The Unindicted

Three days before Operation Iraqi Freedom (sic) was launched, the New York Times reported that the Bushadministration had "identified nine senior Iraqi officials, including Saddam Hussein and his two sons,who would be tried for war crimes or crimes against humanity after an American-led attack on Iraq." Theissue of U.S. war crimes is rarely broached, of course, but how does the record of un-indicted U.S. warcriminals stack up against those who have paid the highest price for their brutality? 

Of the 185 Nazisindicted at Nuremberg, only 24 were sentenced to death. Among those two dozen was the German High Commissionerin Holland who ordered the opening of Dutch dikes to slow the advance of Allied troops. Roughly 500,000 acreswere flooded and the result was mass starvation. Less than a decade later, the United States Air Force bombedthe dams during the Korean War in order to flood North Korea's rice farms, a move designed by the USAF tobring about "starvation and slow death." 

During the Vietnam War, the bombing of dikes in SouthVietnam was an uncontroversial measure. Our history books teach us: Vanquished war criminals must and will bebrought to justice in unbiased tribunals. The key word here is "vanquished," because only losersface indictment. The highest-ranking Nazi defendant at Nuremberg, Hermann Goering, stated it plainly:"The victors will always be the judges, the accused the vanquished." Other accused Nazis wonderedaloud: "What about Dresden? What about Hiroshima?"

But the Germans and the Japanese lost in 1945 (as Serbia lost in 1999). The undeniable transgressions ofthese and other criminal regimes have been well-documented elsewhere and some of those responsible for warcrimes have been prosecuted. It was the war planners in the nations that defeated these regimes that sat injudgment. General Curtis LeMay, commander of the 1945 Tokyo fire bombing operation that killed 672,000Japanese, understood this paradigm well. "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as awar criminal," he said. "Fortunately, we were on the winning side." 

So far, the U.S. has alwaysended up on the winning side and therefore hasn't had to accept responsibility for more than two centuries ofits own atrocities...many of them against civilians.

Civilians die during war, everyone knows that, but not all of the dead civilians are mere "collateraldamage." In many cases-particularly when invasions provoke guerilla warfare-civilians are perceived asthe enemy and are treated as such. This practice stands in defiance of the Geneva Conventions. Article 50states: "In case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered a civilian...The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against dangers arising frommilitary operations... Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited." 

In addition, the Principles of theNuremberg Tribunal define "crimes against humanity" as: "Murder, extermination, enslavement,deportation, and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population." Examples of civilians killedby the American military could fill volumes. For the purposes of this essay, three Asian nations will serve asexamples.

Philippines

In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the U. S. fought a brutal war of conquest against Filipinos. By1900, more than 75,000 American troops-three quarters of the entire U.S. Army-were sent to the Philippines. Inthe face of this overwhelming show of force, the Filipinos turned to guerrilla warfare. The February 5, 1901edition of the New York World shed some light on the U.S. response to Filipino guerilla tactics: "Oursoldiers here and there resort to terrible measures with the natives. Captains and lieutenants are sometimesjudges, sheriffs and executioners. 'I don't want any more prisoners sent into Manila' was the verbal orderfrom the Governor-General three months ago. 

It is now the custom to avenge the death of an American soldier byburning to the ground all the houses, and killing right and left the natives who are only suspects." Inan eerie presaging of Vietnam's hamlets, Filipino villagers were herded into concentration camps called "reconcentrados."Captive Filipino soldiers and civilians alike were submitted to the "water cure." According to thePhilippine-American War Centennial Initiative, this method "consisted of forcing four or five gallons ofwater down the throat of the captive whose body becomes an object frightful to contemplate, and then squeezingit by kneeling on his stomach. The process was repeated until the 'amigo' talked or died." And if thoseamigos struck back, the U.S. was ready to up the ante. 

When a U.S. platoon was wiped out in an ambush, Brig.Gen. Jacob W. Smith, a veteran of the Wounded Knee massacre, issued orders to kill "all persons of 10years and older." "The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness," Smith declared."I want no prisoners, I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will pleaseme. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the UnitedStates." "The My Lai massacre had its predecessor in the Philippines in 1906," says Howard Zinn."The American army attacked a group of 600 Moros in southern Philippines-men, women, and children livingin very primitive conditions, who had no modern weapons. The American army attacked them with modern weapons,wiped out every last one of these 600 men, women, and children." The commanding officer responsible forthis war crime received a telegram of congratulations from Theodore Roosevelt.

Korea

"On summer nights when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kidsscreaming," said Edward Daily. This U.S. Army veteran of the Korean War was talking about the killing ofhundreds of refugees, mostly women, children and old men at No Gun Ri in Korea on July 26-29, 1950."According to Korean survivors' and victims' relatives," says Norm Dixon in Green Left Weekly,"following a surprise U.S. air raid that killed about 100 villagers who had been evacuated from theirvillage by U.S. troops, 300 other villagers, overwhelmingly women, children and old men, had taken refuge in anarrow culvert beneath the bridge." 

"The bloody atrocity at No Gun Ri, a hamlet 100 miles south ofSeoul, has been known in South Korea for decades," adds journalist Esther Galen, "but a series ofpro-U. S. military dictatorships suppressed any public protest or investigation." The incident came tolight when veterans of the U.S. Army First Cavalry Division told their stories to the Associated Press in1999. Veterans of No Gun Ri told AP that Captain Melbourne C. Chandler, "after speaking to superiorofficers by radio, ordered machine-gunners from his heavy weapons company to set up near the bridge tunnelopenings and open fire. U.S. commanders had claimed there were 'infiltrators' among the villagers."Chandler told his men: "The hell with all those people. Let's get rid of all of them." 

Survivors ofthe massacre spoke of the experience. Park Hee-sook, a girl of 16 in 1950, said, "I can still hear themoans of women dying in a pool of blood. Children cried and clung to their dead mothers." Chun Choon Ja,12 years old at the time, said the U.S. troops, "dug into positions over hundreds of yards of hillyterrain" where they could fire on the civilians. "The American soldiers played with our lives likeboys playing with flies," said Chun. "The U.S. Armed Forces Claims Service told AP that there was noevidence that the First Cavalry Division was in the area," Dixon says. "AP reporters using mapcoordinates from declassified documents have established that four First Cavalry Division battalions were inthe area at the time."

The AP investigation unearthed other U.S. war crimes against Korean civilians. "On August 3,1950," Galen reports, "a U.S. general and other army officers ordered the destruction of twobridges, as South Korean refugees streamed across, killing hundreds of civilians. One bridge ran across theNaktong River at Waegwan." That same day, 7,000 pounds of explosives were used to destroy a steel-girderbridge crowded with "women and children, old men, and ox carts with their belongings."

"These two incidents were not aberrations or the product of exceptional circumstances, but rathercharacteristic of the entire American military intervention in Korea from 1950 to 1953, one of the bloodiestchapters in U.S. history," says Galen. Un-indicted war criminal and U.S. Air Force commander in Korea,General Curtis LeMay concurred with this observation, boasting that U.S. warplanes "killed off twentypercent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure."

Vietnam

"In all my years in the Army I was never taught that communists were human beings," said Lt. WilliamCalley. "We were there to kill ideology carried by-I don't know-pawns, blobs of flesh. I was there todestroy communism. We never conceived of people, men, women, children, babies." The date was March 16,1968. "Under the command of Lieutenant William L. Calley, Charlie Company of the Americal Division'sEleventh Infantry had 'nebulous orders' from its company commander, Captin Ernest Medina, to 'clean thevillage out'," explains historian Kenneth C. Davis. 

All they found at My Lai were women, children, andold men...no weapons, no signs of enemy soldiers. Calley ordered villagers to be killed and their hutsdestroyed. Women and girls were raped before they were machine-gunned. By the end of the massacre, hundreds ofvillagers were dead. When the truth about My Lai was eventually revealed, Henry Kissinger sent a note to WhiteHouse Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman: "Now that the cat is out of the bag, I recommend keeping thePresident and the White house out of the matter entirely." 

Nixon, for his part, blamed the New York Times, what he called "dirty rotten Jews from New York," for covering the story. Perhaps what hadthe White House on edge was best articulated by Colonel Oran Henderson, charged with covering-up the My Laikillings, who explained in 1971: "Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace.""This was not the only crime against civilians in Vietnam," Davis states. "It was not uncommonto see GIs use their Zippo lighters to torch an entire village." Indeed, My Lai was not an aberration. Onthe very same day that Lt. Calley entered into infamy, another U.S. Army company entered My Khe (a sistersubhamlet of My Lai) and killed a reported 90 peasants. One of the My Khe veterans later said, "What wewere doing was being done all over."

In his book, Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, Telford Taylor, chief United States prosecutor atNuremberg, suggested that General William Westmoreland and others in the Johnson administration could be foundguilty of war crimes under criteria established at Nuremberg.

The information presented within this article is not buried (except in mounds of spin) by the guilty.Anyone with a search engine or a library card can construct a convincing war crimes case against the UnitedStates. Acutely aware of this reality, Washington has refused to sign on to the recently proposedInternational Criminal Court (ICC).

Established by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court on July 17, 1998, the ICC is the"first ever permanent, treaty based, international criminal court established to promote the rule of lawand ensure that the gravest international crimes do not go unpunished." The United States is not happyabout the ICC and Human Rights Watch explains why: "The Bush Administration is attempting to negotiatebilateral impunity agreements with numerous countries around the globe. The goal of these agreements is toexempt U.S. military and civilian personnel from the jurisdiction of the ICC." 

The need to protect itssoldiers is the common U.S. justification for not signing on, but an "anonymous top Bush official,"quoted in the Sept. 7, 2002 New York Times, articulated the real reasons: "The soldiers are like thecapillaries; the top public officials-President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell-they are at theheart of our concern."

Currently the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, John Bolton furtherexplained the U.S. position in 1998. "Much of the media attention to the American negotiating position onthe ICC concentrated on the risks perceived by the Pentagon to American peacekeepers stationed around theworld," said Bolton, in his role as head of the American Enterprise Institute. "Our real concernshould be for the president and his top advisers. The definition of 'war crimes' includes, for example:'intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians nottaking direct part in hostilities.'"

Of course, war crimes can be made to disappear. On April 6, 2003, the New York Times reported of a post-warU.S. plan aimed at "demilitarizing" the Iraqi curriculum. "Iraqi textbooks, such as this onefor sixth-graders, tout Iraqi weaponry and war prowess and cite the United States as an enemy," reportersDavid B. Ottaway and Joe Stephens state without irony before explaining that the Bush administration hopes to"have in place wholesale revisions to textbooks that have taught a generation of Iraqis to be ready todie for Saddam Hussein." 

A few paragraphs into the article, we learn that the U.S. Agency forInternational Development (AID) is "preparing to award education-related contracts worth an estimated $65million" with the front-runner being Creative Associates International of Northwest Washington, thearchitect of a similar "educational reform" in Afghanistan. "One of the most important things[taught] is the bearing of arms and the constant readiness to fight enemies," said former NationalDefense University professor Phebe Marr, presumably with a straight face. "The definition of the nationand your identity is very much tied up with the military... All the way through the texts, you are supposed tobe ready to fight for and defend your country." Imagine that...