|
Banned
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Seaver
I know I'm coming late to this conversation... but this is just flat out wrong. The laws pertaining to this make these terrorists (freedom fighters as you so describe them as) the same legal standing as the Werewolves in post-WW2 Germany.
Now holding them, feeding them, and "reasonable" treatment is a hell of a lot better IMO than simply shooting them as the US/French/Brit/Russians legally did postwar.
|
Perhaps I was not clear enough. My point is that, at Nuremberg, Justice Jackson believed that the core crime was waging aggressive war...or...war of aggression, and that other lawbreaking against humanity (such as secret prisions operated by covert agencies, abuse or torture of detainees, etc.) followed the initial, enabling act.
There is not much evidence to indicate that the "Werewolves" were signifigant beyond the Bush administration's effort to weave them into their post Iraq invasion propaganda........
Quote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/mid...st/3661134.stm
Thursday, 16 September, 2004, 09:21 GMT 10:21 UK
Iraq war illegal, says Annan
............When pressed on whether he viewed the invasion of Iraq as illegal, he said: "Yes, if you wish. I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter from our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal."
Mr Annan's comments provoked angry suggestions from a former Bush administration aide that they were timed to influence the US November election........
|
Quote:
http://web.archive.org/web/200310021...ves_2003.shtml
Historians: Germany's resistance unlike Iraq's
White House has drawn on comparison
By MAURA REYNOLDS
Los Angeles Times
Friday, August 29, 2003
Iraq
WASHINGTON - As violence continues in Iraq, Bush administration officials have increasingly compared the postwar situation there with that of Germany after World War II. In particular, they have likened the guerrilla-type attacks on U.S. forces to actions by the die-hard Nazis known as "werewolves."
"SS officers - called 'werewolves' - engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them, much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said in a speech Monday.
But historians and military analysts take issue with that comparison.
"The werewolves existed more in the idea or the fantasy stage than ever as a real phenomenon," said Lt. Col. Kevin Farrell, a historian at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
The werewolves were founded in September 1944 by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who saw them as a special force that would work behind U.S. lines to sabotage equipment and kill U.S. troops. About 5,000 SS officers were trained as werewolves.
But according to Perry Biddiscombe, a historian of postwar Germany who wrote a 1998 book on the werewolves, the force was designed only to assist the German army in winning the war. It was not created to be an underground movement after a German defeat.
As a result, Biddiscombe said, Rice is correct that the SS's werewolves did attack U.S. troops - but the only documented attacks took place before the Nazis capitulated on May 7, 1945.
"After the end of the war there's a lot more ambiguity," said Biddiscombe, who teaches European history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
One reason for that ambiguity is that a few days before the Nazi surrender, the SS officially disbanded the werewolves. But in the last month of the war, as Germany collapsed, Nazi radio propaganda called on German citizens to take up arms to resist the occupying forces. Members of the Hitler Youth vowed to join the werewolves in attacking Allied troops, and some individual Germans who resisted after the surrender adopted the term "werewolf'" to describe themselves. ..............
...... "There was a lot of talk before the end of the war, especially within the Army, about underground units, fanatical Nazis who would hold out and commit sabotage and snipe at U.S. soldiers. But when it actually came to the point, there was some resistance - but it was not werewolf resistance," Berghahn said.
The most notorious documented werewolf attack was the assassination of the mayor of the town of Aachen on March 25, 1945, before the end of the war. The perpetrators were tried by U.S. authorities for the crime, Biddiscombe said. .......
........ Tom Schlesinger, a retired Army major and professor at Plymouth State University who served in Army intelligence in occupied Germany, described the werewolves as "almost a deliberate urban myth."
"I was in Germany all through the surrender and, although at lower rank, had access to all classified intelligence distribution as part of the occupation security force," Schlesinger said. "The werewolf story turned out to be mostly a hoax, perhaps some wishful thinking of a few SS officers, though it caused us a few inconveniences due to the phony alerts."
It's possible, Biddiscombe said, that some isolated werewolf cells or officers may have continued to operate for a few months after the war. Guerrilla-style attacks did take place against U.S. soldiers - stringing wires across roads to decapitate soldiers or pouring sand in gas tanks were two examples - and there were several suspicious deaths of U.S.-appointed mayors. In some towns, leaflets and posters threatened Germans who cooperated with the U.S. occupiers. But none of that activity can be directly attributed to the werewolves, historians say.
"The Army put bars on jeeps to prevent decapitation by wires, but that was the only action taken by the Army," said Farrell of Fort Leavenworth. "There's very little evidence of the werewolves offering effective resistance." ...........
........For the first month or two after the Nazis' surrender, there were about the same number of sabotage and sniper attacks in Germany as have taken place in postwar Iraq. But in Germany, such attacks dropped off after June 1945, a month after the surrender, and for the rest of that year deaths of U.S. troops subsided to "tens."...........
|
|