Trump's war crime campaign, explained by an expert
"People have long memories when it comes to atrocity crimes."
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During his dystopian primetime address to the nation on Wednesday, President Trump threatened that if Iran doesn’t make a deal, “we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously.”
“There's not a thing they could do about it,” he added.
Those comments prompted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to post the “back to the Stone Age” tweet you can see at the top of this post. And Trump went even further on Thursday, first in a Truth Social post bragging about blowing up a bridge (a strike that reportedly killed at least eight civilians) and then in another post threatening even worse crimes to come.
As former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane pointed out when Trump made a similar threat days earlier, attacking civilian infrastructure as part of a punishment campaign is a textbook war crime.
The uncomfortable truth is that Trump and his henchmen’s disdain for the rule of law extends to the laws of war. Trump has been talking about pillaging the natural resources of other countries for at least 20 years, and Hegseth rails against “stupid rules of engagement” at every opportunity.
Now, however, Trump and Hegseth are doing much worse than just talking about war crimes. Their strategy in Iran, to the extent there is one, seems to involve literally bombing the country into dust.
To get some expert perspective on war crimes and the to which extent the Trump regime is committing them, we connected with Finucane, who now works as a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group. He made a case that Trump’s illegal campaign against Iran flows from the raid in Venezuela in which the US military captured Nicolás Maduro.
“The Venezuela invasion was a patent violation of the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force, and the administration never even really put forward a justification under international law for it,” he said. “But I think one of the most substantial implications of it is that it emboldened President Trump to undertake other military adventures in contravention of both US and international law, mainly in Iran. But for the perceived tactical success of Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela, I don’t think the US would be at war with Iran.”
Finucane also detailed ways in which Trump and his henchmen might be engaged in war crimes in Iran.
“The ‘no quarter’ declaration from Secretary Hegseth was obvious, because the denial of quarter and the declaration of such is a war crime,” he said. “We’ve also seen threats from the president in recent days to attack power plants in Iran. Targeting civilian objects would be a war crime.”
A full transcript of the conversation between Finucane and Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. If you’d like to read it but aren’t already a paid subscriber, please sign up to support our work. Paid subscribers make this newsletter possible and help keep the vast majority of what we publish free for everyone.
Thor Benson
