Image: Iraqi children
The issue of War Crimes emerged after World War I at the Versailles Conference, but it was not until the end of World War II that a more comprehensive definition of what constitutes war crimes was developed. First among new international conventions addressing war crimes was the 1950 Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Its fundamental premise was that the conduct of war in violation of international treaties was a crime against peace. Ill treatment of prisoners of war, killing hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages was a war crime. Crimes against humanity include murder, extermination, deportation, and prosecution based on political, racial or religious grounds.
The 1949 Geneva Convention gave
recognition to the development of new technologies which exposed
civilian life to greater threats of destruction. A 1977 addendum further
emphasized the right of civilians to be protected against military
operations. This included the protection of civilians against starvation
as a method of warfare. Article II of the Geneva Convention addressed
the issue of genocide, defined as killing or causing serious bodily harm
to individuals based on their nationality, ethnic, racial or religious
group and with the intent to destroy that group.
Since the Geneva Convention, a number of
other significant international treaties addressing war and human
rights have been drafted, but the United States has rejected almost all
of them. Among the treaties that the United States has refused to sign
are the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (1966);
the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966); the
Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination
(1966), and the American Convention on Human Rights (1965).
The United States has been particularly
reluctant to sign treaties addressing the “laws of war”. It has refused
to sign The Declaration on the Prohibition of the Use of Thermo-Nuclear
Weapons (1961); The Resolution on the Non-Use of Force in International
Relations and Permanent Ban on the Use of Nuclear Weapons (1972); The
Resolution on the Definition of Aggression (1974); Protocols Additional
to the 1949 Geneva Convention (1977); and the Declaration on the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons(1989).1
Equally disturbing was the U.S. refusal
to sign the Convention on Rights of the Child, introduced into the
United Nations General assembly on November 20, 1989 and subsequently
ratified by 191 countries.
The first use of atomic weapons against
human beings occurred on August 6-9 1945, when the United States
incinerated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World
War II, killing an estimated 110,000 Japanese citizens and injuring
another 130,000. By 1950 another 230,000 died from injuries and
radiation. Earlier in 1945 two fire bombing raids on Tokyo killed
140,000 citizens and injured a million more.
Since World War II the US has bombed twenty-three nations. [2001 figures] Author William Blum notes:
“It is sobering to reflect that in our era of instant world wide communications, the United States has, on many occasions, been able to mount a large or small scale military operation or undertake other equally blatant forms of intervention without the American public being aware of it until years later if ever.”2
The growing primacy or aerial
bombardment in the conduct of war has inevitably defined non-combatants
as the preferred target of war. Indeed, the combination of American air
power and occupation ground forces has resulted in massive civilian
casualties around the world.
Korea:1943-1953
On August 15,1945, the Korean people,
devastated and impoverished by years of brutality from Japanese
occupation forces, openly celebrated their liberation and immediately
formed the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence (CKPI).
By August 28, 1945, all Korean provinces on the entire Peninsula had
established local people’s democratic committees, and on September 6,
delegates from throughout Korea, north and south, created the Korean
People’s Republic (KPR). On September 7, the day after the creation of
the KPR, General Douglas MacArthur (image left), commander of the
victorious Allied powers in the Pacific, formally issued a proclamation
addressed “To the People of Korea.” The proclamation announced that
forces under his command “will today occupy the Territory of Korea south
of 38 degrees north latitude.”
The
first advance party of U.S. units, the 17th Regiment of the 7th
Infantry Division, actually began arriving at Inchon on September 5th,
two days before MacArthur’s occupation declaration. The bulk of the US
occupation forces began unloading from twenty-one Navy ships (including
five destroyers) on September 8 through the port at Inchon under the
command of Lieutenant General John Reed Hodge. Hundreds of black-coated
armed Japanese police on horseback, still under the direction of
Japanese Governor-General Abe Noabuyki, kept angry Korean crowds away
from the disembarking US soldiers.
On the morning of September 9, General
Hodge announced that Governor-General Abe would continue to function
with all his Japanese and Korean personnel. Within a few weeks there
were 25,000 American troops and members of “civil service teams” in the
country. Ultimately the number of US troops in southern Korea reached
72,000. Though the Koreans were officially characterized as a
“semi-friendly, liberated” people, General Hodge regrettably instructed
his own officers that Korea “was an enemy of the United States…subject
to the provisions and the terms of the surrender.”
Tragically and ironically, the Korean
people, citizens of the victim-nation, had become enemies, while the
defeated Japanese, who had been the illegal aggressors, served as
occupiers in alliance with the United States. Indeed, Korea was burdened
with the very occupation originally intended for Japan, which became
the recipient of massive U.S. aid and reconstruction in the post-war
period. Japan remains, to this day, America=s forward military base
affording protection and intelligence for its “interests” in the
Asia-Pacific region.
Seventy-three-year-old Syngman Rhee was
elected President of ASouth Korea@ on May 10,1948 in an election
boycotted by virtually all Koreans except the elite KDP and Rhee’s own
right -wing political groups. This event, historically sealing a
politically divided Korea, provoked what became known at the Cheju
massacre, in which as many as 70,000 residents of the southern island of
Cheju were ruthlessly murdered during a single year by Rhee’s
paramilitary forces under the oversight of U.S. officers. Rhee took
office as President on August 15 and the Republic of Korea (ROK) was
formally declared. In response, three-and -a-half weeks later (on
September 9, 1948), the people of northern Korea grudgingly created
their own separate government, the Democratic People’s's Republic of
Korea (DPRK), with Kim II Sung as its premier.
Korea was now clearly and tragically
split in two. Kim Il Sung had survived as a guerrilla fighter against
the Japanese occupation in both China and Korea since 1932 when he was
twenty years old. He was thirty-three when he returned to Pyongyang in
October 1945 to begin the hoped-for era of rebuilding a united Korea
free of foreign domination, and three years later, on September 9, 1948,
he became North Korea’s first premier. The Rhee/U.S. forces escalated
their ruthless campaign of cleansing the south of dissidents,
identifying as a suspected “communist” anyone who opposed the Rhee
regime, publicly or privately. In reality, most participants or
believers in the popular movement in the south were socialists
unaffiliated with outside “communist” organizations.
As
the repression intensified, however, alliances with popular movements
in the north, including communist organizations, increased. The Cheju
insurgency was crushed by August 1949, but on the mainland, guerrilla
warfare continued in most provinces until 1959-51. In the eyes of the
commander of US military forces in Korea, General Hodge, and new
“President” Syngman Rhee, (left) virtually any Korean
who had not publicly professed his allegiance to Rhee was considered a
“communist” traitor. As a result, massive numbers of farmers, villagers
and urban residents were systematically rounded up in rural areas,
villages and cities throughout South Korea. Captives were regularly
tortured to extract names of others. Thousands were imprisoned and even
more thousands forced to dig mass graves before being ordered into them
and shot by fellow Koreans, often under the watch of U.S. troops.
The introduction of U.S./UN military
forces on June 26,1950 occurred with no American understanding (except
by a few astute observers such as journalist I.F Stone) that in fact
they were entering an ongoing revolutionary civil war waged by
indigenous Koreans seeking genuine independence after five years of U.S.
interference. The American occupation simply fueled Korean passions
even more while creating further divisions among them.
In the Autumn of 1950, when U.S. forces
were in retreat in North Korea, General Douglas MacArthur offered all
air forces under his command to destroy “every means of communication,
every installation, factory, city and village ” from the Yalu River,
forming the border between North Korea and China, south to the battle
line. The massive saturation bombing conducted throughout the war,
including napalm, incendiary, and fragmentation bombs, left scorched
cities and villages in total ruins. As in World War II, the U.S.
strategic bombing campaign brought mass destruction and shockingly heavy
civilian casualties. Such tactics were in clear violation of the
Nuremburg Charter, which had, ironically, been created after World War
II, largely due to pressure from the U.S. The Nuremburg Tribunal defined
“the wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages” to be a war crime
and declared that Ainhumane acts against any civilian population” were a
crime against humanity.
From that fateful day on September 8,
1945 to the present, a period of 56 years, U.S. military forces
(currently numbering 37,000 positioned at 100 installations) have
maintained a continuous occupation in the south supporting de facto U.S.
rule over the political, economic and military life of a needlessly
divided Korea. This often brutal occupation and the persistent U.S.
support for the repressive policies of dictatorial puppets continues to
be the single greatest obstacle to peace in Korea, preventing the
inevitable reunification of the Korean Peninsula.
Until 1994, all of the hundreds of
thousands of South Korean defense forces operated under direct U.S.
command. Even today, although integrated into the Combined Forces
Command (CFC), these forces automatically revert to direct US control
when the US military commander in Korea determines that there is a state
of war.
Indonesia: (1958-1965)
After 350 years of colonialism,
President Sukarno, with the cooperation of the communist party (PKI),
sought to make Indonesia an independent socialist democracy. Sukarno’s
working relationship with the PKI would not be tolerated by Washington.
Under the direction of the CIA, rebels in the Indonesian army were
armed, trained and equipped in preparation for a military coup. The
Indonesian army=s campaign against the PKI in 1965-66 brought the
dictator Suharto to power. Under his rule, teachers, students, civil
servants and peasants were systematically executed. In Central and East
Java alone, 60,000 were killed. In Bali, some 50,000 people were
executed, and thousands more died in remote Indonesian villages. In some
areas citizens were confined in Navy vessels which were then sunk to
the bottom of the sea.
The most extensive killing were
committed against suspected PKI supporters identified by U.S.
intelligence. Historian Gabriel Kollo states that the slaughter in
Indonesia “ranks as a crime of the same type as the Nazi perpetrated.”3
Recent revealed documents at George
Washington University’s National Security Achive confirmed how
effectively the Indonesian army used the U.S.-prepared hit list against
the Indonesian communist party in 1965-66. Among the documents cited is a
1966 airgram to Washington sent by U.S. ambassador Marshall Green
stating that a list from the Embassy identifying top communist leaders
was being used by the Indonesian security authorities in their
extermination campaign.
For example, the US Embassy reported on
November 13,1965 that information sent to Suharto resulted in the
killing of between 50 to 100 PKI members every night in East and Central
Java. The Embassy admitted in an April 15, 1966 airgram to Washington:
“We frankly do not know whether the real figure for the PKI killed is
closer to 100,000 or 1,000,000.”4
The Indonesian military became the
instrument of another counter revolutionary offensive in 1975 when it
invaded East Timor. On September 7,1975, just 24 hours after the highest
officials of the United States government, President Gerald Ford and
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, had been in Djakarta on a state
visit, 30,000 Indonesian troops landed in East Timor. Napalm, phosphorus
bombs and chemical defoliants were delivered from US supplied planes
and helicopters, resulting in the killing of tens of thousands of
people, and the conflict continues to simmer.5
Vietnam: (1954-1965)
President Harry Truman began granting
material aid to the French colonial forces in Indochina as early s 1946,
and the aid was dramatically increased after the successful Chinese
revolution in 1949 and the start of the “hot” Korean War in June 1950.
By the time of the French army was defeated in 1954, the U.S. was paying
nearly 80 percent of the French military expenditures and providing
extensive air and logistical support.
The unilateral U.S. military
intervention in Vietnam began in 1954, immediately following the
humiliating French defeat in early May 1954. The July 21, 1954 Geneva
Agreement concluded the French war against the Vietnamese and promised
them a unifying election, mandated for July 1956. The U.S. government
knew that fair elections would, in effect, ensure a genuine democratic
victory for revered Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. This was unacceptable.
In June 1954, prior to the signing of the historic Geneva agreement,
the U.S. began CIA-directed internal sabotage operations against the
Vietnamese while setting up the puppet Ngo Dinh Diem (brought to Vietnam
from the U.S.) as “our” political leader. No electrons were ever held.
This set the stage for yet another war for Vietnamese independence —
this time against U.S. forces and their South Vietnamese puppets.
The significance of U.S. intentions to
interfere with independence movements in Asia cannot be underestimated.
U.S. National Security Council documents from 1956 declared that our
national security would be endangered by communist domination of
mainland Southeast Asia. Secret military plans stated that nuclear
weapons will be used in general war and even in military operations
short of general war. By March 1961, the Pentagon brass had recommended
sending 60,000 soldiers to western Laos supported by air power that
would include, if necessary, nuclear weapons, to assure that the Royal
Laotian government would prevail against the popular insurgency being
waged against it. For the next ten years the U.S. unleashed forces that
caused (and continue to cause ) an incomprehensible amount of
devastation in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia.
Eight million tons of bombs (four times the amount used by the U.S. in all of World War II) were dropped indiscriminately,
leaving destruction which, if laid crater to crater, would cover an
area the size of the state of Maine. Eighty percent of the bombs fell on
rural areas rather than military targets, leaving ten million craters.
Nearly 400,000 tons of napalm was dropped on Vietnamese villages. There
was no pretense of distinguishing between combatants and civilians.
The callous designation of as much as
three-fourths of South Vietnam as a “free fire zone” justified the
murder of virtually anyone in thousands of villages in those vast areas.
At the time, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara cited a 1967 memo in
which he estimated the number of Vietnamese civilians killed or
seriously injured by U.S. forces at 1000 per week. The CIA=s Phoenix
program alone killed as many as 70,000 civilians who were suspected of
being part of the political leadership of the Viet Cong in the south.
There was a historically unprecedented
level of chemical warfare in Vietnam, including the indiscriminate
spraying of nearly 20 million gallons of defoliants on one-seventh the
area of South Vietnam. The vestigial effects of chemical warfare
poisoning continue to plague the health of adult Vietnamese (and ex-GIs)
while causing escalated birth defects. Samples of soil, water, food and
body fat of Vietnamese citizens continue to reveal dangerously elevated
levels of dioxin to the present day.
Today, Vietnamese officials estimate the
continued dangerous presence of 3.5 million landmines left from the war
as well as 300,000 tons of unexploded ordnance. Tragically, these
hidden remnants of war continue to explode when farmers plow their
fields or children play in their neighborhoods, killing thousands each
year. The Vietnamese report 40,000 people killed since 1975 by landmines
and buried bombs. That means that each day, 4 or 5 Vietnamese civilians
are killed day by U.S. ordnance.
The U.S. and its allies killed as many
as 5 million Southeast Asian citizens during the active war years. The
numbers of dead in Laos and Cambodia remain uncounted, but as of 1971, a
congressional Research Service report prepared for the U.S. Senate
Foreign Relations Committee indicated that over one million Laotians had
been killed, wounded, or turned into refugees, with the figure for
Cambodia estimated two million. More than a half million “secret” US
bombing missions over Laos, begun in late 1964, devastated populations
of ancient cultures there. Estimates indicate that around 230,000 tons
of bombs were dropped over northern Laos in 1968 and 1969 alone.
Increasing numbers of U.S. military personnel were added to the ground
forces in Laos during 1961, preparing for major military operations to
come.
The “secret” bombing of Cambodia began
in March 1969, and an outright land invasion of Cambodia was conducted
from late April 1970 through the end of June, causing thousand of
casualties. These raging U.S. covert wars did not cease until August 14,
1973, by which time countless additional casualties were inflicted.
When the bombing in Cambodia finally ceased, the U.S. Air Force had
officially recorded the use of nearly 260,000 tons of bombs there. The
total tonnage of bombs dropped in Laos over eight and a half years
exceeded two million.
The consensus today is that more than 3
million Vietnamese were killed, with 300,000 additional missing in
action and presumed dead. In the process the U.S. lost nearly 59,000 of
her own men and women, with about 2,000 additional missing, while
combatants from four U.S. allies lost over 6,000 more. The South
Vietnamese military accounted for nearly 225,000 dead. All of this
carnage was justified in order to destroy the basic rights and capacity
of the Vietnamese to construct their own independent, sovereign society.
None of the victims deserved to die in such a war. Vietnamese,
Laotians, Cambodians, and U.S. military “grunts” were all victims.
All of these corpses were created to
perpetuate an incredible lie and to serve a “cause” that had been
concocted by white male plutocrats in Washington, many of whom possessed
Ph.Ds from prestigious universities. Like most of their predecessors
throughout U.S. history, these politicians and their appointees, along
with their profit-hungry arms makers/dealers, desired to assure the
destruction of people’s democratic movements in East Asia that
threatened the virtually unlimited American hegemony over markets,
resources, and the profits to be derived therefrom. But never did a
small country suffer so much from an imperial nation as the Vietnamese
did from the United States.
Iraq:1991-2001
The royal family in Kuwait was used by
the United States government to justify a massive assault on Iraq in
order to establish permanent dominion over the Gulf. The Gulf War was
begun not to protect Kuwait but to establish US power over the region
and its oil.6 In 1990, General Schwarzkopf had testified before the
Senate that it was essential for the U.S. to increase its military
presence in the Gulf in order to protect Saudi Arabia. However,
satellite photos showed no Iraqi troops near the Saudi Border.
After Iraq announced that it was going
to annex Kuwait, the United States began its air attacks on Iraq. For 42
days the US sent in 2000 sorties a day. By February 13,1991, 1,500
Iraqi citizens had been killed. President George Bush ordered the
destruction of facilities essential to civilian life and economic
production.
The Red Crescent Society of Jordan
announced at the end of the war that 113,00 civilians were dead and
sixty percent were women and children. Some of the worst devastation was
wrought by the US military’s use of Depleted Uranium (DU) on
battlefields and in towns and cities across Iraq. It left a legacy of
radioactive debris which has resulted in serious environmental
contamination and health problems, particularly among Iraqi children.
Child mortality rates have risen by 380 percent. Between August 1990 and
August 1997 some 1.2 million children in Iraq died due to environmental
devastation and the harsh economic sanctions imposed in 1991. Not
satisfied with such havoc, the U.S. and Britain have recently sought to
tighten the blockade against Iraq by imposing so-called :”smart
sanctions.” This would continue the aggression against northern and
southern Iraq and lead to the deaths of more women, children and
elderly.
Yugoslavia: (1991-1999)
The United States and Germany prepared
plans for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the late 1980′s and have
since reconfigured Yugoslavia into mini-states, with only Serbia and
Montenegro remaining in the Yugoslav federation, a situation which has
opened the way to the re-colonization of the Balkans.
In 1991, the European Community, with US
involvement, organized a conference on Yugoslavia that called for the
separation, sovereignty and independence of the republics of Yugoslavia.
President George Bush’s administration passed the 1991 Foreign
Operations Act, which provided aid to the individual republics, but cut
off all aid to Belgrade, the capitol of Yugoslavia. This stimulated the
eventual secession of Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and
Bosnia-Herzegovina. With secession came civil wars. Ethnic Serbs living
in Croatia had been loyal to that Yugoslav republic, but great power
meddling now forced them to defend their region in Croatia known as
Krajina. The U.S. covertly provided arms, training, advisors, satellite
intelligence and air power to the Croats in “Operation Storm” directed
against the helpless Serbs in Krajina. When the bombing began, the
Krajina Serbs fled to Belgrade and Bosnia. Approximately 250,000 Serbs
were thus ethnically cleansed from the Krajina and all evidence of Serb
habitation was systematically destroyed. Civilians were executed,
livestock slaughtered and houses were burnt to the ground.7
To avoid a similar human catastrophe in
Bosnia/Herzegovina, Bosnian Serbs consolidated Serb-owned lands, an area
constituting about two thirds of Bosnia/Herzegovina. Germany and the
U.S. quickly aided the military alliance of Bosnian Muslims and Croats
against the Serbs, and , supported by American bombing and regular army
forces from Croatia, the Muslim/Croat alliance soon swept the Serbs from
the majority of Bosnia/Herzegovina. As in the Krajina, the conflict
forced ethnic Serbs off of their lands, creating one hundred thousand
Serb refugees.
Under the U.S.-brokered Dayton
Agreement, Bosnia/Herzegovina was divided into two parts, a Muslim-Croat
Federation and Republica Srpska. The central government today is
controlled by US/NATO forces, the IMF, and international NGOs. With no
history of independence, Bosnia/Herzegovina=s economic assets have been
taken over by foreign investors who now own their energy facilities,
water, telecommunication, media and transportation.
The effects of the Bosnian civil war on
the city of Srebrenica were reported extensively in the western media.
Reports claimed that 7,414 Bosnian Muslims were executed by the Serbian
army. After years of searching, digging and extensive investigations,
only seventy bodies were found, but the original charges of genocide are
still circulated in the media.
Kosovo, an autonomous region of Serbia,
is the site of the most recent, and perhaps most disastrous, U.S.
military intervention. Kosovo=s problems began after World War II when
immigrants from Albania flooded into the region, sparking political
confrontation between Albanians and Serbs. escalated into military
conflict. The “Kosovo Liberation Army, an Albanian terrorist/separatist
group, escalated tensions by directing their violence against not only
Serbian civilians, but Albanian who refused to join their cause. As the
war intensified, a United Nations team of observers in the Kosovo
village of Racak found 44 Albanian bodies. The Serbs identified them as
KLA fighters killed during one of the now frequent gun battles with
police. William Walker, a US diplomat, who had earlier acted as an
apologist for the death squads in El Salvador, led a group of
journalists to view the bodies, and their subsequent claims of Serb war
crimes made world-wide headlines.8
President Clinton used this event to
bring delegates form the contending forces in Bosnia to Rambouillet, and
the proposed Ramboullet Accords served as a prelude to U.S.
intervention in Kosovo. The accords, if accepted, would have allowed
NATO forces complete access to all of Yugoslavia, a virtual foreign
occupation, with all associated costs to be borne by the Yugoslav
government. As the Ramboullet negotiations began to stall, U.S.
Secretary of State Madeline Albright ordered the bombing of Yugoslavia
to begin.
On March 16, 1999, twenty three thousand
missiles and bombs were dropped on a country of eleven million people.
Thirty five thousand cluster bombs, graphite bombs and 31,000 rounds of
depleted uranium weapons were used, the latter scattering radioactive
waste throughout the Yugoslav countryside.
The 78 day bombing of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia targeted schools, hospitals, farms, bridges,
roads communication centers, and waterways. Because a large number of
chemical plants and oil refineries bombed by US/NATO planes were located
on the banks of the Danube river, the bombing of these industrial sites
polluted the Danube, a source of drinking water for ten million people
in the region. The environmental damage done to the soil, water and air
of Yugoslavia soon spread to Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia,
Greece and Italy. Countries like Russia, Ukraine and Georgia, which
border on the Black Sea, into which the Danube empties, also continue to
face health hazards.
Afghanistan:(1979-2001)
“The Bush-Afghan war calls up memories of the Vietnam War in both actions and rhetoric, the massive use of superior arms heavily impacting civilians, deliberate food deprivation, wholesale terror allegedly combating ‘terrorism’, but always sincere regrets for collateral damages.”9
The U.S. war in Afghanistan began in
1979, ostensibly as a campaign to oust the ruling Taliban and apprehend
the alleged terrorist Osama Bin Laden, who was assumed to be hiding in
Afghanistan. Ironically, the Taliban had received billions of dollars
worth of weapons from the CIA to help it overthrow a progressive
socialist government in Afghanistan, and Bin Laden regarded himself as
an important CIA asset. Indeed, the CIA had been deeply involved in
Afghanistan even before the Soviet Union intervened there in 1979 to
defend the revolutionary government.
Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist
attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, the U.S. has waged a
merciless war against the Afghan people, using chemical, biological and
depleted uranium (DU) weapons. The use of DU continues to spread
radiation throughout large parts of Afghanistan and will affect tens of
thousands of people in generations to come, causing lung cancer,
leukemia and birth defects. DU was also used against Iraq and
Yugoslavia, where the frequency of cancer has tripled.
The bombing of the Afghan population has
forced thousands of civilians to flee to Pakistan and Iran, and seven
to eight million civilians are facing starvation. UNICEF spokesman Eric
Larlcke has stated, “As many as 100,000 more children will die in
Afghanistan this winter unless food reaches them in sufficient
quantities in the next six weeks.”10
The racist underpinnings of the American
world-view allows the American press and its political leaders to be
silent on the mass killing of Third World children. Donald Rumsfeld, the
U.S. Secretary of Defense, has stated that the U.S. is not looking to
negotiate peace with the Taliban and Al-Quida in Afghanistan. There is a
clear indifference to the daily carnage in Afghanistan, where sixty
percent of the casualties are women and children. Human rights
organizations have expressed concern over reports of large-scale
executions of would-be Taliban defectors in the city of Kunduz, and the
United Nations has echoed human rights groups in demanding an
investigation into the slaughter of prisoners at the Qala-i-Jhangi fort
near Mazar-i-Sharif. With more than 500 people dead and the fort
littered with bodies, allegations of war crimes against the U.S. and UK
for ignoring the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war
have led the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary
Robinson, to call for an urgent inquiry.
“Once we recognize the pattern of activity designed to simultaneously consolidate control over Middle Eastern and South Asian oil and contain and colonize the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan is exactly where they need to go to pursue that agenda.”11
In his book The Grand Chessboard,
Zbigniew Brezezinski writes that the Eurasian Balkans are a potential
economic prize which hold an enormous concentration of natural gas and
oil and important minerals as well as gold.
Brezezinski declares that the Central
Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are “known to contain reserves of
natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or
the North Sea.”12 Afghanistan will serve as a base of operations to
begin the control over the South Asian Republic in order to build a
pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan to deliver
petroleum to the Asian market. This pipeline will serve as a bonanza of
wealth for the US oil companies.
Conclusion:
An examination of the American conduct
of its wars since World War II shows the US to be in violation of the
Nuremberg Principles, the 1949 Geneva Convention relating to protection
of civilian prisoners of war, the wounded and sick, and the amended
Nuremberg Principles as formulated by the International Law Commission
in 1950 proscribing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The massive
murder and destruction of civilian infrastructure through the use of
biological, chemical and depleted uranium weapons violates not only
international laws but the moral and humanitarian standards expected in
modern civilization.
Notes
1. Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1942 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1977, p. 371.2. William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Intervention Since World War II, Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995, p. 17.
3. Gabriel Kollo, AWar Crimes and the Nature of the Vietnam War, Bertrand Russell Foundation, http:www.homeusers.prestel.co.uk/littleton/br7006gk.htm
4. George Washington University’s National Security Archive, July 27, 2001, www.Narchives.org
5. Deirdre Griswold, Indonesia: the Second Greatest Crime of the Century, 2d edition. New York: World View Publishers, 1979, p. vii.
6. Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992, p. 3.
7. Scott Taylor, INAT: Images of Serbia and the Kosovo Conflict. OttAwa, Canada: Espirit de Corps Books, 2000, p. 15.
8. Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia. New York: Verso, 2000, p. 106.
9. Edward Herman, A Genocide as Collateral Damage, but with Sincere Regrets, Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG) at http://globalresearch.ca , 2001
10. 100,000 Afghan Children Could Die This Winter, The Times of India, October 16, 2001.
11. Stan Goff, A September 11th Analysis, October 27, 2001, www.maisonneuvepress.com .
12. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperative, New York: Harper
Lenora Foerstel is author of War, Lies & Videotape: How media monopoly stifles truth ,
Brian Willson is a Vietnam war veteran, peace activist and author. Brian Willson has carefully documented the balance sheet of US government war crimes in Vietnam and Korea
The original source of this article is Global Research
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I contracted hpv' i was told there is no hpv cure except treatment to control it, i totally lost of hope all i could think loosing my life because it was so embarrass for been hpv patient. some weeks ago i read possible natural cure which was guarantee And I ordered the treatment after one week i got 100% cure. I'm so excited to shear this testimony to every article for others living with hpv there is possible natural treatment to eliminate the virus email Dr agaba, his herbal clinic address; Dragabasolutionhome@gmail.com
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