Quotes about War Crime

Abraham Lincoln

Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? I think in such a case to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional, but withal, a great mercy.

Vallandigham was urging Union soldiers to refuse to fight and serve. Lincoln had to approve all the death sentences of deserters from the army and there were few duties that troubled him more … so much so that he even violated the 1st Amendment responsiblities he had sworn to uphold. Based in this precedent and others, President Woodrow Wilson jailed critics of the First World War including the labor leader Eugene Debs.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

Unless a nation's life faces peril, war is murder.

Noam Chomsky

The invasion of Iraq was simply a war crime. Straight-out war crime.

Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad

When the English King [Richard I] saw that Saladin delayed in carrying out the terms of the treaty ... they brought up the Moslem prisoners ... more than 3 thousand men in chains. They fell on them as one man and slaughtered them in cold blood with sword and lance.

The treaty was for the surrender of the city of Acre. King Richard led all the Christian Crusaders. He has always had a good reputation in the West, and most people—especially the English would be surprised to learn that in order to speed up compliance with a treaty he ordered this atrocity. Christian historians corroborate the slaughter.

Nayirah Al-Sabah

I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital. While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where ... babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.

She was testifying about the atrocities of the Iraqis in their invasion of Kuwait. However, this was completely fraudulent and deliberated orchestrated, the result of a huge campaign orchestrated by the Kuwait Embassy and Hill & Knowlton, America’s largest PR firm. She was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States. When she testified, she was only identified by her first name “Nayirah” with the explanation that if her last name were disclosed, her family in Kuwait would be the victims of Iraqi reprisals. She appeared all over America whipping up support for the First Iraq War. The image of the Kuwaiti babies being left to die on the hospital floor became the icon for support for the war. Ironically, there was more than ample justification for America’s role in the war without making up fictions like this. However this quotation to many is an example of the fraudulent schemes and lies that war advocates will resort to in order to manipulate public opinion.

Asma Jahangir

When the Bangladesh war happened, people in Pakistan who did not support it were called unpatriotic. My father was in the jail at that time, and a lot of those who knew my family used to call us children of a traitor.

Raphael Lemkin

Genocide

Charles Evans Hughes

War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals.

William Randolph Hearst

His military experiences have been confined to shooting a fleeing Spaniard in the back on the slopes of Kettle Hill in Cuba.... No other conspicuous American public man would behave with such squalid selfishness.

Theodore Roosevelt considered another run at the presidency in 1920:

George Wald

Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.

Carlos Saavedra Lamas

War of aggression, war which does not imply defense of one's country, is a collective crime.

T. E. Lawrence

We turned our Hotchkiss on the prisoners and made and end to them.

Lawrence of Arabia. In the Middle East, Lawrence led a small Arab army against the Turks and the Germans. In a battle near Tafas, the captured 250 Turkish and German soldiers as prisoners. They them shot them all in cold blood with their Hotchkiss machine gun. What makes this quotation so significant is that one of the great British heroes of WWI was actually guilty of War Crimes. An American journalist gave Lawrence and his exploits great publicity without mentioning the atrocities. The British chain of command also ignored the transgression of one of the most fundamental rules of war even though the clear evidence was in basic battle report files. However, the British never removed the report from the files or destroyed it. The Turks and the Germans while they respected the rules of war with the English, French, and most allies, treated the Arabs much more harshly and murdered Arab prisoners on many occasions. In part this atrocity at Tafas was an act of vengeance and retaliation. But Lawrence never even tried to explain it.

Joseph Joffre

Men who abandon their units, if there be any such, are to be hunted down and immediately shot.

Joseph R. Biden Jr.

I think that you are a war criminal, and I am going to do everything in my power to see that you will be tried as one.

William Hull

In a few days an officer came to our camp, under a flag of truce, and informed Hamilton, then a captain of artillery, but afterwards the aid of General Washington, that Captain Hale had been arrested within the British lines condemned as a spy, and executed that morning.