Category Archives: Op-Eds

Op-Eds

Trump Isn’t the First War Criminal President. He Should be the Last.

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Nuremberg Trials at courtroom 600, November 1945
Nuremberg Trials at courtroom 600, November 1945 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Only a couple of weeks ago, US president Donald Trump stated his desire to bring American troops home from Syria: “We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon …. Let the other people take care of it now.”

As if on cue: An alleged chemical attack in Douma, where the Assad regime’s forces are rooting out rebel resistance in their re-taking of the eastern Ghouta region.

Investigators from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical weapons are only now arriving to look into the claim, but Trump (as well as the UK’s Theresa May and France’s Emmanuel Macron) wasted no time proclaiming the allegations proven and Assad the culprit. On April 14, the three governments launched missile strikes on supposed Syrian chemical facilities.

The strikes were illegal under both US and international law. Congress hasn’t declared war on Syria. Congress hasn’t even passed an extra-constitutional “Authorization for the Use of Military Force” regarding Syria. Nor has the United Nations authorized military action versus Syria.

The strikes on Syria constitute war of aggression. The Syrian regime has never attacked, nor threatened to attack, any of the three countries which just attacked it, nor are its alleged domestic crimes, however horrible, the bailiwick of those three governments.

And as the Nuremberg Tribunal noted, “To initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Donald Trump, Theresa May, and Emmanuel Macron are war criminals.

They’re certainly not the first war criminals to hold positions of power in their countries. Every living former US president with the possible — possible — exception of Jimmy Carter has a lot to answer for, as do Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, et al.

Not the first by any means. But there’s no good reason why they shouldn’t be the last.

In the US, at least, Congress has the power of impeachment, and reason to use it. An increasingly imperial presidency has, since the end of World War Two, eaten away at its constitutionally vested war powers. Congress should finally re-assert its power in that sphere by removing an offending president. In fact, it should have done so long before Trump took office. He just happens to be the current perpetrator.

Beyond impeachment, it’s time to reconstitute something like the Nuremberg Tribunal and give it teeth. I personally oppose the death penalty, but if it is a deterrent to retail murder, presumably it would also deter mass murder in the form of wars of aggression.

These people won’t stop committing these crimes on their own. They must be stopped. And there’s no time like the present.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

The Senate vs. Facebook: Beware Untrustworthy Partners, Revisited

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“Congress must determine if and how we need to strengthen privacy standards to ensure transparency and understanding for the billions of consumers who utilize [technology] products,”  Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said at a US Senate hearing held to grill Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg on April 10.

“[I]f Facebook and other online companies will not or cannot fix the privacy invasions,” opined Bill Nelson (D-FL), “then we are going to have to — we, the Congress.”

Lindsey Graham (R-NC): “What do we tell our constituents, given what’s happened here, why we should let you self-regulate?”

Richard Blumenthal (D-CT): “I think legislation is necessary. The rules of the road have to be the result of congressional action.”

John Kennedy (R-LA): “I don’t want to vote to have to regulate Facebook, but by God I will.”

Back in early 2015, when then-president Barack Obama signed an executive order on cybersecurity “information sharing,” I pointed out in a column that the federal government is the last organization any sane human being would trust to secure the privacy of his or her data.

My opinion was swiftly and irrefutably vindicated: That same year produced revelations of government database breaches compromising the personal information of 22 million former government employees, 330,000 taxpayers, and 191 million voters.

So here we are, three years later, and the US Senate wants you to believe that it can, if it deems itself called upon to do so, excel the efforts of Mark Zuckerberg to safeguard the information you entrust to social media.

Cue laughter, followed by horror as the realization dawns that yes, the US Senate will undoubtedly soon deem itself called upon to do that.

It’s not that the rest of us need their help. We don’t, and even if we did they couldn’t help us.

It’s that we don’t understand the real problem, and they do.

The real problem is not with Facebook’s handling of your information.

The real problem is that politicians never have as much power as they want to have.

The solution to that problem is obvious: All they need to do is just award themselves a little bit more power. More power over Facebook. More power over the Internet.  More power over your information. More power over you.

You didn’t really believe this was about your information, your privacy, or your freedom, did you? Politics is always about who’s in charge, and politicians always sincerely believe that it should be them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Mueller is Desperate — But For What?

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On April 9, federal agents raided the office, home and hotel room of Michael Cohen, personal attorney to US president Donald Trump. Cohen has come under fire, with potential legal implications, for paying  $130k to silence adult film actress and alleged Trump paramour Stephanie Clifford, better known as “Stormy Daniels.”

That hush money seems to be the excuse for the raids, but as the Washington Post reports, they are “part of an investigation referred by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to federal prosecutors in New York …”

Poor  Mueller. After nearly a year as special counsel in the “Russiagate” probe, he has yet to accomplish either of his missions.

His putative job is to expose “Russian meddling” in the 2016 presidential election, especially with respect to possible collusion between the campaign of now-president Donald Trump and the regime of Vladimir Putin.

His real goal, of course, is to overturn that election by “getting” Trump on something — anything will do — that Congress can treat, and that the public will accept, as  impeachable/indictable.

So far Mueller’s secured indictments of a few Trump associates on charges having little or nothing to do with his overt mission, and of a few Russians for running an Internet “troll farm” that posted some cheesy social media ads. But he has yet to put real meat on his mandate and doesn’t seem to be getting much closer to Trump himself than when he started.

Now he’s hitching his wagon to Stormy Daniels’s star. Why? There are two plausible reasons.

One is that he hopes to get Trump on something other than “collusion with Russia.” Trump has publicly denied the affair with Daniels, and has also denied knowledge of Cohen’s payment to Daniels. If he’s lying, and if the payment violated any laws, proof of that might be enough to get impeachment proceedings rolling in Congress and move a grand jury to indict.

The other possibility is that Mueller is baiting Trump to fire him, something sure to be followed by  the usual suspects crying “obstruction!” and “constitutional crisis!” then demanding Trump’s head on a platter, and possibly getting it.

No one is likely to mistake me for a Trump supporter. I wouldn’t be at all sorry to see him go. But there are larger and more troubling implications here.

If attorney-client privilege can be so casually breached versus the president of the United States, just how secure do you think it will remain for the rest of us?

And if this president is successfully removed, will there ever again be a presidential election that isn’t immediately followed by an open-ended “find something, anything” probe like Mueller’s?

The decline and fall of the American empire seems to be speeding up.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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