The conviction of ex-Nazi Boere and Washington ’s war crimes

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The conviction of ex-Nazi Boere and Washington’s war crimes
26 March 2010

On March 23, a German court sentenced former Nazi death squad member
Heinrich Boere to life imprisonment for war crimes carried out more
than 65 years ago.

Boere, 88, was charged with the cold-blooded killing of three Dutch
civilians suspected of supporting resistance to Nazi occupation in
1944. The murders were carried out as part of a repressive campaign
waged by his unit, known as the “Germanic SS of the Netherlands.”

Boere had lived in Germany openly since escaping from the Netherlands
at the end of the war. A Dutch court tried him in absentia in 1949,
condemning him to death. While the sentence was later commuted to life
in prison, the German government refused to extradite him. In the
early 1980s, a German commission investigating Nazi war crimes dropped
his case, concluding that the killings were “acceptable acts of war,”
justifiable under international law as a response to violent acts of
resistance against the German occupiers.

This was the position held by Boere himself, who made no attempt to
deny the killings. He invoked the so-called Nuremberg defense: He was
following orders. In 2007, he told the German magazine Der Speigel:
“They told us they were partisans, terrorists. We thought we were
doing the right thing.”

Much of the press coverage of Boere’s prosecution and conviction has
stressed that this will be one of Germany’s last war crimes trials,
given that the surviving perpetrators of the atrocities of Hitler’s
Third Reich are rapidly dying off.

The New York Daily News editorialized on the subject: “There aren’t
many Nazi slugs left to feel such justice, but every last one must—and
soon.” The newspaper added that “culpability for monstrous crimes is
never erased. It is the job of those who believe in justice to make
evildoers pay.”

While Boere richly deserves his sentence, with neither the passage of
time nor his advanced age justifying clemency, one does not have to
reach back nearly seven decades to uncover such crimes, or focus
solely on octogenarians in meting out justice.

The same newspaper, last month, published an editorial entitled “One
for the good guys: Sharpshooting drones pick off Pakistan Taliban chief.”

Commenting on the January 14 remote-controlled assassination of
Hakimullah Mehsud, a leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, the editorial
stated that Mehsud was an “extra-appealing target because he claimed
responsibility for sending the suicide bomber who infiltrated a CIA
base in Afghanistan in December and killed five of the agency’s
officers and two civilian contractors.” It concluded by urging its
readers to “give a cheer to the skilled US forces who guide the drones
from thousands of miles away.”

During the Second World War, those who resisted Nazi occupation by
assassinating German officials and collaborators—in the Netherlands
and other countries—were known as partisans. Their exploits were
lionized in the media as well as in a host of films.

The German occupiers routinely described these same resistance
fighters as terrorists, thereby justifying their extra-judicial execution.

Washington has employed the same modus operandi in its wars and
occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Any Afghan or Iraqi who resists
the US occupation of their country is branded a “terrorist,” whose
killing is justified.

The same kind of crimes Heinrich Boere was convicted of carrying out
in the Netherlands 65 years ago are being committed by the US military
and the CIA on a daily basis. Heavily armed Special Forces units are
tasked with assassinating those suspected of involvement in the Afghan
resistance. They carried out the same murderous work in Iraq. In many
instances, the victims are unarmed men, women and children.

In one such operation on December 27, US Special Forces raided a house
in Kunar Province, dragged eight Afghan students, ages 11 through 17,
from their beds, handcuffed them and shot them through the head. A
farmer and a young peasant boy were also killed in the attack.
Military officials justified the killings on the suspicion that the
house was being used to manufacture roadside bombs.

In a similar raid last month in Ghazni province, a 61-year-old
shopkeeper, his wife and son were gunned down by US troops because the
family had provided shelter to Taliban fighters the night before.
Boere and his cohorts in the SS would have been very familiar with
such operations.

Then there are the drone missile attacks against suspected enemies of
the US occupation on the other side of the border in Pakistan.

“Since 2009, as many as 666 terrorism suspects, including at least 20
senior figures, have been killed by missiles fired from unmanned
aircraft flying over Pakistan,” the Washington Post reported March 21.
Here, the word “terrorism suspects” is used—in a fashion
indistinguishable from the Nazis—to describe fighters resisting the
foreign occupation of Afghanistan.

The Post report cites figures compiled by the New America Foundation,
a corporate-backed think tank, which concluded that 32 percent—one in
three—of those killed by the drone attacks have been unarmed civilian
men, women and children. Pakistani government officials have reported
that the overwhelming majority of those killed are civilians.

In handing down the sentence in Germany, the judge referred to
Heinrich Boere’s gunning down of suspected supporters of the Dutch
resistance to Nazi occupation as “practically incomparable
maliciousness and cowardice—beyond the decency of any soldier.”

What can one say of those who kill defenseless men, women and
children—and those suspected of resisting US occupation—by pushing a
button while sitting in front of a video screen 7,000 miles away? One
can only imagine what Adolf Hitler could have done with such technology.

The main theme of the article in the Washington Post is the role of
CIA Director Leon Panetta in directing these assassinations and mass
killings. It focuses on one particular drone attack that killed
Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud last August. CIA officers told Panetta
that Mehsud, whose movements were being tracked by a drone camera, was
not alone, but with his wife. He ordered them to “take the shot” that
killed them both.

What is described is a policy of cold-blooded murder in which
so-called “collateral damage”—the slaying of innocent civilians—is not
some accident, but a calculated, deliberate act.

In an earlier period, when the CIA gained its epithet “Murder Inc.,”
there was an effort made in Washington to keep such bloodthirsty acts
secret. Now, US officials—including Obama—openly boast of “taking out”
their enemies, provoking little or no controversy in the political
establishment and the media.

Such a debased political and moral atmosphere is an unmistakable
manifestation of a deep-going crisis of US imperialism, which
America’s ruling elite is attempting to resolve by means of war abroad
and a wholesale assault on the working class at home.

The reality is that Obama, Panetta and Gates, just like Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld & Co. before them, are guilty of war crimes. The individual
atrocities, assassinations, acts of torture and collective punishment
are the inevitable byproducts of waging wars of aggression, the
principal offense for which the surviving Nazi leaders were tried at
Nuremberg.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/pers-m26.shtml

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