According to a report in the New York Times (2/11/09), NBC is launching a new series to track down and expose war criminals. The network's plan has attracted some criticism from U.S. officials and human rights experts, who are concerned that the network's journalists might be publicizing false accusations against the suspects they're "confronting" on the air. (The show sounds eerily similar to the network's To Catch a Predator series, which purported to bust sexual predators.)

The first suspect is apparently Leopold Munyakazi, a visiting professor at a Maryland college who has been accused by Rwandan authorities of participating in the 1994 genocide in that country; a Human Rights Watch official is quoted in the article saying that the case against Munyakazi is actually somewhat murky.

If NBC is actually interesting in exposing war crimes, though, there might be an easier way to do this. Couldn't they just invite Henry Kissinger to appear on Meet the Press, and then "surprise" him?

With Bob Kerrey back in the news (New York Times, 12/11/08) as the faculty of the New School University that he heads gives him a vote of no confidence, it's worth recalling the kid-glove treatment given to him by most of the media when his involvement in Vietnam-era war crimes was revealed (Extra!, 7-8/01).

Oddly, New York Times reporters Marc Santora and Lisa Foderaro, who wrote about the New School vote, don't seem to recall that Kerrey participated in a massacre of Vietnamese civilians--an atrocity that caused considerable controversy when it was exposed by the New York Times Magazine (4/25/01)--when they recount the major events of his career, though they do remember that Kerrey "briefly considered a run for mayor of New York in 2005." Presumably a war criminal heading up a school largely founded by refugees from Nazi Germany is a problem for at least some faculty members, but the New York Times' summation of the politics of the situation is that Kerrey's own politics "were too moderate for the unabashedly liberal campus."