Is there an effort now to cry foul? That really there is not a problem, but it is men being picked on?

I am seeing a consistency in threads and am curious if the tide turned here.

Might as well, time to stir the pot.

Who would you start with? What would you charge them with? Who would bring the charges? Where would this war crimes court be held?

It seems to me that the only time a war criminal is ever prosecuted and punished is after his defeat in war and at the hand of his enemy.

If you are going to declare a fellow countrymen as a war criminal, you are going to have to apply any charges through due process. You would have to show evidence and produce witnesses that apply to law, not philosophy or world view.

and the same guys who authorized torture.

We have courts don't have trouble figure out whose jurisdiction crimes should be tried in.

If we started there, the shit would roll downhill as it is doing with the sex offenders and we might clear a lot of sociopaths out of Washington.

the charges?

Are you going to rely upon the U.S. Department of Justice? If so, what is the likelyhood that any administration's DOJ would pursue an investigation and bring charges? I mean, a hundred and fifty years later, no one has been prosecuted for the abduction, murder and enslavement of Africans. No one has been prosecuted for the genocide and theft perpetrated on Native Americans. Our complicity is inherent in our citizenship.

So rather than speak in the abstract, name one person.

didn't commit obvious war crimes?

I doubt that they will be prosecuted any time soon but to imply they didn't break any laws requires ignoring a lot of recent history.

The Geneva Convention is actually quite easy to read.

You should try it.

and name the charge. Also, charges of violations of the Geneva Conventions are brought by a protecting power that is not a party in the armed conflict. So you are going to have to go to the UN to bring specific charges against named persons in the U.S.

U.S. women need not petition the UN for remedy of sexual harassment committed in the U.S. by other U.S. citizens. Lamenting the current focus on women's struggle in this area, because war crimes, is not a way to bring justice for Iraqis. Our only recourse, as far as Iraq goes, is political. Dick Cheney will die a free man.

We can, in the mean time, change who runs our government. We can change America's motive.

a powerful tool that could serve other purposes.

Even if we couldn't try the Bushies, we could it impossible for them to have the public stature to commit such crimes again.

That the neocons had some influence in the Obama administration and Hillary's campaign was not a positive development, either politically or for the survival of the world.

But completely non democratic and antithetical to a nation of laws,

We are not a nation of laws if they don't apply to the most powerful as well as they do to pizza thieves and guys selling loose cigarettes.

The law against selling loose cigarettes cannot be applied to the guy who "failed to use the same level of creativity to prosecute Wall Street . . . that they have to hold some prisoners at Guantanamo Bay".

Failing to use creativity is not a crime. Failing to prosecute is not a crime. If you think they should be crimes, the remedy in a democracy is to petition to have it made a crime. But not to invent a crime and then decry that no one is being prosecuted under your invented crime. That is autocracy or anarchy, depending on how many people you think should be able to make their own laws -not democracy.

as is happening with sexual harassment.

Are you saying we shouldn't even be doing this with sexual harassment?

they are obviously defenseless against middle class people who barely have time to post crap to a discussion board.

Under the Geneva Conventions, each of the signatory nations has an obligation to prosecute its citizens who violate the laws of war. Further, the signatory nations are obliged to prosecute war criminals that are citizens of another country that are found within its borders. The fact that any given war crime occurred outside the US is irrelevant.

Assuming there are provable facts, there could always be a prosecution for a war crime violation. Of course, there will not be any such prosecutions. If nothing else, it would be political suicide.

Soldiers and junior officers can be prosecuted for war crimes by simply charging the parallel offense. (2LT William Calley.) There is simply no way that a senior officer, much less a member of the political leadership, would ever be charged with anything. (BG Karpinski.)

I thought for a while that Chaney or Rumsfeld would be arrested when in another country. At this point, I don't think it's going to happen.

who had long careers in the service.

It was very disturbing to me that junior enlisted people went to prison while politicians who ordered the torture policy, and a couple of other clear violations of the Geneva Convention were left untouched.

"I was only following orders" shouldn't be a get out of jail free card--it should be the beginning of prosecutions up the food chain.