disapora" that the Iraeli Government knows well how to manipulate. These are part of the overall forces and lobbies for preemptive attacks against Iran this time as they were lobbyists for attacking Iraq under the WMD banner.
-
See here cognitive dissonance kicks in. When there is a conflict and naked contradiction between belief and emotions (interests),or between belief and facts, or between facts and emotions, it sets up some dissonance or disharmony in need of resolution. Example? "Well if you are such a hard-core Zionist and supporter of Israel, and Zionism means to return to build and defend the Jewish State, why do you not speak Hebrew or Yiddish?"; "Why do you go over to Israel only for short trips and stay in nice hotels?" "Why do you not serve in the Israeli military?" "Why do you not invest your life and body in Israel, perhaps in the most dangerous areas where you are most needed, especially with the rates at which these damn Arabs breed, instead of staying in the comfortable and safe Diaspora?" These are actually the kinds of things native-born Israelis often say about some of the big mouths in the Diaspora so hot on shedding someone else's blood. They are exactly like the Chickenhawks here who are all for "staying the course" by the military in which they never served and their children will never serve.
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Interestingly, according to the polls, over 70% of Jews in Israel identify themselves as "Secular Non-observant" or "Reform" Jews. This means that according to the hard-core ultra-rightists and ultra-religious Jews who hold political power in Israel, and who do not consider Reform and Secular Jews as "real Jews", and thus do not consider their marriages--and therefore the children from those marriages--as legitimate", then according to those in power, over 70& of the population of "The Jewish State" are not "real Jews" and their children are bastards.
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The Israeli Government and Zionist organizations help the at-a-safe-distance-super-Zionists (their Chickenhawks) with their cognitive dissonance angst with stuff like: "We need Jews and non-Jewish supporters in the Diaspora to spread the word and to recruit people and money; they are a vital part of the overall security of Israel and are needed just where they are..."
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If you look at some of the profiles of some of these settlers that occupy and refuse to leave Palestinian lands even when ordered by the Israeli Government, the ones inflaming the Middle East with their arrogance and conempt for even basic international law and the Indigenous Peoples, you will find a similar profile of a cognitive-dissonance-driven angst. Many, when they came to Israel, spoke no Hebrew and still speak little, had been secular and non-observant Jews, perhaps into sex, drugs and rock and roll during younger years, but now married with young kids, now catching up for lost time and claiming to be super-religious. But the questions remain and are often posed by native-born Israelis: "Where were you all this time?" "How come you do not speak Hebrew and Yiddish if you are so super religious and culturally so super Jewish?" "How come you are coming to Israel only now at 30 some years old etc?" And of course, since all converts have to show their "bona fides" to the "insiders", "nothing as fanatic as a convert" just like with ex-smokers, so they act even more belicose, arrogant, racist, chauvinistic etc than many of the cynical or peace-seeking Sabras and a major source of the problems in the Middle East.
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It is a sure sign that this Empire is on its last days when the "best" it can produce among candidates in both parties for president and indeed other offices is this present assortment of intellectual intellectual and moral nothings. The thought of the codes and authority to take the world into global Armageddon in the hands of any of these pompous and posturing creatures from our typical menus of "choice" is truly frightening--as is the prospect of the power to "elect" any of them and place them in positions of such powers in the hands of as many self-absorbed and willfully ignorant morons as there are in America.
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The point is, the day is rapidly approaching, actually it is here now, when racist, colonizing and imperial nations like the U.S. and Israel will hypocritically invoke or beg for protections of the very international law they so arrogantly violate and show utter contempt for now. In the end, they are not only principal sources of State-sponsored terrorism in the world today, they give direct aid, comfort, and even license and the authority of precedents for other terrorists.
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-
I swear I in my travels and living outside the U.S. for over twenty years, I have never seen any nation with as many really dumb, stupid (we are all ignorant about different things but stupid means wants to stay ignorant and take active measures to do so), intellectually smug and uncurious, and just plain mean, selfish and arrogant people as in this country.
-
But remember what Britain once in was (an empire so vast geographically thus on which the sun never sets)and what Britain is now: a little two-bit nation with an inbred dysfunctional monarchy unable to hang on to even Northeren Ireland.
-
Why we have law--international and otherwise? Without it all you have is Darwin Day with the most vicious, most predatory, most ruthless ruling until, like "The Fastest Gun in the West" who is no longer "the fastest", one highly armed and vicious predator is replaced by another even more armed and more vicious. Of course predators, always think they they are immune and no one can beat them; they do not have a concept that the very laws they mock and break today, they will one day invoke and beg to have enforced for their own survival.
-
According to the book The Samson Option by Seymour Hersh, Israel has about 200 nukes, full ABC (Atomic, Biological and Chemical) capabilities (at Nes Ziiyona near Tel Aviv according to former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky) and they threaten that if their existence is threatened, they will light off all 200 nukes and take down the whole temple (the whole planet--The Samson Option).
-
Want to hear something very interesting and true? Use this when you get accused of being an anti-Semite by one of the big mouths who call any critics of Israel or Zionism anti-Semites.
-
Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent and author of several books on Mossad, used to have a radio show called "Spy Talk" in Tuscon. Well on one of his shows he was discussing the U.S.S. Liberty incident during the Seven Day War when Israel attacked the USS Liberty, an NSA survillance ship the Israelis knew well, and after sinking it in three separate attacks, also strafing the waters over 40 minutes to try to make sure all crew were dead. Why? According to James Bamford's "Body of Secrets" a definitive book on NSA (along with his Puzzle Palace) and made with assistance of NSA after Bamford and his book "The Puzzle Palace" had first been blacklisted by them, the Israeli troops under the command of Ariel Sharon, had lined up and executed a bunch of Egyptian POWs Nazi "Einsatzgruppen" style, and the Liberty had picked up radio transmissions of the war crimes going on and the Israelis thought only the Liberty had heard them and could be taken out to destrroy th evidence. The Israelis did not know that an NSA EC-121 was also picking up the same broadcasts.
-
Well I called in to the show with what I just relayed and Ostrovfsky agreed that this had happened. Before going into Mossad, he had been a Commander in the Israeli Navy. I then raised the issue that while Israel was selling cluster bombs and training the fascist forces of Pinochet of Chile and his DINA in interrogation techniques, the chief advisor on "internal security" for Pinochet was none other than Walter Rauff, the architect of the first Nazi mobile gas vans, sentenced to death in absentia in 1946 and a wanted Nazi war criminal, and one of the heads of the infamous ODESSA the organization for aiding nazi war criminals and setting up a "Fourth Reich" someday.
-
Well Ostrovsky got into it and did me one better. It seems that when he was in Mossad, he saw evidence, that in 1949, at an Israeli naval base, training Israeli commandos was none other than "Hitler's Commando", who put down the July 20th 1944 assasination plot against Hitler, a head of the ODESSA, onetime wanted nazi war crimninal until CIA put him on their payroll, an active and totally committed nazi until his death, Otto Skorzeny. I about crapped when I heard that.
-
So yes, what goes for any one country goes for all. If any one nation can have nuclear weapons then all, regardless of type of system, have precedent and authority for the same. If one nation can launch a preemptive attack with genocidal intent, then all nations have precedent and license. Otherwise we say authority of law is situational and binding on the weak or systems WE do not endorse or like, but NOT on the strong and that are like US and that we endorse. And of course that is exactly what nazis said and say.
-
And what is so tragic, and such an ugly desecration to the memory of the Nazi Holocaust and its victims, Jewish and non-Jewish, is when descendents of the victims of Nazis act like Nazis and even collaborate--under the banner of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"--not only with neo-nazis, but actual wanted nazi criminals from that very Holocaust they cynically use for their own propaganda to cover their own forms of fascism and hubris.
-
Interestingly the most rabid and most uncritical supporters of Israeli exclusionism from all being demanded of other nations, including by them, are guilt-ridden Zionists outside of Israel (not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews) of the "Disapora" that the Iraeli Government knows well how to manipulate. These are part of the overall forces and lobbies for preemptive attacks against Iran this time as they were lobbyists for attacking Iraq under the WMD banner.
-
See here cognitive dissonance kicks in. When there is a conflict and naked contradiction between belief and emotions (interests),or between belief and facts, or between facts and emotions, it sets up some dissonance or disharmony in need of resolution. Example? "Well if you are such a hard-core Zionist and supporter of Israel, and Zionism means to return to build and defend the Jewish State, why do you not speak Hebrew or Yiddish?"; "Why do you go over to Israel only for short trips and stay in nice hotels?" "Why do you not serve in the Israeli military?" "Why do you not invest your life and body in Israel, perhaps in the most dangerous areas where you are most needed, especially with the rates at which these damn Arabs breed, instead of staying in the comfortable and safe Diaspora?" These are actually the kinds of things native-born Israelis often say about some of the big mouths in the Diaspora so hot on shedding someone else's blood. They are exactly like the Chickenhawks here who are all for "staying the course" by the military in which they never served and their children will never serve.
-
Interestingly, according to the polls, over 70% of Jews in Israel identify themselves as "Secular Non-observant" or "Reform" Jews. This means that according to the hard-core ultra-rightists and ultra-religious Jews who hold political power in Israel, and who do not consider Reform and Secular Jews as "real Jews", and thus do not consider their marriages--and therefore the children from those marriages--as legitimate", then according to those in power, over 70& of the population of "The Jewish State" are not "real Jews" and their children are bastards.
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The Israeli Government and Zionist organizations help the at-a-safe-distance-super-Zionists (their Chickenhawks) with their cognitive dissonance angst with stuff like: "We need Jews and non-Jewish supporters in the Diaspora to spread the word and to recruit people and money; they are a vital part of the overall security of Israel and are needed just where they are..."
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If you look at some of the profiles of some of these settlers that occupy and refuse to leave Palestinian lands even when ordered by the Israeli Government, the ones inflaming the Middle East with their arrogance and conempt for even basic international law and the Indigenous Peoples, you will find a similar profile of a cognitive-dissonance-driven angst. Many, when they came to Israel, spoke no Hebrew and still speak little, had been secular and non-observant Jews, perhaps into sex, drugs and rock and roll during younger years, but now married with young kids, now catching up for lost time and claiming to be super-religious. But the questions remain and are often posed by native-born Israelis: "Where were you all this time?" "How come you do not speak Hebrew and Yiddish if you are so super religious and culturally so super Jewish?" "How come you are coming to Israel only now at 30 some years old etc?" And of course, since all converts have to show their "bona fides" to the "insiders", "nothing as fanatic as a convert" just like with ex-smokers, so they act even more belicose, arrogant, racist, chauvinistic etc than many of the cynical or peace-seeking Sabras and a major source of the problems in the Middle East.
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It is a sure sign that this Empire is on its last days when the "best" it can produce among candidates in both parties for president and indeed other offices is this present assortment of intellectual intellectual and moral nothings. The thought of the codes and authority to take the world into global Armageddon in the hands of any of these pompous and posturing creatures from our typical menus of "choice" is truly frightening--as is the prospect of the power to "elect" any of them and place them in positions of such powers in the hands of as many self-absorbed and willfully ignorant morons as there are in America.
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The point is, the day is rapidly approaching, actually it is here now, when racist, colonizing and imperial nations like the U.S. and Israel will hypocritically invoke or beg for protections of the very international law they so arrogantly violate and show utter contempt for now. In the end, they are not only principal sources of State-sponsored terrorism in the world today, they give direct aid, comfort, and even license and the authority of precedents for other terrorists.
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Blackfoot Indictment of U.S. and Canada for Genocide
Would someone please ask our illustrious candidates about this? Warning lengthy, but issues of law and history bear on present issues being discussed on Middle East and elsewhere.
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Blackfoot Indictment of the United States of America
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INDICTMENT OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OF CANADA, DESIGNATED AGENCIES OF THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND CANADA, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE BRITISH CROWN AND NAMED CHURCHES RESIDENT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND CANADA*
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FOR THE COMMISSION OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST BLACKFOOT LAW AND PETITION FOR ORDERS MANDATING THE PROSCRIPTION AND DISSOLUTION OF NAMED INTERNATIONAL CONSPIRACIES AND THEIR ORGANIZATIONS
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By James M. Craven/Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi
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Member and Named Prosecutor, Sovereign Blackfoot Nation
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INTRODUCTION
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I. EXISTENCE, STATUS AND SOVEREIGNTY OF THE BLACKFOOT NATION
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Long before there were recognized nations called The United States of America and Canada, and for many years since the genesis and recognition of those nations, Blackfoot People lived as and formed a Whole People and Nation. By any and all criteria under international law that legitimate and mandate recognition of The United States of America and Canada as sovereign nations, that have the unalienable rights: recognition, security and self-determination as nations. Blackfoot People have collectively constituted a “People” and Nation. Specifically, Blackfoot People, historically have possessed, and in the present-day possess:
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1) Recognized and Commonly-shared Territory;
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2) Recognized and Commonly-shared History, Culture, Spirituality and Language;
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3) Recognized and Commonly-shared Legal and Political Institutions, Processes and
Traditions;
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4) Recognized and Commonly-shared Economic Institutions, Processes and Traditions;
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5) Recognized and Commonly-shared Mechanisms and Institutions for Determination of
Membership in and Leadership/Composition of the Nation;
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6) Recognized and Commonly-shared Ancestors and Ties of Blood--Family, Clan and
Tribe;
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7) Recognized Capacity to Enter Into Relations With Other Nations;
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8) Recognized and Expressed Common Will of Blackfoot Individuals to Live Together in
Collectives Forming Whole Societies Greater Than the Sums of the Parts;
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9) Close Attachment to Ancestral Lands and their Resources;
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10) Self-identification and Identification by Others as Members of a Distinct Nation or Cultural Group;
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11) a Recognized and Expressed Desire to Remain Distinct as Blackfoot and Not to be
Assimilated;
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As in the case of any Nation, the status and legitimacy of the Blackfoot Nation and the unalienable rights of the Blackfoot Nation and its members to security, peace, prosperity and self-determination do not depend upon any degree or kind of recognition or nonrecognition by any other Nation or entity. The objective reality and status (under international law and as a defacto reality) of Blackfoot People as a Nation, and the derivative rights of the Blackfoot Nation to security, peace, prosperity and self-determination demand--rather than depend upon--recognition by all those Nations seeking or asserting similar recognition ( often with less authority) for themselves.
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Further, it is established and customary practice, and explicitly codified in international law,that no members of one nation can be summarily declared to be members or citizens of another nation without their consent. Blackfoot Peoples and members of the Blackfoot Nation were summarily declared to be “citizens” of the United States of America in 1924 without their consent and were summarily declared to be “citizens” of Canada in 1963 without their consent.Further, it is established and customary practice, and explicitly codified in International law, that no nation or representative government of any nation makes “treaties” with its own citizens; treaties are instruments and agreements between and among sovereign nations. Further, it is established and customary practice, and explicitly codified in international law, that nations have the right to seek, expose and indict those who commit crimes in the name of/against members of a nation and/or against international law, and to prosecute, on their soil, or in recognized international venues, those alleged to have committed such crimes.
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Prior to the precedents set at the Nuremberg and other International Tribunals, it was thought that “established and customary” practice of international law, and the whole of international law itself, applied only between nations. It was the “customary and established practice” in international law that what governments or parties of nations did or didn’t do to their “own citizens” or their “own national minorities” that caused harm to these “citizens” or “national minorities” was not a matter for or concern of international law. Documents of and research on, the periods during which the U.S. and Canadian Governments summarily declared Blackfoot Peoples to be “citizens” of the United States and Canada without their consent, reveal that one of the clear and stated motives and intent of summary declaration of citizenship was to summarily declare removed--and to remove--certain “national minorities” of the United States and Canada (including Blackfoot People) from any protection, coverage or application of international law or conventions or treaties to which the U.S. and Canada were signatories and were bound by summarily changing their status to that of “citizens” and thus making their status and treatment an “internal matter” and supposedly not subject to international law; this is in violation of Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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Any extent to which any of the core elements of the Blackfoot Nation have been diminished or extinguished as a result of conquest, occupation,and ethnocidal or genocidal policies and practices, does not, and should not, in any way call into question the existence, legitimacy, or fundamental rights to sovereignty and self- determination of the Blackfoot Nation and its members. Were it so, those who sought to eliminate Indigenous Peoples in general and Blackfoot in particular, would be rewarded for and assisted in the commission of the very genocidal crimes against Blackfoot Peoples and International Law for which they are being legitimately brought to a Tribunal of Blackfoot Justice.
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Indigenous Nations in general and Peoples of the Blackfoot Nation in particular have recognized, established and codified rights to national recognition, national sovereignty, national preservation and protection of lands and resources, national self-determination and the national right to take any and all measures necessary to preserve and protect the Nation against genocide, wars of aggression, crimes against humanity, war crimes or any other kinds of crimes or threats against the existence and survival of the Nation as a whole or its members.
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Legal support for and/or codification of these fundamental rights are to be found in:
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• The Nuremberg Charter; The 1948 UN Convention on Genocide;
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• Convention on the Rights and Duties of States adopted by the Seventh International Conference of American States Dec. 26, 1933 (to which Canada was not a signatory);
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• Charter of the United Nations, Article I (2) and Article 55
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• United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Articles I and 27
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• The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), Article I
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• UN General Assembly Declaration of Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation Among States in Accordance With the Charter of the United Nations
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• UN General Assembly’s Declaration on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the United Nations
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• Supreme Court of Canada Decisions (e.g. “the right of colonial peoples to exercise their right to self-determination by breaking away from the ‘imperial power’ is ‘now undisputed’.”)
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• UN General Assembly Resolution on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources
(GA Res. 1803, XVII, 17 U.N. GAOR Supp. No. 17 at 15 U.N. Doc. A/5217, 1962)
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• Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles 15 and 17
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• UN General Assembly Resolutions 1514, XV (Declaration on the Granting of Independence of Colonial Countries and Peoples of 14.12.1960) and 1541
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• UN GA Res. 2625 (XXV) of 24.10.1970, Annex, “Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation Among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations
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• Basket I, Final Act, Article VIII of the Helsinki Conference on Cooperation and Security in Europe
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• Article 38 no. 1 b of ICJ Statute ( two elements needed to create valid customary law in international law: general customary practice and opinio juris)
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• Article 38 para. 1 d) of the ICJ Statute (judicial decisions can be used as “subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law”)
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• The ICJ Advisory Opinion on Namibia in 1971 (“Legal Consequences for States of the Continued Presence of South Africa in Namibia)
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• ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Western Sahara (Order of 22 May 1975, ICJ Rep. 1975)
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• ICJ Judgment on U.S. Military and Paramilitary Activities Against Nicaragua, ICJ Rep. 1986
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• ICJ Judgment on East Timor (Portugal v Australia), ICJ Rep. 1995
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• Permanent ICJ Ruling in the Case of Greco-Bulgarian Communities, P.C.I.J. [1930], Series B, No. 17,21
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• International Commission of Jurists, East Pakistan Staff Study, 1972 (“a people begins to exist only [and] when it becomes conscious of its own identity and asserts its will to exist”, p. 47)
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• International Labor Organization Convention 107
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• The draft “Inter-American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” by the Organization of American States
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• Declaration of President Richard Nixon, 1973(“self-determination as the key concept that would govern relations between Indian tribes [sic] and the government of the U.S.”)
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• Declaration of President Ronald Reagan in 1983 (“…the government-to-government relationship between the U.S. and Indian tribes had endured…consistently recognized a unique political relationship between Indian Tribes and the U.S. which this Administration pledges to uphold”)
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• Declaration of President William Clinton in 1994 (“This is our first principle: respecting your values, your religions, your identity, and your sovereignty…[We want to]…become full partners with the tribal nations.”)
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• Memorandum of the U.S. Department of Justice (opinio juris) ([Clinton’s position] “builds on the firmly established federal policy of self-determination for Indian tribes.”)
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• Helsinki Final Act
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• “Fulfilling Our Promises: The United States and the Helsinki Final Act” by the Commission on Security and Cooperation in the U.S., 1979
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• “Compact of Self-governance Between the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe and the United States of America”
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• Article I, Section 10 and Article VI Section 2 of the Constitution of the United States
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From the fundamental right of the Blackfoot Nation to survival and self determination, other facts and conclusions flow inexorably. For example, Canada’s Indian Act, and the Indian Reorganization Act of the U.S., strip recognized Indigenous sovereign nations, such as the Blackfoot Nation, with its recognized right to self-determination, of the power to govern the internal affairs of the Nation and transfer that power to entities of a foreign power (DIA , Minister of Indian Affairs and their “Tribal Council” creations in Canada and the BIA, Department of the Interior and their “Tribal Council” creations of the U.S. Government) thus summarily eliminating the right of self-determination as a prelude to and instrument of elimination of the Nation itself. The paternalistic policies of the Canadian and U.S. Governments purporting to “protect” Indigenous Peoples through a “trustee relationship”, have demonstrably created, and inexorably create, not “protecting powers”, but rather, powers, exploitative relationships and indeed genocidal policies from which Indigenous Peoples need protection through the exercise of the right of selfdetermination and through international law.
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For the above-mentioned and other clear reasons, agencies such as the BIA and DIA, and their creations the “Tribal Councils”, whose policies and actions are all subject to final approval and ratification by the BIA and DIA, can never be recognized as the legitimate leadership and political authority of the Blackfoot Nation. The mechanisms through which the Blackfoot Tribal Councils are selected are non-Blackfoot in nature and in terms of the “final authority” conducting and sanctioning them.
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Indeed historically and in the present, corrupt Tribal Councils (not an indictment of every person serving or who has served on a Tribal Council) have been selected, used and run by the Canadian and U.S. governments as key instruments of genocide. It would be absurd and inherently illogical to suppose that only those same Tribal Councils could have the authority standing to bring charges against those who have committed crimes against the Blackfoot Nation— crimes in which they were often intimately involved as co-conspirators and key instruments of genocide.
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II. PRECEDENTS, STANDING AND LEGAL AUTHORITY OF THE TRIBUNAL
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It was clearly established and accepted, by the parties participating in prosecution and judgment at the Nuremberg and later International Tribunals (which included the U.S. and Canada), that their findings would constitute binding precedents adding to the corpus of evolving international law to which the parties prosecuting and sitting in judgment themselves also would be bound. Specifically, in his opening argument at Nuremberg, the U.S. Chief Prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson noted:
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Never before in legal history has an effort been made to bring within the scope of a single litigation the developments of a decade, covering a whole continent, and involving a score of nations, countless individuals, and innumerable events... Unfortunately, the nature of these crimes is such that both prosecution and judgment must be by victor nations over vanquished foes [but] we must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice. (Nuremberg transcript)
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The findings, arguments and judgments of the Nuremberg and later International Tribunals and Conventions clearly established, and incorporated into the corpus of evolving international law that:
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1) universal jurisdiction exists with respect to crimes against humanity and genocide (no nation can claim immunity from international law or a “sovereign right” to conduct crimes against humanity and genocide against persons living under the control of that nation);
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2) no nation may legally arrogate the “sovereign right” to selectively and conveniently meet or not meet the terms of legitimate treaties or international conventions it has ratified and accepted; nor may any nation summarily assert primacy of national law over international law, treaties or conventions in the event of conflicts between national laws and policies and international laws;
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3) even when certain crimes against humanity and genocidal acts against persons and groups have been traditionally practiced and accepted by members of dominant exploiting groups, and even in the absence of certain explicit laws prohibiting such crimes, established principles against retroactivity or ex-post-facto prosecution and punishment (punishing someone for violating laws that did not exist when the crime was committed on the basis the person (s) had no warning that they were culpable for their conduct) may not preclude prosecution and punishments in present circumstances when it can be shown, that alleged perpetrators violated established and customary practices, sensibilities, laws and principles that natios commonly recognized, asserted and obeyed for themselves for their own protection;
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4) individuals and organizations may be held to be criminal and culpable and prosecuted and punished even when acting as agents of broader governmental entities and policies, and, the argument of “only following orders” would no longer be acceptable;
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5) mens rea, intentions, motives and interests may be inferred and considered “proved” on the basis of the highly probable, clearly foreseeable (by an average and reasonable prudent person) or inexorable consequences of given actions or policies even in the absence of witnesses to or recordings of specific utterances or documents explicitly detailing mens rea, intentions, motives and interests;
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6) common plans to wage aggressive wars (crimes against peace), war crimes or crimes against humanity constitute criminal conspiracies and are in violation of international law and established treaties to which the U.S. and Canada were bound even before Nuremberg;
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7) waging aggressive wars and barbaric practices against other nations or groups within a nation constitute “Crimes Against Peace” and “Crimes Against Humanity” in violation of international law and treaties existing even before Nuremberg and to which the U.S. and Canada were bound;
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8) even in all-out war there are limits in terms of outlawed barbaric practices and outlawed targets of those practices that constitute “War Crimes” and “Crimes Against Humanity”;
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9) any “designated authorities”, collaborators or “contrived institutions” placed in control by occupiers over the occupied victims of crimes and aid in the commission of crimes (--e.g. Vichy Government in France during World War II) by those being prosecuted, are also criminal and can never be held to be or recognized as the legitimate and representative authorities and institutions of those seeking prosecution of and punishment for any crimes or violations of international law;
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10) citizens of a given nation are also citizens of a World Community, and since reckless, genocidal and aggressive crimes, policies and actions by parties of one nation have spillover effects on the World Community, and since no one is free and all are threatened when anyone is oppressed, all human beings of the World Community have both the unalienable right and sacred duty to sit in judgment of (and attempt to stop) genocidal and other criminal acts and policies by or against any members of that World Community;
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11)racial stereotyping and caricatures, racial policies objectively create environments that make genocide and crimes against humanity more likely and easier to conduct and accept, and are themselves crimes, even without a specific nexus between a specific policy or polemics on the one hand and the death of specific persons on the other hand;
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The governments of Canada (represented by the British government) and the United States were both participants (as prosecutors and sitting in judgment) at the Nuremberg Tribunals. In his opening address, the U.S. Prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson noted:
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The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs, which we seek to condemn and punish, have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captives to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has even paid to reason.
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There was more than grotesque irony and hypocrisy in this statement.The architect(Hitler) of many of the very crimes and policies committed by the nazis and their collaborators for which they were being tried at Nuremberg,had been directly“inspired” by aspects of U.S. and Canadian histories, policies and actions related to Indigenous Peoples. According to James Pool in his “Hitler and His Secret Partners”:
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Hitler drew another example of mass murder from American history. Since his youth he had been obsessed with the Wild West stories of Karl May. He viewed the fighting between cowboys and Indians in racial terms. In many of his speeches he referred with admiration to the victory of the white race in settling the American continent and driving out the inferior peoples, the Indians. With great fascination he listened to stories, which some of his associates who had been in America told him about the massacres of the Indians by the U.S. Calvary.
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He was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on the reservations. He thought the American government’s forced migrations of the Indians over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate policy of extermination. Just how much Hitler took from the American example of the destruction of the Indian nations his hard to say; however, frightening parallels can be drawn. For some time Hitler considered deporting the Jews to a large ‘reservation’ in the Lubin area where their numbers would be reduced through starvation and disease. (p. 273-274).
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And:
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The next morning Hitler’s ‘plan’ was put in writing and sent out to the German occupation authorities as ‘The Fuehrer’s Guidelines for the Government of the Eastern Territories: ‘ the Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we don’t need them, they may die. Therefore compulsory vaccination and German health services are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives and practice abortion, the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is sufficient… if they can count up to a hundred. At best an education is admissible which produces useful servants for us. Every educated person is a future enemy.
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Religion we leave to them as a means of diversion. As to food, they are not to get more than necessary. We are the masters, we come first.’
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Always contemptuous of the Russians, Hitler said:‘For them the word ‘liberty’ means the right to wash only on feast-days. If we arrive bringing soft soap, we’ll obtain no sympathy…There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.’ Having been a devoted reader of Karl May’s books on the American West as a youth, Hitler frequently referred to the Russians as ‘Redskins’. He saw a parallel between his effort to conquer and colonize land in Russia with the conquest of the American West by the white man and the subjugation of the Indians or ‘Redskins’. ‘I don’t see why’, he said, ‘a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.” (James
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Pool, Ibid, pp. 254-255)
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And from a speech by Heinrich Himmler (date not given):
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I consider that in dealing with members of a foreign country, especially some Slav nationality…in such a mixture of peoples there will always be some racially good types. Therefore I think that it is our duty to take their children with us, to remove them from their environment, if necessary, by robbing or stealing them… (Telford Taylor “Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials”, Alfred A Knopf, N.Y. 1992, p. 203)
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And from John Toland, preeminent biographer of Adolf Hitler:
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Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa And for the Indians in the Wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the ‘Red Savages’ who could not be tamed by captivity. (John Toland, “Adolf Hitler” Vol II, p 802, Doubleday & Co, 1976)
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Scholars such as Charles Higham, Christopher Simpson, John Loftus, Mark Aarons and others have thoroughly documented that the U.S. and British Governments that prosecuted and sat in judgment at Nuremberg and at other war crimes trials of Japanese war criminals, and certain companies of the U.S. and Britain, were actively complicit in some of the crimes of the nazi and Japanese fascists through various economic and political relationships that continued throughout the war between U.S. and British Governments and companies and German and Japanese Governments and companies.
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These scholars have also documented that many of the wanted war criminals of Germany and Japan were sheltered, employed, placed in post-war political positions and aided in escape by the U.S. and British Governments that prosecuted and sat in judgment of other Japanese and German war criminals. Despite the myriad and naked forms of hypocrisy and duplicity on the part of the U.S. and British Governments at Nuremberg and at other war crimes trials, the precedents and judgments they set were nonetheless valid and incorporated into international law.
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We have and will present, solid evidence that many of the genocidal practices and policies for which German and Japanese fascists were put on trial and punished at Nuremberg and other International Military Tribunals, were inspired by and directly paralleled, U.S. and Canadian histories, policies and practices (past and present) with respect to Indigenous Peoples in general and Blackfoot People in particular.
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Specifically, and not limited to:
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1) forced relocations and transfers of Indigenous children and adults;
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2) coerced/deceptive sterilizations of Indigenous children and adults;
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3) coerced and deceptive uses of Indigenous children and adults for medical experimentation;
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4) coerced and deceptive uses of “blood-quantum” criteria and categories to establish categories of “status” (versus non-recognized and “non-status”) Indians specifically designed and intended to define Indigenous Peoples (and eliminate the ‘persistent Indian problem’) out of existence;
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5) arrogating to summarily eliminate traditional Indigenous institutions and ways of determining Indigenous leadership (Chiefs) and membership/composition of Indigenous Nations and replacing those traditional Indigenous institutions and ways with non-Indigenous organizations, entities, mechanisms and criteria designed to impose compliant and collaborationist/sell-out agents of the non-Indigenous forces intent on policies and practices defined as “genocide” under Article II of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide;
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6) outright thefts and takings of traditional Indigenous lands and resources and making and summarily breaking treaties constructed and imposed through unconscionable relationships, threats, fraud, deception etc;
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7) designating and using Indigenous Reserves/Reservations as dump sites for highly toxic wastes and causing a wide range of diseases and disease trends that served as instruments of genocide;
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8) calculated uses of various instruments of chemical and biological warfare designed to exterminate large populations of Indigenous Peoples;
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9) practicing and/or knowing about and/or tolerating and/or covering-up and/or being willfully blind to: routine murder, sexual and physical abuse, mind control, torture, illegal confinement, starvation, unsanitary conditions, deleterious non-Indigenous diets, abductions, illegal “adoptions”, forced assimilation into non-Indigenous cultures, denial of basic due process, coerced abortions and forced religious conversions in Residential and Boarding Schools and other institutions;
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10) establishing and/or knowing about and/or tolerating and/or covering-up and/or being willfully blind to corrupt Government-sanctioned “Tribal” authorities, institutions, policies and practices that resulted in losses/misappropriations of billions of dollars of desperately-needed and owed Nation/Tribal resources
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11) systematic refusal to ratify and apply various precedents, Conventions and principles of international law as they relate to Indigenous Peoples.
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These are but some of the issues and particulars that we propose to charge and prove in this Tribunal.
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The U.S. Government and the Canadian Government (represented by the British Government) were major forces initiating and conducting the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and those Tribunals were a major force in the origination and content of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide. Yet the U.S. Government did not ratify the UN Convention on Genocide until 1988, forty years after the original UN Convention on Genocide. Further, the U.S. government summarily placed a “restriction” on its ratification of the UN Convention on Genocide known as the “Lugar-Helms-Hatch Sovereignty Package” which stated in Article I (2):
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Nothing in the Convention requires or authorizes legislation or other action by the United States of America prohibited by the Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the United States.
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This is a clear violation of Article 27 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as the definitive international law on treaties) as it is in violation of Article VI, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution itself:
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[treaties are] the supreme law of the land, and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
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Documents of the U.S. Government reveal clearly consciousness of guilt on the part of the Government and its agencies. Debates in the U.S. Senate reveal that there was a general awareness of and fear that the U.S. Government could/would be charged with genocide and related acts for historical and present-day policies and actions related to African-Americans and American Indians.
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The Government of Canada was even more ingenuous in its duplicity and attempts to appear to ratify the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide while effectively obstructing its recognition and application. The government of Canada put the crime of genocide in the criminal code of Canada as a crime. However, of the five specific acts mentioned as constituting genocide in Article II of the UN Convention on Genocide,three were deleted from the definition of genocide in the Canadian criminal code. So from Article II of the Genocide Convention, b) “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”, and d)“Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”, and e)“Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” were deliberately not included in the Canadian criminal code definition of the crime of genocide. Only a) [deliberate] killing members of the group, and part of c) an intentional plan to “bring about the physical destruction the group in whole or in part” were retained. The clear intent was to make the definition of “intent” very narrow and the proving of mens rea or intent next to impossible--and therefore prosecution next to impossible to pursue. Indeed there has been only one case of anyone being charged with the Canadian Criminal Code’s “genocide” and that resulted in an acquittal.
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For these and other clearly calculated, duplicitous and obstructionist machinations on the part of the Canadian and U.S. Governments and some of their agencies, they are also in violation of the following articles of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:
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Article I:
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The contracting parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law for which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
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Article III
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The following acts shall be punishable:
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Genocide;
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Conspiracy to commit genocide;
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Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
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Attempt to commit genocide;
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Complicity in genocide;
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Article IV
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Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.
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Article V
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The Contracting parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention, and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III
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Article VI
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Persons charged with genocide or any other acts enumerated in Article III shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction.
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Article VII
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Genocide and the other acts enumerated in Article III shall not be considered as political crimes for the purpose of extradition. The Contracting Parties pledge themselves in such cases to grant extradition In accordance with their laws and treaties in force.
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Article VIII
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Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression Of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III.
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Article IX
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Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfillment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in
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Article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.
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The calculated, systematic and ongoing violations of Articles I to IX of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, by the Governments of the United States of America and Canada, along with Articles I to IX themselves, and all authority under international law recognizing/supporting the sovereignty and self-determination of the Blackfoot Nation and People, legitimate and give “standing” and authority to this Tribunal of the Blackfoot Nation. The Governments of the United States of America and Canada have refused to recognize, and have sought to exterminate, the traditional elements, authorities and institutions of the Blackfoot Nation and replace them with collaborationist elements and institutions that would or could never charge those Governments of crimes against international law or with crimes against their own laws even if they were so inclined and the evidence mandated such charges. The Governments of the United States and Canada have refused to allow their own genocidal policies and actions to be submitted to the ICJ and have refused to recognize traditional Blackfoot authorities or institutions as having “standing” or authority to bring charges at the ICJ and have been refused/obstructed in any real exercises in Blackfoot self-determination that would result in the Blackfoot Nation and its traditional authorities and institutions having standing and becoming/being recognized as a “Contracting Party” able to bring charges at the ICJ.
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The U.S. Government has refused to accept the authority of the ICJ on any matters other than those related to “commercial affairs”. The narrow language of the UN Convention on Genocide has been selectively interpreted by the Governments of the United States of America and Canada in such ways as to allow those who practice genocide and other crimes against international law to either physically eliminate and/or summarily non-recognize any victims, evidence or traditional institutions that might bring charges against them. This is like the nazis recognizing only their puppet/collaborationist regimes in the occupied territories as being “Contracting Parties” or “competent authorities” with the “standing” to charge them with various crimes, and, recognizing only nazi courts as the legitimate venues in which any charges could be brought.
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The long history of barbaric, criminal and genocidal activities committed by the Governments of the United States and Canada and their accomplices, against Indigenous Peoples in general and Blackfoot People in particular, continues today. Every attempt to expose, stop and obtain redress for various criminal activities through the institutions of the perpetrators has been met with more denial, cover-up and repression.
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Attempts to establish a World Court or International Criminal Court free of the biases and influences of the perpetrators of crimes against Indigenous Peoples, have been obstructed by those very perpetrators. We therefore assert this constituted Tribunal and its constituted authorities and procedures to be legitimate(in traditional Blackfoot Law and in International Law) in composition, location and standing.Any final decisions of this Blackfoot Tribunal will qualify as binding “judicial decisions” within the meaning of Article 38 (1) (d) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice and will therefore constitute a “Subsidiary Means For The Determination of Rules of Law” for international law and practice.
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As the “Statute of the International Court of Justice” is an “integral part” of the United Nations’ Charter under Article 92 and to which both the U.S. and Canada are signatories, this Tribunal’s decision may be relied upon by some future International Criminal Court or Tribunal or by any People or State of the World Community. Were this not so, the nazis of World War II, for example, could never have been brought to justice for crimes in “occupied territories” as the “designated representatives” and “recognized authorities” of the occupied nations and victims, supposedly charging and judging those nazis, would have been the very collaborators and accomplices of the nazis against whom also charges were also properly made and later proved. Indeed, not one of those “governments” or “governmental agencies” recognized by the nazis as “legitimate”, sat as judges and prosecutors at Nuremberg; they all sat as defendants.
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As to the standing, fairness and legitimacy of this Blackfoot Tribunal, composed of potential victims judging alleged victimizers, A. L. Goodheart in his “The Legality of the Nuremberg Trials”, “Juridicial Review”, April 1946 took on this argument succinctly:
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It has been argued that the Tribunal cannot be regarded as a court in the true sense because, as its members represent the victorious Allied Nations, they must lack that impartiality which is an essential in all judicial procedure. According to this view only a court consisting of neutrals, or, at least, containing Some neutral judges, could be considered to be a proper tribunal. As no man can be a judge in his own case, so no allied tribunal can be a judge in a case in which members of the enemy government or forces are on trial. Attractive as this argument may sound in theory, it ignores the fact that it runs counter to the administration of law in every country. If it were true then no spy could be given a legal trial, because his case is always heard by judges representing the enemy country. Yet no one has ever argued that in such cases it was necessary to call on neutral judges. The prisoner has a right to demand that his judges shall be fair, but not that they shall be neutral. As Lord Writ has pointed out, the same principle is applicable to ordinary criminal law because ‘ a burglar cannot complain that he is being tried by a jury of honest citizens.
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III. SPECIFIC CRIMES AND VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
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The traditionally recognized and responsible authorities of the Blackfoot Nation, present at this Tribunal and acting on behalf of the Blackfoot Nation and whole People, specifically charge that the Government of the United States of America and its agencies, the Government of Canada and its agencies, the British Crown authority in Canada and named Church or religious organizations resident on Blackfoot lands and/or in which Blackfoot were placed (Catholic Church, United Church, Anglican Church, LDS or Mormon Church, Presbyterian Church) directly committed, and/or conspired to commit, and/or sanctioned and tolerated, and/or facilitated, and/or covered-up, and/or refused to prosecute and/or obstructed the prosecution of and/or were willfully blind to the following crimes specified further in the following:
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1) Article I of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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2) Article II of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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a) Killing Blackfoot persons as Blackfoot;
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b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to Blackfoot persons as Blackfoot;
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c) Deliberately inflicting on Blackfoot persons and the Blackfoot Nation conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Blackfoot People and Nation in whole or in part;
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d) Imposing measures intended to prevent biological reproduction of the Blackfoot People and Nation;
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e) Forcibly transferring Blackfoot children to other (non-Blackfoot) groups, lands and cultures;
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3) Article III of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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4) Article IV of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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5) Article V of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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6) Article VI of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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7) Article VII of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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8) Article VIII of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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9) Article IX of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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10) Common Article 3 and Additional Protocol II of the Geneva Conventions of 1949;
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11) Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg:
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A) Article 6
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a) Crimes Against Peace
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b) War Crimes
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c) Crimes Against Humanity
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B) Article 7
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C) Article 8
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12) Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal as adopted by the International Law Commission of the United Nations 1950 and UN General Assembly Resolution 177
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a) Principle I
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b) Principle II
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c) Principle III
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d) Principle IV
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e) Principle V
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f) Principle VI
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g) Principle VII
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13) Articles of the Statute of the International Criminal Court for Former Yugoslavia
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Specifying the Acts Within the Court’s Jurisdiction
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a) Article 2
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b) Article 3
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c) Article 4
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d) Article 5
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14) Articles of the Statute of the International Criminal Court for Rwanda
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Specifying the Acts Within the Court’s Jurisdiction:
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a) Article 2 (2,3)
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b) Article 3
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c) Article 4
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CONCLUSION
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The Blackfoot Nation and People are on the verge of extinction. Victims of and witnesses to the various charged crimes are dying. Blackfoot People individually and collectively cannot wait for the formation of an International Criminal Court (blocked by the U.S. Government) to hear Blackfoot charges against the Governments of the U.S and Canada and other named parties. The Blackfoot and People cannot wait for the U.S. and Canadian Governments to allow charges to be heard by the ICJ at the Hague. The Blackfoot Nation and People Blackfoot cannot wait for the traditional authorities, institutions and self-determination of the Blackfoot Nation to be recognized and respected by the very Governments of the U.S. and Canada intent on elimination of the Blackfoot Nation and People and their self-determination. The Blackfoot Nation and People cannot wait for the U.S. and Canadian Governments to “decertify” and derecognize their puppet and complicit entities (Tribal Councils, BIA and DIA) and to recognize the traditional authorities and institutions of the Blackfoot Nation that are certified and legitimated by the recognized right of and international law governing self-determination of the Blackfoot Nation and People.
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For all of the above-mentioned reasons, and under all of the above-mentioned legal authority (and more to be specified later) this Tribunal, structured and conducted by the competent and traditionally recognized authorities and institutions of the Blackfoot Nation, has standing and authority under international law and any decisions or findings of this Tribunal can be considered binding judicial decisions under Blackfoot Law and International Law.
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The competent, legal and traditional authorities of the Blackfoot Nation propose that ultimate authority and power is truth, reason, law and evidence. Power pays no real ‘tribute to reason’ when the conquerors put on trial—rather than summarily executing or jailing without due process—the conquered. Power pays only a ‘tribute to reason’ and law when the powerful submit to the very laws, standards, precedents and morality to which they purport to hold others and to which the powerful purport to be bound--by their own words and deeds. We will hold these named Governments and agencies or entities to their own laws, words, precedents, deeds and professed values in addition to specific Blackfoot laws and values that they have violated and for which the Blackfoot Nation and People have sovereign rights to protect.
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Finally, on the question of the amount of time that has lapsed since some or many of these alleged crimes have been committed (and we allege that many of the crimes continue in various forms today), we note that it is widely recognized in international law that there is no "statute of limitations" on gross violations of human rights (Article 1,
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"Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations on War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity", Nov. 26, 1968 see "A Comprehensive Handbook of the United Nations", Vol. II, 1979) Also, under the U.S. Document "The Third Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States (Section 702):
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Blackfoot Indictment of the United States of America
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Blackfoot Indictment of the United States of America
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INDICTMENT OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OF CANADA, DESIGNATED AGENCIES OF THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND CANADA, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE BRITISH CROWN AND NAMED CHURCHES RESIDENT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND CANADA*
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FOR THE COMMISSION OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST BLACKFOOT LAW AND PETITION FOR ORDERS MANDATING THE PROSCRIPTION AND DISSOLUTION OF NAMED INTERNATIONAL CONSPIRACIES AND THEIR ORGANIZATIONS
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By James M. Craven/Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi
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Member and Named Prosecutor, Sovereign Blackfoot Nation
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INTRODUCTION
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I. EXISTENCE, STATUS AND SOVEREIGNTY OF THE BLACKFOOT NATION
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Long before there were recognized nations called The United States of America and Canada, and for many years since the genesis and recognition of those nations, Blackfoot People lived as and formed a Whole People and Nation. By any and all criteria under international law that legitimate and mandate recognition of The United States of America and Canada as sovereign nations, that have the unalienable rights: recognition, security and self-determination as nations. Blackfoot People have collectively constituted a “People” and Nation. Specifically, Blackfoot People, historically have possessed, and in the present-day possess:
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1) Recognized and Commonly-shared Territory;
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2) Recognized and Commonly-shared History, Culture, Spirituality and Language;
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3) Recognized and Commonly-shared Legal and Political Institutions, Processes and
Traditions;
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4) Recognized and Commonly-shared Economic Institutions, Processes and Traditions;
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5) Recognized and Commonly-shared Mechanisms and Institutions for Determination of
Membership in and Leadership/Composition of the Nation;
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6) Recognized and Commonly-shared Ancestors and Ties of Blood--Family, Clan and
Tribe;
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7) Recognized Capacity to Enter Into Relations With Other Nations;
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8) Recognized and Expressed Common Will of Blackfoot Individuals to Live Together in
Collectives Forming Whole Societies Greater Than the Sums of the Parts;
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9) Close Attachment to Ancestral Lands and their Resources;
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10) Self-identification and Identification by Others as Members of a Distinct Nation or Cultural Group;
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11) a Recognized and Expressed Desire to Remain Distinct as Blackfoot and Not to be
Assimilated;
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As in the case of any Nation, the status and legitimacy of the Blackfoot Nation and the unalienable rights of the Blackfoot Nation and its members to security, peace, prosperity and self-determination do not depend upon any degree or kind of recognition or nonrecognition by any other Nation or entity. The objective reality and status (under international law and as a defacto reality) of Blackfoot People as a Nation, and the derivative rights of the Blackfoot Nation to security, peace, prosperity and self-determination demand--rather than depend upon--recognition by all those Nations seeking or asserting similar recognition ( often with less authority) for themselves.
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Further, it is established and customary practice, and explicitly codified in international law,that no members of one nation can be summarily declared to be members or citizens of another nation without their consent. Blackfoot Peoples and members of the Blackfoot Nation were summarily declared to be “citizens” of the United States of America in 1924 without their consent and were summarily declared to be “citizens” of Canada in 1963 without their consent.Further, it is established and customary practice, and explicitly codified in International law, that no nation or representative government of any nation makes “treaties” with its own citizens; treaties are instruments and agreements between and among sovereign nations. Further, it is established and customary practice, and explicitly codified in international law, that nations have the right to seek, expose and indict those who commit crimes in the name of/against members of a nation and/or against international law, and to prosecute, on their soil, or in recognized international venues, those alleged to have committed such crimes.
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Prior to the precedents set at the Nuremberg and other International Tribunals, it was thought that “established and customary” practice of international law, and the whole of international law itself, applied only between nations. It was the “customary and established practice” in international law that what governments or parties of nations did or didn’t do to their “own citizens” or their “own national minorities” that caused harm to these “citizens” or “national minorities” was not a matter for or concern of international law. Documents of and research on, the periods during which the U.S. and Canadian Governments summarily declared Blackfoot Peoples to be “citizens” of the United States and Canada without their consent, reveal that one of the clear and stated motives and intent of summary declaration of citizenship was to summarily declare removed--and to remove--certain “national minorities” of the United States and Canada (including Blackfoot People) from any protection, coverage or application of international law or conventions or treaties to which the U.S. and Canada were signatories and were bound by summarily changing their status to that of “citizens” and thus making their status and treatment an “internal matter” and supposedly not subject to international law; this is in violation of Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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Any extent to which any of the core elements of the Blackfoot Nation have been diminished or extinguished as a result of conquest, occupation,and ethnocidal or genocidal policies and practices, does not, and should not, in any way call into question the existence, legitimacy, or fundamental rights to sovereignty and self- determination of the Blackfoot Nation and its members. Were it so, those who sought to eliminate Indigenous Peoples in general and Blackfoot in particular, would be rewarded for and assisted in the commission of the very genocidal crimes against Blackfoot Peoples and International Law for which they are being legitimately brought to a Tribunal of Blackfoot Justice.
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Indigenous Nations in general and Peoples of the Blackfoot Nation in particular have recognized, established and codified rights to national recognition, national sovereignty, national preservation and protection of lands and resources, national self-determination and the national right to take any and all measures necessary to preserve and protect the Nation against genocide, wars of aggression, crimes against humanity, war crimes or any other kinds of crimes or threats against the existence and survival of the Nation as a whole or its members.
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Legal support for and/or codification of these fundamental rights are to be found in:
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• The Nuremberg Charter; The 1948 UN Convention on Genocide;
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• Convention on the Rights and Duties of States adopted by the Seventh International Conference of American States Dec. 26, 1933 (to which Canada was not a signatory);
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• Charter of the United Nations, Article I (2) and Article 55
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• United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Articles I and 27
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• The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), Article I
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• UN General Assembly Declaration of Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation Among States in Accordance With the Charter of the United Nations
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• UN General Assembly’s Declaration on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the United Nations
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• Supreme Court of Canada Decisions (e.g. “the right of colonial peoples to exercise their right to self-determination by breaking away from the ‘imperial power’ is ‘now undisputed’.”)
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• UN General Assembly Resolution on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources
(GA Res. 1803, XVII, 17 U.N. GAOR Supp. No. 17 at 15 U.N. Doc. A/5217, 1962)
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• Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles 15 and 17
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• UN General Assembly Resolutions 1514, XV (Declaration on the Granting of Independence of Colonial Countries and Peoples of 14.12.1960) and 1541
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• UN GA Res. 2625 (XXV) of 24.10.1970, Annex, “Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation Among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations
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• Basket I, Final Act, Article VIII of the Helsinki Conference on Cooperation and Security in Europe
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• Article 38 no. 1 b of ICJ Statute ( two elements needed to create valid customary law in international law: general customary practice and opinio juris)
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• Article 38 para. 1 d) of the ICJ Statute (judicial decisions can be used as “subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law”)
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• The ICJ Advisory Opinion on Namibia in 1971 (“Legal Consequences for States of the Continued Presence of South Africa in Namibia)
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• ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Western Sahara (Order of 22 May 1975, ICJ Rep. 1975)
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• ICJ Judgment on U.S. Military and Paramilitary Activities Against Nicaragua, ICJ Rep. 1986
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• ICJ Judgment on East Timor (Portugal v Australia), ICJ Rep. 1995
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• Permanent ICJ Ruling in the Case of Greco-Bulgarian Communities, P.C.I.J. [1930], Series B, No. 17,21
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• International Commission of Jurists, East Pakistan Staff Study, 1972 (“a people begins to exist only [and] when it becomes conscious of its own identity and asserts its will to exist”, p. 47)
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• International Labor Organization Convention 107
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• The draft “Inter-American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” by the Organization of American States
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• Declaration of President Richard Nixon, 1973(“self-determination as the key concept that would govern relations between Indian tribes [sic] and the government of the U.S.”)
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• Declaration of President Ronald Reagan in 1983 (“…the government-to-government relationship between the U.S. and Indian tribes had endured…consistently recognized a unique political relationship between Indian Tribes and the U.S. which this Administration pledges to uphold”)
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• Declaration of President William Clinton in 1994 (“This is our first principle: respecting your values, your religions, your identity, and your sovereignty…[We want to]…become full partners with the tribal nations.”)
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• Memorandum of the U.S. Department of Justice (opinio juris) ([Clinton’s position] “builds on the firmly established federal policy of self-determination for Indian tribes.”)
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• Helsinki Final Act
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• “Fulfilling Our Promises: The United States and the Helsinki Final Act” by the Commission on Security and Cooperation in the U.S., 1979
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• “Compact of Self-governance Between the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe and the United States of America”
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• Article I, Section 10 and Article VI Section 2 of the Constitution of the United States
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From the fundamental right of the Blackfoot Nation to survival and self determination, other facts and conclusions flow inexorably. For example, Canada’s Indian Act, and the Indian Reorganization Act of the U.S., strip recognized Indigenous sovereign nations, such as the Blackfoot Nation, with its recognized right to self-determination, of the power to govern the internal affairs of the Nation and transfer that power to entities of a foreign power (DIA , Minister of Indian Affairs and their “Tribal Council” creations in Canada and the BIA, Department of the Interior and their “Tribal Council” creations of the U.S. Government) thus summarily eliminating the right of self-determination as a prelude to and instrument of elimination of the Nation itself. The paternalistic policies of the Canadian and U.S. Governments purporting to “protect” Indigenous Peoples through a “trustee relationship”, have demonstrably created, and inexorably create, not “protecting powers”, but rather, powers, exploitative relationships and indeed genocidal policies from which Indigenous Peoples need protection through the exercise of the right of selfdetermination and through international law.
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For the above-mentioned and other clear reasons, agencies such as the BIA and DIA, and their creations the “Tribal Councils”, whose policies and actions are all subject to final approval and ratification by the BIA and DIA, can never be recognized as the legitimate leadership and political authority of the Blackfoot Nation. The mechanisms through which the Blackfoot Tribal Councils are selected are non-Blackfoot in nature and in terms of the “final authority” conducting and sanctioning them.
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Indeed historically and in the present, corrupt Tribal Councils (not an indictment of every person serving or who has served on a Tribal Council) have been selected, used and run by the Canadian and U.S. governments as key instruments of genocide. It would be absurd and inherently illogical to suppose that only those same Tribal Councils could have the authority standing to bring charges against those who have committed crimes against the Blackfoot Nation— crimes in which they were often intimately involved as co-conspirators and key instruments of genocide.
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II. PRECEDENTS, STANDING AND LEGAL AUTHORITY OF THE TRIBUNAL
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It was clearly established and accepted, by the parties participating in prosecution and judgment at the Nuremberg and later International Tribunals (which included the U.S. and Canada), that their findings would constitute binding precedents adding to the corpus of evolving international law to which the parties prosecuting and sitting in judgment themselves also would be bound. Specifically, in his opening argument at Nuremberg, the U.S. Chief Prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson noted:
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Never before in legal history has an effort been made to bring within the scope of a single litigation the developments of a decade, covering a whole continent, and involving a score of nations, countless individuals, and innumerable events... Unfortunately, the nature of these crimes is such that both prosecution and judgment must be by victor nations over vanquished foes [but] we must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice. (Nuremberg transcript)
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The findings, arguments and judgments of the Nuremberg and later International Tribunals and Conventions clearly established, and incorporated into the corpus of evolving international law that:
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1) universal jurisdiction exists with respect to crimes against humanity and genocide (no nation can claim immunity from international law or a “sovereign right” to conduct crimes against humanity and genocide against persons living under the control of that nation);
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2) no nation may legally arrogate the “sovereign right” to selectively and conveniently meet or not meet the terms of legitimate treaties or international conventions it has ratified and accepted; nor may any nation summarily assert primacy of national law over international law, treaties or conventions in the event of conflicts between national laws and policies and international laws;
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3) even when certain crimes against humanity and genocidal acts against persons and groups have been traditionally practiced and accepted by members of dominant exploiting groups, and even in the absence of certain explicit laws prohibiting such crimes, established principles against retroactivity or ex-post-facto prosecution and punishment (punishing someone for violating laws that did not exist when the crime was committed on the basis the person (s) had no warning that they were culpable for their conduct) may not preclude prosecution and punishments in present circumstances when it can be shown, that alleged perpetrators violated established and customary practices, sensibilities, laws and principles that natios commonly recognized, asserted and obeyed for themselves for their own protection;
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4) individuals and organizations may be held to be criminal and culpable and prosecuted and punished even when acting as agents of broader governmental entities and policies, and, the argument of “only following orders” would no longer be acceptable;
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5) mens rea, intentions, motives and interests may be inferred and considered “proved” on the basis of the highly probable, clearly foreseeable (by an average and reasonable prudent person) or inexorable consequences of given actions or policies even in the absence of witnesses to or recordings of specific utterances or documents explicitly detailing mens rea, intentions, motives and interests;
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6) common plans to wage aggressive wars (crimes against peace), war crimes or crimes against humanity constitute criminal conspiracies and are in violation of international law and established treaties to which the U.S. and Canada were bound even before Nuremberg;
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7) waging aggressive wars and barbaric practices against other nations or groups within a nation constitute “Crimes Against Peace” and “Crimes Against Humanity” in violation of international law and treaties existing even before Nuremberg and to which the U.S. and Canada were bound;
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8) even in all-out war there are limits in terms of outlawed barbaric practices and outlawed targets of those practices that constitute “War Crimes” and “Crimes Against Humanity”;
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9) any “designated authorities”, collaborators or “contrived institutions” placed in control by occupiers over the occupied victims of crimes and aid in the commission of crimes (--e.g. Vichy Government in France during World War II) by those being prosecuted, are also criminal and can never be held to be or recognized as the legitimate and representative authorities and institutions of those seeking prosecution of and punishment for any crimes or violations of international law;
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10) citizens of a given nation are also citizens of a World Community, and since reckless, genocidal and aggressive crimes, policies and actions by parties of one nation have spillover effects on the World Community, and since no one is free and all are threatened when anyone is oppressed, all human beings of the World Community have both the unalienable right and sacred duty to sit in judgment of (and attempt to stop) genocidal and other criminal acts and policies by or against any members of that World Community;
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11)racial stereotyping and caricatures, racial policies objectively create environments that make genocide and crimes against humanity more likely and easier to conduct and accept, and are themselves crimes, even without a specific nexus between a specific policy or polemics on the one hand and the death of specific persons on the other hand;
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The governments of Canada (represented by the British government) and the United States were both participants (as prosecutors and sitting in judgment) at the Nuremberg Tribunals. In his opening address, the U.S. Prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson noted:
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The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs, which we seek to condemn and punish, have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captives to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has even paid to reason.
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There was more than grotesque irony and hypocrisy in this statement.The architect(Hitler) of many of the very crimes and policies committed by the nazis and their collaborators for which they were being tried at Nuremberg,had been directly“inspired” by aspects of U.S. and Canadian histories, policies and actions related to Indigenous Peoples. According to James Pool in his “Hitler and His Secret Partners”:
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Hitler drew another example of mass murder from American history. Since his youth he had been obsessed with the Wild West stories of Karl May. He viewed the fighting between cowboys and Indians in racial terms. In many of his speeches he referred with admiration to the victory of the white race in settling the American continent and driving out the inferior peoples, the Indians. With great fascination he listened to stories, which some of his associates who had been in America told him about the massacres of the Indians by the U.S. Calvary.
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He was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on the reservations. He thought the American government’s forced migrations of the Indians over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate policy of extermination. Just how much Hitler took from the American example of the destruction of the Indian nations his hard to say; however, frightening parallels can be drawn. For some time Hitler considered deporting the Jews to a large ‘reservation’ in the Lubin area where their numbers would be reduced through starvation and disease. (p. 273-274).
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And:
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The next morning Hitler’s ‘plan’ was put in writing and sent out to the German occupation authorities as ‘The Fuehrer’s Guidelines for the Government of the Eastern Territories: ‘ the Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we don’t need them, they may die. Therefore compulsory vaccination and German health services are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives and practice abortion, the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is sufficient… if they can count up to a hundred. At best an education is admissible which produces useful servants for us. Every educated person is a future enemy.
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Religion we leave to them as a means of diversion. As to food, they are not to get more than necessary. We are the masters, we come first.’
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Always contemptuous of the Russians, Hitler said:‘For them the word ‘liberty’ means the right to wash only on feast-days. If we arrive bringing soft soap, we’ll obtain no sympathy…There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.’ Having been a devoted reader of Karl May’s books on the American West as a youth, Hitler frequently referred to the Russians as ‘Redskins’. He saw a parallel between his effort to conquer and colonize land in Russia with the conquest of the American West by the white man and the subjugation of the Indians or ‘Redskins’. ‘I don’t see why’, he said, ‘a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.” (James
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Pool, Ibid, pp. 254-255)
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And from a speech by Heinrich Himmler (date not given):
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I consider that in dealing with members of a foreign country, especially some Slav nationality…in such a mixture of peoples there will always be some racially good types. Therefore I think that it is our duty to take their children with us, to remove them from their environment, if necessary, by robbing or stealing them… (Telford Taylor “Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials”, Alfred A Knopf, N.Y. 1992, p. 203)
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And from John Toland, preeminent biographer of Adolf Hitler:
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Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa And for the Indians in the Wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the ‘Red Savages’ who could not be tamed by captivity. (John Toland, “Adolf Hitler” Vol II, p 802, Doubleday & Co, 1976)
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Scholars such as Charles Higham, Christopher Simpson, John Loftus, Mark Aarons and others have thoroughly documented that the U.S. and British Governments that prosecuted and sat in judgment at Nuremberg and at other war crimes trials of Japanese war criminals, and certain companies of the U.S. and Britain, were actively complicit in some of the crimes of the nazi and Japanese fascists through various economic and political relationships that continued throughout the war between U.S. and British Governments and companies and German and Japanese Governments and companies.
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These scholars have also documented that many of the wanted war criminals of Germany and Japan were sheltered, employed, placed in post-war political positions and aided in escape by the U.S. and British Governments that prosecuted and sat in judgment of other Japanese and German war criminals. Despite the myriad and naked forms of hypocrisy and duplicity on the part of the U.S. and British Governments at Nuremberg and at other war crimes trials, the precedents and judgments they set were nonetheless valid and incorporated into international law.
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We have and will present, solid evidence that many of the genocidal practices and policies for which German and Japanese fascists were put on trial and punished at Nuremberg and other International Military Tribunals, were inspired by and directly paralleled, U.S. and Canadian histories, policies and practices (past and present) with respect to Indigenous Peoples in general and Blackfoot People in particular.
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Specifically, and not limited to:
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1) forced relocations and transfers of Indigenous children and adults;
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2) coerced/deceptive sterilizations of Indigenous children and adults;
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3) coerced and deceptive uses of Indigenous children and adults for medical experimentation;
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4) coerced and deceptive uses of “blood-quantum” criteria and categories to establish categories of “status” (versus non-recognized and “non-status”) Indians specifically designed and intended to define Indigenous Peoples (and eliminate the ‘persistent Indian problem’) out of existence;
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5) arrogating to summarily eliminate traditional Indigenous institutions and ways of determining Indigenous leadership (Chiefs) and membership/composition of Indigenous Nations and replacing those traditional Indigenous institutions and ways with non-Indigenous organizations, entities, mechanisms and criteria designed to impose compliant and collaborationist/sell-out agents of the non-Indigenous forces intent on policies and practices defined as “genocide” under Article II of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide;
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6) outright thefts and takings of traditional Indigenous lands and resources and making and summarily breaking treaties constructed and imposed through unconscionable relationships, threats, fraud, deception etc;
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7) designating and using Indigenous Reserves/Reservations as dump sites for highly toxic wastes and causing a wide range of diseases and disease trends that served as instruments of genocide;
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8) calculated uses of various instruments of chemical and biological warfare designed to exterminate large populations of Indigenous Peoples;
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9) practicing and/or knowing about and/or tolerating and/or covering-up and/or being willfully blind to: routine murder, sexual and physical abuse, mind control, torture, illegal confinement, starvation, unsanitary conditions, deleterious non-Indigenous diets, abductions, illegal “adoptions”, forced assimilation into non-Indigenous cultures, denial of basic due process, coerced abortions and forced religious conversions in Residential and Boarding Schools and other institutions;
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10) establishing and/or knowing about and/or tolerating and/or covering-up and/or being willfully blind to corrupt Government-sanctioned “Tribal” authorities, institutions, policies and practices that resulted in losses/misappropriations of billions of dollars of desperately-needed and owed Nation/Tribal resources
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11) systematic refusal to ratify and apply various precedents, Conventions and principles of international law as they relate to Indigenous Peoples.
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These are but some of the issues and particulars that we propose to charge and prove in this Tribunal.
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The U.S. Government and the Canadian Government (represented by the British Government) were major forces initiating and conducting the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and those Tribunals were a major force in the origination and content of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide. Yet the U.S. Government did not ratify the UN Convention on Genocide until 1988, forty years after the original UN Convention on Genocide. Further, the U.S. government summarily placed a “restriction” on its ratification of the UN Convention on Genocide known as the “Lugar-Helms-Hatch Sovereignty Package” which stated in Article I (2):
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Nothing in the Convention requires or authorizes legislation or other action by the United States of America prohibited by the Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the United States.
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This is a clear violation of Article 27 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as the definitive international law on treaties) as it is in violation of Article VI, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution itself:
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[treaties are] the supreme law of the land, and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
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Documents of the U.S. Government reveal clearly consciousness of guilt on the part of the Government and its agencies. Debates in the U.S. Senate reveal that there was a general awareness of and fear that the U.S. Government could/would be charged with genocide and related acts for historical and present-day policies and actions related to African-Americans and American Indians.
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The Government of Canada was even more ingenuous in its duplicity and attempts to appear to ratify the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide while effectively obstructing its recognition and application. The government of Canada put the crime of genocide in the criminal code of Canada as a crime. However, of the five specific acts mentioned as constituting genocide in Article II of the UN Convention on Genocide,three were deleted from the definition of genocide in the Canadian criminal code. So from Article II of the Genocide Convention, b) “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”, and d)“Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”, and e)“Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” were deliberately not included in the Canadian criminal code definition of the crime of genocide. Only a) [deliberate] killing members of the group, and part of c) an intentional plan to “bring about the physical destruction the group in whole or in part” were retained. The clear intent was to make the definition of “intent” very narrow and the proving of mens rea or intent next to impossible--and therefore prosecution next to impossible to pursue. Indeed there has been only one case of anyone being charged with the Canadian Criminal Code’s “genocide” and that resulted in an acquittal.
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For these and other clearly calculated, duplicitous and obstructionist machinations on the part of the Canadian and U.S. Governments and some of their agencies, they are also in violation of the following articles of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:
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Article I:
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The contracting parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law for which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
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Article III
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The following acts shall be punishable:
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Genocide;
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Conspiracy to commit genocide;
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Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
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Attempt to commit genocide;
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Complicity in genocide;
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Article IV
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Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.
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Article V
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The Contracting parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention, and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III
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Article VI
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Persons charged with genocide or any other acts enumerated in Article III shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction.
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Article VII
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Genocide and the other acts enumerated in Article III shall not be considered as political crimes for the purpose of extradition. The Contracting Parties pledge themselves in such cases to grant extradition In accordance with their laws and treaties in force.
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Article VIII
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Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression Of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III.
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Article IX
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Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfillment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in
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Article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.
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The calculated, systematic and ongoing violations of Articles I to IX of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, by the Governments of the United States of America and Canada, along with Articles I to IX themselves, and all authority under international law recognizing/supporting the sovereignty and self-determination of the Blackfoot Nation and People, legitimate and give “standing” and authority to this Tribunal of the Blackfoot Nation. The Governments of the United States of America and Canada have refused to recognize, and have sought to exterminate, the traditional elements, authorities and institutions of the Blackfoot Nation and replace them with collaborationist elements and institutions that would or could never charge those Governments of crimes against international law or with crimes against their own laws even if they were so inclined and the evidence mandated such charges. The Governments of the United States and Canada have refused to allow their own genocidal policies and actions to be submitted to the ICJ and have refused to recognize traditional Blackfoot authorities or institutions as having “standing” or authority to bring charges at the ICJ and have been refused/obstructed in any real exercises in Blackfoot self-determination that would result in the Blackfoot Nation and its traditional authorities and institutions having standing and becoming/being recognized as a “Contracting Party” able to bring charges at the ICJ.
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The U.S. Government has refused to accept the authority of the ICJ on any matters other than those related to “commercial affairs”. The narrow language of the UN Convention on Genocide has been selectively interpreted by the Governments of the United States of America and Canada in such ways as to allow those who practice genocide and other crimes against international law to either physically eliminate and/or summarily non-recognize any victims, evidence or traditional institutions that might bring charges against them. This is like the nazis recognizing only their puppet/collaborationist regimes in the occupied territories as being “Contracting Parties” or “competent authorities” with the “standing” to charge them with various crimes, and, recognizing only nazi courts as the legitimate venues in which any charges could be brought.
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The long history of barbaric, criminal and genocidal activities committed by the Governments of the United States and Canada and their accomplices, against Indigenous Peoples in general and Blackfoot People in particular, continues today. Every attempt to expose, stop and obtain redress for various criminal activities through the institutions of the perpetrators has been met with more denial, cover-up and repression.
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Attempts to establish a World Court or International Criminal Court free of the biases and influences of the perpetrators of crimes against Indigenous Peoples, have been obstructed by those very perpetrators. We therefore assert this constituted Tribunal and its constituted authorities and procedures to be legitimate(in traditional Blackfoot Law and in International Law) in composition, location and standing.Any final decisions of this Blackfoot Tribunal will qualify as binding “judicial decisions” within the meaning of Article 38 (1) (d) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice and will therefore constitute a “Subsidiary Means For The Determination of Rules of Law” for international law and practice.
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As the “Statute of the International Court of Justice” is an “integral part” of the United Nations’ Charter under Article 92 and to which both the U.S. and Canada are signatories, this Tribunal’s decision may be relied upon by some future International Criminal Court or Tribunal or by any People or State of the World Community. Were this not so, the nazis of World War II, for example, could never have been brought to justice for crimes in “occupied territories” as the “designated representatives” and “recognized authorities” of the occupied nations and victims, supposedly charging and judging those nazis, would have been the very collaborators and accomplices of the nazis against whom also charges were also properly made and later proved. Indeed, not one of those “governments” or “governmental agencies” recognized by the nazis as “legitimate”, sat as judges and prosecutors at Nuremberg; they all sat as defendants.
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As to the standing, fairness and legitimacy of this Blackfoot Tribunal, composed of potential victims judging alleged victimizers, A. L. Goodheart in his “The Legality of the Nuremberg Trials”, “Juridicial Review”, April 1946 took on this argument succinctly:
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It has been argued that the Tribunal cannot be regarded as a court in the true sense because, as its members represent the victorious Allied Nations, they must lack that impartiality which is an essential in all judicial procedure. According to this view only a court consisting of neutrals, or, at least, containing Some neutral judges, could be considered to be a proper tribunal. As no man can be a judge in his own case, so no allied tribunal can be a judge in a case in which members of the enemy government or forces are on trial. Attractive as this argument may sound in theory, it ignores the fact that it runs counter to the administration of law in every country. If it were true then no spy could be given a legal trial, because his case is always heard by judges representing the enemy country. Yet no one has ever argued that in such cases it was necessary to call on neutral judges. The prisoner has a right to demand that his judges shall be fair, but not that they shall be neutral. As Lord Writ has pointed out, the same principle is applicable to ordinary criminal law because ‘ a burglar cannot complain that he is being tried by a jury of honest citizens.
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III. SPECIFIC CRIMES AND VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
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The traditionally recognized and responsible authorities of the Blackfoot Nation, present at this Tribunal and acting on behalf of the Blackfoot Nation and whole People, specifically charge that the Government of the United States of America and its agencies, the Government of Canada and its agencies, the British Crown authority in Canada and named Church or religious organizations resident on Blackfoot lands and/or in which Blackfoot were placed (Catholic Church, United Church, Anglican Church, LDS or Mormon Church, Presbyterian Church) directly committed, and/or conspired to commit, and/or sanctioned and tolerated, and/or facilitated, and/or covered-up, and/or refused to prosecute and/or obstructed the prosecution of and/or were willfully blind to the following crimes specified further in the following:
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1) Article I of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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2) Article II of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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a) Killing Blackfoot persons as Blackfoot;
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b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to Blackfoot persons as Blackfoot;
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c) Deliberately inflicting on Blackfoot persons and the Blackfoot Nation conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Blackfoot People and Nation in whole or in part;
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d) Imposing measures intended to prevent biological reproduction of the Blackfoot People and Nation;
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e) Forcibly transferring Blackfoot children to other (non-Blackfoot) groups, lands and cultures;
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3) Article III of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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4) Article IV of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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5) Article V of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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6) Article VI of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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7) Article VII of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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8) Article VIII of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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9) Article IX of the UN Convention on Genocide;
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10) Common Article 3 and Additional Protocol II of the Geneva Conventions of 1949;
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11) Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg:
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A) Article 6
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a) Crimes Against Peace
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b) War Crimes
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c) Crimes Against Humanity
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B) Article 7
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C) Article 8
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12) Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal as adopted by the International Law Commission of the United Nations 1950 and UN General Assembly Resolution 177
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a) Principle I
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b) Principle II
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c) Principle III
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d) Principle IV
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e) Principle V
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f) Principle VI
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g) Principle VII
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13) Articles of the Statute of the International Criminal Court for Former Yugoslavia
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Specifying the Acts Within the Court’s Jurisdiction
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a) Article 2
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b) Article 3
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c) Article 4
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d) Article 5
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14) Articles of the Statute of the International Criminal Court for Rwanda
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Specifying the Acts Within the Court’s Jurisdiction:
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a) Article 2 (2,3)
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b) Article 3
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c) Article 4
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CONCLUSION
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The Blackfoot Nation and People are on the verge of extinction. Victims of and witnesses to the various charged crimes are dying. Blackfoot People individually and collectively cannot wait for the formation of an International Criminal Court (blocked by the U.S. Government) to hear Blackfoot charges against the Governments of the U.S and Canada and other named parties. The Blackfoot and People cannot wait for the U.S. and Canadian Governments to allow charges to be heard by the ICJ at the Hague. The Blackfoot Nation and People Blackfoot cannot wait for the traditional authorities, institutions and self-determination of the Blackfoot Nation to be recognized and respected by the very Governments of the U.S. and Canada intent on elimination of the Blackfoot Nation and People and their self-determination. The Blackfoot Nation and People cannot wait for the U.S. and Canadian Governments to “decertify” and derecognize their puppet and complicit entities (Tribal Councils, BIA and DIA) and to recognize the traditional authorities and institutions of the Blackfoot Nation that are certified and legitimated by the recognized right of and international law governing self-determination of the Blackfoot Nation and People.
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For all of the above-mentioned reasons, and under all of the above-mentioned legal authority (and more to be specified later) this Tribunal, structured and conducted by the competent and traditionally recognized authorities and institutions of the Blackfoot Nation, has standing and authority under international law and any decisions or findings of this Tribunal can be considered binding judicial decisions under Blackfoot Law and International Law.
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The competent, legal and traditional authorities of the Blackfoot Nation propose that ultimate authority and power is truth, reason, law and evidence. Power pays no real ‘tribute to reason’ when the conquerors put on trial—rather than summarily executing or jailing without due process—the conquered. Power pays only a ‘tribute to reason’ and law when the powerful submit to the very laws, standards, precedents and morality to which they purport to hold others and to which the powerful purport to be bound--by their own words and deeds. We will hold these named Governments and agencies or entities to their own laws, words, precedents, deeds and professed values in addition to specific Blackfoot laws and values that they have violated and for which the Blackfoot Nation and People have sovereign rights to protect.
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Finally, on the question of the amount of time that has lapsed since some or many of these alleged crimes have been committed (and we allege that many of the crimes continue in various forms today), we note that it is widely recognized in international law that there is no "statute of limitations" on gross violations of human rights (Article 1,
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"Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations on War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity", Nov. 26, 1968 see "A Comprehensive Handbook of the United Nations", Vol. II, 1979) Also, under the U.S. Document "The Third Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States (Section 702):
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Blackfoot Indictment of the United States of America
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