US role at Nuremberg
The bloodlust and lawlessness of the present-day political establishment is placed in sharp relief by comparing its campaign of political assassination in Iraq with the attitude of the US to the treatment of fascist mass murderers captured at the end of World War II.
Less than sixty years ago, Washington opposed the summary execution of the leaders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan—who had committed crimes on a far more massive scale than any carried out by the regime of Saddam Hussein—and insisted they be placed on public trial and accorded all of the legal privileges of due process. The vast contrast between then and now underscores the break with any conception of democratic principles that has occurred within the American ruling elite.
The surviving Nazi leaders were responsible for the deaths, by genocide and war, of tens of millions, yet American officials were scrupulous in demanding that they be captured alive and placed on trial, as they eventually were, at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in 1945-46. Considerable pains were taken to ensure that the defendants not take their own lives. The US was insistent that the defendants be provided with counsel and access to evidence and that they be accorded the right to cross-examine witnesses.
Dennis Hutchinson of the University of Chicago in a November 18, 2001 Chicago Tribune article cited the comments of Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, chosen to represent the US in any post-war proceeding, explaining the options he presented to President Harry Truman: “We could execute or otherwise punish them [the Nazi officials] without a hearing. But undiscriminating executions or punishments without definite findings of guilt, fairly arrived at, would ... not set easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride.” Jackson insisted that the only appropriate “course is to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused after a hearing as dispassionate as the times and horrors we deal with will permit, and upon a record that will leave our reasons and motives clear.”
Jackson feared that summary executions would erode the moral high ground that the victorious powers enjoyed, according to Hutchinson, and that it was necessary as well to document the precise nature of the Nazi crimes for posterity. Jackson commented: “Unless we write the record of this movement with clarity and precision, we cannot blame the future if in days of peace it finds incredible accusatory generalities uttered during the war. We must establish incredible events by credible evidence.”
In a comment directly relevant to the current international situation, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, Jackson noted that the Allied triumph by itself did not provide the victors with the legal sanction to punish German officials, nor did Allied claims and proclamations. The guilt of the Nazi leaders had to be proven in a court of law.
Jackson declared, “The president of the United States has no power to convict anyone. He can only accuse. He cannot arrest in most cases without judicial authority. Therefore, the accusation made carries no weight in an American trial whatsoever. These declarations are an accusation and not a conviction. That requires a judicial finding. Now we could not be parties to setting up a formal judicial body to ratify a political decision to convict. Then judges will have to inquire into the evidence and give an independent decision.”
In his opening statement to the Nuremberg tribunal, Jackson said, “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 law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.”
