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[Neonivek]

Japan would try its own war criminals

I honestly HATE this aspect of War.

Don't get me wrong on the surface it is fine (except well... being completely one sided) but a lot of the time these tend to be "You were our enemy and that is the greatest crime of all!" or they are being punished for tactics practiced widely by both sides.

This is ignoring, of course, how much the USA loathes defending its enemies in court even when absolutely required... The sheer number of times the US has butchered their own justice system because they dislike someone makes me sick. The American Justice system is supposed to stand for something...

[Max™]

[Slowpoke]Guys, I think Gary Johnson is in Aleppo.[/Slowpoke]

[Reelya]

Japan would try its own war criminals

I honestly HATE this aspect of War.

Don't get me wrong on the surface it is fine (except well... being completely one sided) but a lot of the time these tend to be "You were our enemy and that is the greatest crime of all!" or they are being punished for tactics practiced widely by both sides.

This is ignoring, of course, how much the USA loathes defending its enemies in court even when absolutely required... The sheer number of times the US has butchered their own justice system because they dislike someone makes me sick. The American Justice system is supposed to stand for something...

The big one cited is usually the wartime medical experiments. But the USA was doing a pile of medical experiments about the same time. And also, basically anyone doing sick medical experiments was actually taken to the USA to do work rather than get charged with warcrimes.

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

The syphilis experiments in Guatemala were United States-led human experiments conducted in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. It was done during the administration of American President Harry S. Truman and Guatemalan President Juan José Arévalo with the cooperation of some Guatemalan health ministries and officials. Doctors infected soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, without the informed consent of the subjects, and treated most subjects with antibiotics. This resulted in at least 83 deaths. In October 2010, the U.S. formally apologized to Guatemala for conducting these experiments.

The experiments were led by physician John Charles Cutler who also participated in the late stages of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

Evidence of this only came out by accident in 2005 when someone was researching  the related:

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

The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, also known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was an infamous clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service studying the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African-American men in Alabama under the guise of receiving free health care from the United States government.

This one was only ended after a whistle-blower went to the media in 1972.

But even after Tuskagee was leaked, they kept quite about the similar experiments in Guatemala for another 30+ years, until documentary evidence surfaced by chance (this stuff isn't in the official archives). Therefore how many more things did they do that we just don't have records for?

http://www.npr.org/2015/06/22/415194765/u-s-troops-tested-by-race-in-secret-world-war-ii-chemical-experiments

Edwards was one of 60,000 enlisted men enrolled in a once-secret government program — formally declassified in 1993 — to test mustard gas and other chemical agents on American troops. But there was a specific reason he was chosen: Edwards is African-American.
...
For the first time, NPR tracked down some of the men used in the race-based experiments. And it wasn't just African-Americans. Japanese-Americans were used as test subjects, serving as proxies for the enemy so scientists could explore how mustard gas and other chemicals might affect Japanese troops. Puerto Rican soldiers were also singled out.

So yeah, people can point to Japan's Unit 731 and similar as the big difference, but America seems to have been doing kinda similar stuff back then, and did y'all charge Unit 731 with war crimes? I wish you had.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

Instead of being tried for war crimes, the researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the U.S. in exchange for the data they gathered through human experimentation.

[smjjames]

That was back in the days when people thought there were somehow some sort of biological differences between the 'races'. Definetly doesn't excuse it, just saying that's what was going around in those days.

[Reelya]

That argument doesn't hold up, because then they would have believed that any results would only be valid for black people. But black people only make up a 14% of the population, so the results would have been useless. 6 out of 7 test subjects would have had to have been white for that to make sense.

[smjjames]

I can't explain it either other than pure racism.

Yes, my country did a lot of shitty stuff in the past, I'm not proud of it.....

Australia hasn't exactly had a clean record as far as racism goes either, just pre-empting pot calling the kettle black.

[Reelya]

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

There are some real eye-openers here. You're kinda lucky you never lost a war on home soil or these would surely be better known. The ones where they injected babies or orphans with terminal diseases are especially fun.

[Neonivek]

Hey all those Orphans are legally volunteers!

As In they were volunteered for it against their will!

[scriver]

Well if we want to get technical, the state was the legal guardians of all those children...

/literal devil's advocate

[Neonivek]

Well if we want to get technical, the state was the legal guardians of all those children...

/literal devil's advocate

That is exactly the justification they used.

I don't know exactly when they stopped doing that to Orphans... but it was standard policy for years... I only know they did it in the 1950s even when they knew it could cause the death of orphans (who were considered expendable)

[Shadowlord]

Many and sharp the num'rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heav'n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn, –
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!

[martinuzz]

In two different places in the US, police officers became the victims of an 'ambush'. In San Antonio, Texas, a police officer was sitting in his car, writing a speeding ticket for a motorcyclist he had just pulled over, when a car drove up next to him, stopped, and shot the officer, who died instantly. The motorcyclist has been apprehended for questioning, but the police says the appears to be no connection between the shooter and him.

A few hours later, in St.Louis, Missouri, a similar incident happened, when a car pulled over next to a patrol car and shot the police officer in the face. The officer is in hospital in critical condition.

The perpetrators of both incidents are still at large.

Police says the shootings show similarities to the shootings in Texas and Louisiana earlier this year.
So far, 57 police officers have been killed by gunfire in 2016, which is a rise of 68% compared to last year.

[SalmonGod]

I'm seeing reports that the situation at Standing Rock is especially barbaric tonight.  Supposedly, people have been sprayed with rubber bullets and water cannons in below freezing temperatures for hours.

[McTraveller]

I find this recent thread of conversation kind of odd; it's like people didn't already know the fact that war is bad. There is no "civilized" way to fight a war - war is just ugly, period.

[Sergarr]

I find this recent thread of conversation kind of odd; it's like people didn't already know the fact that war is bad. There is no "civilized" way to fight a war - war is just ugly, period.

Oh, so this must be why Vietnam, North Korea and Iraq are currently irradiated toxic depopulated wastelands, due to all the chemical and nuclear weapons that USA has used to quickly destroy their cities and military forces...

Wait, they didn't actually use them? Weeeeeird. I wonder why would that happen. Maybe it's because they're actually civilized, unlike, say, Assad, who gleefully gassed his own citizens?