EWR

Richard Maybury


Part Two: Detailed examples of the damage the U.S. government has done in other countries

Why do they hate us?
and
How do we end the war?

Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury

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The U.S. Conquest of the Philippines, 1898-1907

    In the Spanish-American War, the US government took the Philippine Islands, but many, probably most, Filipinos did not want to be part of the US empire. An army was sent to subdue them. Explained the SAN FRANCISCO ARGONAUT, "The islands are enormously rich, but unfortunately, they are infested with Filipinos."1
    The Philippines War became the primary vehicle by which the federal government's policies toward the American Indians in the 19th century would be turned against the outside world in the 20th.
    A soldier from Kansas wrote, the Philippines "won't be pacified until the niggers are killed off like the Indians."2 General Jacob Smith ordered, "I want no prisoners. I wish you to burn and kill; the more you burn and kill the better it will please me."3
    General Jack Smith defined enemy combatants as any male or female "ten years and up."4
    President Theodore Roosevelt's 1902 Brigandage Act defined any group of more than three Filipino men as bandits, and subjected them to 20 years in prison or death.5
    American warships and other heavy weapons were decisive. One account at the time boasted about the victory, saying, "On the side of the rebels the dead had literally fallen in heaps. There were swarms of armed men everywhere in front of the American lines when the fighting began. Tottering old men and little boys, armed only with knives, huddled in the trenches with the native riflemen, and many of these - how many will probably never be known - were shot down along with the more formidable warriors."6
    Historians today estimate the number of Filipino dead at upwards of 200,000.7
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 "We Are Repeating the Mistake We Made in the Philippines 100 Years Ago," by William Loren Katz, History News Network, 5 Mar 04, http://hnn.us/articles/4915.html
2 Ibid.
3 ALMANAC OF AMERICA'S WARS, John S. Bowman, Mallard Press, 1990, p. 101.
4 "We Are Repeating the Mistake We Made in the Philippines 100 Years Ago," by William Loren Katz, History News Network, 5 Mar 04, http://hnn.us/articles/4915.html
5 "A Tale of Two Wars," by Greg Bankoff, Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2000, p. 180.
6 OUR NEW POSSESSIONS, by Trumbull White, W.S. Reeve Publishing Co., Chicago, 1898, p. 294.
7 "A Tale of Two Wars," by Greg Bankoff, Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2000, p. 180.

Salvadoran Civil War: 1979-1992

    Beginning in 1979, El Salvador erupted into civil war between the ruling regime and guerrillas. By July 1981, an estimated 22,000 Salvadorans had been slain.1
    The United Nations estimated 9,250 political murders had occurred in El Salvador in the first half of 1981.2
    Officially, the US military presence in El Salvador was limited to an advisory capacity. In actuality, military and CIA personnel were active on a continuous basis, helping the Salvadoran government, which claimed to be pro-American and anti-Soviet.3
    The CIA and the US military played an essential role in the conception and organization of the security agencies from which death squads emanated. And, CIA surveillance programs supplied the agencies with information on individuals who ended up victims of the death squads.4
    The US administrations of democrat Carter and republican Reagan pumped $6 billion in aid to the Salvadoran regime. By the end of the conflict in 1992, the war had claimed the lives of at least 75,000 Salvadorans.5
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 WARFARE AND ARMED CONFLICTS, by Michael Clodfelter, Vol. II, 1992. p. 1175.
2 Ibid.
3 ROGUE STATE, by William Blum, 2000. p. 156.
4 KILLING HOPE, by William Blum, 2004. p. 354.
5 WARFARE AND ARMED CONFLICTS, by Michael Clodfelter, Vol. II, 1992. p. 1177.

Iraq: Saddam Hussein and his WMDs (weapons of mass destruction)

    In January 1998, President Clinton warned America it must "confront the new hazards of chemical and biological weapons, and the outlaw states, terrorists and organized criminals seeking to acquire them."1
    However, in the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, Washington had backed Saddam Hussein. According to US Senate Committee reports in 1994, private American companies, under application and licensing by the US Department of Commerce, supplied Hussein with chemical and biological weapons ingredients. Hussein was using chemical weapons against Iranians.2
    US officials today speak as if Hussein's WMDs were a tremendous threat. In the 1980s, these officials were quite happy to see him using them to annihilate Iranians.
    Total casualties in the Iran-Iraq War for both sides is estimated by numerous sources to be at least 1,000,000, including 500,000-600,000 Iranians.3
    Iranians had overthrown the US-backed dictator Shah Pahlavi, and were now seen as varmints in need of extermination. Poison gas was just the thing to get the job done.
    Michael Clodfelter reports Iran's casualties in the Iran-Iraq War were at least 450,000 killed, 600,000 wounded, and 45,000 prisoners, with the total killed possibly as high as 730,000, and 1.2 million wounded.4
    US foreign aid to Saddam Hussein was used on Iraqis, too. The poison gas was used to exterminate Iraqi Kurds and Iraqi Shiites.
    Human Rights World Report 2004 estimates that "in the last twenty-five years of Ba`th Party rule the Iraqi government murdered or 'disappeared' some quarter of a million Iraqis, if not more."5
    Following the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the Iraqi and Kuwaiti governments quarreled, and US officials sided with the Kuwaitis. In the resulting Gulf War One, casualties numbered at least 100,000 Iraqis killed, but the count runs as high as 150,000.6
    In the aftermath of this war, during the international embargo against Iraqis that began in 1990, accepted estimates of Iraqi deaths (mostly children under the age of five) run as high as 500,000, from malnutrition and other illnesses resulting from deprivation. By 1999, the UN made much higher estimates: as many as a million Iraqis, mostly children, had died under the US-enforced sanctions.7
    Before the US began backing Saddam Hussein (because he was killing Iranians), oil-rich Iraq was one of the most affluent and modern places in the Mideast. Said U.N. special envoy Prakash Shah, "People were clearly much more prosperous, their lifestyle was much better, their health was clearly much more healthy. You didn't see beggars, for example, on the streets, or either women or children begging on the streets or near the mosque as you do now."8
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 ROGUE STATE, by William Blum, 2000. p. 121.
2 Ibid.
3 WARFARE AND ARMED CONFLICTS, by Michael Clodfelter, Vol. II, 1992. p. 1173.
4 Ibid.
5 WORLD REPORT 2004, "War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention." hrw.org/wr2k4/3.htm
6 WORLD POLITICAL ALMANAC, 3rd Ed. (Facts on File: 1995) by Chris Cook.
7 "Iraq condemns embargo on 9th anniversary of sanctions," CNN, 6-Aug-99.
8 Ibid.

The Shah of Iran — 25 years of US-backed tyranny

    In 1951, the Iranian parliament, under Prime Minister Mohammad Mossedegh, voted to nationalize Iran's sole oil company run by the British. British officials asked the US government to overthrow the Mossedegh regime.
    US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles under President Eisenhower went to work on it.1
    CIA operatives concluded the overthrow in August 1953, initiating 25 years of rule and repression by Shah Pahlavi, who claimed to be pro-US and anti-Soviet.
    Life under the US-backed Shah brought the Iranians "grinding poverty, police terror, and torture. Thousands were executed in the name of fighting communism. Dissent was crushed from the outset of the new regime with American assistance."2
    The Iranian secret police, SAVAK, created under guidance of both the CIA and the government of Israel, spread its tentacles all over the world "to punish Iranian dissidents."3
    One former CIA analyst in 1979 said SAVAK was trained in torture techniques by the Agency. Before that, in 1976, Amnesty International noted that Iran had "the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief."4
    US foreign aid continued to pour into the country during the Shah's rule, most of the funds going to religious leaders paid by the CIA to stay loyal to Washington. Estimates run up to $400 million per year,5 with the money continuing annually until 1977 when President Carter put a stop to it. Two years later, the Shah's regime fell to the Iranian cleric Ayatollah Khomeini.
    Compared to the body counts of other US-backed dictators, the number of deaths under the Shah was not extremely high (16,0006), but the Shah's rule was deep, and downstream effects of the oppression are still felt today. Former NEW YORK TIMES correspondent, Stephen Kinzer in his book, OVERTHROW, says this single US intervention can be viewed as the major cause of the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism that led to the Shah's overthrow and the problems we still face in that part of the world.
    One Iranian diplomat, a half-century after Washington put the Shah in power, writes that none of the upheavals toward the United States might ever have happened if Mosseadegh had not been overthrow in 1953:

It is a reasonable argument that but for the coup, Iran would be a mature democracy. ...
A lot of history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran. The 1953 coup and its consequences [were] the starting point for the political alignments in today's Middle East and inner Asia.7

    The United States is still paying the price for the 1953 intervention.

Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 OVERTHROW, by Stephen Kinzer, 2006. p. 120.
2 KILLING HOPE, by William Blum, 2004. p. 72.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid. 6 DEATH BY GOVERNMENT, by R.J. Rummel, 1994.
7 OVERTHROW, by Stephen Kinzer, 2006. p.203.

Vietnam: More than a million dead

    America's slide into it's Vietnam war began in the 1950s with the US siding with the French, the former colonizers, against Ho Chi Minh and his followers. Ho Chi Minh was fighting for Vietnam's independence from the French, but the US government could only spell that effort one way: some kind of Communism.
    The US forced Ho Chi Minh to the North, and with help of the CIA installed Ngo Dinh Diem in the South.
    Ho Chi Minh was forced to look for help elsewhere, and so turned to Russia and China. Had the US been more favorable to Ho Chi Minh and not sided with the French, the ensuing split of Vietnam into North and South, and the war and casualties to follow, might never have happened.
    As with all wars, atrocities occur in trying to fight an enemy that is hard to fight, or simply hard to find.
    As the US entered the war, the CIA in 1971 implemented what it called the Phoenix Program, an inevitable consequence of fighting a native population. "You never knew who was your friend, who was enemy. Anyone was a potential informer, bomb-thrower, or assassin. Safety demanded that, unless proved otherwise, everyone was to be regarded as the enemy. ..."1
    Vietnamese citizens were rounded up, jailed, tortured and killed either in the process of being arrested or subsequently. CIA officer William Colby's records state that during the period from early 1968 to May 1971, 20,587 alleged Vietcong met their death because of the Phoenix program.2 How many really were Vietcong, no one knows.
    When, in a Congressional Hearing (where that number of deaths of alleged victims was given), Colby was asked if he was certain the [US government operatives] knew a member of the Vietcong from a South Vietnam citizen, Colby replied, "No, Mr. Congressman, I am not."3
    The South Vietnamese government says an estimated 40,0004 deaths can be attributed to the Phoenix Program, the true number may never be known.
    Over the course of the war, it was the Vietnamese who suffered the most. The cost for the US was 57,000 killed in the war, but the cost for the Vietnamese was over 1,100,000 killed.5
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 KILLING HOPE, by William Blum, 2004. p. 131.
2 "U.S. Assistance Program in Vietnam," Hearings before a Subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Operations, 19 July 71, p.189. KILLING HOPE, by William Blum, 2004. p. 131.
3 Ibid.
4 KILLING HOPE, by William Blum, 2004. p. 131.
5 DEATH BY GOVERNMENT, by R.J. Rummel, 1994. p. 291. br>

Cambodia's "Killing Fields"

    For 15 years, Cambodian Prince Sihanouk refused to be an American client. But in the spring of 1970, the US threw him out of office. Immediately, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge forces - the Cambodian Communists -- got into the fray. Cambodians were outraged at the US government and flocked to the Khmer Rouge.
    For the next three years, the US bombed the country with more than a hundred thousand tons of bombs1 causing Cambodia's traditional economy to vanish.2
    In January of 1973, the decade of US war in Vietnam came to an end, but the bombing in Cambodia continued.
    The Nixon administration had insisted the bombings had been to protect US troops n Vietnam, but now the US not only failed to cease the bombings but increased the levels, desperate to keep the Khmer Rouge from coming to power. Under increased pressure, the Nixon administration ended the bombing in August. But by that time, more than two million Cambodians had been made homeless.3
    Events at last pushed Pol Pot into power. Incredibly, his Khmer Rouge inflicted even more misery on the Cambodians.
    From 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge exacted torture and death on Cambodians. By January 1979, the Khmer Rouge were overthrown and pushed to the Western part of Cambodia by Vietnam who responded to ethnic cleansing of Vietnamese in Cambodia.
    In yet another irony, the United States government backed the Khmer Rouge for years with funds that were usually referred to as "non-lethal" or "humanitarian." But the US aid probably just freed up other money to purchase military equipment.4
    The numbers killed over the years following the US-backed coup that removed Prince Sihanouk and put the Khmer Rouge into power, is staggering. In his book DEATH BY GOVERNMENT, historian R.J. Rummel estimates 2 million. This in a field of casualty measures that range from 600,000 to 3 million dead.5
    More stunning is the rate of the killing. Deaths following the US-led "regime change" resulted in nearly one-third of all Cambodians wiped out in cold blood.6
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 KILLING HOPE, by William Blum, 2004. p. 139.
2 ROGUE STATE, by William Blum, 2000. p. 136.
3 KILLING HOPE, by William Blum, 2004. p. 139.
4 ROGUE STATE, by William Blum, 2000. p. 89.
5 DEATH BY GOVERNMENT, by R.J. Rummel, 1994. p. 193.
6 Ibid. p. 194.

Zaire - Republic of Congo: 1961 - 1978

    With the help of the CIA, Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba (a communist) was assassinated in 1961. This turned over control of the area to 30 years of civil war and chaos at the hands of Mobutu Sese Seko.1
    Mobutu ruled the country, which he renamed Zaire, with a level of corruption and cruelty that "shocked even his CIA handlers."2
    Mobutu became a billionaire while the country lived in abject poverty.
    From 1977-78, the Carter administration rushed extensive military aid to Zaire, including airlifting Moroccan troops, to help Mobutu quell rebel uprisings and remain in power.3 President George Bush, Sr. remarked later that Mobutu was "our best friend in Africa."4
    The effects of Mobutu's rule were long lasting and continued well into the 1990s and beyond. Accompanied by US support, the lingering effects of Mobutu rule drained the Congo with more than 40 years of strife, civil war and refugee horrors.
    An International Rescue Committee study revealed 3,800,000 excess deaths in Democratic Republic of Congo from the start of the Second Congo War [1998] through April 30, 2005.5
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 ROGUE STATE, by William Blum, 2000. p. 138.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 International Rescue Committee, "Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo," April-July 2004. intranet.theirc.org/docs/DRC_MortalitySurvey2004_RB_8Dec04.pdf, Executive Summary, Page iii.

The Saudi dictatorship: close allies of Washington

    Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud has ruled Saudi Arabia since the death of his half-brother, King Fahd, in 1995. In 2005, he officially became King Abdullah.
    A strong business and political ally of the United States and ranked as the 7th worst dictator in the world,1 King Abdullah sits as absolute ruler and monarch over a kingdom where phone calls are recorded and mobile phones are banned.2
    By law, all citizens must be Muslim. Saudi women may not appear in public with a man who is not a relative and must cover their faces in public and may not drive.3
    Interviews by Amnesty International of former political prisoners reveal a culture of police brutality, torture and ill treatment in many police stations, prisons and detention centers across the country. Beatings with sticks, electric shocks, cigarette burns and nail-pulling are some of the torture methods often described.4
    Saudi Arabia's criminal justice system facilitates torture. Lack of judicial supervision of arrest and detention, denial of prompt access to relatives and a doctor, and no access to lawyers all leave prisoners extremely vulnerable to abuse. Torture is used to extract confessions and to enforce discipline. Sometimes it is inflicted apparently without reason.5
    To help the Saudi dictatorship stay in control of the oil-rich kingdom, Washington has, over time, sold Saudi Arabia military aircraft (F-15s, AWACS, and UH-60 Blackhawks), air defense weaponry (Patriot and Hawk missiles), armored vehicles (M1A2 Abrams tanks and M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles), and other equipment. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has had a long-term role in military and civilian construction activities in the Kingdom."6
    Of the nineteen hijackers who flew planes onto US soil on 9/11, fifteen were from Saudi Arabia.
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 PARADE MAGAZINE, 22 Jan 06, p. 5.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 SAUDI ARABIA: CULTURE OF BRUTALITY, Torture. 20 Oct 2000.
5 Ibid.
6 U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3584.htm

Egypt's Mubarak: a US ally ruling a country rife with torture

    Imagine a country in the Middle East, backed by the US government, where torture continues for victims of all walks of life. It's not Iraq under Saddam Hussein, it's a chief US ally in the region: Egypt under Hosni Mubarak.
    The most common torture is electric shocks, beatings, suspensions by the wrists or ankles, and various forms of psychological torture, including death threats and threats of rape or sexual abuse of the detainees, or of a female relative. 1
    By no stretch of the imagination is Egypt a free country. Mubarak rules by a military dictatorship where the President has been elected in single-candidate elections for more than fifty years.
    Following the assassination in 1981 of former President Sadat, Mohamed Hosni Mubarak took office and has enjoyed continued and unabridged support from the United States government.
    The US lured Egypt into the 1991 Gulf War with what amounts to a bribe. Reports THE ECONOMIST, " When America was hunting for a military alliance to force Iraq out of Kuwait, Egypt's president joined without hesitation. His reward, after the 1991 Gulf war, was that America, the Gulf states and Europe forgave Egypt around $20 billion worth of debt, and rescheduled nearly as much again."2
    Egypt is hardly a bedrock of human rights. Amnesty International in 2004 reports that prisoners of conscience in Egypt continued to be sentenced to prison terms. Thousands of suspected supporters of banned Islamist groups remained in detention without charge or trial; some had been held for years. Others were serving sentences imposed after grossly unfair trials. Torture and ill treatment of detainees continued to be systematic. Death sentences continued to be passed and carried out by courts no American would consider unbiased or non-political.3
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 Amnesty International Report 2004. http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/egy-summary-eng
2 THE ECONOMIST, "The IMFs Model Pupil," May 1999.
3 Amnesty International Report 2004. http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/egy-summary-eng

The Iron Rule of the US-backed Somozas in Nicaragua

    United States interference in Nicaragua increased in the 1970s and '80s, but began in the 1800s, and became very serious in 1909 when the US government deposed then President Jose Santos Zeleya.
    President Zeleya was considered by many to have embraced free market principles more fully than any other Central American of his era,1 but that did not deter US officials. They were angry at his friendliness toward European powers and his plan to form a new, larger country out of the five Central American countries. This larger country would be better able to stand against US pressures.
    Following Zeleya's rule came nearly a century of interventions by Washington, with a heavy toll in blood and treasure. During the first half of the century, US Marines created the Nicaraguan National Guard headed by General Anastasio Somoza Garcia, Sr.
    The Somozas established family rule for 43 years, and maintained it with help from Washington. The Nicaraguan Guardsmen passed their time with "martial law, rape, torture, murder of the opposition, and massacres of peasants, as well as less violent pursuits such as robbery, extortion, contraband, running brothels and other government functions."2
    President Franklin Roosevelt once said, "Somoza may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch."
    During their rule, the Somoza clan claimed the lion's share of Nicaragua's land and businesses. When Somoza, Jr. was overthrown in 1979, he fled into exile, arriving in Miami worth an admitted $100 million, later placed by US intelligence at $900 million.3
    The cost in lives numbered at least 30,0004 during the Sandinista Rebellion (1972-79) and 30,0005 during the ensuing Contra Rebellion (1981-90).
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 Stephen Kinzer, OVERTHROW, 2006. p. 100.
2 KILLING HOPE, by William Blum, 2004. p. 290.
3 Ibid.
4 ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, 15th edition, 1992 printing.
5 SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute).

Guatemala's torture and murder, supported and funded by the US government

    In 1954, the CIA with a group of Guatemalans overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, initiating 40 years of military-government death squads, torture, disappearances, mass executions and unimaginable cruelty, totaling more than 200,000 victims.1
    The US incursion was based on fear of the proverbial Soviet takeover, when in fact the Soviets had such little interest they did not even have diplomatic relations with Guatemala at the time.
    The real problem was the fact Arbenz had taken over some of the cultivated lands of a US firm, United Fruit Company, which had extremely close ties to American power elite.2
    Torture was routine during the US and CIA-backed regimes.
    "One method of torture consisted of putting a hood filled with insecticide over the head of the victim; there was also electric shock-to the genital area is the most effective; in those days it was administered by using military field telephones hooked up to small generators; the United States supplied the equipment and the instructions for use to several countries, including South Vietnam..."3
    The US provided planes and enough military equipment to patrol with .50-calibre machine guns, napalm and air-to-ground 5-inch rockets, for use against guerrillas throughout Guatemala.4
    Right-wing terrorists machine-gunned people and houses in full light of day. Any civilian with a vaguely leftist (communist) association, or moderately critical of the new government was a target; relatives of victims guilty of kinship, even common criminals, were taken from jails and shot.5
    This was what the citizens of Guatemala faced, knowing it was fully supported and funded by the US government.
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 ROGUE STATE, by William Blum, 2000. p. 130. Also, DETERRING DEMOCRACY, by Norm Chomsky, 1991.
2 ROGUE STATE, by William Blum, 2000. p. 131.
3 KILLING HOPE, by William Blum, 2004. p. 232.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.

Chiang Kai-Shek — Washington sides with "the world's worst leadership"

    At the close of World War II, the US intervened in China's civil war, taking sides with Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists against Mao Tse-tung's Communists, even though the latter had been a much closer ally of the US during World War II.1
    Chiang had more support from the U.S. than from his own people, who hated him.2 By 1949, US aid to the Nationalists totaled $2 billion in cash and $1 billion in military hardware, but Chiang's dynasty was collapsing.
    The Chinese people at large were hostile to Chiang's "tyranny, his wanton cruelty, and the extraordinary corruption and decadence,"3 leaving American political and military leaders with no illusions about the nature of Chiang's rule. General David Barr, head of US Military Mission in China, said Chiang's Nationalist forces were under "the world's worse leadership."4
    Total deaths of helpless people attributed to Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists from the earliest years to their final defeat on the mainland, range from a low of 6 million to a high of 18 million, probably around 10 million.5
    In the late 1940s, the tyranny of the US-backed Chiang led to a rebellion in which Mao's Tse-tung's Soviet-inspired communists took over, and they went on to murder an additional 37.8 million.6
    Your tax dollars at work.
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 ROGUE STATE, by William Blum, 2000. p. 126.
2 KILLING HOPE, by William Blum, 2004. p. 23.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 DEATH BY GOVERNMENT, R.J. Rummel, Transaction Publishers, 1997, p. 134.
6 Ibid. p. 8.

Emperor Halie Selassie, with the help of Washington, creates permanent chaos in Ethiopia

    Ethiopian Emperor Halie Selassie took the throne in the 1930s with absolute rule, until an uprising threw him out in 1974.
    During the latter part of Selassie's reign, Washington made Ethiopia the leading African beneficiary of US economic and military aid.1
    In 1978, US foreign aid to Ethiopia was suspended after growing criticism of human rights violations. But the US-backed regime had made such a mess of the place that even today, Ethiopia is one of the most chaotic and deadly places in the world.
    In December 2001, the Oromia Support Group, which attempts to raise awareness of human rights abuses in Ethiopia, reported 2,850 extra-judicial killings and 847 disappearances of civilians suspected of supporting groups opposing the government. Most were Oromo people. Thousands of civilians were imprisoned. Torture and rape of prisoners was commonplace, especially in secret detention centers, whose existence was denied by the government.2
    In 1991, the Washington Post reported that about "400,000 people have died in fighting in Eritrea and other parts of Ethiopia in recent years, and 1 million perished across that land because of famine. About 800,000 Eritrean refugees are scattered around the world."3
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL USA.
2 OSG (Oromia Support Group) Press Release, December 2001. http://www.oromo.org/osg/pr35.htm
3 "A Victory Tempered By Sorrow; D.C. Area Eritreans Express Joy, Pain", Washington Post, 26 May 91.

Uzbekistan's Karimov in 2005: another US ally who commits mass murder

    Uzbekistan Dictator, Islam Karimov, in power since 1990, presented the world in May of 2005 with the worst massacre of demonstrators since Tiananmen Square. The Uzbek regime was an ally of Washington.
    Until the massacre, the worst excesses of Karimov's regime had been the torture rooms of his prisons, but on May 25, 2005 he ordered a mass killing in the city of Andijan when 23 businessmen held in prison were freed by their supporters who assembled in the main square.
    Close to 10,000 demonstrators gathered as tanks rolled through the square, firing indiscriminately, and snipers picked off their victims from convenient buildings. Soldiers shot some of the wounded dead. As many as 1,000 were killed.1
     A 2003 Uzbekistani law had made Karimov and all members of his family immune from prosecution forever.2
    Following the incident, Washington made a token call for an international probe, but basically expressed its horror by imposing no sanctions of any kind on Uzbekistan.
    Reported the ECONOMIST, "On few, if any, occasions since the cold war has so little been done by so many in the face of such atrocity."3
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 THE ECONOMIST, 27 Aug 05.
2 PARADE MAGAZINE, 22 Jan 06, p. 5.
3 THE ECONOMIST, 27 Aug 05.

Washington supported the embezzler and mass murderer Suharto in Indonesia, 1967 to 1998

    Maj. Gen. Haji Mohammad Suharto ruled from 1967 to 1998, during which time he embezzled more money than any other world leader in history. Estimates range from $15 billion to $35 billion.1 Gen. Suharto enjoyed support of the U.S. government, which claimed his regime was an essential bastion against the spread of communism.2
    In one of the worst massacres of the century, the US government played a significant role by supplying names of thousands of suspected Communists to the Indonesian army, which "hunted down the leftists and killed them," all part of a bloodletting that took an estimated 250,000 lives.3
    Later, Washington stood virtually alone in the world with its consistent support of Indonesia's claim to East Timor, and downplayed the slaughter, while continuing to supply military hardware and training to carry out the job.4
    Despite denials, Washington continued military aid "up to and including the period of extensive massacres of pro-independence Timorese in 1999 by Indonesian soldiers and their militia allies."5
    As late as 1995, a senior Clinton administration official said: "He's our kind of guy."6 This was after Indonesian troops had killed as many as 200,000 Timorese out of a population of between 600,000 and 700,000.7 Michael Clodfelter (Warfare and Armed Conflicts) reports as many as 140,000 Timorese were dead by 1984.8
    In the decades prior to that, hundreds of thousands of alleged Indonesian communists were killed. Estimates range from 500,000 to one million, and US officials had no objection to that, either.9

"Armed with wide-bladed knives called parangs, Moslem bands crept at night into the homes of communists, killing entire families. ... Travelers ... tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies." —Time magazine, Dec. 1951.10

"Nearly 100 Communists, or suspected Communists, were herded into the town's botanical garden and mowed down with a machine gun ... the head that had belonged to the school principal, a P.K.I. member, was stuck on a pole and paraded among his former pupils, convened in special assembly." —NY Times, May 1966.11


    A US State Department expert on Indonesia said in 1965, "No one cared, as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered. No one was getting worked up about it."12
    It is important to note the use of the words "alleged" and "suspected." If you were Indonesian, and you said something that led a bystander to think you might be a communist, you were killed.
    More of your tax dollars at work.

Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 TRANSPARENCY INTERNATIONAL, 25 Mar 05.
2 "Report: U.S. Arms Helped Indonesia," Washington Post, 25 Jan 06.
3 "Ex-agents say CIA compiled death lists for Indonesians," San Francisco Examiner, 20 May 90.
4 ROGUE STATE, by William Blum, 2000. p. 147.
5 Allan Nairn, "US Complicity in Timor," The Nation, 27 Sep 99, p.5-6, "U.S. trained butchers of Timor," The Observer (London), 19 Sep 99. ROGUE STATE, by William Blum, p. 147.
6 NEW YORK TIMES, 31 Oct 95, p. 3. ROGUE STATE, by William Blum, p. 147.
7 Los Angeles Times, 13 Oct 89, p. A6. KILLING HOPE, William Blum, p. 197.
8 WARFARE AND ARMED CONFLICTS, Vol II, 1990-1991, by Michael Clodfelter, p. 1140.
9 "Widely accepted range; see, e.g., various Amnesty International report on Indonesia published in the 1970s." KILLING HOPE, William Blum, 2004. p. 193.
10 KILLING HOPE, William Blum, 2004. p. 193.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid. p. 194.

U.S. Support for Joseph Stalin
and the Kremlin, 1941-1945

    In 1917, the Russian government was taken over by the Soviet Socialists, who established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. After consolidating their power in Russia, the Soviet Socialists went on to overrun and absorb surrounding areas, with the goal of eventually conquering the whole world.
    In 1924, Joseph Stalin took over the Kremlin. He was probably the most evil person in history, responsible for the murder of more than 42,000,000.1
    The Soviet Socialists as a whole eventually murdered more than 61,000,000.2 In Ukraine in 1932-33, for instance, about five million men, women, children and infants were deliberately deprived of food until, emaciated, they dropped from hunger. Whole families were found in their homes, starved to death.3
    In 1941, the German army under Adolph Hitler attacked the Soviet Union with the intention of removing Stalin and destroying this most evil government in history.
    On June 24, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced he was entering the war by siding with the Soviet regime.4 The reasoning was that Hitler was worse than Stalin — despite the fact that Hitler's eventual murder toll was a third that of the Soviet Socialists.5
    The supply of US weapons, supplies and ammunition to the Soviet Socialists continued for the rest of the war, and was highly instrumental in helping Stalin's forces defeat the Germans and hold the Soviet empire intact. The Soviet government was able to take all of eastern Europe, thus expanding its empire further, and launch the Cold War, in which the whole world lived in fear of nuclear annihilation for more than a half-century.
    This is not to whitewash Hitler, or paint him as a nice guy. It's only to say, on the basis of the objective evidence — the body counts —  Stalin was much worse than Hitler, and President Roosevelt sided with Stalin.
    In my opinion, when Hitler stabbed Stalin the back, attacking Russia on June 22, 1941, that was the solution to World War II (and to the subsequent nuclear Cold War). The US government should have stood aside and let the two cutthroats demolish each other on the plains of eastern Europe.
    Worst case, one of these Satan's henchmen would have been left standing, and he would have been much easier to beat in his greatly weakened condition.
    To strengthen Stalin —  who, again, on the basis of the objective evidence, was probably the most evil person in history — was insane.
    The extent of this insanity can been seen in Operation Keelhaul. During World War II, thousands of Soviet rebels had joined the Germans in hopes of destroying the Soviet government. In Washington's Operation Keelhaul at the end of the war, captured Soviet rebels in German uniforms were not set free; they were handed over to Soviet authorities,6 which helped keep Stalin in power.
    Total Soviet rebels turned over to Stalin by Washington and its allies, to be executed or imprisoned, are estimated at two million.7
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Maybury
1 DEATH BY GOVERNMENT, R.J. Rummel, Transaction Publishers, 1997, pages 8 and 79.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., p. 80.
4 WORLD WAR II DAY BY DAY, by Donald Sommerville, Dorset Press, 1989, p. 86.
5 DEATH BY GOVERNMENT, R.J. Rummel, Transaction Publishers, 1997, p. 4.
6 Wall Street Journal, 29 Sep 87, p. 28.
7 THE FAILURE OF AMERICA'S FOREIGN WARS, edited by Richard Ebeling and Jacob Hornberger, The Future of Freedom Foundation, Fairfax, VA, 1996, p. 211.
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