Edward Peck says it best:

In 1985, when I was the Deputy Director of the Reagan White House Task Force on Terrorism, [my working group was asked] to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used throughout the government. We produced about six, and each and every case, they were rejected, because careful reading would indicate that our own country had been involved in some of those activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_terrorism

Similar:

If we applied the laws we used to prosecute the Nazis at Nuremberg, every single post WWII US President/government would be considered to have committed war crimes.

I find it interesting that the Nuremberg Trials are continually held up, often by people who ought to know better, as a shining example of "International Law" and not a fairly straightforward example of the victors of a war taking the opportunity to polish off a few key enemies they missed. Which is a time-honored and not especially surprising practice, but hardly laudable, particularly when it involved some ex post facto invention of capital offenses.

Had it occurred in the context of anything but World War II, and was it aimed at anyone other than the Nazis, I think the consensus on it would be much more... nuanced. But because there is a very significant interest (across the US, Germany, Russia, Japan, etc.) in maintaining the Nazis as a singular sort of villain, so abjectly evil as to defy all comparison past or present, special rules apply.

(Plus, I suppose, there's some grading-on-a-curve that happens when the inevitable comparison is made between the Allied handling of the postwar environment and that of the Soviets; the Nuremberg Trials may have had certain jurisprudential imperfections, one could easily argue, but at least they didn't require heavy equipment just to dig the mass graves. Though that seems like damning with faint praise.)

If anything, the Nuremburg trials were overly light.

Both the USA and Germany had the death penalty at the end of WW2.

If you actually applied the law as you would in peacetime (as is reasonable because the gas chambers had no military necessity in the way a PoW camp would) then anyone involved in the process, including bringing supplies to the camp, would have been guilty until proven innocent. Evidence of participation is evidence of guilt, and by civilian standards of the time 90% of Germans in uniform and probably 20% of civilians should have been hung.

The Nuremburg trials were like Rwanda's Peace and Reconciliation process. Something that was knowingly far from completist, but just enough to stop the bloodshed and retribution.

> but at least they didn't require heavy equipment just to dig the mass graves

If you support the right of the state to kill (in War, etc) then what's the problem? Pretty much every Nazi was a criminal and had committed and supported war crimes. Pretty much everyone else was a collaborator.

(fwiw, that's the risk of going to war as a democracy. When you have choice, you have culpability.)

Certainly, there's a number of issues with the Nuremberg Trials. They certainly were guided by many motives, not all of which were pure.

But my point is this: the same allies that came up with these reasons for prosecution, created such offenses, have been (not the only) ones to then go on and breach them, steadily, ever since.

i.e. my intent is not necessarily to hold up Nuremberg as a victory for humanity (though certainly _some_ of the things that came about from it are good), but to also implicate many of the allies and governments to follow as very much "do as I say, not as I do".

Wow, I never knew that! That is a gem of a piece of history.

Because the laws of war is different when you have civilians as your main targets?

Here is my standard reference about the subject. Note that it is critical of the US -- and that ROE is still followed quite closely. Compare that to [terrorists and non democracies].

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n04/michael-byers/the-laws-of-war-u...

(Are you really surprised by the content of this answer..?)

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Edit: My answer to throwaway98237's deleted follow up comment:

>> a small band of tribes from Afghanistan

>> Also, the "laws of war" have evolved over time.

You went from: Setting an equal sign between terrorists and real armies (which use legal weapons psychological warfare against enemy soldiers, not against civilians).

To: Excusing terrorists because (a) some of them also do guerrilla warfare and (b) because the laws of war were a bit different 50+ years ago?

That is just not coherent.

Bye.

I deleted my comment because I didn't see a reply from you and wasn't certain my comment was correctly speaking to your points because I just don't get your comment. Since I wasn't certain my response was speaking to the points, I removed it so as not to muddy the conversation.

Don't appreciate your aggressive tone.

Like this, then:

You started by arguing that following the laws of war is terrorism. That subject of law have been really discussed, there are lots of academic papers. I'd be happy to see references?

And your follow up was just not possible to parse. Please read Byer's article, it taught me a lot on the subject.