Major Unpunished US War Crimes
by Stephen Lendman (stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman)
America has been a warrior state without mercy from inception. Throughout its history, US forces committed horrendous high crimes of war, against humanity, and genocide.
No US political or military officials were ever held accountable, victims most often blamed for high crimes committed against them.
Historian Gabriel Kolko called America since the 19th century “violen(t), racis(t), repressi(ve) at home and abroad (and) cultural(ly) mendaci(ous).”
From colonial America to today, America has been a class society, serving privileged interests exclusively. The notion of a benevolent nation was pure myth throughout its history. Its democracy is pure fantasy, not real.
War and repression against Native Americans, African-Americans, other people of color, ordinary Americans, Muslims, unwanted aliens, the poor, disadvantaged, and women have gone on for time immemorial in the US.
From the October 1492 arrival of Columbus in the Americas through the end of the 19th century, US Census data estimated fewer than 3% of Native Americans survived.
Historian, author, political activist Ward Churchill vividly explained things, saying countless millions of Native Americans were “hacked apart with axes and swords, burned alive and trampled under horses, hunted as game and fed to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped for bounty, hanged on meathooks and thrown over the sides of ships at sea, worked to death as slave laborers, intentionally starved and frozen to death during a multitude of forced marches and internments, and, in an unknown number of instances, deliberately infected with epidemic diseases.”
US genocide against its native people remains unparalleled in world history. Cultural genocide against them continues.
Churchill explained it in one of his books, titled “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” what remains of their original numbers.
The African holocaust continuing for centuries was much the same, 100 million or more humans sold like cattle, millions perishing in the Middle Passage from extreme pain and discomfort, diseases, filth, slime, blood, vomit, and human excrement below deck, bodies crammed into coffin-sized spaces.
Others were flogged or clubbed to death. Anyone thought to be diseased was dumped overboard like garbage. Unknown numbers suffered from claustrophobia-caused insanity. Perhaps 50 million or more died while the slave trade continued for centuries.
America’s coming of age came at the expense of countless tens of millions of lives lost, including from numerous wars – notably its devastating mid-19th century civil war, the early 20th century war to end all others, the horrific “good” world war that followed, endless others since then, multiple wars ongoing today, no end of them in prospect.
The risk of possible, perhaps inevitable, nuclear war hangs over humanity like a sword of Damocles.
Through the FBI’s existence since 1908, originally known as the Bureau of Investigation, headed by J. Edgar Hoover for nearly half a century (1924 – 1972), its secretive counterintelligence program ruthlessly targeted political dissidents, including communists; anti-war, human and civil rights activists; the American Indian Movement; and Black Panther Party among others.
From earlier ways to modern sophisticated techniques, the bureau operated and continues operating as a national Gestapo, including clandestine/largely illegal political repression and assassinations, mass surveillance, black propaganda, and other disruptive activities – amounting to state-sponsored terror.
The CIA, NSA, and other US spy agencies operate the same way – extrajudicially without accountability, inspired by how Nazi Germany’s Gestapo operated.
Historian Robert Gellately said Hoover sent one of his key aides, Edmund Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s Gestapo to learn firsthand how it operated, impressed with what he saw.
Post-WW II, the FBI recruited hundreds of Nazis, including some close to Hitler, to work for the agency, their identities concealed, wanting Gestapo tactics used in America.
Anyone daring to expose what went on risked either being called a threat to national security or eliminated.
Nazi tactics are used by US spy agencies, the Pentagon, and other government agencies – including mass surveillance, secret repression, political assassinations, torture, indefinite detentions, and other high crimes, things going on today, suppressed by major media, accountability never forthcoming.
Congress facilitates what goes on by passing numerous police state laws, enacted by Republican and undemocratic Dem presidents – the Clintons and Obama as ruthlessly lawless as Bush/Cheney and Trump.
Endless US war on humanity rages at home and abroad, threatening everyone everywhere.
Previous articles discussed horrific conditions in illegal US-controlled, southern Syria’s Rukban refugee camp.
Russian National Defense Control Center head Mikhail Mizintsev compared horrific conditions there to Nazi German death camps, an estimated 60,000 Syrian refugees affected.
They’re terrorized by US-supported jihadists in the camp, held captive by US forces, victims of horrendous Obama and Trump regime crimes of war and against humanity – along with tens of millions of others throughout the region, Central Asia, North Africa, and elsewhere.
US-led terror-bombing in Syria and elsewhere continues massacring countless numbers of civilians, mostly women and children, on the phony pretext of combating ISIS Washington created and supports – along with virtually all other regional terrorist groups.
Chemical, biological, radiological, and other banned weapons are used by its forces in all US wars.
High “crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity” are repeated endlessly in all US war theaters, what the 1945 Nuremberg Principles prohibited.
Post-WW II, naked aggression was waged against all US targeted countries – the highest of high crimes gone unpunished.
Advancing America’s imperium has come at the cost of countless trillions of dollars, diverted from vital homeland needs, and tens of millions of lives – defenseless civilians comprising the vast majority of victims.
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