Tag: Iran
War Crimes in the News
DETROW: That’s what the press secretary says. The Pentagon has repeatedly said, the United States does not deliberately target civilians, and yet the president is talking about attacking a desalination plant. Would that be a war crime?
RONA: Absolutely, Scott, both under international law and U.S. law. We have a War Crimes Act that prohibits precisely this kind of thing. It would also be a violation of laws against terrorism. It’s prohibited to engage in attacks in armed conflict where the primary purpose is to spread terror among the civilian population. If you’re targeting a desalination plant, then that would be an act of terrorism.
DETROW: Help us understand a little bit more just ’cause I think you cannot overexplain this enough, right? Like, here’s an example. In the early days of the war, it seems like the United States accidentally bombed a girls school. What is the difference between something like that and deliberately attacking civilian infrastructure like a desalination plant?
RONA: So the difference is that even though one might have been mistaken and the other intentional, under U.S. law, both intentional and mistaken attacks that aren’t pursuant to due diligence can be war crimes.
When the Secret Police Go Out of Town for a Few Days
What the Peace Corps volunteer found rather comical was bearing witness to the element of farce that police states often engender, of how easily the arrogance of officialdom can tilt into stupidity. As in all Iranian towns and cities, a favorite guessing game of Sonqorians was speculating on the identity of the SAVAK agents in their midst, a parlor game Metrinko was increasingly brought into as he gained residents’ trust. In the late summer of 1971, such speculations were abruptly resolved when the regime announced that travel to the city of Shiraz was temporarily off-limits to all private Iranian citizens, a security precaution for the upcoming international gala being held in nearby Persepolis. Except that soon after that announcement, many of those Sonqorians suspected of being secret police climbed aboard buses and left town, bound for Shiraz. “So that proved to everyone they were SAVAK.” Metrinko laughed. “They were all going down to stand guard over the shah’s party.”
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
Scott Anderson