Prosecuting For War Crimes: as Lincoln Said, The Battle of Today is not for Today Alone, but for A Vast Future – National Affairs

There are also those who will say that American courts will never call this country’s leaders, or their minions like John Yoo, to account. That almost surely is true now and will likely remain true for at least ten or twenty years, even though library stacks and internet servers already are fairly bulging with books, journal articles, internet essays, legal complaints, newspaper articles and other materials showing that horrendous crimes have been committed, and more evidence of and reasons for guilt are in process of being written down. (Our courts are unlikely to act because, unlike in Germany or Iraq, our courts will be branches of the same government which committed the horrible acts, and will include deeply conservative political and judicial supporters of the acts.) But, as we have already seen in the last few years, in Italy, Germany and France, there are courts, and there also are international tribunals, that will prosecute these people, either in person if they dare venture abroad so they can be caught there, or in absentia if necessary. Even trials and convictions in absentia of current leaders would send a powerful message to future ones. And who knows, perhaps someday in the distant future even American courts may be willing to punish the criminal miscreants, or to at least admit that serious crimes have been committed (just as American judges ultimately admitted defacto, decades later, the horribly miscreant nature of the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II).