The verdict is in: GUILTY.
On January 15, after a year-long trial, ten jurors found four major U.S. military contractors—Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed and General Atomics—guilty on charges of willfully participating in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
The prosecution of the “merchants of death” was coordinated by Brad Wolf, a former Pennsylvania-based prosecutor, and fellow peace activists Kathy Kelly and Nick Mottern.
Over the past year, the three assembled video testimony by military and academic experts and eyewitnesses who observed first hand how weapons produced by the four major military contractors were used to slaughter innocent civilians and destroy vital infrastructure and the environment across the Middle East and in the Russo-Ukraine War.
When Wolf, Kelly and Mottern tried to visit with corporate executives to get their perspective as to why they were producing weapons of death, the executives refused to meet with them and failed to respond to subpoenas and other requests by Tribunal staff for information.
The same was true of 150 members of Congress to whom Tribunal staff sent questionnaires by mail which went unanswered—unsurprisingly, in light of their close ties to the war industry and complicity in U.S. war crimes.
The senators and congresspeople included some of the most prominent politicians in control of military spending and policy: Senators Jack Reed (D-RI), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Susan Collins (R-ME), and House members Mike Rogers (R-AL), Mike Turner (R-OH) and Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), who spurned numerous direct outreach efforts after the original questionnaires were ignored.
“In America—At This Restaurant Only One Person Is Served”
In an introduction to the January 15 verdict announcement, Kathy Kelly spoke eloquently about the “troubling evidence amassed by the Tribunal” concerning “horrific crimes,” including “massive arms shipments to the Israeli government” as it embarked on a “vicious murder spree.”
Kelly reminded people that, after World War I, arms manufacturers were blamed for the industrialized slaughter that wiped out a generation of youth, resulting in a strong anti-war movement that fed in part off the revelations of the 1934 Nye Committee hearings on corporate war profiteering.[1]
Kelly went on to show a remarkable Russian cartoon from the 1950s entitled “In America—At This Restaurant Only One Person Is Served,” that juxtaposed the greed of the “merchants of death” with the starving of vital public services by the U.S. government.[2]
The American waiter in the cartoon serving a beefy steak to a war profiteer—who symbolically slashes American money with a knife—was Harry S. Truman, the president who dropped the atomic bomb and started the Cold War.
He was being assisted by a red-jacketed waiter who looked like Winston Churchill.
The men and women who oversaw health care, education, science and the arts were, meanwhile, left with empty plates.
In a World Run by Criminals
Nick Mottern followed Kelly by emphasizing that the “Global War on Terror” has provided a cover for U.S. corporations to gain control over economic resources around the world and for an orgy of war profiteering by modern-day “merchants of death” whose weapons had killed hundreds of thousands of people.
The underlying objective of the Citizens Tribunal, according to Mottern, was to a) try to stimulate war industry divestment campaigns in the U.S. and the world; b) raise awareness about corporate profiteering and its centrality to the U.S. warfare state; and c) help assist human rights lawyers and activists to carry out prosecution of these companies and politicians for war crimes building off the evidence accumulated by the Tribunal.
After Kelly and Mottern’s remarks, the ten jurors each spoke to affirm the reasons why they had voted guilty. They all said that the evidence was overwhelming in favor of conviction and that there was absolutely no way to spin it otherwise.
The first jurist to speak, Marjorie Cohn, professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, said that executives from the four named companies were liable for punishment under the Rome Statute.
She noted that, to assist the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Lockheed sold the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) F-16 and F-35 fighter jets and Hellfire missiles, Boeing sold it F-15 fighters, and General Atomics sold it MQ-9 Reaper drones that targeted Palestinian civilians.
Additionally, Boeing and Raytheon provided the IDF with bombs of excessive tonnage that were known to indiscriminately kill civilians and destroy civilian infrastructure.
The second jurist, Colonel Ann Wright, a former U.S. diplomat who resigned in opposition to the 2003 Iraq War, said that the weapons manufacturers had no actual argument for doing what they were doing except their desire to make more and more money.
The third speaker, Mazin Qumsiyeh, director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University in the Occupied West Bank, spoke among other things of the devastating environmental effects of the war on Gaza, which has left a residue of toxic poisons derived from U.S. weapons systems and massive greenhouse gas emissions.
The next jurist, Abdi Samatar, a Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, said he became an anti-war activist after experiencing the bombing of the village in Somalia where he grew up in the 1960s by an Ethiopian army supplied with U.S. weaponry. Because of his experience, he can empathize with the terror experienced by children growing up under the shadow of the U.S. and Israel’s wars.
Additional jurists included: Basir Bita, an Afghan peace activist who condemned the U.S. war in Afghanistan and the millions of lives it cost; Arwa Mokdad, a Yemeni-American graduate student who discussed how U.S. foreign policy in Yemen had amounted to the collective punishment of an entire population; and Dr. Ibrahim Salih, an Iraqi doctor who said that the world was run by criminals and that people of the Middle East were treated worse than vermin and animals in that they were being hunted down and killed by death machines from the sky.
Finally there were Dinorah La Luz Feliciano, a professor and legal scholar who discussed the horrifying consequences of the 126-year U.S. colonization of Puerto Rico; Matthew Hoh, an Afghan and Iraq War veteran and Green Party candidate from North Carolina who reiterated how damning and thorough the evidence compiled by the Tribunal was; and Rania Masri, a peace and environmental activist with a Ph.D. from North Carolina State University, who emphasized the pernicious marketing strategies of military contractors guilty of mass murder and their bribing elected officials and financing of think tanks that helped condition the public to support U.S. imperialism.
Principles of Nuremberg Trials
A final report issued by the Merchants of Death Tribunal underscored the key findings of the Citizens Tribunal and points advanced by the jurists who found the four companies guilty of involvement in war crimes.
The authors of the report—Wolf, Kelly and Mottern—emphasized how they were guided by the Nuremberg principles, which established the guilt of Nazi criminals for the outbreak of World War II. Corporations that abetted Nazi crimes, including Krupp, I.G. Farben and Flick, were put on trial at this time and held legally accountable for participating in war crimes—just as their modern-day U.S. counterparts should be today.[3]
The final report included a list of some of the key executives whom the authors believe should be prosecuted, including: Neal Blue, CEO of General Atomics from 1986 to the present; Gregory Hayes, Raytheon’s CEO from 2020 to 2024 and Raytheon’s current CEO, Christopher Calio; Boeing’s current CEO Robert “Kelly” Ortberg and his predecessor David Calhoun; and Lockheed Martin’s CEO James Taiclet and his predecessor Marillyn Hewson.
The report suggested that the above-identified CEOs could be prosecuted outside the U.S. under the well-established doctrine of universal jurisdiction.
A Human Rights Watch paper titled “The Pinochet Precedent—How Victims Can Pursue Human Rights Criminals Abroad” explained: “This…[is] the principle that every state has an interest in bringing to justice the perpetrators of particular crimes of international concern, no matter where the crime was committed, and regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators or their victims.”
Prosecutions could also be carried out under the Rome Statute, as Marjorie Cohn pointed out, as well as the Geneva and Hague Conventions, the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, and for violation of the U.S. Leahy Law that prohibits weapons sales to regimes that violate human rights.
Besides prosecutions, the Tribunal recommended that individual investors, college and university endowment fund managers, pension fund managers and other institutional investors rid their portfolios of stock of all firms making weapons and providing services enabling the use of weapons.
Prohibition of the trading of stock of any firm making weapons or providing services enabling the use of weapons, should be established, and members of the U.S. Congress prohibited from owning stock in such firms prior to the creation of a recommended stock trading prohibition.
The Tribunal further recommended establishment of a State Department agency for assessing damages for reparations payments to civilian populations impacted by criminal U.S. military operations, and the termination of all commercial U.S. weapons sales and military aid programs along with the dismantling of U.S. nuclear weapons systems and all U.S. overseas military bases.
- CovertAction Magazine’s previous reporting on the Merchants of Death Tribunal can be found here, here, and here.
- The 36-plus videos that were part of the Tribunal’s evidence can be found here
- A Tribunal study guide is available here
Headed by Senator Gerald Nye (R-ND), the hearings included testimony from leading war profiteers Irénée DuPont, president of the DuPont Corporation, and J.P. Morgan. ↑
The cartoon ran in a 1953 issue of Krokodil, a satirical magazine published in the Soviet Union. ↑
Mottern pointed out in a talk given at the beginning of the tribunal in November 2023 that, under U.S. pressure, the Nuremburg tribunal sadly dropped the most important charge accusing the corporate executives of planning and waging a war of aggression and, instead, prosecuted them for the lesser crime of slavery and theft of property from other countries. After the war, the U.S. was intent on reintegrating German industrial capacity into the global capitalist order and bolstering West Germany’s economy for purposes of the Cold War. By 1951, Alfred Krupp and other war industry executives were released from prison under orders of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, and in 1957 Krupp was featured on the cover of Time magazine, which published a flattering article celebrating his command over a $1 billion business empire. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
