Laws and regulations that make war criminality legal — as in the United States and Israel — assist in making the case against it

© 2025 Peter Free

 

01 December 2025

 

 

Background

 

YouTube's Valhalla VFT explained, in detail, how the American Empire finds its decisions to murder foreigners — in this instance, people in alleged narco-terrorist boats — straightforwardly legal:

 

 

Valhalla VFT, SECWAR Pete Hegseth is Officially a War CRIMINAL?!, YouTube (30 November 2025)

 

 

And so

 

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth — and by inference, the President — cannot be war criminals, as some on the political 'left' have claimed.

 

As an attorney, I do not dispute (green beret) Valhalla VFT's well-reasoned conclusion.

 

The United States is exquisitely skilled at always finding itself the right-doer. Even as it dismembers international law and morality at every turn.

 

 

The key legal point comes from a larger-than-American perspective

 

The United States cannot lawfully absolve itself of war-criminal-like behavior, simply by conveniently classifying its victims as enemy combatants and terrorists and then, allegedly lawfully, proceeding from there.

 

 

Consider, in illustration . . .

 

. . . Israel's genocide-serving definition of Palestinian enemy combatants and terrorists.

 

The Israeli definitions have proven broad enough — in Israeli minds and that murder-minded nation's purported law —  to encompass the entire Palestinian people living in Hamas-controlled Gaza and beyond.

 

According to Israelis, even  babies are terrorists and should be killed.

 

 

Similarly so, in the United States

 

No one perceptive can have missed the fact that the United States routinely — and often seemingly randomly — defines any group of people that opposes the American Imperial Will as terrorists and slaughter-deserving combatants. Thereby, justifying killing, imprisoning and — when in fashion — torturing them.

 

 

It has certainly not been an accident . . .

 

. . . that it is the internationally rogue United States that funds and militarily assists Israeli Zionism's genocide of Palestinians. And further, actively supports Israel in warring against Syria, Lebanon and Iran. And whomever else, Zionism wishes to sweep away.

 

Both nations are — in the eyes of most of the rest of planet — led by unalloyed war criminals.

 

 

Take Venezuela's alleged narco-terrorist boats

 

In American eyes, oil-rich Venezuela has suddenly and magically became a narco-terrorist nation. Despite the fact that Venezuela manufactures and distributes significantly fewer illegal drugs than other nations do.

 

This alleged drug-running is an imperially useful lie, when the American Empire actually wants to seize Venezuelan oil wealth. And thus, expand the United States' predatory grip in South America.

 

President Trump has even called for the closure of Venezuelan air space. Evidently, on the clearly ridiculous pretext that anything goes, when some small proportion of a nation's people are US-alleged narco-terrorists.

 

So somehow, drug-running Venezuelan boats have metaphorically taken to the skies. Even under circumstances where, according to Trump's own narrative, boats— not air travel — were the problem.

 

With such leaps of blatant irrationality, the US begins a war to change the leadership of a nation predominantly comprised of innocents.

 

This is a clear violation of sovereignty-protecting international law.

 

Ergo, 'war criminal' in character.

 

 

The moral? — War criminals are easily recognized

 

The fact that war criminals justify their actions — according to the intentionally twisted laws, terminologies and evidence of their own manufacture — strengthens the international legal case against them.

 

The world knows murderously violent parasites, when it sees them.

 

So yes, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump are not war criminals according to American law.

 

And neither, it seems, would be the equivalents of Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin. Had they been born into today's United States and its mire of Machiavellian justifications for the American Slaughter Lebensraum.

 

No one sane — and legally grounded — accepts mass murderers' self-spawned assessments of their own righteousness.

 

Valhalla VFT's case against Hegseth's alleged war criminality is intelligent, well-crafted and accurate.

 

And simultaneously, completely beside the core legal point about (significantly more accurate than American) international definitions of war criminality.