Intercept - During the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, several Nazis, including top German generals Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel, claimed that they were not guilty of the tribunal’s charges because they had been acting at the directive of their superiors.
Ever since, this justification has been popularly known as the “Nuremberg Defense,” in which the accused states they were “only following orders.”
The Nuremberg judges rejected the Nuremberg Defense, and both Jodl and Keitel were hanged. The United Nations’ International Law Commission later codified the underlying principle from Nuremberg as, “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”
Many members of the Washington, D.C. elite are now stating that it in fact is a legitimate defense for American officials who violate international law to claim they were just following orders.
Specifically, they say, Gina Haspel, a top CIA officer whom President Trump has designated to be the agency’s next director, bears no responsibility for the torture she supervised during the George W. Bush administration.
Haspel oversaw a secret “black site” in Thailand, at which prisoners were waterboarded and subjected to other severe forms of abuse... John Kiriakou, a former CIA operative who helped capture many Al Qaeda prisoners, recently said that Haspel was known to some at the Agency as “Bloody Gina” and that “Gina and people like Gina did it, I think, because they enjoyed doing it. They tortured just for the sake of torture, not for the sake of gathering information.”
4 comments:
Asking questions are actually nice thing if you are not understanding something totally,
but this piece of writing provides fastidious understanding yet.
My goodness, now we have our very own Maria "The Beast" Mandel as head of the CIA. What a downward trajectory our nation has taken.
For reasons that are not well-understood, not too many women get a psychopath diagnosis. But Haspel sounds like she would qualify. Did she learn her trade from the Shin Bet ("Haspel" is an Ashkenazi family name)?
Indeed, which is why the court also created the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which starts out with the guideline that all military personnel are required to refuse to obey any order which is illegal, or would cause them to commit an illegal act. But apparently they don't teach that to American recruits.
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