It Could Happen Here - War Crimes with Robert and James

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Robert and James discuss war crimes that have happened in their proximity, but which they (and this is important for legal reasons) did not partake in.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Calls on Media. what's warring my crimes this is it could happen here a podcast about things falling apart and you know the what all the kids these days are talking about is war crimes that was that was me being kind of blithe but but they actually are because of what's continuing to happen to Gaza. More people than probably that I can recall in recent memory are talking about war crimes,

what it means to commit war crimes, violations of international law, which is good because that's an important thing to be talking about. The downside of it is, as is often the case when people talk about things on the internet a lot of people are talking about war crimes and don't actually know what that means uh so i i i figured let's talk about like what war crimes is be do uh and i i

i'm gonna bring on james stout fellow war crimes watcher uh to talk with me about what war crimes be james what's your favorite war crime my favorite that's a difficult one isn't it because i've yeah it's like asking the best season of doctor who you know it is yeah what i like to do with reference to war crimes is i wake up right and i sort of you know you're just waking up you get your phone off the charger there and then you look and there's a message on telegram but that's how i that's how i consume war crimes just a random if it's on telegram there's a 40 chance it's a violation of the 1864 geneva convention or the subsequent geneva conventions yes so i wanted to do this because

i do think that one of the things that is unfortunate kind of about the colloquial way in which like the positive side of the way social media has impacted the coverage of conflicts is that we are now seeing like for the first time, this is not the first time Israel has killed a shitload of Palestinians. This is the first time that like a really substantial majority of the American populace has been like, and that's bad. And that owes a lot to the way in which information is spread on social media. One of the downsides of that is because this is happening in kind of a colloquial diction, people are not always super accurate. And a term like war crimes in particular often gets used to mean like anything

I don't like that happens in a war. And there are a lot of things that happen, like war is bad and everything that happens in war, nearly everything is really bad. But most of the things that happen in war are not war crimes. And believe me, I'm not setting us up to say that like Israel is not committing war crimes in Gaza. They are. I actually have a lot of issues with other kinds of conflicts and,

and things that happen in conflicts that get discussed as if they were war crimes that I think muddies the issue. We're going to be trying to make it clear what international law actually covers and what kind of that coverage means and all that stuff so that hopefully people can have a little bit more information going forward when they try to talk about like, is this something that's just bad that happens in war versus is this a war crime? Because that actually matters when it comes to, you know, the theoretical idea of a rules-based international order and prosecuting this stuff. So the first thing we have to get into is the idea that like, war crimes are a pretty recent conception. The idea that like, there would be a thing that you could do as a country that the

international community would come in and have beef with does not go back very far, right? Yeah. We are talking the 18th century. So really the last 200 years has been when this really all started to get codified. We start with the Geneva Convention in 1864. There are several Geneva Conventions in 1949. There's, I think, two more in 1977. You also have the Hague Conventions in 1899 and 1907. And these are all, so part of what that should suggest is that like, even within kind of the realm of codified war crimes law, it's kind of been a slapdash, catch-as-catch-can affair, right? Like, people have come together and made rules that were largely based on the shit that either had just happened or that they thought was about to happen. And one of the consequences of this is that the actual legislation about, like, what is

and isn't illegal to do in war is really uneven. A great example of this would be the idea of dum-dum bullets, right? This is a thing that you get kind of around the turn of the century, which is, so bullets, most bullets that are used in war are what are called full metal jacket, right? And that just means that there's a copper, generally, jacket around the lead bullet. And there's not like a hole in the middle or whatever, like a modern, like if you go up to a police officer and take his gun, which is very easy and safe to do. Legally, that was a joke.

You will notice that all of the bullets in that gun have like a little divot in the middle of them, right? And the purpose of this divot is so that when the bullet hits a person, it transfers more of its force into the meat of that person's body. This is the same with any bullet that like someone carries for self-defense generally. And this is actually a safety device in a way because bullets like this do not penetrate as much and you don't want bullets that you're using in like an urban area for self-defense to penetrate as much because that increases the risk that if you miss or if you hit that person that it goes through them and hits something else right but there was an understanding around the turn of the century that these bullets which initially were not

manufactured soldiers would literally like cut like crosses in the tops of their bullets i used to do this when i was a child i would uh spend a lot of time shooting rabbits it was kind of my thing that i did when i was a kid and we used to dum-dum that air rifle yeah yeah and there's this there was this understanding that developed that this should be illegal because it's uh it causes additional harm now the specific i think this is like like line 20 or something from the uh geneva convention but it's a employing weapons, projectiles and material and methods of warfare, which are of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering or which are inherently indiscriminate in violation of the international law of armed conflict, provided such weapons, projectiles and material and the methods of

warfare are the subject of a comprehensive prohibition and are included in an annex to this statute by an amendment in accordance with the relevant. Anyway, so you're not supposed to employing employed bullets which, quote, flatten or expand easily in the human body, such as bullets with a hard envelope, which is not entirely cover its core or is pierced with incisions. You're not supposed to employ asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and all analogous liquids, materials or devices. That one obviously came about as a result of the horror in World War I, right? People start using a lot of these poison gas weapons, and it's decided by the international community that that absolutely should not be allowed to be done. You're not allowed to employ poison or poisoned weapons.

Now, most people can look at that and be like, well, yeah, I mean, hollow points sound extra mean poison sounds extra mean gas sounds extra mean. You shouldn't be able to use those extra mean weapons in war, but, and I, I don't have a problem with trying to limit horrifying weapons, but we still allow, for example,

artillery shells that are meant to create huge amounts of shrapnel that are their whole purpose is to cause grievous wounds to a large number of people in a large area and from where i'm standing i don't think that like that's less horrible than a hollow point like i actually think that's probably a lot worse than a hollow point yes yeah so one of the first things that you get when you look at what are war crimes is they're not actually all like things that you morally should have an issue with. Like really,

if you are looking at all of the weapons employed in war today, there's no reason a hollow point should frighten you, right? There's so many worse weapons right now. On the other hand of that poison gas is much worse than the vast majority of weapons that are used in war today. And I think it's good that that's a crime. Yeah.

Doesn't stop people using it. It doesn't stop people like it. Doesn't stop people, like Bashar al-Assad, right? Friend of the show, Bashar al-Assad. I was just thinking about barrel bombs. I don't know if barrel bombs are specifically prohibited. They are not.

There would be a way to do that, really, that just a barrel stuff with explosives. Well, because, I mean, they were invented by Israel, actually. I think 47 is the first use. It might have been like, yeah, but I believe it was 47 was the first recorded use of, because if you have planes and you have reliable access to planes, but you don't, can't reliably manufacture advanced like rockets and shit to shoot from them, a barrel bomb is very easy to make.

You're basically just taking a 50 gallon drum and filling it with gunpowder and shrapnel, right? Like, I mean, it's a little more complicated than that, but yeah. Yeah, the Hunter and Myanmar have started using them as their access to russian munitions dries up yeah and there's you know again that's one of those things where it's like that's not technically a war crime other than that if you it can be if you're like using it indiscriminately in a civilian like against civilians but like also they basically no one ever gets prosecuted for doing that so yeah yeah right this is the case with many of these things. And again, like barrel bombs can be legal.

Hollow points can't. That doesn't really make sense. It's also like, I will say, I've witnessed at least one war crime in person that I really didn't feel like was a war crime, which when I was embedded with the Iraqi army, they tear gassed an ISIS sniper to get him out of his position so they could kill him. And that's definitely illegal. And also of all of the things

I saw done in that war, like the fact that somebody threw a tear gas grenade did not upset me over much, right? Like the fact that I was watching apartment buildings get blown up by Apache helicopters really upset me a lot more

than the little bit of tear gas. Yeah, it's one of these like very sort of like, yeah, if you want to take the strict legalistic definition versus... Yeah, that was a war crime. Yep. The only war crime that was committed that day, maybe. Yeah. Yeah.

So anyway, I want to get into some of this in a little bit more of an organized fashion. But first, let's have a little bit of an ad break. Hi, I'm Ed Zetron. But first, let's have a little bit of an ad break. to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse

and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all

is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRad Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k?

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show.

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There have been so many times when I've been really lost. I say that because I'm on the other side of it. And the only way to get to the other side of something is to go through it, not around it. Allow your body to feel the pain. And then you have to dig in sometimes and look within to learn from it because that's what all these obstacles are for, I guess. Ultimately, what other choice do you have? Listen to The Bright Side from Hello Sunshine on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, so we're back and we're talking about war crimes. So I want to just kind of go through and with some commentary, straight up read a large chunk of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 8, which largely defines war crimes as that term has a meaning in a legal sense. And it defines war crimes as grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, namely any of the following acts against persons or property committed against the provisions of the relevant Geneva Convention. These include willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, willfully causing great suffering, serious injury to body or health,

extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly, compelling a prisoner of war or other protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile power, willfully depriving a prisoner of war or other protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement, and taking of hostages, right? And you'll notice, among other things, a lot of that is stuff that you can find Israeli soldiers doing onages, right? And you'll notice, among other things, a lot of that is stuff that you can find Israeli soldiers doing on TikTok, right?

Yeah, yeah, streaming themselves doing. Yeah, I mean, particularly the clear, not maybe not the clearest, but one that comes up to me just because of some stuff I've seen of like soldiers posing with like stolen canes from Gazans who presumably were disabled and no longer have their canes for whatever

terrible reason, like these kind of like joking photos, that's a destruction and appropriation of property, right? You get a lot of videos of soldiers like going through people's property, taking stuff, destroying stuff like those are war crimes. You are not as a soldier. Obviously, property will get destroyed in gunfights. So there's part of why it's kind of hard to, this stuff is not prosecuted as much as it ought to be,

but you are not supposed to just fuck with people's shit as a soldier. That is legal. You know, is it one of the war crimes that is probably least prosecuted and most common? Absolutely. I think that that is very fair to say. Yeah.

Look, Boris Johnson stole stuff from Saddam Hussein's palace in Iraq, you know, like he's yet to be called to the Hague. And that would be one of those, look, Boris Johnson stole stuff from Saddam Hussein's palace in Iraq, you know, like he's yet to be called to the Hague. And that would be one of those like, I don't know, I don't like Boris Johnson, but also I don't have a problem with anyone stealing from Saddam Hussein. Yeah, of all the bullshit he's done. But this is, I mean, that's one of those, because I would say a lot of soldiers I know who have been, and maybe didn't even realize themselves that what they were doing was

committing a war crime, but just like you're in somebody's house, they are gone. They ran. And like, you wind up fucking with shit. Like it happens. I think what we're seeing,

I think willfully is kind of a, an important term here. Right. And I think that's really what we've seen very clearly in a lot of these IDF tech talks, right. Is people taking glee in the destruction of property. And I think that's very easy to prove as a war crime.

I think anyone can make a moral distinction, right? Between like, I was recently in Rojava and I was talking to some friends and they were talking about how they, a lot of people died in IED blasts because they were going into buildings to try and get food or tea or sugar. There's a distinction between going into the kitchen of an abandoned building and taking

some sugar or whatever, rice, you know, than, yeah, these guys going through women's underwear drawers and taking pictures with their underwear. Yeah, yeah. I know some US Marines who, like, happened upon a cigarette factory during the invasion. like the uncut cigarettes that are like five feet long. And they just started like smoking a bunch. I guess that's destruction of property. Probably not going to be my priority as the ICC, but it also doesn't seem like the clearer stuff is their priority. So I don't know.

Free my man with a five foot cigarette. He did. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, other war crimes include intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking part in hostilities. There's a video going around right now, man in his 50s in Gaza who was working a market stall and was shot by an Israeli drone, just executed. by an Israeli drone just executed.

There's no way to describe that other than intentionally directing an attack against a civilian not taking direct part in hostilities. That is a war crime. That's one example of, I mean, that's just the clearest video that I saw recently, right? Yeah, I heard it from people who listen. I think this was in the episode, but when we talked to our friends at PK Garda,

they were talking about one of the members of their group was recovering bodies from a bombed building and was shot by a quadcopter like not like a drone like 10 000 feet in the air dropping a missile like a drone yeah like 10 feet in the air firing a drone like you could buy it a fucking best buy that's been modified yeah yeah that shoots like a it shoots a rifle like like just like a soldier would shoot a rifle. Where the operator is looking and seeing that person and pressing a button to fire a bullet, it's not collateral damage. It's deliberate targeting of civilians. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Continue from that list of war crimes, intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is objects which are not military objectives. A great example of this that's been happening in Gaza in particular is destruction of mosques, right? Very clear civilian objects. Now, there are exceptions. For example, one thing that does sometimes happen, I don't think it happened. I certainly have not seen evidence of it happening often in most of the places where there are attacks on mosques but like periodically like if if somebody if a if a if a fighter or a military unit sets up inside a mosque all right or a church or whatever which happened in world war ii a lot right you would have like churches used as strong points

because they're well-made buildings you can attack that right like the it's not like magical right like you can't suddenly not attack soldiers who are shooting at you from a church but you are not supposed to intentionally direct attacks against civilian objects that are not military objectives. Intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, materiel, units or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping mission in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations. As long as they are entitled to the protection given to civilians or civilian objects under international law of armed conflict. Best example of this from Gaza recently would be those World Kitchen employees and their bodyguards who were essentially murdered by the Israelis, right? Very clear, internationally recognized humanitarian assistance, very clear. War crime, if you can prove it was intentional, I'm sure there's, you know, that's a court case, right? But I think pretty clear. And then there is intentionally launching an attack in the

knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread long-term and severe damage to the natural environment, which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated. This is one of the top things that is a war crime that never gets punished because it is so hard because it seems like most, I would say most of what I have seen planes do in war seems like it falls under this where it's like, wow, that's a lot of environmental damage, a lot of incidental loss of life and injury. But is it excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage? Well, the people ordering those airstrikes would say no, right? And like, yeah. And that is one of those things where it's like, well, I know what

looks like crime to me, you know? Yeah. But can I, could I win an ICC case about that? I don't know. Now, I want to actually move over to talk about Ukraine here, because I think that that, number one, doesn't happen enough on the left. And I think there's some really good, clear examples of Russian war crimes here, because one thing that you're not allowed to do is, quote, attacking or bombarding by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives. And both of those last two points make it very clear that the Russian military committed war crimes against Ukraine from March 4th to March 31st, 2022, when they occupied the town of Bukha, which is about 30 kilometers north of Kiev. This is one of the best, probably the best documented Russian war crime in Ukraine at the moment.

And I'm not saying that this is the only, it's not nearly the only, it's just like a particularly well-documented example. As of this point, you know, we're almost two years past when Buka got liberated. The bodies of more than a thousand civilians have been discovered in the Buka region. At least about 650 people are known to have been executed by the Russian army. And these are pretty hideous mass executions. A lot of people were held for a week or two prior to being executed. There's significant evidence of torture, of beatings of civilians before their summary execution. And yeah, it's a very clear example of a war crime. I don't know how else to say it. I will read a quote from this Human Rights Watch article that interviewed some funeral

home workers in Buka. Another funeral home worker, Sergei Makyuk, who helped collect bodies, said that he personally collected about 200 bodies from the streets since the Russian invasion began on February 24th. Most of the victims were men, he said, but some were women and children. Almost all of them had bullet wounds, he said, including around 50 whose hands were tied and whose bodies had signs of torture. Bodies with hands tied strongly suggest that the victims had been detained and summarily

executed. And that's a, I mean, a thousand, it's a hideous war crime, right? That's a mass killing of civilians in a, crucially, there's no argument, and one way in which civilians always die are killed in war and it's not usually a war crime because it generally happens while there's gunfights going on while you're carrying and you can claim like well look you know you can't stop bullets from going through buildings you can't stop people from getting hit by shrapnel you're fighting in a city civilians are going to die this is a very clear case of this town was occupied. There was not

resistance ongoing in it, and they were mass executing civilians. That's illegal. You're not allowed to do that, theoretically, if international law means anything. Now, I do want to get to another case of a war crime that, or a thing that people call a war crime that isn't a war crime. And for this, we're actually going to go back to the Iraq, the first Iraq war, Desert Storm. Before we go to Desert Storm, let's go to these ads. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned silicon valley into a playground for billionaires from the chaotic world of generative ai to the destruction of google search better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of

tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose this season i'm going to be joined by everyone from nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and i'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things

that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel.

I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the El as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck.

You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year,

you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're gonna get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide

if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they don't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head,

search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, fam. I'm Simone Boyce. I'm Danielle Robay. And we're the hosts of The Bright Side, the daily podcast from Hello Sunshine that is guaranteed to light up your day. Every weekday, we bring you conversations with the culture makers who inspire us. Like our episode with actor, former Beverly Hills 90210 star,

and host of the podcast, I Choose Me, Jenny Garth. There have been so many times when I've been really lost. I say that because I'm on the other side of it. And the only way to get to the other side of something is to go through it, not around it. Allow your body to feel the pain. And then you have to dig in sometimes and look within to learn from it because that's what all these obstacles are for, I guess. Ultimately, what other choice do you have? Listen to The Bright Side from Hello Sunshine on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, we're back. James, what do you know about the highway of death? Oh, I know a little bit about the highway of death. Yeah, that's a throwback, isn't it? It's a throwback. I hear it described by particularly leftists on the internet a lot as a U.S. war crime. Yeah. And as a spoiler, it's not it's ugly it's really hideous it's like a horrifying thing but it's just war right yeah and it was combatants

fighting combatants yeah it was combatants killing retreating combatants which people think sometimes shouldn't be allowed but it doesn't really make sense for that to not be allowed if you just like know what war is and i i'm going to talk about why here and like i'm not trying to justify this because nothing in war make it like you don't justify it just is a thing that happens right like it's all hideous if you've been through it you see in humanity every second but one of the things that you learn if you study war on an academic level is that a massive part of it is retreating. Like all the time, all throughout history, armies retreat, regroup, and then carry out additional offensives, right? That is war in a nutshell, right?

And so when armies are retreating, you're allowed to keep killing them. And in fact, that's the norm. And most soldiers up until the modern era, the vast majority of combat deaths were during retreats, right? This is the primary way in which soldiers are killed is when they're retreating, right? And so what actually happened is in August, so obviously, August of 1990, the US leads a coalition against the Iraqi army who have invaded and occupied Kuwait illegally. You know, one of my stances on this is that Iraq very clearly violated international law and they shouldn't have been allowed to occupy Kuwait. prior to this that are, you could say, extenuating, including the fact that we had kind of pushed them to invade Iran and then played both sides of that conflict.

And that was part of what Saddam was pissed about. But that doesn't justify the Kuwait being occupied, right? You can't just get mad and invade somewhere unless you're America. Unless you're America, which we're going to do to Iraq not much longer after this. But in this case, you know, we're more or less on the better side of things, right? And we basically immediately throw the Iraqi army into a full-fledged retreat. This culminates in late February 1991 with a huge number of Iraqi soldiers and military vehicles jammed up on a convoy on Highway 80, which is the highway that connects Iraq to Kuwait.

And what we do is we use our planes to blow up vehicles on both ends of this convoy of like 3,000 vehicles, which then traps thousands and thousands of soldiers inside these walls of fire so we can spend 10 hours bombing them. And this is fucking hideous. The event is memorialized, and this is part of why people think of it as a war crime, in a picture by a photojournalist of the corpse of an Iraqi soldier, hideously burned, frozen in time as he tried to flee his flaming tank. And that picture, you can find it, it's, I mean, it's horrible. It's a great example of why war is bad, and we should do less of it. And it is, you know, it's one of those things, a lot of U.S. soldiers who participate in this feel uncomfortable with it, feel like they are unnecessarily killing a large number of people. And you can make that case. You can make a case, and I'll listen to it,

that this was hideously evil, but it's not a war crime, right? Now, Saddam's going to make that claim, arguing that his soldiers are trying to peacefully withdraw. But there's like a definition of that and what the Iraqis were doing didn't meet it. What actually happened is that the Iraqi army made contact with the U.S. army and then they went into a retreat. They were attempting to leave the area after losing a fight and they had not formally surrendered. And there's nothing in international law that makes it illegal to kill soldiers who happen to be withdrawing, right? A great example of this would be 1944 during the Battle of Normandy. There are reports of retreating German soldiers shot by US soldiers.

And there was debate at the time as like, well, is this a violation of the Geneva Conventions, right? And the conclusion that was generally reached then is that you shouldn't kill an enemy who is number one, not in combat, and number two, surrendering. And there is kind of a blurry line between that and retreat. But again, the vast majority of soldiers killed in war

are killed running away, right? Like that's just kind of, I mean, that's changed a bit in the modern era, but like this is, I think, more falls under one of those things where everyone sees this as a nightmare because it is a nightmare those random iraqi conscripts did not deserve to burn to death in this charnel house we created on highway 80 and also like well that's just what war is man you think we didn't do that to the nazis

you think the nazis didn't do that to the fucking Russians? You think like, you think that hasn't happened every war? Like, that's just what war is, man. That's why we shouldn't do it. It's really bad.

Yeah, it's fucked. The things you're allowed to do are fucked, so the things you're not allowed to do, like, yeah,

we did do some things in the, specifically in that incident, which are now, I don't think they're war crimes, but like,

they use cluster bombs on the highway of death, which, it's a separate agreement. It's not part of the Geneva Convention the highway of death. Yes, yes. It's a separate agreement. It's not part of the Geneva Convention, right? Yeah, yeah. I think that's a separate agreement. And obviously, our doctrine and internet has changed as a result of that, in part because a lot of American soldiers were like, I really didn't feel good about this.

It doesn't seem like this was necessary at all. Yeah. And I don't think it was necessary, right? Like, I don't think it was needed to do this to beat. I think the Iraqi army was already beaten. But the question isn't wasn't necessary. The question is, was this not at a time is acceptable in war, right? Like, it's bad.

Yeah, bad things happen in war. We should avoid it if we can. Yeah. So let's continue our list of things that be war crimes. One of them is making improper use of a flag of truce. So you're not allowed to pretend to surrender or pretend to try to negotiate and then start shooting. That's a war crime, actually. You're not allowed to transfer parts of the population of the civilian population of a territory you occupy to other parts of your territory, which the Russians have done in Ukraine. They have been taking particularly

Ukrainian children and moving them to elsewhere in Russia, adopting them out to families. That is a war crime. Turkey's done it in Afrin. Turkey does a hell of a lot of this, right? They've done a lot of that in Afrin. Yes, as you said. And obviously the Israeli, well,

I mean, the Israeli military, we're actually gonna talk about their abduction and imprisonment of Palestinians because that also violates, that arguably violates this, but there's a separate segment of the Rome statues that violates. And then intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science, or charitable purposes.

I'm thinking about historical monuments, hospitals. Very easy to find examples of that in Gaza, right? Very. Again, the little bit of wiggle room here is like if they're being occupied as like an enemy HQ, which is basically what everyone claims when they bomb hospitals, right? The US has done this a lot too. Like we have, especially in Afghanistan, we hit a number of hospitals and it was always like, well, we thought there were some guys there. We weren't trying to, right? And Russia and Israel both have extensive histories doing this. During the Syrian civil war, Russian planes backing the Assad regime regularly targeted medical facilities in Aleppo at least 27 times from fall of 2015 to the winter of 2016. More recently, Russia has targeted hospitals in Kherson, per this Guardian article. Quote, since December 2022, the Russian army has been bombarding Kherson from dug-in positions

on the nearby left eastern flank of the Dnipro River. It has attacked civilian infrastructure, including schools, private residential houses, hospitals, and the railway station. And yeah, it's pretty hideous. Like, these are systematic attacks. 14 separate attacks over six months between December of 2022 and May of 2023, striking hospital facilities several times with the apparent purpose of degrading their capacity to continue to serve the civilian population. The targeting of hospitals has also been utterly endemic to Israeli activities in Gaza. In November of 2013, they killed at least 12 people in attacks on the Indonesian hospital

in Beit Lahia, Gaza. And basically every medical facility in Gaza has been targeted and more than 20 of the 35 hospitals in Gaza have at this point been taken out of service due to damage. The most famous of these was the Al-Shifa hospital, which held dozens of premature babies, 31 of whom had to be evacuated

after weeks of losing power to their incubators and being fed formula mixed with poisoned water. Eight infants died at least, I'm sure that number is higher, before evacuation. This is obvious war crime, right? Yeah, a friend, Tarek Loubani, who I've interviewed for the show before,

was working with the premature babies at that time. You can find interviews with him. It's just, it's like I would not recommend reading it unless you want to traumatize yourself. It's honestly one of the most horrible things i've ever had to be about yeah i i uh it's it's nightmarish stuff and i mean a lot of these are right uh the rome statues continues with committing outrages upon personal dignity in particular humiliating and degrading treatment and my god there's a lot of examples of that from Gaza. Committing rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, as defined in Article 7, Paragraph 2.

Enforced sterilization or any other form of sexual violence also constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions. Utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas, or military forces immune from military operations. So using civilians as shields, right? If you're hiding military forces among a civilian populace, you know, that is also a war crime. Intentionally directing attacks against buildings, material, medical units, you know, that's supposed to be illegal. Starvation, forced starvation of civilians is supposed to be illegal. And conscripting or enlisting children under the age of 15 years old into the national forces, which I've noticed, you know, when I would report on report on the ypg some of the people that i reported on that were like 17 and people like using child soldiers you can enlist in the british army at 16

that's not illegal yeah you 17 year olds have always been allowed to do war yeah i think they don't deploy them right do they not they not deploy you to a... Certainly not 16-year-olds, right? Yeah, but then the... And it's often women, actually. It's often the YPJ, right? Because they've come from abusive homes. And they also make an effort not to deploy them, from what I understand.

Yes, yes. But you are... Theoretically, you're allowed to deploy 16-year-olds, right? Yeah. So, at least as regards international law. So, and then, of course, we get to kind of some of the, some of our final war crimes, which, you know, I haven't gone over a comprehensive list, but

this gives you a good list of the things covered, you know, between the various different statutes and international agreements. Violation to life in person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture, committing outrageous upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating or degrading treatment, which is maybe the most common by numbers thing that I see happening in Gaza, right? Certainly not like the, you know, the killing is much more offensive, but like there's so many examples of like outrages upon personal dignity, you know, the taking of hostages, the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court. And then you get to paragraph two, there's a note like

after this, all of this stuff that like you're not supposed to do violence to life in person, committing outrages upon personal dignity, taking hostages, doing summary executions. And then there's a note that like, this does not apply, this applies only to armed conflicts and not situations of internal disturbances and tensions, such as riots, isolated and sporadic acts of violence or other acts of a similar nature, which is fun to me because it's like the international agreement's like, well, I mean, countries can do this to their own people if they want, right? Like, that's not a problem, you know?

Yeah, go ahead. Which I guess is probably, we're in a gray area with some of what Israel does to Palestinians here, because like, one of the things that has been happening for a long time, has continued to happen, is there are presently 9,500 at least Palestinians from the occupied West Bank in captivity. Prior to October 7th, there was just 5,200 people, so this escalated significantly after that. Most of these were people who had been arrested before for stuff literally like waving a flag or like posting on social media in sympathy with Gaza. 15 of these people have died since October 7th. A number of them have been tortured and beaten. This is the kind of thing that could be a war crime, except for,

again, you have that little note that like, this doesn't apply to internal disturbances. And the West Bank, you can say that that's an internal disturbance right which is you know bullshit yeah yeah i i don't love that that's the way that that works and yeah it's uh it's one of those things and another thing you know to be fair here one thing i should note because we're about to talk about the actual icc investigation that's going on. The taking of hostages is a war crime. So it's, there's been a lot of, a lot of talk about, because there's been disinformation about how many civilians did Hamas kill, right? Like how many, we had that bleak period of, we were arguing, looking at dead babies and arguing, were those babies beheaded or did their heads just come

off because they burnt? Like Hamas definitely committed war crimes. And we know that because they admitted to them because they, Hamas does not deny that they took hostages.as definitely committed war crimes, and we know that because they admitted to them. Because they, Hamas does not deny that they took hostages. That's a war crime, right? Again, should you be as offended by the taking of hostages as the killing of 35,000 people from the sky? Well, no, but I would also say that the taking of hostages is not like tear gassing a sniper. I think that that's bad. You shouldn't take civilian hostages.

That makes sense as a war crime to me now this kind of leads us to the crux of our discussion which is like should you actually care about what a war crime is and isn't right and i'm gonna argue yes even though as i we've made the case here it's not a perfect thing this is not a perfect whether or not something is a war crime does not make it a perfect measure of morality. I don't think a soldier tossing a tear gas grenade at a sniper because they don't want to get shot by a sniper is like a thing that is horrifying to me. And I do think that, for example, the use of shrapnel shells is horrifying to me.

I haven't seen what happens to people when they get gutted by shrapnel, I don't think those are good. And I know what I think is a worse thing to do. But even with that taken into account, I think that a lot of this does matter and that it is good that the ICC has recently announced a set of warrants, both against Benjamin Netanyahu and against three Hamas leaders, right? And I saw some people saying when this got announced that there were like these warrants against these Hamas leaders alongside Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yov Galant, like,

oh, they're both sides in it. No, Hamas took hostages. If the ICC is going after Israel for its clear and obvious war crimes, we know that Hamas took hostages. It's not wrong that the ICC would issue a warrant there. That's their job, right? And I think that that actually, it's kind of important to do that because if you don't, the Israelis are going to be like, well, they took hostages. That's definitely a war crime. The ICC is invalid because they're not prosecuting this.

Now, the reality is that not only is now Israel kind of gearing up to go to war with the International Criminal Court, but they have been doing that for years prior to October 7th, right? And in fact, a couple of years ago, I think in 2021, the ICC launched an investigation into Israeli actions in Gaza, right? This started when the former prosecutor of the ICC, Fatou Bensouda, made the call to like, yeah, start a formal investigation. And that culminated a couple of weeks ago in the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. And when that process started, there is evidence that the former head of the Mossad, the guy who was running the Mossad at the time, Yossi Cohen, made contact with an ICC prosecutor and basically threatened him.

And I'm actually, I'm going to read a quote from a Guardian article here. Cohen's personal involvement in the operation against the ICC took place when he was the director of the Mossad. His activities were authorized at a high level and justified on the basis the court posed a threat of prosecutions against military personnel, according to a senior Israeli official. Another Israeli source briefed on the operation against Bensouda said that the Mossad's objective was to compromise the prosecutor or enlist her as someone who could cooperate with Israel's demands. A third source familiar with the operation said Cohen was acting as Netanyahu's unofficial messenger. Cohen, who was one of Netanyahu's closest allies at the time and is emerging as a political force in his own right in Israel, personally led the Mossad's involvement in an almost decade-long campaign by the country to undermine the court. According to accounts

shared with ICC officials, he's alleged to have told her, you should help us and let us take care of you. You don't want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family, which is very much mob shit, right? Like, yeah, it couldn't be more mob shit. And it's like, I don't actually think that is a war crime. I don't even know because I guess they didn't even think anyone would do that, right? Like that you would just like, hey, you know, we could break your fucking legs. You know, Miss Prosecutor Lady, like we the Mossad. I don't even know that that,

because at least from my reading over of the Rome statutes, that's not listed. Maybe they should add that one in there. But yeah, this has been a brief overview of what be a war crime. I hope you find this helpful in your discussions of what be a war crime. But I do kind of want to end on the note, again, does any of this matter? What's going to, well, no. Do I think that like Benjamin Netanyahu is going to actually be taken to Den Haag and fucking chains? I mean, maybe someday, actually. I don't think that that's impossible. I don't think we should give up hope for that. And this is a necessary precursor to that. And I think it's good. I think the evidence that this is valuable. If you actually, if you want my best case for why this matters, If you want my best case for why this matters, Israel spent 10 years previous to the announcement of this warrant devoting Mossad resources to an underground campaign to sabotage and threaten the ICC.

That means they see this as a threat. They consider prosecutions like this to be dangerous to them. And that means you should at least passively support what the ICC is doing here, right? Netanyahu's regime considers this a threat to their operations, to what they're doing in Gaza. And I think that's enough of a reason to think that it's good. Yeah, yeah. If they think it's going to stop them murdering civilians, then yeah, it's good that we don't need to be around the bush too much. Like anyway. Yeah.

Yeah. It'd be nice to see someone who wasn't from Africa prosecuted at the Hague. They got those Serbians, right? They got a couple of Serbs. Yeah. Yeah. It's true.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's throw an Israeli or two in there. And yeah, some of those Hamas guys, I'm fine. Like, look,

something let's try to do something. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe, maybe let's make a statement or two in there. And yeah, some of those Hamas guys. I'm fine. Like, look, something. Let's try to do something. Yeah, yeah. Maybe let's make a statement that it's bad to murder and kidnap civilians. It's bad to, yeah. I don't know. I'm very critical of the idea that there ever was a rules-based international order, but I think we should try that sometime.

It'd be nice to have some rules. Yeah. Anyway, James, anything else to add before we cut out here? No, don't engage in war crimes. think we should try that sometime um it's pretty nice to have some rules yeah anyway james yeah anything else to add before we cut out here don't engage in war crimes don't commit a war crime yeah don't commit a war crime avoid that if you can don't engage in war if you don't have to it's really try to avoid war because one of the things come reading through this i just i think about all the things i've seen that i'm like well i could argue that that was a war crime. You know, um,

they happen a lot. It turns out, um, or at least edge cases are most of the things you see in war. Yes. Anyway, we're done. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts

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