Donald Trump has been saying something rather terrifying of late. Something the media needs to talk about more.
Start at the 1:35 mark
Go ahead, listen to it again. You did hear that right.
Donald Trump just said he would order the US Military to go after civilian non-combatants in retaliatory actions. He doubled down on this point at the latest debate.
What Donald Trump is advocating here is a direct violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention:
No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
Pillage is prohibited.
Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.
Similarly, Trump’s claim he would go beyond the use of waterboarding – itself a sticky issue within international laws on military conflicts – is itself a violation of the United Nations Convention against Torture and the Third Geneva Convention, both of which the US has signed and ratified.
While terrorists and soldiers of ISIS are exempted as illegal enemy combatants from the general provisions for treatment of POW’s due to their repeated violations of Article 4, Section A, Sub-Section 2 of the Third Geneva convention:
(2) Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:
(a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
(c) that of carrying arms openly;
(d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
They are still protected – hostis humanis generis though they may be – from outright torture.
If Donald Trump is elected, it will only be a matter of time before he is the man in the glass cage at Nuremburg…
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This post brought to you by Eric D. Mertz
