Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
In the 1990s, Captain Michael Cronin, a Navy pilot who had been captured and tortured in Vietnam, began to lobby for a bill that would hold his Vietnamese torturers accountable.
The ‘War Crimes Act’ was passed and Cronin died in 2020 without his torturers facing justice.
The bill, originally sold as a way to hold torturers of Americans accountable, did nothing to stop abuses of American prisoners, either by Communist or Islamist foes. Its criminalization of Geneva Conviction violations was never going to matter to our enemies, instead it became a weapon used by them, and their radical allies in the United States, against our troops.
Republican House and Senate majorities allowed the ‘War Crimes Act’ to sail through even though it had been loaded with the biggest poison pill of all, applying its provisions to American soldiers, and President Bill Clinton, a former anti-war protester, gleefully signed it into law.
The ‘War Crimes Act of 1996’ was the fever dream wishlist of every anti-Vietnam War protester, threatening to prosecute American soldiers for international law violations, and would probably never have become law if it hadn’t been smuggled through using a Vietnam War POW as an unwitting human shield. Once the bill had been passed, it was weaponized against Americans.
After 9/11, the Left used the ‘War Crimes Act’ to target the Bush administration and our soldiers fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Now they’re using it to go after the Trump administration, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and American personnel taking out drug smugglers.
Some Senate Democrats are threatening to investigate Hegseth and our military personnel for violations of the ‘War Crimes Act’, claiming that taking out drug boats may be a war crime.
A law purportedly passed to punish Communist abuses of Americans is being used to protect Marxist drug cartels while intimidating the American military personnel who go after them.
The ‘War Crimes Act’ failed completely at its original purpose. It’s time to repeal it.
Since 1996, there wasn’t a single successful prosecution under the ‘War Crimes Act’ until 2023 when the Biden administration decided to ‘prosecute’ four Russian military personnel who had tortured a Ukrainian civilian with U.S. citizenship. Since none of the Russians involved are in the United States (and one doesn’t even have a known last name) the prosecutions are entirely pointless and wasted the time of the Department of Justice, Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI and, specifically, the FBI’s International Human Rights Unit, which the Trump administration meant to shut down during its first term, but unfortunately still exists.
The globalist human rights theater was only possible because, rather than abolishing the ‘War Crimes Act’ which until that point had resulted in no prosecutions, the ‘Justice for Victims of War Crimes Act’ was passed in 2023 which broadened the scope of war crimes to include atrocities committed anywhere in the world so long as either the victim or the perpetrator was either a resident alien or present in this country.
Earlier this year, a Gambian was sentenced to 67 years in prison for torturing other Gambians in Gambia. The DOJ put out a press release bragging that it was the first case of a “non-US national” being convicted of torture. While the torture being described in the Gambian case is ugly, there’s no basis for believing that his victims were Americans. ICE had detained him for deportation, but instead he’s going to spend the rest of his life in federal custody receiving medical care and services at taxpayer expense at a cost of countless millions of dollars.
No one seems to have asked whether we should be using law enforcement resources for this.
In Los Angeles, a 72-year-old Syrian official with the previous Shiite regime is going on trial for torturing Sunni Muslims. None of whom even appear to be Americans. The investigation involved the DOJ’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, another entity that should be abolished, the Swedish Police Authority, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and, best of all, unstated “authorities in Belgium”. Syria had been taken over by Al Qaeda whose leader was favored with a diplomatic visit despite his role in an organization murdering American soldiers.
Prosecuting a Syrian Muslim senior citizen for killing Syrians of another Muslim sect, some of whom were also Islamic terrorists, seems like a complete waste of time and resources, but the good news is that whatever happens, the 72-year-old Syrian will be enjoying free health care in the federal prison system, better than Americans get, for what is likely to be the rest of his life.
Rather than focusing on legitimate national security prosecutions, a global human rights tribunal has been set up within the Justice Department. Despite claims that this infrastructure serves our national interests, there’s been little regard for foreign policy in these random prosecutions. Rather the ‘War Crimes Act’ has made the United States into a miniature UN, selectively enforcing a fictional international law against other countries and their foreign nationals.
America is not only becoming the world’s policeman, but its official prosecutor.
All of this alone is a compelling argument for scrapping not only the ‘Justice for Victims of War Crimes Act’ but the renewed push to use the ‘War Crimes Act’ against American military personnel makes it more urgent than ever to end the application of foreign laws to America.
Like other pieces of legislation that mandate compliance with an international treaty, the ‘War Crimes Act’ is a constitutional abomination. The Geneva Convention is an international accord and it should be the elected officials of our government that determine our degree of compliance with any treaty. Legislation that permanently embeds any foreign treaty or accord into our legal system makes international law, not American law, the law of the land. And that’s a mistake.
Our open borders crisis was caused in part by the ‘Refugee Act of 1980’ with which Sen. Ted Kennedy successfully embedded the ‘UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees’, previously signed by LBJ, into American law. The ‘War Crimes Act’ could be even more potentially catastrophic, especially as Senate Democrats once again show signs of willingness to weaponize it against any efforts to protect the United States of America from foreign threats.
The ‘War Crimes Act’ was a mistake. It has done nothing to stop the torture of American soldiers abroad. Instead taxpayer money and national security resources have been wasted punishing random human rights offenses around the world as if we were the UN, not the U.S.
Now, the ‘War Crimes Act’ threatens American officials, soldiers and our national security.
American governments should only be accountable to our Constitution and its laws, and not any foreign agreements which they may enter into and withdraw from as they see fit, and any agreement that hinders our national defense can and should be scrapped. The first step is to abolish the ‘War Crimes Act’. And then we can begin to properly defend our country.
