No one is above the Law
Or are they?
With the recent rightful conviction of Trump for being a scumbag, Democrats and liberals are celebrating that “no one is above the law.” This ignores that President Biden is currently in violation of at least six separate US laws (and multiple international laws) due to his arming of Israel and Ukraine. This article will briefly describe those laws and the provisions being broken.
When we look at these policies, it is necessary to understand that on April 5, 2024, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning the “use of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in Gaza.” They also called for an arms embargo on Israel. Although this declaration is not legally binding, it still indicates that human rights are being violated on a gross scale in Gaza.
The International Court of Justice also ruled on May 24, 2024 that:
The Court considers that, in conformity with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, Israel must immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
The United States withdrew from the court in 1986 after it ruled the US was in violation of international law in their covert war in Nicaragua. However, the ruling indicates a gross violation of human rights in Gaza in violation of international law.
Recently Human Rights Watch co-founder Aryeh Neier, a Holocaust survivor born in Germany, has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
What changed my mind was that over a period of time Israel has obstructed the delivery of humanitarian assistance to Gaza and those who have been most severely victimized are not the members of Hamas. Men with guns ordinarily find a way to get food and to get fed. But it is young children who are most severely damaged by malnutrition, and who will either starve to death or if they survive they will be diminished for the rest of their lives, diminished physically and psychologically by the severe malnutrition they are enduring as children.
And I thought that severe obstruction of the delivery of humanitarian assistance amounted to a genocide. - Aryeh Neier
The US state department has ignored these allegations. The rules-based international order that they so often refer to does not apply when those rules do not favor the US foreign policy which supports war crimes and genocide. As will be seen, if the US followed their own rules, they would have stopped sending weapons to both Israel and Ukraine due to gross violations of human rights by both countries. But the Biden regime does not follow the rules and continues to arm both countries.
The Conventional Arms Transfer Policy
According to National Security Memorandum 18, from the president on February 23, 2023, the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy supports the following object:
Prevent arms transfers that risk facilitating or otherwise contributing to violations of human rights or international humanitarian law
This echoes the goal of the original policy under Obama, which stated:
United States conventional arms transfer policy serves the following U.S. national security and foreign policy goals….
10.Ensuring that arms transfers do not contribute to human rights violations or violations of international humanitarian law.
This makes it absolutely clear that the US should not be transferring arms to Israel or Ukraine.
The Foreign Assistance Act
This Foreign Assistance Act was first passed in 1961. It was last amended and enacted on March 23, 2024, so this is not some anachronistic law from the sixties. It is the current law of the land in the United States.
This act includes SEC. 116. ø22 U.S.C. 2151n - HUMAN RIGHTS. This section includes the following statement (italics added):
No assistance may be provided under this part, and no support may be provided under title II of the Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development Act of 2018, to the government of any country which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges, causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction and clandestine detention of those persons, or other flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty, and the security of person, unless such assistance will directly benefit the needy people in such country.
Israel is clearly in violation of this. As reported by Al Jazeera in January, Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN Human Rights Office in Palestine, met with several Palestinians who “were detained by Israeli Security Forces in unknown locations for between 30 to 55 days.” As Al Jazeera reported:
“They described being beaten, humiliated, subjected to ill-treatment, and to what may amount to torture. They reported being blindfolded for long periods – some of them for several consecutive days,” Sunghay said in a statement. “One man said he had access to a shower only once during his 55 days in detention”.
In March 2024, The Guardian reported:
An internal UN report describes widespread abuse of Palestinian detainees in Israeli detention centres, including beatings, dog attacks, the prolonged use of stress positions and sexual assault.
These are all clear violations of human rights, putting US aid to Israel in violation of Section 116 of the Foreign Assistance Act. In January 2024, Senator Bernie Sanders, who has yet to withdraw his endorsement of Genocide Joe, attempted to invoke Section 502B(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act to force the Biden regime to be accountable for the actions of Israel. This attempt naturally failed.
The Arms Export Control Act
Public Law 90-629, enacted December 22, 2023. The Arms Export Control Act includes the following:
Decisions on issuing export licenses under this section shall take into account whether the export of an article would contribute to an arms race, aid in the development of weapons of mass destruction, support international terrorism, increase the possibility of outbreak or escalation of conflict, or prejudice the development of bilateral or multilateral arms control or nonproliferation agreements or other arrangements.
Israel most certainly supports international terrorism, as does the US. The recent decision by the US to allow US weapons to be used against Russian territory also indicates an opening for Ukraine to carry out further acts of international terrorism with full US support.
The US War Crimes Act
PUBLIC LAW 104-192. The US War Crimes Act was passed in 1996.
This is a short law, the bulk of it reads as follows:
(a) OFFENSE.—Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.
"(b) CIRCUMSTANCES.—The circumstances referred to in subsection (a) are that the person committing such breach or the victim of such breach is a member of the Armed Forces of the United States or a national of the United States (as defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act).
"(c) DEFINITIONS.—As used in this section, the term 'grave breach of the Geneva Conventions' means conduct defined as a grave breach in any of the international conventions relating to the laws of warfare signed at Geneva 12 August 1949 or any protocol to any such convention, to which the United States is a party."
As can be seen, this codifies the Geneva Convention as US national law and holds anyone in breach of it accountable by law.
The Leahy Law
According to the State Department:
The term “Leahy law” refers to two statutory provisions prohibiting the U.S. Government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights (GVHR). One statutory provision applies to the State Department and the other applies to the Department of Defense. The State Department Leahy law was made permanent under section 620M of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, 22 U.S.C. 2378d. The U.S. government considers torture, extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance, and rape under color of law as GVHRs when implementing the Leahy law.
At this point, it is clear the entire IDF is implicated in the commission of gross violations of human rights while they carry out a genocide. There are plenty of reports about Israeli use of torture camps.
November 8, 2023, from Amnesty International: Israel/OPT: Horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees amid spike in arbitrary arrests
March 13, 2024, from Al Jazeera: Not just the UNRWA report: Countless accounts of Israeli torture in Gaza
May 11, 2024, from CNN: Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center
The continued shipment of weapons to Israel is a clear violation of the Leahy Law.
The Genocide Convention Implementation Act
S 1851 - The Genocide Convention Implementation Act was passed in 1988. It defines genocide in the same manner as the Genocide Convention:
"§ 1091. Genocide
"(a) BASIC OFFENSE.—Whoever, whether in time of peace or in time of war, in a circumstance described in subsection (d) and with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such—
"(1) kills members of that group;
"(2) causes serious bodily injury to members of that group;
"(3) causes the permanent impairment of the mental faculties of members of the group through drugs, torture, or similar techniques;
"(4) subjects the group to conditions of life that are intended to cause the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part;
"(5) imposes measures intended to prevent births within the group; or
"(6) transfers by force children of the group to another group; or attempts to do so, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b).
As mentioned earlier, the ICJ has ruled that Israel must halt their military operations in Rafah. This indicates that Israel is in fact carrying out a genocide and halting military operations is the only way to prevent this. By arming Israel, the US is complicit in this genocide and is violating their own law.
The basic punishment for a violation of S 1851 is:
"(1) in the case of an offense under subsection (a)(1), a fine of not more than $1,000,000 and imprisonment for life; and
"(2) a fine of not more than $1,000,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both, in any other case.
This law is a little murkier than the others as it may only apply to offenses committed on US soil.
Bonus - The Refugee Act of 1980
As described by WOLA, Biden’s recent executive order breaks US law:
The Refugee Act of 1980 (enshrined as Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, INA) states that any non-citizen on U.S. soil has the right to request asylum if they fear for their life or freedom “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” They must receive due process for their asylum request regardless of how they arrived in the United States. This law placed the United States in compliance with the Refugee Convention of 1951, which emerged after World War II when nations pledged never to repeat that era’s tragic turnbacks of people fleeing extermination campaigns. The executive action shuts down this legal right, based not on fleeing migrants’ protection needs but on a daily number. Like the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, this is a rollback of a human right granted during a previous generation.
As can be seen, the Biden regime is in violation of numerous US laws. And no doubt many more international laws which I have no covered here. Trump and Biden both belong in prison, but are instead allow to run again for president. There is no democracy in the United States, only war criminals doing the bidding of the ruling class.
As we're seeing in real time, the problem is law itself. For the concept of law to have meaning, it has to be implemented as a boundary defining what is considered welcome or tolerated in a society and that which is actively excluded. More than defining boundaries, however, law is expected to be applied in a way that prioritizes the values foundational to society over the qualities of the individual or group being judged. It is this "purity" that gives it legitimacy. It is the source of the law's gravitas. Ideally those who wield it do so with their focus tightly bound to core principles, not politics, status, or power. More than ever before, we're seeing that legitimacy called into question. It is terrifying to watch the glee with which partisans loyal to the two major parties leverage the courts for their political whims.
Thank you for this clear explication of Biden's lawbreaking. Nearly every US president since the Geneva conventions has broken the law with the complete approval of the US power structure and, crucially, the media. We are living under a chronically criminal regime. It must be overthrown.