in the real world, when you write war criminal, people think someone convicted of a war crime, it’s really not meant to be used a figure of speech. John Yoo is still a UC Berkeley Law Professor. You’re making war criminal as meaningless a term as a Nazi.
> in the real world, when you write war criminal, people think someone convicted of a war crime
First, no, people commonly speak based on beliefs about commission of crime without conviction. Similarly, they often do not describe people as criminals who are convicted, if they disagree with the conviction.
Second, in any case, Yoo is, aside from being a person who has committed war crimes, in fact, strictly speaking, a convicted war criminal. (One might, of course, disagree with either the accuracy or the process of that conviction, or both, but if conviction is all that you think matters…)
If you’re going to speak this strictly, then in the interest of intellectual honesty you should at least mention he was tried in absentia, and that the court in question — the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal — is not recognized by the United Nations.
John Yoo, one of the principal architects of the Bush Administration’s campaign of torture as state policy in the War on Terror.