Will the US ever be Held Accountable?
“We could not leave them to themselves - they were unfit for self-government - and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there, worse than Spain’s was ... there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” -U.S. President William McKinley, 1899, on the Filipinos
The 1953 Coup of Iran was the first successful overthrow of a foreign government by the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). Once secret CIA files that have since been made public, state: “By the end of 1952, it had become clear that the Mossadeq government in Iran was incapable of reaching an oil settlement with interested Western countries and had cooperated closely with the Tudeh (Communist) Party of Iran. In view of these factors, it was estimated that Iran was in real danger of falling behind the Iron Curtain; if that happened it would mean victory for the Soviets in the Cold War. It was the aim of the TPAJAX project to cause the fall of the Mossadeq government and to replace it with one which would govern Iran according to constructive policies.” It’s not hard for anyone who considers the obvious: ‘Constructive policies for whom’? Following Iran was Guatemala. In 1954, the US brought down and smashed Guatemala's one attempt at democracy. The new reformist-capitalist democratic regime was overthrown, causing plain disaster and catastrophe.
In 1963, there was concern in Washington that there might be another election, and as a result, Kennedy encouraged another military coup. It was documented by the vice-president of Guatemala that American planes based in Panama at the time bombarded the place with napalm. Effectively, that brought a smile back to the faces of the US administration. Since that date, about 150,000 people were murdered in Guatemala mainly by US-backed forces and frequently with direct US military participation. These numbers tend to lose their meaning on paper; human rights reports describe how paramilitary groups of the country supported by the US took all the men out and beheaded them. Then they sexually abused and slaughtered the women. The children were massacred by smashing their heads with rocks.
What about Vietnam? Again, the US had to stop the successful social and economic development of the country. The biggest fear for the US was that such development could be the paradigm for people elsewhere to advance and develop on their own and that was unacceptable. The war, from 1965 to 1975, left approximately three million dead Vietnamese and roughly two million dead in Cambodia and Laos. So overall about five million people were killed, which is a pleasing triumph when you're struggling to avert any flourishing social and economic development.
There are still thousands of deaths every year in these countries due to the utilisation of chemical weapons; the reports are easy to find: children still born with birth defects, cancers, tumours and deformities. In Laos a parallel assessment ‘justifies’ the extreme atrocities that the US demonstrated in the 1960s. It was the most violent bombing in history just after Cambodia (more bombs dropped on Laos than all the US bombs dropped in World War II). The violence was in reality concentrated against a minor upheaval that was just beginning in northern Laos, and that had to be eliminated. Again, wiping out Laos had to be done because if a progress can take place in such a trivial, backward country as this, then the illustration consequences would yet be further in substance and importance for other countries.
On May 27, 2004, The New York Times published one of the most tremendous rulings. They ran an article about the Nixon-Kissinger conversations. Kissinger battled hard to prevent it, but in the end the courts allowed it to become public. Nixon at one point informs Kissinger: ''I want them to hit everything,'' he said. ''I want them to use the big planes, the small planes, everything they can that will help out there, and let's start giving them a little shock.''
Subsequently, Kissinger conveys the command to the Pentagon to conduct a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. “Anything that flies on anything that moves."
Repeatedly throughout history, the US has preached against war crimes…is the above ruling by Kissinger a genocide order?
Long after the bombing of Cambodia in 1970, the Clinton administration released some secret documents. And it now turns out that the load of bombings was five times more than what was previously known. Further, the slaughter of the Cambodians in 1970 gave rise to one of the worst dictators and torturers in history: Pol Pot, a puppet to the US administration. His reign with the Khmer Rouge executed the slaughtering of another one and a half million peasants in Cambodia. In 1965, the US backed a coup in Indonesia which led to the massacre of around 700,000 people, mostly landless peasants, turning the place into a living hell for the Indonesians and as Chomsky mentions, a "paradise for the investors." The mainstream media of course paid no attention to the atrocities and focused on furthering the economic development of the ‘empire.’ A New York Times article called the war ‘a gleam of light in Asia.’ The coup in 1965 brought to power one of the most vicious rulers the world has ever seen - Suharto – while the Clinton administration described him as ‘our kind of guy.’
Furthermore, the Milosevic trial was a total fiasco and a facade. In August 1992, millions of people were appalled to see photographs of a believed Bosnian Serb death camp. But the death camp story was a lie. The ITN crew had filmed from inside a fenced-in storage area. By filming through the fence ITN produced footage that gave the impression that the Bosnian men were imprisoned. With a little editing, this footage was turned into pictures that gave the feeling of a death camp – media fabrication. I am not a Milosevic sympathiser by any means; I think the man has undertaken some terrible acts towards his people but I agree with Mira Beham, a journalist in Belgrade at the time, when she says: “The prosecution is very eager to diminish the responsibility of other players; the aim is to eliminate Milosevic as soon as possible because of political interests.” In addition, George Kenney, the American who was serving as the acting State Department officer in charge of Yugoslavian affairs, states: “I remember very vividly looking at all these reports of atrocities in Kosovo and thinking…this is complete nonsense; these stories were at best incorrectly reported and at worst fabricated.”
And of course, the whole invasion of Iraq is a major war crime: undeniably the supreme international crime, at variance from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows, in the conditions of the Nuremberg judgment. This is amid the themes that can't be discussed, in the political environment or elsewhere. Why are we in Iraq? How are we obliged to the Iraqis for demolishing their country and their lives? The popular voice of the American people support US removal from Iraq. Do their voices count for something?
The treatment of ‘enemy combatants’ undermines international law and disregards fundamental human rights. Ever since Washington launched its ‘war on terror,’ lawyers and human rights groups have presented evidence of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees by US authorities in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and at other secret locations. The Pentagon’s prisoner interrogation techniques constitute torture. Additionally, solitary confinement procedures and the failure to provide ‘full and fair’ trials at detention centers violate the Geneva Convention and basic human rights.
You often listen, read or come face to face with sayings from the US media, such as, ‘We are opposing terror.’ Frankly, this was and still is a disgraceful joke which insults any thinking human being. Did the US oppose any war or any atrocities around the world? Nicaragua, Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Guatemala, Haiti, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Laos, Chile, El Salvador, Cyprus, Panama, Congo, Indonesia, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan… the list goes on. No. The US does not oppose terror; on the contrary it often supports it.
As Canadian Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff stated in 2002: “America's entire war on terror is an exercise in imperialism. This may come as a shock to Americans, who don't like to think of their country as an empire. But what else can you call America's legions of soldiers, spooks and special forces straddling the globe?”
1st April 2009