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Comment by turar | Hacker News Reader

Well at least one US president actually did nuke civilians, on purpose, twice, instead of merely talking about it. Another fire bombed them. And that's even before Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, or drone assassinations where any civilian can just be labeled as non-civilian by the government without much proof or oversight.

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That was in the middle of something that was referred to (at that time already, by the participants themselves!) as "total war".

That doesn't change the fact that it was a crime, even at the time and considering the conditions.

By what legal standard was it a crime? Keep in mind, that it has to be a standard that was at force at the time of the attack; and that the nuclear bombings were not even the deadliest air raids during the war.

> Keep in mind, that it has to be a standard that was at force at the time of the attack

Does that mean that Nuremberg and Tokyo trials were just a farce?

"[Chief US prosecutor] Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg. I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas." - US Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone [0]

"No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." - US Constitution Article 1 Section 9 [1]

"No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed." - United Nations Universal Declaration of human rights. Article 11 [2]

[0] http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p167_webera.html

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section9

[2] http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

Is that a rhetorical question? Of course yes! More seriously, international tribunals always present a difficulty from the law standpoint. "Presidents" always arrange their country to not sign international treaties and dodge international penalties (e.g. Singapore has never signed treaties against torture). Of course Nuremberg and Tokyo trials could be viewed as a farce by exaggerating the doubts, but they're extremely widely legitimate. Legality without legitimacy also happens: The Hague tribunal is legal but its legitimacy is criticized because it only attacks African presidents. Being legal is the bonus that brings a mathematical proof to a decision, but being legitimate is even more important.

In a parallel fashion, WWII's Prisoners Of War (POWs) were renamed DEF by the US ("Disarmed Enemy Forces"), to dodge the Geneva convention about POWs, and some were badly treated (The Wikipedia page has a discussion on the numbers – see "Other Losses").

There is no such thing as black and white.

Yes. My point was that if atrocities against civilians in Hiroshima or Dresden were not crimes by gizmo686's logic above, then neither were Nazi atrocities, and Nuremberg and Tokyo trials were nothing but a fancy lynching.

That's ridiculous. The nazis eradicated a peaceful civilian population. The USA nuked cities where literally everyone was somehow engaged in a war against them, and who had started it in the first place.

I think you need to check your facts a bit - a lot of Japanese civilians were killed by these bombs

Not quite. If the Allies prosecuted German pilots and their commanders for, say, strategic bombing of London - including civilian targets - then yes, it would have been a sham. But they weren't, precisely because the Allies did it too. So the atrocities people were prosecuted for at Nuremberg was stuff like shooting surrendered prisoners, or deliberately executing civilians in controlled areas.

Yes. However, I was merely applying gizmo686's criterion of a crime, "it has to be a standard that was at force at the time of the attack", to Nazis in similar fashion as (s)he applied it to Allies.

And Nuremberg trials was famous for doing precisely what gizmo686 described -- charging defendants with "crimes" that were defined as crimes after the fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials#Criticism

The way they did it was by claiming that the crimes didn't stem from any written law, but rather from an unwritten universal (for Europe, at least) custom. This is not actually all that far fetched - the notion of "customs of war" long predated any formal conventions etc.

Their expository value was great, their legal value was specious.

Are you going to pretend that no civilians were killed during the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If you don't, you have your crime. Killing civilians was pretty damn widely agreed upon on that it's not acceptable. The US committed a war crime, and a crime against humanity. Accept it. It's not the first, and there are plenty others to follow.

How do we meaningfully say that something is internationally illegal? Or how do we say that a nation commits crimes? There is no international legislative body. The International Criminal Court isn't respected. When the ICC is disrespected, an international police force doesn't come to enforce the court's will. And by what basis is the ICC even the legitimate court of the international?

The notion that there are some "norms of civilized behavior" that go beyond states and their written laws is very old, dating back centuries and even millenia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_gentium

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostis_humani_generis

It works in the same manner as unwritten common law does - set by custom and precedent.

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