They\u2019re back!<\/p>\n
From the look of the presidential campaign, war crimes are back on the American agenda. We really shouldn\u2019t be surprised, because American officials got away with it last time — and in the case of the drone wars continue<\/a> to get away with it today. Still, there\u2019s nothing like the heady combination of a \u201cpopulist\u201d Republican race for the presidency and a national hysteria over terrorism to make Americans want to reach for those \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques.\u201d That, as critics have long argued, is what usually happens if war crimes aren\u2019t prosecuted.<\/p>\n In August 2014, when President Obama finally admitted<\/a> that \u201cwe tortured some folks,\u201d he added a warning. The recent history of U.S. torture, he said, \u201cneeds to be understood and accepted. We have to as a country take responsibility for that so hopefully we don\u2019t do it again in the future.\u201d By pinning the responsibility for torture on all of us \u201cas a country,\u201d Obama avoided holding any of the actual perpetrators to account.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, \u201chope\u201d alone will not stymie a serial war criminal — and the president did not even heed his own warning. For seven years his administration has done everything except help the country \u201ctake responsibility\u201d for torture and other war crimes. It looked the other way when it comes to holding accountable those who set up and ran the CIA\u2019s large-scale torture operations at its \u201cblack sites<\/a>\u201d around the world. It never brought charges against those who ordered torture<\/a> at Guant\u00c3\u00a1namo. It prosecuted no one, above all not the top officials of the Bush administration.<\/p>\n Now, in the endless run-up to the 2016 presidential elections, we\u2019ve been treated to some pretty strange gladiatorial extravaganzas<\/a>, with more to come in 2016. In these peculiarly American spectacles, Republican candidates hurl themselves at one another in a frenzied effort to be seen as the candidate most likely to ignore the president\u2019s wan hope and instead \u201cdo it again in the future.\u201d As a result, they are promising to commit a whole range of crimes, from torture to the slaughter of civilians, for which the leaders of some nations would find themselves hauled into international court as war criminals. But \u201cwar criminal\u201d is a label reserved purely for people we loathe, not for us. To paraphrase<\/a> former President Richard Nixon, if the United States does it, it\u2019s not a crime.<\/p>\n In the wake of the brutal attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, the promises being openly made to commit future crimes have only grown more forthright. A few examples from the presidential campaign trail should suffice to make the point:<\/p>\n * Ted Cruz guarantees<\/a> that \u201cwe\u201d will \u201cutterly destroy ISIS.\u201d How will we do it? \u201cWe will carpet bomb<\/a> them into oblivion\u201d — that is, \u201cwe\u201d will saturate an area with munitions in such a way that everything and everyone on the ground is obliterated. Of such a bombing campaign against the Islamic State, he told a cheering crowd at the Rising Tide Summit<\/a>, \u201cI don\u2019t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we\u2019re going to find out.\u201d (It\u2019s hard not to take this as a reference to the use of nuclear weapons, though in the bravado atmosphere of the present Republican campaign a lot of detailed thought is undoubtedly not going into any such proposals.)<\/p>\n