The
Executive Branch of the U.S. Government
World's Most Evil and Lawless Institution?
Executive Branch leaders have killed, wounded and made homeless well over 20 million human beings in the last 50 years, mostly civilians.
By Fred Branfman
America has a secret. It is not discussed in polite company or at the dinner tables of the powerful, rich and famous.
World's Most Evil and Lawless Institution?
Executive Branch leaders have killed, wounded and made homeless well over 20 million human beings in the last 50 years, mostly civilians.
By Fred Branfman
America has a secret. It is not discussed in polite company or at the dinner tables of the powerful, rich and famous.
Parents do
not teach it to their children. Best-selling authors do not
write about it. Politicians and government officials ignore it.
Intellectuals avoid it. High school and college textbooks do not
refer to it.
TV pundits do not comment on it. Teachers do not
teach it. Journalists from the nation's most highly regarded TV
news shows, newspapers and magazines, do not report it.
Columnists do not opine about it. Editorial writers do not
editorialize about it. Religious leaders do not sermonize about
it. Think tanks and professors do not study it. Lawyers do not
litigate it and judges do not rule on it.
The
courageous few who do not keep this secret, who try to break
through to their fellow citizens about it, are marginalized and
ignored by society at large.
To begin
to understand the magnitude of this secret, imagine that you get
into your car in New York City, and set out for a drive south,
staying overnight in Washington DC, a four-hour drive. As you
leave, you look out your window to the left and see a row of
bodies, laid end to end, running alongside you all the way to
DC.
You spend
the night there, and set out early the next morning for
Charleston, South Carolina, an 11-hour drive. Again, looking out
your window, you see the line of bodies continues, hour after
hour. You are struck that most are middle-aged or older men and
women, younger women, or children. You arrive in Charleston,
check into your hotel, have a good meal, and get up early the
next morning to drive to Miami, another 12-hour drive. And once
again, hour after hour, the line of bodies continues, all the
way to your destination.
If you can
imagine such a drive you can begin to get a feeling for former
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's mid-range estimate of 1.2
million civilians killed by U.S. firepower in Vietnam. (The U.S.
Senate Refugee Committee estimated 430,000 civilian dead at the
end of the war. Later estimates as more information has become
available, e.g. by Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That
Moves, put
[4] the number as high as 2
million.)
And the
secret that is never discussed is far larger. To the 430,000 to
2 million civilians killed in Vietnam must be added those killed
in Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq and many other nations (see
below), all those wounded and maimed for life, and the many
millions more forced to leave villages in which their families
had lived for centuries to become penniless refugees. All told,
U.S. Executive Branch leaders – Democrat and Republicans,
conservative and liberal—have killed wounded and made homeless
well over 20 million human beings in the last 50 years, mostly
civilians.
U.S.
leaders have never acknowledged their responsibility for ruining
so many lives, let alone apologized or made proper amends to the
survivors. Those responsible have not been punished, but
rewarded. The memory of it has been erased from national
consciousness, as U.S. leaders endlessly declare their nation’s,
and their own, goodness. Millions of civilian lives swept under
the rug, forgotten, as if this mass murder and maiming, the
destruction of countless homes and villages, this epic violation
of basic human decency—and laws protecting civilians in time of
war which U.S. leaders have promised to observe—never happened.
Over a
million innocent human lives in Vietnam alone. Grandparents,
parents and children. Decent, hard-working people, each with a
name, a face, and loved ones; people with dreams and hopes, and
as much of a right to life as you or I. Forgotten. Over one
million civilians dead, over 10 million wounded and made
homeless in Vietnam alone, forgotten. And particularly
remarkable is how this has happened. Totalitarian regimes go to
great lengths—strict censorship, prison for those violating
it—to cover up their leaders' crimes. But in America, the
information is available. All that is needed to keep America’s
secret is to simply ignore it.
Americans
keep this secret because facing it openly would upend our most
basic understandings about our nation and its leaders. A serious
public discussion of it would reveal, for example, that we
cannot trust Executive Branch leaders’ human decency, words, or
judgment. And more troubling, acknowledging it would mean
admitting to ourselves that we have been misleading our own
children, that our silence has robbed them of the truth of their
history and made it more likely that future leaders will
continue to commit acts that stain the very soul of America.
It is a
matter of indisputable fact that the U.S. Executive Branch has
over the past 50 years been responsible for bombing, shooting,
burning alive with napalm, blowing up with cluster bombs,
burying alive with 500-pound bombs, leveling homes and villages,
torturing, assassinating and incarcerating without evidence more
innocent civilians in more nations over a longer period of time
than any other government on earth today.
It is also
undeniable that it has committed countless acts, as no less an
authority than U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry noted
[5] in regard to Vietnam,
which have been "contrary to the laws of the Geneva Convention,
and... ordered as established policies from the top down," and
that "the men who ordered this are war criminals."
And its
crimes against humanity have continued since Vietnam. Thirty
years later, a Nuremberg prosecutor speaking of the U.S.
invasion of Iraq stated
[6] that a "prima facie case
can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme
crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of aggression
against a sovereign nation." And as you read these words the
U.S. Executive Branch is adding to it crimes, as it conducts
secret drone and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) ground
assassinations of individuals without due process.
The
rationalizations by which even decent human beings allow
themselves to ignore their leaders’ mass murder, e.g. that
“these things always happen in war,” or “it’s the other side’s
fault,” are just that: rationalizations that allow us to avoid
our secret shame. Human civilization, through its body of
international law, has defined which acts are both immoral and
illegal even in times of war. And a citizen’s first
responsibility is to oppose his or her own government’s crimes,
not those of others.
Although
America's media, intellectual, political and economic elites
turn their heads pretending they just don't see U.S. leaders'
responsibility for mass murder, dozens of dedicated and
honorable scholars and activists led by Noam Chomsky have spent
years of their lives meticulously documenting it.
Readers
wishing to flesh out the overview below are directed to five
important recent books: Kill Anything That Moves, by
Nick Turse, about Vietnam; Dirty Wars (and a film), by
Jeremy Scahill, about Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia; The
Deaths of Others, by John Tirman, covering Korea, Vietnam,
Iraq and Afghanistan; The Untold History of the U.S. by
Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick (and a
10-part Showtime documentary) discussing U.S. policy from World
War II to the present; and Drone Warfare by
Medea Benjamin.Flyboys, by James Bradley, also offers
invaluable information on U.S. aerial mass murder of civilians
in World War II, as does The Korean War: A History by
Bruce Cumings on U.S. Executive massacres of civilians in Korea.
Such careful work has been supplemented by numerous reports from
such organizations as Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch.
Until now,
the issue of U.S. Executive Branch leaders' disregard for
innocent human life has mainly concerned their treatment of
"non-people" abroad. But as the sinews of a surveillance state
and police-state infrastructure have been steadily strengthened
at home since 9/11, an Executive Branch mentality that has been
so indifferent to innocent human life abroad will increasingly
threaten increasing numbers of Americans in coming years.
No honest
human being can deny what the facts below reveal about the U.S.
Executive's institutional evil and lawlessness. The only serious
question is what we are willing to do about it.
Can Americans Trust the U.S. Executive Branch?
Columnist
George Will recently summarized
[7] the fundamental issue
underlying not only Edward Snowden's recent whistleblowing, but
all controversies about U.S. Executive Branch behavior: "The
problem is we're using technologies of information-gathering
that didn't exist 20 years ago... and they require reposing
extraordinary trust in the Executive Branch of government."
Former
Bush aide Matthew Dowd chimed in on the same talk show, saying
"what they're saying is trust us, trust us." Trust is indeed the
only basis for supporting a U.S. Executive which hides its
activities from its own citizens.
But can we
trust the Executive’s Branch’s commitment to truth, law and
democracy, or even basic human decency? Judging its actions, not
words, over the past 50 years is the key to deciding this issue.
And we might begin with some basic questions:
How would
you regard the leaders of a foreign power who sent machines of
war that suddenly appeared over your home, dropped bombs which
killed dozens of your neighbors and your infant daughter,
wounded your teenage son, destroyed your home, and then forced
you into a refugee camp where your older daughter had to
prostitute herself to foreigners in order to support you, your
wife and legless son? (U.S. Executive Branch officials created
over 10 million refugees in South Vietnam.)
What would
you think of foreign leaders who occupied your country,
disbanded the military and police, and you found yourself at the
mercy of marauding gangs who one day kidnapped your uncle and
cousin, tortured them with drills, and then left their mangled
bodies in a garbage dump? (U.S. Executive Branch officials
occupied Iraq, disbanded the police, and failed to provide law
and order as legally required of Occupying Powers.)
How would
you view a foreign power which bombed you for five and a half
years, forced you and your family to live in caves and holes
like animals, burned and buried alive countless of your
neighbors, and then one day blinded you in a bombing raid that
leveled your ancestral village, where you had honored your
ancestors and had hoped after your death to be remembered by
your offspring? (U.S. Executive Branch leaders massively bombed
civilian targets in Laos for nine years, Cambodia for four
years.)
What would
you think of foreign assassins whom as Jeremy Scahill reports
in Dirty Wars, broke into your house at 3:30am as a
dance was coming to an end, shot your brother and his 15-year
old son, then shot another of your brothers and three women
relatives (the mothers of 16 children) denied medical help to
your brother and 18-year-old daughter so that they slowly bled
to death before your eyes, then dug the bullets out of the
women's bodies to cover up their crimes, hauled you off to
prison, and for months thereafter claimed they were acting in
self-defense? And how would you feel toward the leaders of the
nation that had fielded not only these JSOC assassins but
thousands more, who were conducting similar secret and lawless
assassinations of unarmed suspects while covering up their
crimes in many other countries around the world? (3)
How would
you view the foreign leaders responsible right now for drone
attacks against you if you lived in northwest Pakistan where, a
Stanford/NYU study reported
[8]after a visit there,
"hovering drones have traumatized millions living in these
areas. Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in
northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles and public spaces
without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women and
children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among
civilian communities. Those living under drones have to face the
constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment,
and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect
themselves."
These are
not rhetorical questions. Every one of these acts, and countless
more, have been committed by the U.S. Executive Branch over the
past 50 years, and will continue indefinitely until it is
transformed. If we judge them by their actions, not words, we
must face the following facts:
--
The U.S. Executive Branch killed in Vietnam from a U.S. Senate
Refugee Subcommittee estimated 415,000 civilians to the 1.2
million civilians later estimated by Robert McNamara, to the two
million civilians estimated
[9] by Nick Turse. And it
wounded at least 1,050,000 civilians and refugeed at least
11,368,000, according to the Refugee subcommittee (3);
assassinated through its Phoenix
Program [10] an
officially estimated 26,000 civilians, and imprisoned and
tortured 34,000 more, on unproven grounds that they were
"Vietcong cadre"; created
an estimated 800,000-1.3 million war orphans and 1 million war
widows [9]; and after
the war ended left behind Agent Orange poisons, unexploded
cluster bombs, and landmines, creating an estimated 150,000
deformed [11] Vietnamese
children; and killing and maiming 42,000
peacetime victims [12]
-- The
U.S. Executive has, in Laos, conducted nine years of bombing
which has been estimated
[13]by Laos' National
Regulatory Authority to have killed and wounded a minimum of
30,000 civilians by bombing from 1964-'73, and another 20,000
since then from the unexploded cluster bombs it left behind. It
also created over 50,000 refugees after it had leveled
[14] the 700-year-old
civilization on the Plain of Jars.
-- The
U.S. Executive has, in Cambodia, killed and wounded tens of
thousands of civilians by carpet-bombing villages from 1969-'75.
All told, after Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger secretly
bombed and invaded Cambodia, waging a war that made the U.S.
Executive responsible for casualties on all sides, the U.S.
Senate Refugee Subcommittee estimated that 450,000 persons had
been killed and wounded, and 3,990,000 made refugees.
(4)Historian Michael Clodfelter has estimated that 600,000
Cambodian civilians died from the bombing. (5)
-- The
U.S. Executive under Bill Clinton in Iraq, John Tirman reports
in The Deaths of Others, imposed an embargo so severe
that "UNICEF estimated that 500,000 children under five years of
age had died as a result of the war and sanctions from
malnutrition, diseases for which cures were available but
medicine in Iraq was not, and poor health at birth due to
prenatal effects on mothers." (6) Dennis Halliday, Assistant UN
Secretary General,declared
[15] that "I had been
instructed to implement a (sanctions) policy that has
effectively killed over a million individuals."
-- And
after invading Iraq in 2003, the Executive under George W. Bush,
as the Occupying Power, was legally responsible for maintaining
law and order. Its war was also an aggressive war as outlawed at
Nuremberg. It thus bears both the moral and legal responsibility
for the deaths of more than130
[16],000
[16]Iraqis(Iraq Body Count)
to 654,965
[17] (Lancet
[17] Scientific Journal) to 1,220,580
[18] (Opinion Research
Business), hundreds of thousands more wounded, and more than
officially estimated 5 million refugees.
-- The
Executive has, in Afghanistan, conducted thousands of night
raids familiar to viewers of World War II Gestapo movies –
killing over 1500 civilians in 6282 raids in 10 months from 2010
to early 2011 alone, as revealed
[19] by investigative
reporter Gareth Porter. They have also conducted numerous
bombing strikes and supported a corrupt regime which has stolen
billions of dollars while their fellow citizens died for lack of
healthcare and food.
--The
Executive has, in Pakistan and Yemen, killed an estimated 2,800-4,000
persons [20] from drone
strikes, only 73
[21] of whom it has named.
Most were killed in “signature strikes” in which the victims’
names were unknown, and who in no way threatened the United
States.
-- Also,
over the past 50 years, the U.S. Executive Branch bears a major
responsibility for massive death and torture throughout Central
and Latin America and in Africa. Church, human rights and others
estimate that U.S.-installed, trained, equipped and advised
death squads in El Salvador and Contras in Nicaragua killed well
over 35,000
[22] and 30,000
[23] persons respectively.
The U.S.-supported Rios Montt regime in Guatemala killed an
estimated 200,000
[24]. The U.S.-supported
coup in Chile brought to power a regime that killed an
estimated 3,200-15,000
[25] political opponents and
tortured another 30,000
[26]. U.S. support for
Indonesian government genocide in East Timor helped kill over 200,000
persons [27]. U.S.
support for terrorists led by Jonas Savimbi in Angola helped
kill an estimated 1.2 million persons and displaced another 1.5
million. (7)
And how
much can you trust the decency of a US. Executive that treats
these millions of human beings as mere nameless, faceless
"collateral damage" at best, direct targets at worst, as human
garbage barely worthy of mention, as "non-people" as Noam
Chomsky has observed?
We almost
never ask such questions in this country, never try to put
ourselves in the shoes of the tens of millions of victims of our
leaders' war-making, because doing so confronts us with a grave
dilemma. On the one hand, if we would say these acts are evil if
done to ourselves they are obviously also evil when done to
others. But admitting that would require most of us to challenge
our most basic beliefs about this nation and its leadership. And
if we are members of our political, intellectual, media,
government and private sector elites, it would threaten our jobs
and livelihoods.
We are
divided. The honest part of ourselves knows there is only one
word that can adequately describe the U.S. Executive Branch’s
indifference to non-American life. It is not a word to be used
lightly, for overuse robs it of its power. But when appropriate,
failing to use it is an act of moral cowardice that assures its
continuation. That word is evil.
If we
would regard such acts as evil if done to us, they are equally
evil if done to others. This is what we teach our children when
we teach them the Golden Rule or that America is a nation of
laws, not men. It means, simply, that if needlessly ruining the
lives of the innocent is evil, the U.S. Executive Branch is the
most evil and lawless institution on the face of the Earth
today, cannot be trusted, and poses a clear and present danger
to countless innocents abroad and democracy at home.
We speak
of “institutional evil” here because the greatest evils of our
time are conducted by often personally decent, even idealistic,
men and women. It is not necessary to be hate-filled or
personally violent for an American to commit evil today. One
need only be part of, or support the police, intelligence and
military activities of the U.S. Executive Branch.
But the
practical part of ourselves, the part that needs to make a
living and maintain emotional equilibrium, leads us to ignore
the mass evil our leaders engage in. It is so much easier. For
accepting this truth means accepting that our leaders are not
good and decent people; that JSOC commandos are not "heroes" but
rather lawless assassins whose very existence shames us all;
that we are not being protected, but endangered by leaders who
are turning hundreds of millions of Muslims against us; that we
must assume that Executive officials are right now secretly
engaging in a wide variety of illegal and immoral activities
that would shock and disgust us if they were revealed; and that
we cannot believe a word they say when these abuses are revealed
as they so regularly engage in secrecy and stonewalling, lying
when discovered, covering up when the lie is revealed, and
claiming it was an aberration and/or blaming it on a subordinate
when the coverup fails. (8)
The issue
of trust is key since it is the only basis upon which U.S.
citizens can support secret Executive actions about which they
are not informed. And the issue of trust is ultimately a moral,
not legal judgment. We acknowledge that the citizen actually has
a moral obligation to resist an unjust law promulgated by an
immoral government, whether in the Soviet Union, South Africa,
or, as we acknowledge when we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s
birthday, in America.
Even when
the law is used by the likes of
David [28]Ignatius
[28],David
Brooks [29],Tom
Brokaw [30], and Nancy
Pelosi [31] and to
attack Edward Snowden, their key unstated assumption is that
they trust the U.S. Executive since they know little more about
its secret activities than anyone else. The moral dividing line
is clear. Those indifferent to innocent human life and democracy
are less angry at Executive mass murder and threats to democracy
than at those who reveal this wrongdoing.
Although
the principal responsibility for the millions of lives U.S.
leaders have ruined lies with the Executive, most of America's
other organs of power have also participated in keeping the
screams of America's victims from reaching the public.
Republicans and conservatives have not only shown no concern for
America's innocent victims, but heartlessly cheered on its
leaders' torment of the innocent.
Bush U.N.
Ambassador John Bolton, when asked by a New York Times
writer about U.S. responsibility to aid the millions of refugees
its invasion of Iraq had created,
responded [32] that the
refugees had “nothing to do with our overthrow of Saddam. Our
obligation was to give them new institutions and provide
security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we
have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.
Helping the refugees flies in the face of received logic. You
don’t want to encourage the refugees to stay.”
But
particularly striking has been the behavior of centrists and
liberals who know full well the horrors U.S. Executive Branch
leaders have inflicted upon the innocent, espouse humanitarian
values, but simply look the other way. The Times, for
example, quite appropriately ran photos and small bios
humanizing each of the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on 9/11.
But its editors have made a conscious decision not to humanize
virtually any of the millions of non-Americans U.S. leaders have
killed abroad, as has the rest of the U.S. mass media.
David
Petraeus became Afghanistan commander on July 4, 2010, and
proceeded to loosen General McChrystal’s rules
of engagement, [33] triple bombing
[34] and night
[35] raids and invade
southern Afghanistan, leading to a huge increase in U.S. and
Taliban violence against civilians. Within months, the Red Cross
said conditions for civilians were theworst
[36]they’d been for 30
years.
A Pakistan
newspaper reported
[37] that things were so bad
at the Kandahar Mirwais hospital that civilian casualties
“overwhelm the limited bed space. On some days, the floor is red
with blood” and that “the overflow at
Kandahar’s Mirwais hospital has forced hundreds of sick and
injured Afghans to cross the border into Pakistan every day to
seek medical treatment.” It also noted that “many Afghans are
unable to get to basic healthcare” because despite hundreds of
billions in U.S. spending on war, thirty years of conflict have
left the country’s health care system struggling to cope.”
The
Special Representative to Afghanistan of close ally Great
Britain said
[38] “David Petraeus should
be ashamed of himself ... He has increased the violence, trebled
the number of special forces raids and there has been a lot more
rather regrettable boasting from the military about the body
count," and that “Petraeus has ignored his own principles of
counter-insurgency which speaks of politics being the
predominant factor in dealing with an insurgency."
But none
of this reached the American public. No stories of visits to
Kandahar Hospital, no interviews with Britain’s Special
Representative appeared in the U.S. mass media. Instead, dozens
of U.S. journalists visiting Afghanistan praised General
Petraeus, and presented his sanitized version of a war in which
only “militants” are killed. Petraeus’ greatest accomplishment,Time magazine
columnist Joe Klein informed
[39] his readers after a
Petraeus-managed trip to Afghanistan, was to turn the U. S. army
into a “learning institution.”
And
Democratic Party politicians, while at least voicing concern for
those in need in this nation and acting honorably for a few
brief moments at the end of the Indochina war, have funded the
Executive's killing abroad and limited their own concerns to the
wellbeing of America's soldiers. (9)
In 1967,
Chomsky wrote a landmark essay
[40] titled "The
Responsibility of Intellectuals," arguing that public
intellectuals — who had the time, opportunity and freedom to
study the pain its leaders inflicted upon the innocent, and to
convey it to the larger public—had a special responsibility to
do so.
But his
argument, by and large, has fallen upon deaf ears, particularly
since Vietnam. Thousands of intellectuals, members of Congress,
pundits, academics and journalists have turned a blind eye to
U.S. mass murder. And many even turned into "liberal hawks",
supporting war against Iraq. The likes of the Washington
Post’s Richard Cohen, the N.Y. Times’ Thomas
Friedman,Slate’s Christopher Hitchens, The New Republic’s Leon
Wieseltier, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, and many others not only urged
a war that brought a living hell to Iraq, but being liberals,
justified it on the grounds that it would help the Iraqi people.
(See “Bush’s
Useful Idiots, [41]” by
Tony Judt.)
They even
denigrated the millions of decent and honorable Americans who
marched to try and head off the Iraq war. It is so easy when
making a good living and having access to “official sources” to
see oneself as smarter and better-informed than “naïve” students
and grandmothers in tennis shoes. Hitchens, for example, called
war opponents "moral imbeciles," "noisy morons," "overbred and
gutless," "naive" and "foolish."
And after
the war began most of these “liberal war hawks” then turned a
blind eye to the civilian carnage resulting from the war they
had supported in the name of the Iraqi people, as the body count
steadily rose by tens of thousands until over 5 million Iraqis
were killed, wounded or made homeless. Nor did they apologize to
the millions of their fellow Americans opposing the war whom
they had so arrogantly maligned, and who had turned out to be so
much wiser and more moral than they were.
Executive Evil in Microcosm: A Personal Report
I first
encountered U.S. Executive evil and lawlessness in September
1969, when I interviewed the first Lao rice farmers to come out
of communist zones in northern Laos into American zones around
the capital city of Vientiane. I was horrified as these gentle
Lao, who did not even know where America was, described living
under U.S. bombing for five and a half years. I interviewed
people who had been blinded and lost limbs and yet were the
lucky ones because they had survived. As I learned of
grandmothers burned alive, pregnant mothers buried alive,
children blown to bits by antipersonnel bombs, and realized that
millions of Lao and Vietnamese farmers were still being bombed,
I felt as if I had discovered Auschwitz while the killing was
still continuing.
As I began
to research the bombing, visiting U.S. airbases in Thailand and
South Vietnam, talking with U.S. Embassy officials, interviewing
a former U.S. Air Force captain over a period of months, I
learned it was but a handful of top U.S. Executive Branch
leaders, Republicans and Democrats alike, who were solely
responsible for the bombing. Neither Congress nor the American
people had even been informed, let alone offered their consent.
The U.S. Executive, I learned, was a power unto its own that
could not legitimately claim to represent the American people.
From May
1964 until March 1970, U.S. Executive officials constantly
denied they were even bombing in Laos. When the evidence became
so great that even Richard Nixon had to admit the bombing,
Executive Branch officials continued to lie by denying they had
bombed any civilian targets at all—even as I was interviewing
over 1,000 refugees on dozens of occasions and hearing from each
that their villages had been destroyed and that they had
witnessed countless civilian casualties.
One day I
was shocked to feel pellets still in the body of an old
grandmother and see a 3-year old girl with napalm wounds on her
breast, stomach and vagina. That night I read that U.S. Air
Attaché Colonel William Tyrrell had testified to the U.S. Senate
that "I recall talking to refugees from (the Plain of Jars) and
they told me they knew of no civilian casualties during the
operation. Villages, even in a freedrop zone, would be
restricted from bombing." (10)
I couldn't
believe it! How could a U.S. official look a U.S. senator
directly in the eye and tell so big a lie?
I also
read how the Senate had not been told of this mass bombing, how
Executive officials had lied to senators even in a closed 1968
hearing. Senator William Fulbright stated at the fall of 1969
hearing that "I think the surprise that is evidenced by the
chairman of the subcommittee and others, that they did not know
the extent of this involvement until these hearings, is pretty
clear evidence that we were not aware of these activities,
although we had had some hearings on it." (11)
Realizing
that a handful of U.S. Executive Branch leaders had the power,
all by themselves, to level the Plain of Jars shook me to my
core. Every belief I had about America was upended. If a handful
of Executive leaders could unilaterally and secretly destroy the
700-year-old civilization on the Plain of Jars, it meant that
America was not a democracy, that the U.S. was a government of
men, not laws. And it meant that these men were not good and
decent human beings, but rather cold-blooded killers who showed
neither pity nor mercy to those whose lives they so carelessly
destroyed.
On a
deeper level, it meant that even core beliefs I took for granted
were untrue. Might did make right. Crime did pay. Suffering is
not redemptive. Life looks very different in a Lao refugee camp
looking up than in Washington, D.C. looking down. In those camps
I realized that U.S. Executive Branch leaders lacked even a
shred of simple human decency toward the people of the Plain.
I remember
once laying in my bed late at night after returning from an
interview with Thao Vong, a 38-year old Lao farmer who had been
blinded in a U.S. bombing raid. Vong was a gentle soul,
displayed no anger to those who had turned him from a provider
of four into a helpless dependent. I contrasted him and the
other Lao farmers who had been burned and buried alive by
bombers dispatched by LBJ, McNamara, Nixon and Kissinger. The
latter were ruthless, often angry and violent men, indifferent
to non-American life—precisely the qualities threatening all
life on earth. Thao Vong was gentle, kind and loving, and he and
his fellow Lao wanted nothing more than to be left alone to
raise their families, enjoy nature and practice Buddhism —
precisely the qualities needed for humanity to survive.
I also
thought of sweet-faced Sao Doumma, whose wedding photo had so
struck me, and who was killed in a bombing raid executed by
Henry Kissinger seven years later. (12)
And I
found myself wondering: by what right does a Henry Kissinger
live and a Sao Doumma die? Who gave Kissinger and Richard Nixon
the right to murder her? Who gave Lyndon Johnson the right to
blind Thao Vong? I found myself asking, what just law or
morality can justify these "killers in high places" who burned
and buried alive countless Lao rice farmers who posed no threat
whatsoever to their nation, solely because they could?
I was also
troubled by another thought: if even a Thao Vong and his fellow
subsistence-level farmers were not safe from this kind of brutal
savagery, who was? If I believed that a society is judged by how
it treats the weakest among us, what did this say about my
nation?
And I
found myself particularly reflecting on the question I found
most troubling of all: beyond the issue of lawless and heartless
American leaders, what does it say about my species as a whole
that the most powerful could so torment the weakest for so long
with virtually no one else knowing or caring? I was anguished
not only about this extreme form of mass murder, but what it
implied about humanity.
I
shuddered in 1969 as I reflected on what I was seeing with my
own eyes. I shudder today as I write these words.
One
particular fact puzzled me during my investigations of the air
war. All the refugees said the worst bombing occurred from the
end of 1968 until the summer of 1969. They were bombed daily,
every village was leveled, thousands were murdered and maimed.
But I knew from U.S. Embassy friends that there were no more
than a few thousand North Vietnamese troops in Laos at the time,
and that there was no military reason for the sudden and brutal
increase in U.S. bombing. Why, then, had this aerial holocaust
occurred?
And then,
to my horror, I found out. At Senator Fulbright's hearing, he
asked Deputy Chief of Mission Monteagle Stearns why the bombing
of northern Laos had so intensified after Lyndon Johnson's
bombing halt over North Vietnam. Stearns answered simply:
"Well, we
had all those planes sitting around and couldn't just let them
stay there with nothing to do." (13)
U.S.
officials had exterminated thousands of people of the Plain of
Jars, destroying their entire civilization, because the U.S.
Executive just couldn't let its planes sit around with nothing
to do. The fact that innocent human beings were living there was
irrelevant. No one hated the Lao. For Executive policy-makers in
Washington, they just didn't exist, had no more importance than
cockroaches or mosquitoes.
And that
wasn’t all. Once the planes became available, they did in fact
discover a purpose for them, as the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on
Refugees reported in September 1970: "The United States
has undertaken a large-scale air war over Laos to destroy the
physical and social infrastructure in Pathet Lao held areas.
Throughout all this there has been a policy of secrecy. The
bombing has taken and is taking a heavy toll among civilians."
Once the
planes became available, the people of the Plain of Jars were
not "collateral damage" to military targets. They were the
target.
Chomsky,
who interviewed the refugees in 1970 and is the world's expert
on U.S. war crimes abroad, has called
[42] the bombing of northern
Laos "one of the most malevolent acts of modern history," and N.Y.
Times columnist Anthony Lewis termed it "the most appalling
episode of lawless
cruelty [43] in American
history." Chomsky has also stated that though U.S. leaders did
not achieve their primary goal of winning militarily in
Indochina, they did destroy a possible independent economic
alternative to the U.S. model for developing countries.
"Malevolence." "Lawless." "Cruel." These are not words we
normally apply to the Executive Branch as an institution, or the
individuals who head its powerful agencies. But if we are to
decide whether we can trust the Executive Branch with our own
lives we must face the truth of its evil lawlessness.
Executive Evil Lawlessness: Might Makes Right
In the
movie The Fog of War, McNamara stated
[44] that after World War
II, General Curtis Lemay, who had firebombed Tokyo killing
100,000 civilians and dropped the atomic bomb “said, `if we'd
lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.'
And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war
criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be
thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral
if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
Good
question. U.S. leaders dropped 6.7 million ton of bombs and
fired an equal amount of ground artillery in Indochina, killed
1.2 million Vietnamese civilians, wounded over a million more,
leveled towns and villages, created 10 million refugees, and
poisoned Vietnam’s forests and soil. This was precisely “the
indiscriminate destruction of cities, towns, and villages,” and
“other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations" as
so painstakingly documented in Kill Anything That Moves,
for which the U.S. executed Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. Had the
same judgment been rendered on Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon,
and other top officials in their administration like Henry
Kissinger and Robert McNamara, they too would have been
executed, as McNamara acknowledged.
But the
truth is that we live in a world, and an America, in which the
rule of law does not prevail and might makes right. Our leaders
endlessly inform us that America is a "nation of laws not men,"
even though they only escape punishment for their massive
violations of basic human decency and the law, as Robert
McNamara suggested, because they are too powerful to be
punished.
Even if
one believes the U.S. had a right to intervene in Indochina, no
decent human being can possibly excuse its disregard for
civilian life after doing so. You do not need to be a lawyer to
know this was wrong. You just need a conscience.
In
addition to one's own sense of right and wrong, there is another
basis for deciding whether Americans can "trust" the Executive
Branch: its willingness to observe the rule of international
law. Laboriously, over more than a century, humanity has slowly
evolved a body of international law that spells out what
"geopolitical evil" consists of.
This body
of international law is what determines whether a given nation
is or is not acting lawfully. Any nation —from North Korea to
Russia to the United States—can pass its own domestic laws
legalizing its war-making, e.g. North Korea giving itself the
right to attack South Korea, or George Bush using the
"Authorization for the Use of Military Force," authorizing him
only to respond appropriately to 9/11, to justify his illegal
invasion of Iraq, failure to meet the legal responsibilities of
an Occupying Power, and subsequent mass murder.
But
domestic laws cannot be said to truly constitute the "rule of
law" unless they also conform to international standards. The
second of the Nuremberg
Principles [45] specifically
states that "the fact that internal law does not impose a
penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international
law does not relieve the person who committed the act from
responsibility under international law."
And the
third and fourth principles specifically state that the fact
that one is a head of state, government official, or was acting
under orders "does not relieve him from responsibility under
international law."
No nation
on earth has refused
[46] to ratify so
many laws [47] seeking
to protect civilians in times of war, and so violated even those
it has signed, than the U.S. The U.S. did ratify the “Fourth
Geneva Convention Relative To The Protection Of Civilian Persons
In Time Of War, 1949," but has massively violated it ever since.
Those laws
seeking to protect civilians in times of war that the U.S. has
refused to ratify include (1) Protocol II to the Geneva
Convention, passed in 1977, "relating to the Protection of
Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts"; (2) the
Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC); (3) the Rome
Statute Of The International Criminal Court; (4) the Convention
for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance,
which prohibits the abduction and secret detention of the state;
(5) the Optional Protocol To The Convention Against Torture; (6)
the Mine Ban Treaty; (7) the Cluster Bomb Treaty. And though the
U.S. ratified (8) the Chemical Weapons Convention, it has gutted
it by demanding exceptions for itself.
The
responsibility for the U.S. failure to ratify treaties
protecting innocent people is shared between the Executive
Branch and U.S. Senate conservatives. But there is little doubt
that if a president and giant Executive Branch agencies,
especially the Pentagon, lobbied for them they would probably be
ratified. In almost every case, however, it is Pentagon lobbying
and presidential indifference which has prevented ratification.
Former Vietnam Veterans Foundation chief Bobby Muller personally
lobbied then-President Bill Clinton to sign the land mine
treaty, for example. Clinton responded that it was up to Muller
to "get the military on board" but showed no interest himself in
trying to do so.
The
Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly defines "grave breaches"
which are to be considered "war crimes." Those that U.S. leaders
have committed on a massive scale include ‘launching an
indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population or
civilian objects in the knowledge that such attack will cause
excessive loss of life, injury to civilians or damage to
civilian objects. (Protocol 1,
Article 85).
[48]
U.S.
Executive Branch leaders have tried to escape their legal
responsibilities in their current war-making by claiming they do
not apply to today's "War on Terror" against "non-state" actors.
But this is, of course, as valid as North Korea giving itself
the right to attack South Korea. As U.N. Rapporteurs on
Torture [49] and Drone
[50] strikes have stated,
there is no serious doubt that U.S. leaders have massively
violated both the spirit and letter of international law seeking
to protect civilians in wartime.
Among the
most obvious and important violations of international law to
which U.S. leaders are a signatory include:
(1) Failing to meet their responsibilities for
"Protection Of Civilian Persons In Time Of War,"including Article
25 [51] of the 1907
Hague Convention which states that "attack or bombardment of
towns, villages, habitations or buildings which are not
defended, is prohibited." In Vietnam alone U.S. leaders dropped
6.7 million tons of bombs and used an equal amount of ground
artillery. As Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick report, "Unexploded
ordnance blanketed the countryside. Nineteen million gallons of
herbicide poisoned the environment. In the South, the U.S. had
destroyed 9,000 of 15,000 hamlets. In the north it rained
destruction on all six industrial cities leveling 28 of 30
provincial towns and 96 of 116 district towns ... Nearly 4
million of their citizens had been killed. The landscape had
been shattered. The beautiful triple-canopy forests are largely
gone. In 2009 land mines and unexploded bombs still contaminated
over a third of the land in six central Vietnamese provinces.
Over 16 million acres remained to be cleared. Beyond the
terrible toll of the war itself, 42,000 more Vietnamese were
killed by leftover explosives." (14)
(2)Failing
to meet their responsibilities as an Occupying Power inIraq
as required by the Hague Convention Article
43 [52] which states
that "the authority of the legitimate power having in fact
passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all
the measures in his power to ensure ... public order and
safety." As discussed, U.S. Executive leaders failed to provide
public order and safety; the U.S. military was revealed in the
Wikileaks cables to be turning over captives to be tortured by
the Iraqi police; and, of course, the U.S. was itself murdering,
maiming, torturing and incarcerating the innocent. (15)
(3)
Engaging in the "Crimes Against Peace"defined
[45] at Nuremberg to include
"planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of
aggression or a war in violation of international treaties,
agreements or assurances," and defined by U.S. Chief Supreme
Court Justice Robert Jackson as "the supreme international crime
differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within
itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
There is
no doubt that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was such a "crime
against the peace." U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan
unambiguously stated, as reported
[53] in a BBC article titled
"Iraq War Illegal, Says Annan": "I have indicated it was not in
conformity with the UN charter from our point of view, from the
charter point of view, it was illegal."
Benjamin
Ferencz, who was a U.S. Nuremberg prosecutor who convicted 22
Nazis has stated
[6] that a "prima facie case
can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme
crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of aggression
against a sovereign nation."
He also
noted that the British deputy legal adviser to the Foreign
Ministry had stated that "I regret that I cannot agree that it
is lawful to use force against Iraq without a second Security
Council resolution ... [A]n unlawful use of force on such a
scale amounts to the crime of aggression; nor can I agree with
such action in circumstances that are so detrimental to the
international order and the rule of law."
Only in
America could leaders convince their citizens they are not
launching an aggressive war when they unilaterally attack
foreign nations thousands of miles away which pose no serious
threat to them.
Fred
Branfman's writing has been published in the New York Times, the
Washington Post, the New Republic, and other publications. He is
the author of several books on the Indochina War
Footnotes
(1) Robert
McNamara, “The Post-Cold War World; Implications for Military
Expenditures In Developing Countries,” in Proceedings of the
World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics, 1991
(Washington D.C.: International Bank of Reconstruction and
Development, 1991)
(2) See
“Dollars and Deaths,” Congressional Record, May 14, 1975,
p. 14262
(3) Kindle
loc., 7078ff.
(4) “The
Study Mission Report for the Subcommittee to Investigate
Problems Connected With Refugees and Escapees,” January 27,
1975, p. 31
(5)
Vietnam in Military Statistics, p. 278
(6) The
Deaths of Others, Kindle loc. 3653
(7) The
Deaths of Others, Kindle loc. 3311
(8) The
Deaths of Others, kindle loc. 5988
(9) The
two times Congress has limited Executive war-making were its
vote to halt bombing over Cambodia in August 1973, and when it
cut military aid to Thieu from $1.2 billion to $700 million in
the fall of 1974.
(10)
"United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad,
Kingdom of Laos,"Hearings Before the Subcommittee on United
States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad of the
Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate,
Ninety-First Congress, First Session, Part 2, October 20, 21,
22, and 28, 1969, p. 514
(11)
“United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad,
Kingdom of Laos," ibid.p. 547
(12) Sao
Doumma’s wedding photo appears on the cover of Voices From
the Plain of Jars, recently republished, which is the only
book of the Indochina war written by the peasants who suffered
most and were heard from least.
(13)
”United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad,
Kingdom of Laos," ibid., p. 484
(14)
The Untold History of the United States, p. 387, 395
(15) In The
Death Of Others, John Tirman makes a convincing case that
the 110,000 Iraqi dead estimated by the Iraq Body Count
organization is far too law since they were limited to the
relatively few deaths reported in English language newspapers,
and located in Baghdad is far too low. He notes it depends upon
English language newspapers, that most murders occur outside
Baghdad in areas where few journalists visit, media coverage of
Iraq plummeted post-invasion, and people often do not report
deaths, particularly to the Iraqi authorities they mistrust. He
also makes a strong case for believing the Johns Hopkins
University estimates published in the Lancet scientific
journal of more than 600,000 Iraqi dead. (Kindle loc. 5797 ff.)
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