(Article changed on February 17, 2014 at 19:14)
Eminent historian Prof. Noam Chomsky of M.I.T., various times voted world's most famous intellectual in international polls, has said over and over again, without provoking much negative outcry, "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."
Principle III states: "The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law."
US Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg trials of Germans in 1945, felt obliged to point out that "these laws are not meant only for Germans, but for the citizens of all nations."
The following lists only the greatest and fully documented crimes of each US president Americans are called to honor on Presidents Day.
TRUMAN:
- Harry Truman, even though the Japanese were already defeated, criminally ordered atom bombs dropped on civilians in two Japanese cities, after the US Air Force had criminally fire bombed sixty other Japanese cities The atom bombing was afterward condemned by Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur.
- Truman criminally had the US Army invade Korea, well after the Japanese surrender had ended the war, overthrowing the democratically elected Korean government the departing Japanese military governor had permitted to be formed (ending forty years of a US non-recognition of Korea but as territory of Imperial Japan).[1]
- Truman criminally cut Korea in two parts and installed in the South a brutal and murderous dictatorship that would massacre nearly 200,000 communists, socialists, unionists, farmers and citizens against the partition of their nation, in the years BEFORE armed forces of the North reunified Korea in five short weeks.
- Truman again ordered a second invasion of Korea that with bombing flat the whole peninsula north and south took the lives of nearly three million Korea men, women and children.
- Truman after witnessing the founding of an independent Vietnam, betrayed US highly decorated ally Ho Chi Minh, and brought back in the French Colonial Army in US ships and financed what would be an eight year French attempt to reconquer their colony which during the war fascist France had administered under the Japanese.
- In Greece Truman betrayed those who fought against the Nazis and aided funded a right wing military takeover that brought subsequent years of deadly dictatorship.
EISENHOWER:
- Dwight Eisenhower had CIA, with bombing, overthrow the first democratically elected and popular president of Guatemala for the benefit of the United Fruit Company which owned or controlled most of the country. (Secretary of State Dulles and his CIA Head brother were both investors in United Fruit.) Massacres went on for decades afterward.
- Eisenhower allowed or ordered the CIA to assassinate the popular Patrice Lumumba first president of an independent Congo, used US planes to help Belgium and other European interests initiate a reign of terror and genocidal confusion has taken more than six million lives and still goes on today. [see relevant CIA opened files]
- Eisenhower ordered a CIA operation led by agent Kermit Roosevelt that with British M16 overthrew Iran's popular democratic government and installed a dictator Shah, who as a lucrative US ally had CIA trained secret police torture and murder until the Iranian people rose up to face death by the thousands to force him to flee the country.
- 'Ike' initiated the bombing of tiny Laos, that would eventually make it the most heavily bombed nation in history.
- Eisenhower had CIA plan an invasion of Cuba.
- In accusing Dwight Eisenhower of criminally forcing the permanent division of Vietnam, with all the subsequent injury and sorrow it brought, by blocking the all Vietnam elections promised the Vietnamese who had defeated the US backed and funded French Colonial Forces, a court would probably quiet naturally have asked why he did this in spite of his knowing (as he publicly admitted in his memoirs that "had the election taken place Ho Chi Minh would have received more than 80 percent of the vote."(Only on his last day in office did Eisenhower reveal the pressure upon him from the military industrial complex that must have brought him to commit these crimes against humanity and advised Americans to beware of the Military Industrial Complex.
KENNEDY:
- John Kennedy facilitated the ascension to power in Congo of the murderous tyrant Mobutu, whose bloody reign lasted for decades.
- Kennedy sent armed advisors into Vietnam and ordered the first bombings of South Vietnam and sent in combat troops. His cabinet and generals okayed the assassination of the no longer useful dictator Diem and replacement by a general.
- Kennedy gave the go ahead for the Eisenhower planed invasion of Cuba that include US bombing with unmarked warplanes, killing more than 900 Cuban men and women defenders.
- Even after bringing the world to the brink of annihilation to remove Soviet missiles in Cuba, afterward he had brother an Attorney General Robert run a program of sabotage and attempted assassination of Cuba's hero Fidel Castro. [see pertinent opened CIA files]
JOHNSON:
- Lyndon Johnson ordered what can only be seen as a genocide in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, second only in magnitude to the Nazi WW II Holocaust. By the time he left office more than three million innocent men, women and children had been killed by as much as a half-million US soldiers (at highest troop level) with air and naval support.
(US Chief Council for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi criminals, General Telford Taylor, told a CBS interviewer in 19 that he would have be glad to prosecute US fliers shot down while bombing Vietnam.)[2]
- Johnson ordered the invasion and subsequent two year occupation of the Dominican Republic to prevent reinstallation of its overthrown and popular President. Thousands of Dominicans died.
- Johnson sent an aircraft carrier and large naval presence to Brazil to back the overthrow of a popular democratic government by Brazilian military and fascists that held repressive power through 1985, a crime against peace by Nuremberg Principles law.
- Under Johnson the CIA has been documented to have been deeply criminally involved in Suharto's massacre of at least a half million Indonesians in the name of anti-communism.
NIXON:
- Richard Nixon continued the genocide in what was French Indochina, heightening the bombing of North Vietnam and secret and horrific high altitude carpet bombing of Cambodia. At a trial of US genocide in Indochina, Nixon would have been charged with overseeing the murder of more than a million innocent citizens in their very own beloved country, as often as not in their own villages and homes.
- A jury of judges could have listened to a self-incriminating tape of Nixon explaining his strategy to his White House Chief of Staff: "I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, "for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry--and he has his hand on the nuclear button" and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace."
- Another taped Nixon instructions to his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger incriminated him in a crime against humanity in Chile: "I want you to make the economy of Chile scream." Nixon would easily have been incriminated in an investigation of CIA homicidal crimes in Chile during his presidency. [see CIA opened files on Nixon]
- In October 1969, the Nixon administration indicated to the Soviet Union that "the madman was loose" when the United States military was ordered to full global war readiness alert (unbeknownst to the majority of the American population), and bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons flew patterns near the Soviet border for three consecutive days.[3]
FORD:
- Gerald Ford, was guilty of giving deadly criminal orders to American officials in Vietnam advising if not also fighting against so called Viet Cong, even though the US Armed Forces had officially been withdrawn. South Vietnam was a criminally created puppet state dictatorship of Washington kept in power by killing enough of its own people as the French had done.
Ford, ordered a belated show-the-flag, after-the-fact, retaliatory air strike that took many Cambodian lives, though the crew of the captured American merchant ship Mayaquez had already been released after having been well fed by Cambodians, who had terribly little food themselves. He is guilty of causing the death of many of the attacking US Marines and airmen as well.
CARTER:
- Jimmy Carter ordered a secret CIA attack on the US friendly government of Afghanistan, initiating what would be thirty-five years of death and destruction that has not yet ended. He instructed the CIA to train, arm and fund fighters of various war lords who were against their girls and women being educated in schools built by the new women-liberating government in Kabul. Carter had the CIA use fundamentalists in a campaign of terror, often executing teachers. These war lords included one famous for throwing acid in the faces of young women 'improperly' attired. Under Carter the CIA involved the secret services of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in this criminally created from outside beginning of civil war. Carter was insidiously convinced by his advisor, David Rockefeller confident, Zbigniew Brzezinski that this CIA effort and involvement would sucker the Soviets into making the mistake of intervening to aid the attacked Kabul government.[4]
- Carter provide large amounts of weapons and ammunition to US backed dictatorship in Nicaragua and El Salvador, knowing it was being used against a persecuted population. Send dictator General Suharto the military equipment including attack bombers that were need for Suharto genocidal invasion of East Timor.
- Carter would have been charged a responsible massacres in General Chun's military dictatorship in South Korea crushing the democracy movement in Kwangju. Paratroopers carried out three days of barbarity killing up to thousand people. The US received two requests for assistance: the citizens committee that had called for democracy requested help in negotiations; General Chun requested the release of 20,000 troops under US command to join the storm troopers. Carter honored the latter request and US naval and air units were deployed in a further show of US support for the military dictatorship of a man who South Korea would years later sentence to death.
- Carter's heartless statement explaining that there was no need to dispense [Nixon promised] monies to Vietnam to repair damage caused by the U.S. nor to apologize to the Vietnamese people, as "the destruction was mutual," would have been seen as self-incrimination for the suffering his nation was obliged to relieve.
- National Security Advisor to President Carter Zbigniew Brzezinski, "began to look more favorably toward Saddam Hussein as a potential counterweight to the Ayatollah Khomeini and as a force to contain Soviet expansionism in the region." A search for documentation might show Carter giving the green light for an invasion of Iran by Saddam Hussain that took place while Carter was still in office.
REAGAN:
- Ronald Reagan ordered the paratrooper and naval invasion of the tiny island state of Grenada that took the lives 94 people, 18 of whom were killed in the accidental bombing of a Grenadian mental hospital. Nearly eight thousand soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines had participated in Operation Urgent Fury, which even US European Allies denounced. The entire population of Grenada was less than 100,000.
- Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya, murdering a hundred Libyans including a daughter of its revolutionary leader Gaddafi, in an attempt to assassinate her father.
- The United States under the Reagan administration was found guilty of war crimes against Nicaragua by the International Court of Justice and ordered to pay reparations. Reagan is also liable for not recognizing the conviction.
- Reagan had US warships bombard villages on the hills around Beiruit, Lebanon at an unknown cost of life.
- Reagan authorized the creation of a so-called Contra army of guerrillas to attack Nicaragua from neighboring bases in Honduras committing atrocity after atrocity against civilians in rural areas.
- Presiding Judge reading the conviction of Guatemalan dictator General Rios Montt, [a favorite of Reagan] "he knew about everything that was going on and he did not stop it, despite having the power to stop it from being carried out." US President Ronald Reagan also had the power, greater power, to stop the massacres being perpetrated by dictator General and President Rios Montt, instead, midway through the eighteen months of horrific massacres, Reagan visited Rios Montt in Guatemala City and praised him as "a man of great personal integrity and commitment. Who was more guilty? There are all kind of documents that implicate Reagan in the genocide Mont was found guilty.
- In El Salvador, despite evidence that by 1984, 65,000 civilians had been murdered by the National Guard and right-wing paramilitary forces, President Reagan's national Bipartisan Commission on Central America justified massive military support.
- Ronald Reagan in his second year in office removed Iraq from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism to ease the transfer of dual-use technology to that country in support of Saddam Hussein's horrific war on Iran. Central Intelligence Agency secretly directed armaments and hi-tech components to Iraq through false fronts and friendly third parties such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait, and they quietly encouraged rogue arms dealers and other private military companies to do the same. The United States actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing U.S. military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that Iraq had the military weaponry required. The United States also provided strategic operational advice to the Iraqis to better use their assets in combat... The CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of non-U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq. Reagan allow the sale of the components to make the gas Saddam used on Iranian troops and civilians.[5]
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