Terrorist, USA

The U.S. is, after all, the only country condemned by the World Court for international terrorism - for "the unlawful use of force" for political ends, as the Court put it - orderint the U.S. to terminate these crimes and pay substantial reparations. The U.S. of course dismissed the Court's judgment with contempt, reacting by escalating the terrorist war agains Nicaragua and vetoing a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe internation law (and voting alone, with Israeil and in one case El Salvador, against similar General Assembly resolutions). The terrorist war expanded in accordance with the official policy of attacking "soft targets" - undefended civilian targets, like agricultural collectives and health clinics - instead of engaging the Nicaraguan air space by the U.S. and the advanced communications equpiment provided to them by their supervisors.

It should also be recognized that these terrorist actions were widely approved.
Even more dramatically, the idea that Nicaragua has the right to defend itself was considered outrageous across the mainstream political spectrum in the United States. The US pressured allies to stop providing Nicaragua with arms hoping that it would turn to Russia, as it did; that provides the right propaganda images. The Reagan administration repeatedly floated rumors that Nicaragua was receiving jet fighters from Russia - to protect its airspace - as everyone knew, and to prevent US terrorist attacks against soft targets. The rumors were false, but the reaction was instructive. The doves questioned the rumors, but said that if they are true, of course we must bomb Nicaragua, because it will be a threat to our security. That tells us quite a lot about the deep-seated "culture of terrorism" that prevails in Western civilization.

This is by no means the most extreme example, I mention it because it is uncontroversial, given the World Court decision, and because of the failed efforts of Nicaragua to pursue lawful means. Nicaragua was but ONE component of Washington's terrorist wars in Central America in that terrible decade, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and four countries in ruins.

During the same years the US was carrying out large-scale terrorism elsewhere, including the Middle East: to cite one example, the car bombing in Beirut in 1985 outside a mosque, timed to kill the maximum number of civilians, with 80 dead and 250 casualties, aimed at a Muslim sheikh who escaped. And it supported much worse terror: for example, Israel's invasion of Lebanon that killed some 18,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, not in self-defense, as was conceded at once; and the vicious "iron fist" atrocities of the years that followed, directed against "terrorist villagers", as Israel put it. And the subsequent invasions of 1993 and 1996, both strongly suported by the US (until the international reaction to the Qana massacre in 96, which caused Clinton to draw back). The post-1982 toll in Lebanon alone is probably another 20,000 civilians.

In the 1990s, the US provided 80 percent of the arms for Turkey's counterinsurgency campaign against Kurds in its southeast region, killing tens of thousands, driving 2-3 million out of their homes, leaving 3,500 villages destroyed (7 times Kosovo under Nato bombs), and with every imaginable atrocity.

The arms flow had increased sharply in 84 as Turkey launced its terrorist attack and began to decline to previous levels only in 99, when the atrocities had achieved their goal. In 1999, Turkey fell from its position as the leading recipient of US arms (Israel-Egypt aside), replaced by Colombia, the worst human rights violator in the hemisphere in the 1990s and by far the leading recipient of US arms and training, following a consistent pattern.

In East Timor, the US (and Britain) continued their support of the Indonesian aggresors, who had already wiped out about 1/3 of the population with their crucial help. That continued right throught he atrocities of 1999 with thousands murdered even before the early September assault that drove 85 percent of the population from their homes and destroyed 70 percent of the country - while the Clinton Administration kept to its position that "it is the responsibility of the government of Indonesia, and we don't want to take that responsibility away from them".

That was September 8, well after the worst of the September atrocities had been reported. By then Clinton was coming under enormous pressure to do something to mitigate the atrocities, mainly from Australia but also from home. A few days later, the clinton administration indicated to the Indonesian generals that the game was over. They instantly reversed course.

They had been strongly insisting that they would never withdraw from East Timor, and they were in fadct setting up defenses in Indonesian West Timor (using British jets, which Britain continued to send) to repel a possible intervention force. When Clinton gave the word, they reversed course 180 degrees and announced that they would withdraw. The course of events revelas very graphically the latent power that was always available to Washington, that could have been used to prevent 25 years of virtual genocide culminating in the new wave of atrocities from early 1999. Instead, successive US administrations, joined by Britain and other in 1978 when atrocities were peaking, preferred to lend crucial support, military and diplomatic, to the killers - to "our kind of guy" as the Clinton administration described the murderous President Suharto. These facts, clear and dramatic, identify starkly the prime locus of responsibility for these terrible crimes of 25 years - in fact, continuing in miserable refugee camps in Indonesian West Timor.

We also learn a lot about Western civilization from the fact that this shameful record is hailed as evidence of our new dediciation to "humanitarian intervention" and a justification for the NATO bombing of Serbia.


The devastation of Iraqi civilian society, with about 1 million deaths, over half of them young children, according to reports that cannot simply be ignored.

- all of the above stated by Mr. Chomsky

Reminds me of The Last Poets' "America's a Terrorist"....

Russell edited them out of Def Poetry when they performed it.

Good post Tostones.

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