Creative Commons License

Federal immigration officers are seen near the scene where Renee Good was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis. Credit: AP Photo/John Locher

I was a freshman in college when the Vietnam War came home. In 1970 two dozen Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on a Kent State student protest, killing Allison Krause, 19, Jeffrey Miller, 20, Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, and William Schroeder, 19. Twelve other students were injured.

Just days later eight students at the University of New Mexico were bayoneted by National Guard. Two students at Jackson State University in Mississippi were shot to death by police. Richard Nixon called us bums, the Ohio governor likened protestors to “brown shirts” and “night riders.” A presidential commission, however, found the Kent State attack unjustified.

The murders sparked a shutdown at 450 colleges; 11 million students went on strike including the University of Connecticut in Hartford and Storrs. Shortly thereafter 100,000 gathered in Washington, D.C. to protest the killings and the widening war into Cambodia.

Which brings us to the present. Have you heard when the first U.S. war crimes tribunal is going to be convened?

The question is not facetious. We live in a country assaulted every day by mass deportations, serious injuries,  homicides. But are they really war crimes? Aren’t they just the acceptable consequences of law and order enforcement?

The 2020 police murder of George Floyd brought official terror into sharp relief for millions, exposing to white people the violence faced by Black and brown communities every day.

In the past few weeks U.S. armed forces quickly moved from destroying fishing boats to the kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro and his spouse. In Minneapolis, deliberate ICE brutality has led to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. There is no reason to believe this will stop.

“Might makes right” is the American operating principle across the globe, from Gaza to Venezuela to Minnesota. President Donald Trump has so far bombed seven countries. That’s 622 overseas drone and aircraft assaults since January 20, 2025.

If we ever believed the Geneva conventions, Nuremberg principles or domestic statutes against state violence were settled law, we know better now.

It was presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln who traveled to Hartford on March 5, 1860 to address chattel slavery, the primary national conflict of the day. He placed his remarks in a framework of justice and equity, arguing that our country could be united only when millions of enslaved Black people and white workers alike were liberated from their oppression.

As Lincoln told the City Hall crowd in a unique turn of phrase, “RIGHT makes MIGHT,” flipping the belligerent reflex on its head and  toward a moral center.

Trump should not be solely accountable for today’s official crimes. He is not the only culpable administration official or military officer. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth, ICE commander Gregory Bovino, border czar Tom Homan, Homeland Security’s Kristy Noem, and White House advisor Steven Miller should all be held personally accountable.

And then there are the dozen white-shoe law firms donating a billion dollars in legal services to Trump, and the corporations that have armed the U.S. military at a great profit.

Although the World Court has long been arrogantly dismissed by the United States, there are precedents for war crime investigations that focus on U.S. actions in foreign lands:

Jack Smith, the former UConn student who took place in the Winter Soldier Investigation, shown throwing his medal at the U.S. Capitol in 1971. Credit: Public Domain / Wikipedia
  • A Civil War military tribunal found Heinrich Wirz, who lived for a while in Hartford before joining the Confederacy, guilty of conspiracy and murder;
  • The Lodge Committee in 1902 exposed waterboarding torture of Filipinos by U.S. soldiers including some from Connecticut;
  • Bertrand Russell convened a “global civilian tribunal” in Europe in 1966-67 to expose Lyndon Johnson’s war in Indochina;
  • In 1971 at the Winter Soldier Investigation hearings in Detroit more than 125 Vietnam veterans gave first-hand testimony documenting U.S. atrocities –including civilian assassinations and chemical warfare– in that conflict. Jack Smith, a UConn student from New Haven and later a Marine in Vietnam, spoke of the crimes he and his fellow soldiers committed there;
  • Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) convened a similar public investigation in 1980 by active duty army personnel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Maybe someday we will read the whole story of the crimes of this administration. We should not have to wait until then. We should not expect the political opposition Democrats, news outlets or even the Supreme Court to rise to the occasion. We have to act now.

A tribunal sounds risky, and it’s true: such a strategy could be misused the same way Trump recklessly wields his seemingly unlimited power.

The statistics, though, call for more than our outrage. They call for justice. An estimated 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 retribution in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan over the last two decades. More than 432,000 victims were noncombatant civilians. The real number wounded or killed is far higher, as is the number who have died by the American destruction of economic and environmental infrastructures. This brings the death toll to more than 4 million souls.

War crime hearings are not a substitute for the grassroots organizing by millions who have continued to oppose U.S. wars of aggression since I was a student. Overwhelming nonviolent mobilizations like the 7 million at recent “No Kings” rallies should multiply and grow.

My children and grandchildren have heard that call and are picking up the banner.

Steve Thornton’s latest book is Radical Connecticut: People’s History in the Constitution State with Andy Piascik (Hard Ball Press).