Abolish the War Crimes Act of 1996
In the 1990s, Captain Michael Cronin, a Navy pilot who had been captured and tortured in Vietnam, began to lobby for a bill that would hold his Vietnamese torturers accountable. The ‘War Crimes Act’ was passed and Cronin died in 2020 without his torturers facing justice. The bill, originally sold as a way to hold torturers of Americans accountable, did nothing to stop abuses of American prisoners, either by Communist or Islamist foes. Its criminalization of Geneva Conviction violations was never going to matter to our enemies, instead it became a weapon used by them, and their radical allies in the United States, against our troops. Republican House and Senate majorities allowed the ‘War Crimes Act’ to sail through even though it had been loaded with the biggest poison pill of all, applying its provisions to American soldiers, and President Bill Clinton, a former anti-war protester, gleefully signed it into law. The ‘War Crimes Act of 1996’ was the fever dream wishlist of every anti-Vi...