Robert McNamara Quotes

If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.

War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, 'I was just following orders.'

I don't think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon.

I think the International Criminal Court could be a threat to American security interests, because the prosecutor of the court has enormous discretion in going after war crimes.

The idea of accountability in Vietnam, Nicaragua and now Iraq - the media never has that in its quiver. When you see time after time there is no possibility of Nuremberg [war crime trials], we're doomed to have it repeated.

It is important to recognize the differences between the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism. The treatment of those detained at Abu Ghraib is governed by the Geneva Conventions, which have been signed by both the U.S. and Iraq.

Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

Some international law specialists compare the invasion of Iraq to the 'crimes against the peace' for which Nazi leaders were indicted at Nuremberg.

I knew that the Hague Convention prohibited the use of poison in war. I didn't know the details of the terms of the Convention, but I did know of that prohibition.

In light of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, critics are arguing that abuses of Iraqi prisoners are being produced by a climate of disregard for the laws of war.

The concept of war crimes is an American invention.

We've committed many war crimes in Vietnam - but I'll tell you something interesting about that. We were committing war crimes in World War II, before the Nuremberg trials were held and the principle of war crimes was stated.

I look upon him as the greatest criminal known for having plunged the world into this ghastly war.

The laws of war do not apply only to the suspected criminals of vanquished nations. There is no moral or legal basis for immunizing victorious nations from scrutiny. The laws of war are not a one-way street.

Even Adolf Eichmann got a trial.

According to the laws of war, a warring party can just walk away from civilian harm that they have caused.

The good news from the U.S. military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders.

Many of the Nazis were convicted after the war, but they were not convicted for being 'unreasonable'. They were convicted for being gruesome murderers.

The way the Statute of Rome is written, responsibility for war crimes can be taken all the way up the chain of command. This is the sort of investigation that some people who live in Fairyland might like to undertake, but which bears no relationship at all to conditions in the real world.

A friend of ours said if the same laws were applied to U.S. Presidents as were applied to the Nazis after WWII, that every single one of them, every last rich white one of them, from Truman on would be hung to death and shot. And this current administration is no exception. They should be hung and tried and shot as war criminals.

George Bush is guilty of murder for the deaths of over 4000 young American soldiers who have died in the Iraqi war.

During the Nuremberg trials, Oswald Pohl, an SS Lieutenant General,...is shown here explaining how Farben operated such concentration camps as Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

There seems to be a strong possibility that international humanitarian law has been violated, in a manner that could amount to war crimes.

I do not feel guilty of any war crimes, I have only done my duty as an intelligence organ, and I refuse to serve as an ersatz for Himmler.

What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered, and conducted wars, war criminals? War criminals are not confined to the Axis Powers alone. Roosevelt and Churchill are no less war criminals than Hitler and Mussolini. England, America and Russia have all of them got their hands dyed more or less red - not merely Germany and Japan.