Moral justification for the execution of criminals of war?

[Thumpalumpacus]

But if you're talking about the human narrative-- growth, discovery, pleasure, ambition, hope, and so on-- I'd say that a life sentence is pretty much the end of a meaningful human existence.  It is sufficiently horrible that it should automatically trigger the same compensations and considerations of execution-- extensive appeals, discovery of new evidence, and so on.

The problem you're clearly avoiding by this point is that killing someone is irrevocable.

Granted, you cannot give someone back 14 years of incarceration after discovering them innocent. But you certainly can compensate them financially and release them from imprisonment.

Once you've killed someone, you cannot undo your mistake.

You're right that a life sentence is serious, but comparing it to a death sentence without addressing this problem is facile, at best.

To sum up your post, "Might makes right."

Not really.  If you have might,  you don't even NEED to be right.  You might pretend to be in the right, though, just for the PR of it.

Ask the thousands of brown people, many of them women and children, that have been bombed by American drones in the past decades, under administrations of both parties.  You don't see Obama crying over little 6-year old Ahmed, the goat-herder's son.

This has the reek of whataboutism.