Our only crime consisted of decreeing our own laws and applying them to all without exception. Our crime is having enacted an agrarian reform which effected the interests of the United Fruit Company. Our crime is wanting to have our own route to the Atlantic, our own electric power and our own docks and ports. Our crime is our patriotic wish to advance, to progress, to win economic independence to match our political independence. We are condemned because we have given our peasant population land and rights.

Torture is not tolerated by this country on the battlefield or off. Anyone who tortures or abuses a detainee tarnishes the service of every honorable student and soldier in this room today. The President has said this, and I will say it again: those who commit torture in the name of the United States government will be prosecuted. In any discussion of Guantanamo, detainees and military commissions, I think that one final fact helps put things in perspective — and that is the fact that members of al Qaeda are not merely common criminals. Some critics around the world have argued that they are “just” criminals, that their crimes somehow do not amount to war crimes. But here are the facts: al Qaeda seeks to employ weapons of mass slaughter as a means of achieving political goals against both the civilian and military capacity of the United States, Europe, and our allies throughout the world. Its members continue to fight our Armed Forces on battlefields around the world, and they will continue to do so until we stop them. Al Qaeda has committed acts on a scale that transcends mere crime, as recognized by NATO immediately after the attacks of September 11th. Their crimes are therefore nothing less than war crimes. Given the magnitude of the atrocities al Qaeda has committed, there can be no comparison between the crimes of its members and that of common civilian criminals.

I think most important is that we have words that attempt to give us moral cleansing, so that somehow we hold those responsible for crashing into the Twin Towers and killing over 2,000 Americans citizens in cold blood, which is an act of terrorism — people who have done that should be sought out and brought to justice; there’s no question of that — but when we do what we have done, illegal war, going into the Middle East, bombing at will, and then hundreds of thousands of people get caught, who are either maimed or over 100,000 have already been killed, who are innocent men, women and children, and we chalk that off to a thing called "collateral damage," as if somehow that murderous thing that we’re doing so cruelly and so inhumanely has no judgment before world opinion, that we are somehow righteous and above criticism and above the law. That is unacceptable. And that’s what I speak out against.

An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.

You know, the Nuremberg Tribunal called the war of aggression the supreme international crime, and it is. And George W. Bush has waged a war of aggression against Iraq. He’s killed more than 100,000 people. Are their lives worth nothing? Can we have a moment of silence in memory of all the people who have died in Iraq because of the criminal acts of George W. Bush in waging this war of aggression? Every moment of their lives is fraught with danger right now because of us. The world is the most dangerous place it’s ever been now because of what our country has done, and is doing, and we have to take it back. We can’t wait four more years. There can’t be any more Fallujahs. Fallujah is the 21st century equivalent of Guernica. We just went in and destroyed that city, drove the people out, killed them, thousands. We don’t know how many. They won’t even bother to count who’s been killed or how many, or estimate how many. They just keep killing. Almost every day we’re reading about another checkpoint where some family got wiped out because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do, according to the military there.

The human being should be the absolute priority. It seems it is more important to reach the planet Mars than prevent 13 million Africans dying of hunger. Why would I want to know if there is water on Mars if we are polluting the water here on Earth, or doing nothing to avoid it? Priorities need to be redefined, but there is no chance of this, if we don't confront the need to know what democracy is.

We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely — those against private citizens or those against itself?

The gravest crimes in the State’s lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax.

Or compare the degree of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults a policeman, with the attention that the State pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet, curiously, the State’s openly assigned priority to its own defense against the public strikes few people as inconsistent with its presumed raison d’etre.

War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals.

We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much-vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples? There are no limits to our greed, none to our cruelty. And as long as such crimes are committed by stealth and by individuals, they are less harmful and less portentous; but cruelties are practised in accordance with acts of senate and popular assembly, and the public is bidden to do that which is forbidden to the individual. Deeds that would be punished by loss of life when committed in secret, are praised by us because uniformed generals have carried them out. Man, naturally the gentlest class of being, is not ashamed to revel in the blood of others, to wage war, and to entrust the waging of war to his sons, when even dumb beasts and wild beasts keep the peace with one another. Against this overmastering and widespread madness philosophy has become a matter of greater effort, and has taken on strength in proportion to the strength which is gained by the opposition forces.

War is a crime against the poor civilians of Iran, Iraq, and the whole Middle East region, who pay for U.S. wars with the destruction of their lives, their health, their homes and their country’s environment. It’s a crime against the poor of the U.S. as well who pay with their tax dollars going to the Pentagon instead of to jobs, health care and a green new deal.

How do they allow themselves to commit so many crimes? Is this the same democracy that Bush, Blair, and Sharon want to bring the Iraqi people as a gift? Death to this democracy. Is this how you want to present this democracy to the world? Shame on this democracy. Are you humans? Animals? What are you?...Why do they commit so many crimes? Stop it. Enough with the treachery. Enough with the crimes. The Iraqi people must know that they will steadfast. Even if half of them will be killed, they will not give up

I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered, and conducted wars, war criminals? War criminals are not confined to the Axis Powers alone. Roosevelt and Churchill are no less war criminals than Hitler and Mussolini. Hitler was “Great Britain’s sin”. Hitler is only an answer to British imperialism, and this I say in spite of the fact that I hate Hitlerism and its anti-Semitism. England, America and Russia have all of them got their hands dyed more or less red — not merely Germany and Japan. The Japanese have only proved themselves to be apt pupils of the West. They have learnt at the feet of the West and beaten it at its own game.

War is the largest crime.