U.S. in violaton of Geneva convention?

Tue Dec 16 15:57:37 PST 2003

At 03:18 PM 12/16/2003, Jim Dixon wrote:
>You should try to remember how the US Civil War ended.  The armed forces
>of the South surrendered.  Lee handed his sword to Grant.  I believe that
>Grant returned it - and allowed each Southern soldier to keep a rifle and
>a mule.  Lee and the other leaders of the South lived out their lives in
>peace.  There were of course acts of terror on both sides, but on the
>whole the combatants behaved decently. There was considerable mutual
>respect, because both sides recognized that the other had behaved
>honourably.  The same cannot be said of Saddam Hussain.

I have no idea what led to believe this.  The North behaved so dishonorably
during the war that it essentially rewrote the book on the rules of war for
the rest of the world.  Most academic historians, without legal training,
have played down the war crimes issue, as if it has no bearing on those who
win a war. It does.

In the early seventeenth century, Hugo Grotius, a Dutch lawyer, came forth
with The Law of War and Peace, which was translated into English in 1646.
It immediately became the bible of the law of nations and found its way
into the courts, libraries, and governments of Europe. Grotius soon became
"the father of modern international law." Grotius held that states, like
people, are bound by a code of law, with duties and prohibitions that are
universal, reasonable, and unchangeable. One nation, for example, may not
attack another. After reviewing the practices of ancient nations,
philosophers and legists, Grotius concluded that "authorities generally
as-sign to wars three justifiable causes: defence, recovery of property,
and punishment."

Grotius noted that the German barbarians of the north had a strong code and
"were the most just: they refrained from war unless attacked." The Ro-man
lawyer Cicero would have been the father of ancient international law. In
his De Republica (30.23) he set forth the principle that "wars undertaken
without reason are unjust wars. Except for the purpose of avenging or
re-pulsing an enemy, no just war can be waged."

By the nineteenth century, the concept of a just war became a part of the
law of nations even though it had been an unwritten rule of society since
the Middle Ages. Many of the tax rebellions in Europe, Spain, and England
were resisting revenue demands of unjust wars, wars that were not for the
defense of the realms. That same principle became part of the U.S.
Constitution, which restricted tax expenditures for "the common Defense."

At West Point cadets were taught the principles of Grotius and
international law under General Order no. 12, by none other than Lincoln's
top commander, General Henry Halleck, who wrote the book. No general
dur-ing the Civil War can claim ignorance of the laws of wars, especially
the laws against the plunder and devastation of private property. Here is
an ex-cerpt from General Order no. 12, written by Halleck on the wanton
plun-der of private property: "The inevitable consequences . . . are
universal pil-lage and a total relaxation of discipline; the loss of
private property, and the violation of individual rights . . . and the
ordinary peaceful and non-combatants are converted into bitter and
implacable enemies. The system is, therefore, regarded as both impolitic
and unjust, and is coming into gen-eral disuse among the most civilized
nations."

But Halleck's book and teachings weren't the only condemnation of plunder
of civilian property. On 24 April 1863, under Lincoln's signature, the army
promulgated to its officers General Order no. 100, which came to be known
as the Lieber Code and eventually received acclaim throughout the military
in the Western world. Halleck was a close friend of its author, Professor
Francis Lieber of Columbia University. A month after this order was given
to the officers in the Union army, Professor Lieber wrote to the top
commander, General Halleck

"I know by letters . . . that the wanton destruction of property by our men
is alarming. It does incalculable injury. It demoralizes our troops, it
annihilates wealth irrevocably and makes a return to a state of peace and
peaceful minds more and more difficult. Your order [to the offi-cers] . . .
with reference to the Code, and pointing out the disastrous consequences of
reckless devastation, in a manner that it might not furnish our reckless
enemy with new arguments for his savagery."

Halleck remained general in chief until Lincoln fired him in 1864 and
appointed Grant as top commander. 1t was under Grant that the Lieber Code,
now in the hands of all leading officers, was disregarded, and pillage and
plunder became the general order of the final year of the war. Sherman and
Sheridan could not possibly have undertaken their devastation of the South
if they had followed this new military code on the laws of war. They also
turned away from their education at West Point and the laws of war they had
learned there under Halleck.

Years after the war Sherman wrote a letter to a friend in which he
acknowledged that he knew better that at West Point he had been taught that
the pillage he brought to the South was a crime, punishable by death: "1
know that in the beginning 1, too, had the old West Point notion that
pil-lage was a capital crime, and punished it by shooting."

American generals were frilly aware that Napoleon was punished and banished
from Europe for engaging in aggressive wars over a twenty year period. The
law of warfare was being enforced for the first tune against a loser. But
winners need not worry, then or now, as war crimes, by and large, are only
committed by defeated leaders. In the Civil War, Lincoln and his generals
were immune from the laws of war because they won.

Unfortunately, during the nineteenth century, Americans seemed to believe
that they had a divine right to aggression. It was the destiny of the
American people and government to rule over North America--all of it. And
this was God's plan. This made the war against Mexico justified, even
though in General Grant's memoirs he condemned the war as one of
ag-gression, and so did Lincoln as a congressman at the time. This may
explain why so much has been written about who fired the first shot of the
Civil War, as if that justifies the total war that engulfed America, even
though that Fourth of July display of cannon at Fort Sumter didn't hurt
any-one. It was not Pearl Harbor.

The laws of war not only focused on the aggressor defender issue, they also
set forth rules about how armies and especially its leaders and gen-erals
had to conduct themselves. Historians with a strongly Northern Lincoln
idolizing viewpoint do not realize the criminal element in the way the war
was conducted criminal by the laws of nations. The end clearly justified
the means. Consider this observation by a prominent historian, Stephen
Oates, who describes Lincoln's method of warfare in glowing terms:
"Lincoln's armies were mopping up the Confederacy in all direc-tions,
waging scorched earth warfare against the Rebel economy and civil-ian
morale with ruthless efficiency .... Lincoln fully endorsed Sheridan's
burning of the Shenandoah Valley, Sherman's brutal March to the Sea through
Georgia, and the Carolina's Brigadier General James H. Wilson's destructive
raid across Alabama. Such warfare earned Lincoln and his gen-erals undying
hatred in Dixie, but it brought victory."

>The people of the South did not walk in terror of Robert E Lee and
>Jefferson Davis. The people of the North were not murdered, raped, and
>tortured by Grant and Lincoln.

In addition to abandoning the Constitution, the Lincoln administration
established another ominous precedent by deciding to abandon international
law and the accepted moral code of civilized societies and wage war on
civilians. General Sherman announced that to secessionists all of them,
women and children included--death is mercy.

Lincoln and his generals violated the laws of nations, and Northern
historians seem unaware of that. Another famous historian from Princeton,
James M. McPherson, goes even further than Oates. He doesn't hesitate to
call Lincoln's war strategy brilliant, even using the term "genius," and
Sherman, with Lincoln's adoration, is a great noble general for his
devastation of civilian property in his march to the sea. When a Southerner
called Sherman a barbarian for what he was doing, Sherman replied that a
commander "may take your house, your fields, your everything, and turn you
out helpless to starve. It may be wrong, but that don't alter the case."

His acknowledgment that "it may be wrong" may have come from his education
at West Point, and contrary to the famous general's excuse, it does alter
the case it makes Sherman a war criminal. Writing to General Halleck in
September 1864, amid his infamous destruction of civilian property and
life, Sherman again excused himself: "If people [civilians] raise a howl
against my barbarity and cruelty I will answer them that war is war." This
is the same general who later, in the Indian wars, used the same philosophy
when he said, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," which he meant
literally. Incidentally, l am not the only historian to see the commission
of war crimes by Sherman and his confederates in arms. Otto Cisenschirnl,
writing in the January 1964 issue of Civil War Times, less than twenty
years after the Nuremberg war crimes trials, asserted that Sherman should
have been hanged as a war criminal.'

While the generals were quite pleased with themselves over their barbarism
and war crimes, the soldiers who had to carry out these orders were not so
pleased with the work. Robert Shaw, a student at Harvard who had risen
through the ranks to be promoted to colonel in early 1863, was commanded by
a superior officer to burn the city of Darien, Georgia. He wrote to his
wife that "for myself, I have gone through the war so far without dishonor,
and I do not like to degenerate into a plunderer and robber, and the same
applies to every officer in my regiment."  (This is the same Shaw portrayed
in the movie Glory.)

Too bad the top gun, General Sherman, didn't feel that way. Sherman lived,
but Shaw, this remarkable officer, was killed in action on Morris Is-land,
South Carolina, a month after writing the above letter.

Lincoln's policy of crushing dissenters with overwhelming military might
was continued after the war with the federal government's eradication of
the Plains Indians by many of the same generals who had guided the North's
war effort (particularly Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan). The stated purpose
of this campaign against the Plains Indians was to make way for the
government subsidized transcontinental railroads. The quest for empire had
become the primary goal of government in America.

steve