Writing in his personal capacity, State Department lawyer
Brian Finucane has
this excellent piece on
Just Security about the duty to punish aspect of the doctrine of command responsibility. He concludes:
Discussions of accountability for atrocity crimes, both domestically and abroad, should be informed by the United States’ own long-standing views that a commander’s failure to punish war crimes by his subordinates may itself amount to a war crime.
So what, then, do we make of the current requests for presidential pardons reported
here?
A pardon for Bales would, hopefully, be even too much for the president. It's just too dark to contemplate a world where that happens.
ReplyDelete