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Recent
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April
15, 2003
Uzma
Aslam Khan
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Robert
Jensen
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Dr.
Susan Block
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April
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April
12 / 13, 2003
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Gagne
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April
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Vest
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de Rooij
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Neale
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Last Tango in Baghdad
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Guthrie
Rumors of War
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War Web Log 4/10
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America's Sovereign Right to Do
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Gagne
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War Web Log 4/8
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War Web Log 4/7
April
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Alexander
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The Iraqi Humanitarian Relief is
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William
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Mahajan
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Gay Marine Refuses to Fight
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Country Music and the Crimes of Patriotism
Ron
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War and Occupation
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Iraq War as Arms Expo
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Li'l Box of Love: a Novelini
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The Meaning of Victory
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The Absence of War
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There Are No More Arguments
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The End of the Innocence
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Z.
Makes Me Sic (Sic): Copy Editing
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Tristam
War Coverage: a Dishonest Reality
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The Deadly Mihrab
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War Web Log 04/04
April
3, 2003
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A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
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Can You Hear the Silence?
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Colin Powell Telemarketer
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War, Debts and Deficits
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Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
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From Baghdad with Tears
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April 18,
2003
Only
Losers Get Tried for War Crimes
The Coalition of the Unindicted
by
MICKEY Z
Three days before Operation Iraqi Freedom (sic)
was launched, the New York Times reported that the Bush administration
had "identified nine senior Iraqi officials, including Saddam
Hussein and his two sons, who would be tried for war crimes or
crimes against humanity after an American-led attack on Iraq."
The issue of U.S. war crimes is rarely broached, of course, but
how does the record of un-indicted U.S. war criminals stack up
against those who have paid the highest price for their brutality?
Of the 185 Nazis indicted at Nuremberg, only 24 were sentenced
to death. Among those two dozen was the German High Commissioner
in Holland who ordered the opening of Dutch dikes to slow the
advance of Allied troops. Roughly 500,000 acres were flooded
and the result was mass starvation. Less than a decade later,
the United States Air Force bombed the dams during the Korean
War in order to flood North Korea's rice farms, a move designed
by the USAF to bring about "starvation and slow death."
During the Vietnam War, the bombing of dikes in South Vietnam
was an uncontroversial measure. Our history books teach us:
Vanquished war criminals must and will be brought to justice
in unbiased tribunals. The key word here is "vanquished,"
because only losers face indictment. The highest-ranking Nazi
defendant at Nuremberg, Hermann Goering, stated it plainly: "The
victors will always be the judges, the accused the vanquished."
Other accused Nazis wondered aloud: "What about Dresden?
What about Hiroshima?"
But the Germans and the Japanese lost
in 1945 (as Serbia lost in 1999). The undeniable transgressions
of these and other criminal regimes have been well-documented
elsewhere and some of those responsible for war crimes have been
prosecuted. It was the war planners in the nations that  defeated these regimes that
sat in judgment. General Curtis LeMay, commander of the 1945
Tokyo fire bombing operation that killed 672,000 Japanese, understood
this paradigm well. "I suppose if I had lost the war, I
would have been tried as a war criminal," he said. "Fortunately,
we were on the winning side." So far, the U.S. has always
ended up on the winning side and therefore hasn't had to accept
responsibility for more than two centuries of its own atrocities...many
of them against civilians.
Civilians die during war, everyone knows
that, but not all of the dead civilians are mere "collateral
damage." In many cases-particularly when invasions provoke
guerilla warfare-civilians are perceived as the enemy and are
treated as such. This practice stands in defiance of the Geneva
Conventions. Article 50 states: "In case of doubt whether
a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered a civilian...
The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy
general protection against dangers arising from military operations...
Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited." In addition, the
Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal define "crimes against
humanity" as: "Murder, extermination, enslavement,
deportation, and other inhumane acts done against any civilian
population." Examples of civilians killed by the American
military could fill volumes. For the purposes of this essay,
three Asian nations will serve as examples.
Philippines In the aftermath of the Spanish-American
War, the U.S. fought a brutal war of conquest against Filipinos.
By 1900, more than 75,000 American troops-three quarters of the
entire U.S. Army-were sent to the Philippines. In the face of
this overwhelming show of force, the Filipinos turned to guerrilla
warfare. The February 5, 1901 edition of the New York World
shed some light on the U.S. response to Filipino guerilla tactics:
"Our soldiers here and there resort to terrible measures
with the natives. Captains and lieutenants are sometimes judges,
sheriffs and executioners. 'I don't want any more prisoners sent
into Manila' was the verbal order from the Governor-General three
months ago. It is now the custom to avenge the death of an American
soldier by burning to the ground all the houses, and killing
right and left the natives who are only suspects." In an
eerie presaging of Vietnam's hamlets, Filipino villagers were
herded into concentration camps called "reconcentrados."
Captive Filipino soldiers and civilians alike were submitted
to the "water cure." According to the Philippine-American
War Centennial Initiative, this method "consisted of forcing
four or five gallons of water down the throat of the captive
whose body becomes an object frightful to contemplate, and then
squeezing it by kneeling on his stomach. The process was repeated
until the 'amigo' talked or died." And if those amigos struck
back, the U.S. was ready to up the ante. When a U.S. platoon
was wiped out in an ambush, Brig. Gen. Jacob W. Smith, a veteran
of the Wounded Knee massacre, issued orders to kill "all
persons of 10 years and older." "The interior of Samar
must be made a howling wilderness," Smith declared. "I
want no prisoners, I wish you to kill and burn, the more you
kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons
killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities
against the United States." "The My Lai massacre had
its predecessor in the Philippines in 1906," says Howard
Zinn. "The American army attacked a group of 600 Moros in
southern Philippines-men, women, and children living in very
primitive conditions, who had no modern weapons. The American
army attacked them with modern weapons, wiped out every last
one of these 600 men, women, and children." The commanding
officer responsible for this war crime received a telegram of
congratulations from Theodore Roosevelt.
Korea "On summer nights when the
breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids
screaming," said Edward Daily. This U.S. Army veteran of
the Korean War was talking about the killing of hundreds of refugees,
mostly women, children and old men at No Gun Ri in Korea on July
26-29, 1950. "According to Korean survivors' and victims'
relatives," says Norm Dixon in Green Left Weekly, "following
a surprise U.S. air raid that killed about 100 villagers who
had been evacuated from their village by U.S. troops, 300 other
villagers, overwhelmingly women, children and old men, had taken
refuge in a narrow culvert beneath the bridge." "The
bloody atrocity at No Gun Ri, a hamlet 100 miles south of Seoul,
has been known in South Korea for decades," adds journalist
Esther Galen, "but a series of pro-U.S. military dictatorships
suppressed any public protest or investigation." The incident
came to light when veterans of the U.S. Army First Cavalry Division
told their stories to the Associated Press in 1999. Veterans
of No Gun Ri told AP that Captain Melbourne C. Chandler, "after
speaking to superior officers by radio, ordered machine-gunners
from his heavy weapons company to set up near the bridge tunnel
openings and open fire. U.S. commanders had claimed there were
'infiltrators' among the villagers." Chandler told his men:
"The hell with all those people. Let's get rid of all of
them." Survivors of the massacre told of the experience.
Park Hee-sook, a girl of 16 in 1950, said, "I can still
hear the moans of women dying in a pool of blood. Children cried
and clung to their dead mothers." Chun Choon Ja, 12 years
old at the time, said the U.S. troops, "dug into positions
over hundreds of yards of hilly terrain" where they could
fire on the civilians. "The American soldiers played with
our lives like boys playing with flies," said Chun. "The
U.S. Armed Forces Claims Service told AP that there was no evidence
that the First Cavalry Division was in the area," Dixon
says. "AP reporters using map coordinates from declassified
documents have established that four First Cavalry Division battalions
were in the area at the time."
The AP investigation unearthed other
U.S. war crimes against Korean civilians. "On August 3,
1950," Galen reports, "a U.S. general and other army
officers ordered the destruction of two bridges, as South Korean
refugees streamed across, killing hundreds of civilians. One
bridge ran across the Naktong River at Waegwan." That same
day, 7,000 pounds of explosives were used to destroy a steel-girder
bridge crowded with "women and children, old men, and ox
carts with their belongings."
"These two incidents were not aberrations
or the product of exceptional circumstances, but rather characteristic
of the entire American military intervention in Korea from 1950
to 1953, one of the bloodiest chapters in U.S. history,"
says Galen. Un-indicted war criminal and U.S. Air Force commander
in Korea, General Curtis LeMay concurred with this observation,
boasting that U.S. warplanes "killed off twenty percent
of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from
starvation and exposure."
Vietnam "In all my years in the
Army I was never taught that communists were human beings,"
said Lt. William Calley. "We were there to kill ideology
carried by-I don't know-pawns, blobs of flesh. I was there to
destroy communism. We never conceived of people, men, women,
children, babies." The date was March 16, 1968. "Under
the command of Lieutenant William L. Calley, Charlie Company
of the Americal Division's Eleventh Infantry had 'nebulous orders'
from its company commander, Captin Ernest Medina, to 'clean the
village out'," explains historian Kenneth C. Davis. All
they found at My Lai were women, children, and old men...no weapons,
no signs of enemy soldiers. Calley ordered villagers to be killed
and their huts destroyed. Women and girls were raped before they
were machine-gunned. By the end of the massacre, hundreds of
villagers were dead. When the truth about My Lai was eventually
revealed, Henry Kissinger sent a note to White House Chief of
Staff H.R. Haldeman: "Now that the cat is out of the bag,
I recommend keeping the President and the White house out of
the matter entirely." Nixon, for his part, blamed the New
York Times, what he called "dirty rotten Jews from New York,"
for covering the story. Perhaps what had the White House on edge
was best articulated by Colonel Oran Henderson, charged with
covering-up the My Lai killings, who explained in 1971: "Every
unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace."
"This was not the only crime against civilians in Vietnam,"
Davis states. "It was not uncommon to see GIs use their
Zippo lighters to torch an entire village." Indeed, My Lai
was not an aberration. On the very same day that Lt. Calley entered
into infamy, another U.S. Army company entered My Khe (a sister
subhamlet of My Lai) and killed a reported 90 peasants. One of
the My Khe veterans later said, "What we were doing was
being done all over."
In his book, Nuremberg and Vietnam: An
American Tragedy, Telford Taylor, chief United States prosecutor
at Nuremberg, suggested that General William Westmoreland and
others in the Johnson administration could be found guilty of
war crimes under criteria established at Nuremberg.
The information presented within this
article is not buried (except in mounds of spin) by the guilty.
Anyone with a search engine or a library card can construct a
convincing war crimes case against the United States. Acutely
aware of this reality, Washington has refused to sign on to the
recently proposed International Criminal Court (ICC).
Established by the Rome Statute of the
International Criminal Court on July 17, 1998, the ICC is the
"first ever permanent, treaty based, international criminal
court established to promote the rule of law and ensure that
the gravest international crimes do not go unpunished."
The United States is not happy about the ICC and Human Rights
Watch explains why: "The Bush Administration is attempting
to negotiate bilateral impunity agreements with numerous countries
around the globe. The goal of these agreements is to exempt U.S.
military and civilian personnel from the jurisdiction of the
ICC." The need to protect its soldiers is the common U.S.
justification for not signing on, but an "anonymous top
Bush official," quoted in the Sept. 7, 2002 New York Times,
articulated the real reasons: "The soldiers are like the
capillaries; the top public officials-President Bush, Secretary
Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell-they are at the heart of our concern."
Currently the under secretary of state
for arms control and international security, John Bolton further
explained the U.S. position in 1998. "Much of the media
attention to the American negotiating position on the ICC concentrated
on the risks perceived by the Pentagon to American peacekeepers
stationed around the world," said Bolton, in his role as
head of the American Enterprise Institute. "Our real concern
should be for the president and his top advisers. The definition
of 'war crimes' includes, for example: 'intentionally directing
attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual
civilians not taking direct part in hostilities.'"
Of course, war crimes can be made to
disappear. On April 6, 2003, the New York Times reported of a
post-war U.S. plan aimed at "demilitarizing" the Iraqi
curriculum. "Iraqi textbooks, such as this one for sixth-graders,
tout Iraqi weaponry and war prowess and cite the United States
as an enemy," reporters David B. Ottaway and Joe Stephens
state without irony before explaining that the Bush administration
hopes to "have in place wholesale revisions to textbooks
that have taught a generation of Iraqis to be ready to die for
Saddam Hussein." A few paragraphs into the article, we
learn that the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID)
is "preparing to award education-related contracts worth
an estimated $65 million" with the front-runner being Creative
Associates International of Northwest Washington, the architect
of a similar "educational reform" in Afghanistan.
"One of the most important things [taught] is the bearing
of arms and the constant readiness to fight enemies," said
former National Defense University professor Phebe Marr, presumably
with a straight face. "The definition of the nation and
your identity is very much tied up with the military... All the
way through the texts, you are supposed to be ready to fight
for and defend your country." Imagine that...
Mickey Z.
is the author of The
Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet
and an editor at Wide Angle.
He can be reached at: mzx2@earthlink.net.
Today's
Features
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Robert
Jensen
Self-Determination in Iraq? Then the
US Must Leave
Dr.
Susan Block
The Rape of Iraq
Ron Jacobs
Aiming at Syria: Stop Them Before They Kill Again
Robert
Fisk
The Final Sacking of Baghdad
Col. Dan
Smith
Post-War Iraq: Asking the Right Questions
Ali
Abunimah and Hussein Ibish
A Cycle of Chaos and Confrontation: Misadventures of the NeoCons
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/15
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