The following statement, by Republican Senator Richard H. Black of the Virginia Senate, came in response to a warning from Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) that U.S. support and collaboration with Saudi Arabia in the criminal war against Yemen was putting US military personnel at risk of prosecution for war crimes. Sen. Black was the former Chief of the Criminal Law Division in the Office of the Judge Advocate General at the Pentagon.        

“I agree with Rep. Lieu’s legal analysis.  However, I believe the more practical aspect of this is the legal exposure of our most senior officials, who directed our servicemen’s actions.  Under the precedent set by the American War Crimes Tribunal of Japanese General Yamashtia following WWII, the senior commander is criminally liable for generalized criminal misconduct by his subordinates.  This applies to conduct of which he knew or should have known.        

“America has widely flouted international norms of conduct in its wars of aggression against Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Yemen.  Some acts appear to constitute common law crimes — such as our refusal to accept the surrender of Col. Kaddafi when he offered to leave Libya.  The U.S., GB, and France reportedly conferred before deciding to ignore his offer to abdicate, and facilitated his murder instead.        

“By flouting settled norms of wartime conduct, the U.S. has severely undermined its moral authority and diminished its power across the globe. While I support a robust defense, we gain nothing by fighting wars to advance globalism particularly when such wars violate the Law of Land Warfare.”
 
President Donald Trump is increasingly indicating that he agrees. His appointment of General (ret.) Michael Flynn is one such indication — Gen. Flynn, as former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, famously warned Obama that his adventure in Syria, as also in Libya, was supporting the establishment of a “caliphate” of the most extreme, Saudi-funded Islamic terrorists. Gen. Flynn also ridiculed Obama’s massive drone assassination program, which so delights the killer president, as militarily worse than useless, as each kill “just made them a martyr, it just created a new reason to fight us even harder.” Like Trump, Gen. Flynn advocates working with Russia to defend the Syrian state and the world against the terrorists.        

Trump also met on Monday with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), with indications that she is being considered as U.S. Ambassador to the UN. Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq war, has been an outspoken critic of Obama’s perpetual warfare, and his failure to combat terrorism in favor of “regime change” against secular governments. Contrast that with Obama’s UN Ambassador Samantha Power, who has joined the braying dinosaurs by ranting at the UN today that she would “bring to justice” the Syrian commanders who have been leading the counter-terror operations in their country.        

The world is in a revolutionary transition. European leaders who followed Obama and the British dictates to sanction Russia and prepare for war are dropping like flies. The election of Francois Fillon, a pro-Russian candidate in the French Republican Party primary this week, follows the election of pro-Russian leaders in Bulgaria and Muldova last week. At the same time, the European banks, with Deutsche Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland in the lead, are hanging by a thread and could bring the entire western banking system down on any given day — unless the U.S. Congress comes to its senses and imposes Glass Steagall, now, without waiting for the new government in January.        

Even more crucial is the fight to restore creative thinking in the western nations, after decades of intellectual poison from the violence and perversion of Hollywood and the rock-drug-sex counter-culture. Three years ago on this date, on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Schiller Institute, founded by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, presented a memorial concert for JFK featuring the Mozart Requiem Mass in D Minor in the Washington area, followed on January 19 by a repeat performance at the Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston, the site of the Solemn Pontifical Requiem Mass in memory of JFK celebrated by Richard Cardinal Cushing 50 years earlier, where the same profound expression of classical beauty had been performed and watched on television around the world. It is precisely the identification of beauty with truth which has been lost in the West, and must be restored, to bring the world together for peace, through shared and cooperative development.

The Schiller Institute’s performance of Mozart’s Requiem in Vienna, Virginia on the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, November 22, 2013.