Every Postwar American President is Guilty of War Crimes --

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Date Posted: 21:08:18 09/15/01 Sat
Author: Nikolai von Kreitor
Subject: Every Postwar American President is Guilty of War Crimes

Noam Chomsky:

Every Postwar American President is Guilty of War Crimes
What are the War Crimes of every Post-WWII President?

An excerpt from an interview given by Tom Morello, of world-renowed linguist and dissenter, Noam Chomsky.

TM: One of the more provocative statements of yours that I have read, is that if the standards of the Nuremberg Trials were applied, then every post world war two American president would have been hanged as a war criminal. Take us briefly through the war crimes committed by each president.

NC: I've done that in print a couple of times. Well with Truman you would, could start with, shortly after he entered office there was the bombing of Hiroshima, which one could give an argument for, well I don't think so. But it is almost impossible to give an argument of the bombing of Nagasaki. That was mostly just trying out a new weapon to see if it would work. Then there was an utterly gratuitous bombing a 1,000 plane raid at the end of the war right in fact after Japan surrendered, called the finale, the grand finale. Then comes for example, the support for the brutal counter insurgency campaign in Greece, which killed about 150,000 people which was undertaken to restore Nazi collaborators and demolish the resistance and then we could go on from there.

The Eisenhover Administration, the Truman and Eisenhoverr Administration, the bombings, whatever you think about the Korean War and there is a pretty complicated story when you really look at it, but, nevertheless, the bombings in North Korea in 1951 and 1952 was just an outright war crime, you can read it in the Air Force history about how in the Eisenhower years, they had nothing left to bomb, everything was flat, so they just bomb dams, which they exalt how wonderful it was to see the water flooding down and killing people and wiping out the crops and so on. Well people were hanged for that, for less than that. They were hanged for opening dikes in Nuremberg, and then again we can proceed with what happened in Guatemala and elsewhere where it was a terrible crime in the Eisenhover years and Kennedy is not even worth discussing.

The invasion in South Vietnam, Kennedy attacked South Vietnam, outright in 1961, 1962 he sent Air Force to start bombing villages, authorized napalm so it also laid the basis for the huge wave of repression that spread over Latin America with the installation of Neo-Nazi gangsters that always supported directly by the United States that went on and in fact picked up under Johnson. In the Nixon years for example, the bombing of inner Cambodia, in 1973 was a monstrous crime. It was just massacring peasants in inner Cambodia. It isn't much reported here because no one paid attention, but it was quite apart from helping create the basis for the Khmer Rouge, well, the CIA estimate is that 600,000 people were killed in the course of those US actions, either directed or actually carried out by the United States.

In the Carter years there were major crimes, for example the Indonesian invasion [of East Timor], which happen to start under Ford and led to the nearest thing to genocide since the holocaust, maybe 1/3 of the population had been slaughtered. That was using 90% US arms. In the Carter years, Indonesians were actually running out of arms in their attack on this country. Carter actually increased the flow of arms in 1978, which was the worst peak of the slaughter. Carter was backing Somosa and his national guard and openly and with direct military and diplomatic support at a time when they had killed about 40,000 people in the last days of their regime. Again, that's a sample.

Going on to the Reagan years, its not even a question. In fact the US was condemned by the World Court during the Reagan years with the unlawful use of force, with the meaning aggression in Central America alone. Maybe 200,000 people or so were slaughtered in a very brutal fashion by US run programs. In southern Africa about 1.5 million people were killed and over $60 billion in damage were done according to the UN commission which rebutted later than from 1980 to 1988 that from South African atrocities that the US was directly supporting. Then again we could go on.

Well Bush, the invasion of Panama for example was simply outright aggression. It was condemned internationally but the US was able to veto the Security Council condemnations, that doesn't change the fact that they were there.

Well we will move on to the Clinton years. One of his first acts within a few months was to send missiles to bomb Baghdad. While it did not kill a huge amount of people I think 8 or so, but was actually no pretext, no pretext I mean it just showed what a tough guy he is. In fact the pretext was so ludicrous, it was embarrassing to repeat it. The pretext was self defense against armed attack, because two months earlier there had been a failed attempt by someone who might or might not have been an Iraqi, no one knew at the time. About 1/2 half of military aid went to Central/Latin America under Clinton was going to military aid and training was going to Columbia, which absolutely has the worst human rights record in the hemisphere, killing thousands of people in a horrifying fashion. These are all crimes. I don't think it is hard to set up a bill of indictment if somebody wanted to.

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