Time magazine, on April 8, summarizes several interviews conducted with the signers of an open letter from international law experts raising concerns about war crimes in the Iran conflict.
Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School who served in the U.S. State Department and the Department of Defense, reminds us that war crimes were codified by the Geneva Convention of 1949. A threat to destroy civilian infrastructure and to destroy “a whole civilization” clearly violates those rules, because it is not connected to any lawful military objective.
Asked about U.S. Secretary of War Hegseth’s mid-March summation to show “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” New York University Law School professor Ryan Goodman, who served as special counsel for the Defense Department, says: “There is actually a very clear provision of the laws of war that apply to the threat itself. … The provision states that it’s prohibited to threaten violence against the civilian population and to spread terror among the civilian population through that threat of violence, and this is exactly the scenario that that provision has in mind.”
Asked if, under international law, the U.S. is responsible for the actions of Israel if it had knowledge of an attack that was a war crime, Harold Koh, a Yale Law professor who served for nearly four years as the Legal Advisor of the Department of State, says that, “if they intentionally aid and abet those attacks through the sharing of intelligence, then they are co-conspirators in the war crime.” Maybe Peter Thiel and Alex Karp whose IA firm Palantir is enabling mass targetting, could reflect on that.
