One of the most
durable features of the U.S. culture is the inability
or refusal to recognize U.S. crimes. The media have
long been calling for the Japanese and Germans to
admit guilt, apologize, and pay reparations. But the
idea that this country has committed huge crimes, and
that current events such as the World Trade Center
and Pentagon attacks may be rooted in responses to
those crimes, is close to inadmissible. A refresher
course:
American
forces currently operate with impunity from bases in
50 countries... "Full spectrum dominance"
is Washington's clearly stated aim.
The
international arms trade is dominated by the US.
Of 35
countries using torture on an administrative basis in
the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United States.
The US
has been bombing one or another Middle Eastern
country almost continuously since 1983. US bombers
and/or battleships have attacked Lebanon, Libya,
Iraq, Iran, the Sudan and Afghanistan.
US
provides material aid including Apache assault
helicopters to support Israeli military occupation of
Arab land. This contrasts sharply with, for example,
US response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
Gulf war
against Iraq produced 160,000 to 220,000 deaths,
60,000-100,000 civilians. 19 Americans died. The
pentagon has consistently dodged estimating Iraqi
casualties and the media has virtually ignored the
issue. Due to sanctions an estimated additional
500,000 Iraqi children have died.
In
Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Mujadeen, which gave
birth to the fanatical Taliban, was largely the
creation of the CIA. Osam Bin Ladin was among those
supported and tutored by the CIA.
The US
government tacitly backed Saddam Hussein's unprovoked
attack on Iran in 1980, and the Reagan administration
supplied him with weapons and CIA intelligence
throughout the eight-year war which followed.
United
States installed the Shah as dictator of Iran in
1953, trained his secret services in "methods of
interrogation".
Almost
unknown to its citizenry, the US is currently
fighting an undeclared war in Colombia.
CIA
directed the invasion of Guatemala in 1954 after new
government nationalized "United Fruit"
company lands. Ultimately 30,000 civilians were
killed by US sponsored death squads trained on US
soil at the infamous "School of the
Americas" The undeclared war in Central America
was financed by shipments of cocaine by the CIA on
military aircraft, a program almost certainly blessed
by the elder George Bush.
US
sponsored violence in Chile that climaxed with the
murder of the democratically elected leader Salvador
Allende.
More
than 250,000 people killed in the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. President Truman ordered the
bombing not so much to shorten the Pacific phase of
World War II - Japan was already on the brink of
surrender - as to send a message to the Soviet Union,
America's ally in the war, that Washington planned to
call the shots in the postwar world.
The CIA
assassinated the democratically elected president of
the Congo and installed Mobutu, who opened their
diamond and cobalt mines to western business
interests.
In Korea
and then in Vietnam, US bombing killed as many as
four million people, the vast majority of them
noncombatants.
In
Indonesia, in 1965-66, a million people were killed
with the complicity of the US and British
governments: the Americans supplying General Suharto
with assassination lists, then ticking off names as
people were killed.
A Wall
Street Journal report in 1997 estimated that perhaps
500,000 children in Vietnam suffer from serious birth
defects resulting from the U.S. use of chemical
weapons there.
The same
is true of millions in southern Africa, where the
United States supported Savimbi in Angola and carried
out a policy of "constructive engagement."
Material was
compiled by Art Ludwig at Oasis Design in Santa
Barbara.
