YES, ABSOLUTELY, LET’S REALLY DISCUSS THE U.S. RECORD ON HUMAN RIGHTS

 

Under capitalism, everything is a commodity for profitable sale; that includes the academics who write the textbooks of the history and realities of capitalism and imperialism

Let’s Talk About Human Rights From http://www.bearcanada.comSeparating Truth From Nonsense

“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa And for the Indians in the Wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination-by starvation and uneven combat-of the ‘Red Savages’ who could not be tamed by captivity.( Toland, John, “Adolf Hitler”, Vol II, p. 802, Doubleday and Co. N.Y. 1976 )”

“It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating[sic] so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards the FINAL SOLUTION OF OUR INDIAN PROBLEM.” (Department of Indian Affairs, Superintendent D.C. Scott to B.C. Indian Agent-General Major D. McKay, DIA Archives, RG-10 series, April 12, 1910 (emphasis added)

“Set the blood-quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed, and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence. When that happens, the federal government will finally be freed from its persistent Indian problem.” (Limerick, Patricia Nelson, “The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of American West” WW. Norton and Co. N.Y. 1987 p. 338),

“ 1763… Sir Jeffrey Amherst noted for his deliberate use of smallpox-infected blankets as a weapon against Indians, Amherst and his British lieutenants were a change from the French commanders at forts throughout the Old Nothwest and Canada. He made no effort to build goodwill with Indian peoples. He had no respect for Indian leaders, treated them contemptuously, and frequently described them as ‘wretched people’…Lord Amherst (for whom Amherst College is named) initiated a genocidal[emphasis added] new policy:‘Could it not be contrived’, he wrote to one of his officers, ‘to send the smallpox among the disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every strategem in our power to reduce them’ ” Blankets were taken from recent smallpox victims and given to healthy Indians, thus spreading the fatal epidemic.” (Nies, Judith Native American History: A Chronology of a Culture’s Vast Achievements and Their Links to World Events”, Ballantine Books, N.Y. 1996 pp. 190-92, 195)

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• The Power of Propaganda

We begin here with a quote from Noam Chomsky:

“A principle familiar to propagandists is that the doctrine to be instilled in the target audience should not be articulated: that would only expose them to reflection, inquiry, and, very likely, ridicule. The proper procedure is to drill them home by constantly presupposing them, so that they become the very condition for discourse.”

As a current example, all discussion on the financial crisis in Europe is directed to “saving the Euro”, ignoring the underlying questions of whether, or why, the Euro should be saved. The purpose underlying the agenda of the international bankers is simply presupposed, as if it were too obvious to question. That’s the tactic.

Another necessary quote for us to consider is this widely-accepted maxim: “If you tell a lie five times, most people will believe it.” And generally, if we repeatedly restate our propaganda doctrine, most people will accept it – especially if the mass media ignore contrary opinions.

We introduce these two thoughts here because they bear directly on the entire question of human rights in a worldwide context.

• It’s OK, so Long as We Do it Somewhere Else

The US propaganda machine has created the presupposition that it is only your actions at home, toward your own citizens, that constitute material to be used in discussions of human rights.

There is no apparent recognition of actions taken toward other nations, other peoples.

Most Westerners have apparently bought into this propaganda to the extent that we seldom question the constant and repeated atrocities that the US (and other imperial powers) have inflicted on much of the remaining world.

It is a stunning tribute to the power of good propaganda that the incredible assumptions underlying these discussions and criticisms have never been identified, much less questioned.

And the foundation for both this propaganda success and its acceptance by the West (again, especially Americans), is racism, based on Christian superiority and American exceptionalism, attitudes generally shared by most Westerners.

• And It’s OK, so Long as You Aren’t White

And that’s the power of propaganda. Create the underlying presupposition that only our behavior at home, only the treatment of our (white) people is relevant in terms of “rights”, and couch all discussion in those terms.

If successful, that leaves us free to roam the world, brutalising (non-white) populations with our halo intact.

Whether in Vietnam or Iraq, Nicaragua or Indonesia, the inconvenient truth is that “human rights” are reserved for white Americans and Israeli Jews. The US native population, the Vietnamese, the Palestinians, the Iraqis, are inferior races and entitled to no particular consideration.

Westerners have been so (willingly) overwhelmed by the US propaganda machine, that the litany of unconscionable atrocities committed in Asia, Africa, South and Central America, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, somehow “don’t count” because “human rights” has been cleverly limited to what we do at home, and because of the unforgivable racism inherent in that propaganda.

That’s the truth. You don’t have to like it, but you can’t spin it away.

Yes, Absolutely, Let’s Talk About Human Rights

Western Colonisation – The Endless Flow of Blood


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• Introduction

Few people seem aware that the state of the world today is the result of a history of colonial atrocities perpetrated by (mostly) Christian Europeans.

Much of the truth of this appalling human tale has been deleted from the history books, and the Western world seems to suffer an almost total amnesia regarding its own savage conduct.

Historian Edward Said, a Professor at Columbia University, wrote: “By the beginning of World War I, Europe and America held 85 percent of the earth’s surface in some sort of colonial subjugation.”

And it is still being done today – mostly by the US, though France, England and Japan would love another chance.

“For centuries the capitalists have behaved in the underdeveloped world like nothing more than war criminals”, notes Frantz Fanon.

“Deportations, massacres, forced labour, and slavery have been the main methods used by [the West] to increase its wealth, its gold or diamond reserves, and to establish its power.”

• Racism and White Christian Supremacy

The Europeans not only possessed superior military technology, but believed they were were inherently superior, racially and spiritually, and this gave them the right to invade other countries and exploit the resources while exterminating the inhabitants.

It was all based on the concepts of White Supremacy, European – and then American – exceptionalism, the doctrine of cultural, social, mental and spiritual superiority, the pathological quest for domination, and apparently insatiable greed.

Moreover, it was founded and supported by the insane conviction of Christians that God was on their side, of the Jews as God’s Chosen People, and of the Japanese as a divinely-favored race.

This Ideological Facism – adherence to these “colonial values” – are deeply rooted in Western culture and are all as thriving and virulent today as they were 500 years ago.

• “Discovery” of the Americas

Christopher Columbus is a celebrated hero in most Western countries, famous for having “discovered” the Americas, but what he did was to set in motion an organised program of criminality that today influences the entire world.

He laid the basis for Western racism, intolerance of peoples and cultures, and the extensive use of organized religion as a rationale for the enslavement and extermination of people. He began the process of exploitation and genocide that is still with us today.

There were originally an estimated 100 million Native Americans in Latin America when Columbus discovered the continent. After a century of exposure to Western Christianity, 95 per cent of the native population of Latin America had been massacred.

Entire races of people – the Maya, the Aztec, the Inca – were exterminated, and all their gold, jewels and treasures plundered.

• The Best of European Christianity

Las Casus, the distinguished Spanish priest and historian, documented numerous accounts of the atrocities and horrors perpetrated by the new American colonialists against the indigenous natives, including hanging them en masse, roasting them on spits, and hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog food.

“The Christians executed massacres and the most evil cruelties among the Native Americans. They spared neither children nor the elderly, nor pregnant women nor those in child labor, as if they were slaughtering dumb animals.

They made bets as to who could slit a man in two or cut off his head or spill out his entrails with one wave of his sword.

They laughed as they tore babes from their mothers and dashed their heads against the rocks. They burned the Indians alive, roasting them over a slow fire. They cut off peoples’ hands and hung them around the victim’s neck.”

According to Las Casus, the natives:

“are by nature the most humble, patient, and peaceable, holding no grudges, free from embroilments, neither excitable nor quarrelsome. These people are the most devoid of rancors, hatreds, or desire for vengeance of any people in the world… they not only possess little but have no desire to possess worldly goods.

For this reason they are not arrogant, embittered, or greedy… They are very clean in their persons, with alert, intelligent minds.”

However, this Native American culture of altruism, fraternity, and mutual compassion was to be replaced by other more important European and “Christian” values, mostly torture, cruelty, murder, sadism, looting, plundering and genocide.

• Europeans in Australia

Australia did something similar with its aborginal peoples, and the Christian Europeans slaughtered the entire population of Tasmania, South of Australia. They killed every man, woman and child in the country, a people with a history of at least 20,000 years.

Tactics for hunting down Tasmanians included shooting them, setting out steel traps to catch them, and putting out poisoned food where they might find and eat it. They cut off the penis and testicles of aboriginal men, to watch the men run a few yards before dying. After killing the adults, they would deal with the children by smashing their heads against the rocks until brains were spilled everywhere.

The last survivor was the Tasmanian Queen named Truganini. They stabbed her mother to death, kidnapped and killed her sister. They killed her intended husband by drowning him while she watched, then they all raped her. She eventually died, still defiant.

In all of this, it is worth noting that when these Christians returned home to Europe, they considered themselves “civilised”. They drank afternoon tea, they preached love and tolerance to their families. And no doubt they attended their churches on Sunday, thanking their god for their great profits from the nations they had looted and plundered.

• God Save the Queen: British Colonial Atrocities

“The British tell their children a fairy-tale story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping”.(1)

This myth is carefully propagated by the UK right-wing press and media, revelling in the greatness of the British Empire, with a “remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard” their evil past.

We had recent revelations that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing its colonial atrocities, and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing information on others.

The disgusting and unconscionable part of this is that even when the documentation of England’s great crimes is abundant, it is not denied by the English people, but simply ignored. The British genuinely do not care.

• Kenya

Newly-discovered documents now prove that not so many years ago, the British Government, in one of the most infamous episodes of British colonial history, perpetrated extremely brutal and truly savage torture.

This included the widespread and systemic castration and rape of black civilians in Kenya – as punishment for their move for independence from British colonisation. Perhaps 100,000 died and countless more suffered horrendously.

Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly ten years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain’s Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. According to her book:

Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick.

Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women’s breasts.

They cut off inmates’ ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound.

• India

Prior to that, the British Government and Military in India removed all feed grains from the countryside to the cities to feed themselves, knowing that millions of civilians would die of starvation. Winston Churchill thought that was “a good thing”.

• China

The British, with their powerful military, invaded China and spent almost 100 years attempting to colonise the country by turning an entire nation into drug addicts. The damage done to China was unimaginable in terms of human suffering, totally eviscerating China’s social order, to say nothing of the financial cost.

By most estimates, this depravity by Britain and the Jewish families who had the opium franchise, set China’s development back by 75 years.

And when the Chinese resisted, Britain committed what is assuredly the most reprehensible act of cultural genocide in the history of the world.

China’s Yuan Ming Yuan, was almost certainly the greatest – and most valuable – palace / museum complex the world has ever seen. This incredible creation contained more than 10 million priceless and irreplaceable treasures representing more than 5,000 years of the history of the world’s most ancient civilisation.

It took 150 years to build, and only three weeks to utterly destroy.

It was so large that more than 7,500 British, French and Punjabi soldiers needed more than three weeks to wantonly and unforgivably loot and burn the greatest concentration of cultural treasures that had ever existed.

And it was done primarily to protect the Jewish Sassoon family’s exclusive opium franchise and the profits both for them and the British Empire.

• The British Discover Tibet

More than 100 years ago, the British decided to force open the Tibet area of China – without China’s knowledge.

They recruited spies in India and Nepal, trained them for two years, then sent them into Tibet to spy and gather information. This was followed by an invasion in which thousands of Tibetans were slaughtered.

The British boasted about how easy it was to kill Tibetans by the hundreds, since they had modern rifles while the Tibet peasants had only swords and bows with arrows.

From what you have read above, it is a great benefit to the people in Tibet that they were not “freed” by the British or Europeans, since today they would all be dead.

• The Jews in Palestine

Anyone following current affairs in the Middle East must surely be aware of the endless litany of atrocities that the Israeli Jews have inflicted on the Palestinians – a people who have watched 95% of their country taken from them by force of arms and the infliction of unbelievable misery.

Where is the discussion of human rights in these events? Where is the recognition that our actions outside our own borders are just as relevant as those inside?

Yes, absolutely, Let’s Talk About Human Rights

Colonising the World – US-Style

 

Early propaganda of the “Westerers” who saw “Aryan Civilization” as spreading from its supposed origins in the Caucasus westward to the “final conquest” of Asia
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• Let’s Colonise the World 

Only a small part of the reach, tentacles and plunder of U.S. Imperialism

Colonising the world is a complicated and difficult business, primarily because most nations are unwilling to be colonised, and they tend to resist foreign invasions and the enslavement of their people.

Therefore, you usually need a large and powerful military to not only invade and conquer, but to frequently kill, torture and terrorise large portions of the population, in order to keep them obedient.

And you need large numbers of officials willing to relocate to these colonies in order to ‘manage’ the plunder of their wealth and resources. And of course, this requires large sums of money and effort.

Also, you must normally remain present in these colonies. History has proven it’s quite difficult to be an ‘absentee coloniser’ since the colonies quickly tend to become forgetful and disobedient, being more interested in their rights rather than yours.

And what with having to put down the constant rebellions, the trouble of loading all that gold and treasure, the selfish peasants preferring to grow food products instead of opium, dealing with a local government that resists the enslavement of their people, it was a difficult job.

• The US Finds a Better Way

But the Americans, inventive as always, discovered a new and almost effortless way to colonise the world while still ensuring the constant flow of treasure to their shores – true remote-control colonisation. Here’s how it worked:

• Choose a target country, especially one with useful natural resources
• Send in the CIA to destabilise the government
• Search the military commanders for a true pathological killer who has no loyalty to his country
• Provide ample financing, training and an unlimited and free supply of arms and weapons
• Finance the military to overthrow the existing government
• Appoint your military commander as the new President
• Inform your new man that he is only ‘President for life’, and that ‘disobedience’ can be fatal
• Make a deal with the new Puppet-President to permit US corporations to plunder the nation’s resources
• Bring your new dictator to the US, to educate him at the famous “School of the Americas”
• Teach him all the principles of torture and repression of a civilian population.
• Train the military on the creation of civil fear and terror, as a ‘population management tool’
• Instruct the military on how to ‘crush’ civil rebellions against this new ‘government’.
• Relax in the White House and manage your new ‘colony’ by remote control

It worked beautifully, in about 50 countries. US multi-nationals could come in, virtually enslave the population by paying dirt-poor wages, export all the resources, and become not only obscenely rich but enormous, world-scale companies.

• US Military Colonisation in Action

These US government-sponsored CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader.

The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment.

So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: “We’ll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us.” The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy).

It uses every trick in the book: propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, sexual intrigue, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, death squads and even assassination.

These efforts culminate in a military coup, which installs a right-wing dictator. The CIA trains the dictator’s security apparatus to crack down on the traditional enemies of big business, using interrogation, torture and murder.

The victims are said to be “communists,” but almost always they are just peasants, liberals, moderates, labor union leaders, political opponents and advocates of free speech and democracy. Widespread human rights abuses follow.

This scenario has been repeated so many times that the CIA actually teaches it in a special school, the notorious “School of the Americas.” Here, the CIA trains Latin American military officers how to conduct coups, the use of interrogation, torture and murder.

The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an “American Holocaust.”

Unlucky nations are targeted for a wide variety of reasons: not only threats to American business interests abroad, but also liberal or even moderate social reforms, political instability, and the unwillingness of a leader to carry out Washington’s dictates.

• How America Became so Rich

This is how the US became a rich country. It was not, as most Americans believe, by being ‘free’ or by having ‘democracy’, or by being smarter or more inventive than other nations.

Instead, it was all done mostly with illegal military force, virtually enslaving many dozens of countries as brutal military colonies, using all of these nations as cows to milk.

It began with the Dulles brothers and their United Fruit Company in Central America, with ITT (the US firm named International Telephone and Telegraph, that helped to finance the overthrow of local governments), and continued from there.

All of South and Central America, much of Africa and much of Asia, were all exposed to this brand of American ‘freedom and democracy’. And it is not a surprise that so much of the world bitterly hates the US today.

Americans never see this side of their country. Indeed, the internet and the US PR machines are full of glowing praise for the power of US companies, with terms like “The American Copper Industry: Bright Future Glorious Past”.

• Plundering in the Name of Democracy

But that ‘glorious past’ consists of raping, looting and plundering other nations for more than 100 years. It is not a surprise that most of South and Central America is as poor today as 100 years ago, in spite of a century of being exposed to American ‘freedoms and human rights’.

The US is only 4% of the worlds population, but has been consuming 25% of the worlds resources. That is why Americans are “exceptional” and rich, but those days are over, forever.

This 4% of the worlds population will have to get used to consuming only its 4% of the world’s resources and that is going to be a very, very painful adjustment.

• One Example – Copper in Chile

By 1929 the US mining giant Anaconda owned all of Chile’s copper – the world’s most productive copper mines – and made billions in profits while Chile remained in poverty.

In 1971 Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, nationalised Anaconda’s copper mines because the company was plundering his nation.

The US government immediately sent in the CIA to destabilise Chile, they overthrew the Allende government, and installed Augusto Pinochet as the new US dictator, a man whose brutality was legendary.

The new ‘government’ agreed to pay Anaconda more than $250,000,000 for its expropriated mines – an astronomical sum of money in those days, especially compared to Anaconda’s total costs of only 77 million for the mines, and the billions in profits they had already made by plundering Chile.

• The US has left a Dirty Legacy all Over the World

It has only been since the removal of the US puppet Pinochet that Chile has begun to recover from 100 years of civilian terror and the plundering of its resources. Brazil and other countries are the same.

It was only after they finally managed to overthrow their brutal, US-installed and supported dictators, that these nations began to progress and develop. It is absolutely true that the US kept dozens of nations in virtual slavery and terror for many decades.

But nowhere in all of this history is there any American discussion about the US-sponsored violations of human rights. And that is because ‘human rights’ are reserved for ‘democratic’ and ‘Christian’ White Americans who are special because they are superior and God is on their side.

And I assume this is one reason so many of you admire the US and would like to adopt US values. Maybe you would even like to study capitalism at a US university so you too can learn how to be special and colonise people who are ‘inferior’ to you.
The US Record on Human Rights

The Great Defender
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• Introduction

For generations the US has proclaimed itself as a beacon of liberty and democracy to the world – and filling its own citizens with this propaganda – but it was instead the world leader in subverting governments and killing hope in other countries.

Americans have been taught to believe that US intentions in the world are noble – that their country is the punisher of aggression and a warrior for freedom.

Due to the incessant propaganda, this image was for generations of Americans the measure by which they judged their country in world affairs. The war in Vietnam ended the illusion that America was always on the “right side”.

Today, America’s image as a defender of democracy and justice has been almost completely destroyed by the illegal wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, the destruction of Libya and killing of its president, and by the countless torture facilities all over the world.

• The Great Defender

By all measures, America has by far the worst human rights record of all countries in the world today. It is only through the incredible power of propaganda and the blindness that inevitably accompanies supremacist arrogance and exceptionalism, that the US can claim to be ‘defenders of freedom and human rights.’

But most Americans believe the US to be the world’s defender of human rights and the exporter of democracy and freedom, these same Americans exhibiting a strange and pathological blindness to their own crimes.

Americans appear to have an astonishing ability to ignore the fact that their government has invaded nations repeatedly and without justification, killing millions of civilians in dozens of countries around the world.

And they do this in the same breath as condemning other nations for what are in retrospect trivial matters like minor censorship.

• Only American Human Rights are of Value

With the US war in Iraq, only US casualties were reported in all the Western media; mention was seldom made of Iraqi deaths, of the enormous casualty toll among Iraqi civilians – which almost surely numbered in excess of one million deaths, the majority of which were not soldiers but civilian women and children.

While the US whined about the terrible toll of perhaps 5,000 of their “sons of freedom paying the ultimate price for democracy”, or some such repugnant nonsense, they were happily killing Iraqi civilians by the hundreds of thousands, and torturing to death countless more.

The same was true with the US war in Vietnam – and Laos, and Cambodia – where at least 5 million people were killed in a totally unjustified and illegal war, but US citizens heard only about how 50,000 Americans ‘gave their lives for freedom’.

The conclusion seems inescapable that a great many Americans are totally blind to the human rights of anyone outside the US, creating an unbelievable moral disconnect where, if their government behaves well enough toward the whites at home, any and all atrocities and human rights violations committed outside their borders are of no consequence.

• Spreading Human Rights – American Style

The US has overthrown dozens of legitimate, functioning, governments for the purpose of installing brutal dicators that were amenable to control, and either directly killed or was responsible for killing, millions of civilians in countries from Vietnam to Haiti, Nicaragua to Iraq, Indonesia to Iran.

The US Government and its CIA overthrew Sukarno’s democratic government in Indonesia to install Suharto in power. And, in the greatest mass slaughter in human history, planned, assisted and executed, the hacking to death with machetes of nearly 3 million Indonesian peasants – because they were exhibiting “communist tendencies”.

During the past 40 years The US has invaded many other countries and killed, or participated in the killing of, perhaps 10 million people – either to obtain oil and other commercial concessions, or to ‘protect the world from communism’.

In recent decades, America also installed and supported more than 45 brutal Right-Wing dictators who killed perhaps another 10 million. The total death figures could be much higher, and the totals of those tortured will likely never be known.

This story played out many times in many different countries, with staggering death tolls everywhere. And where were all the Americans who love to scream about violations of human rights? Silent, of course. What would you expect?

And it wasn’t only communism. Any country showing signs of socialism – such as wanting education or national health care or workers’ unions, or a redistribution of land from the nobles to the population, was sufficient for the US to invade and destroy, or to overthrow the government and install a Right-Wing dictator. Any kind of socialism was seen as only one step from communism.

• The US Record on Human Rights is the Worst in the World’s Recent History

Prior to the Iraq invasion, US sanctions caused the deaths of more than 500,000 children alone, primarily from deliberately targeting the supplies of drinking water – deaths which then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said “were worth it”.

And it wasn’t only the immediate and violent war deaths. Voluminous evidence exists that the US used countless thousands of depleted uranium artillery shells and cruise missile warheads, many carrying more than 600 pounds each of this violently toxic mineral.

The incidence of cancers has risen alarmingly in Iraq by orders of magnitude, with tens of thousands of hideously-deformed babies born each year from the widespread contamination of the country with the so-called ‘depleted’ but highly-radioactive uranium.

During the decade from 2001, the US created the largest network of torture facilities in the history of the world, consisting of secret prisons and prison ships used exclusively for this purpose – Guantanamo Bay, Abu Graib, Baghram and others.

When the torture prison at Abu Ghraib became too infamous, the US closed it and secretly built another much larger one at Baghram containing, according to many reports, as many as 50,000 ‘terrorist’ prisoners.

The US also opened a new “Peace Medicine” facility located in Indonesia’s jungle. No information on its activities, but it is an absolute certainty this facility doesn’t involve either peace or medicine.

• And Where are the American Human-Rights Advocates?

Nowhere in any of the above did we see a discussion of “human rights”.

It is abundantly clear that only the “human rights” of (mostly white) Americans have any value – typically elitist, racist and white supremacist.

Americans appear to take the position that these crimes are all forgiven because they have been openly discussed in the media.

And, since they are forgiven, nothing needs to be done. So Guantanamo Bay and all the other prisons remain open and the torture continues unabated.

And the entire affair is simply erased from American consciousness and US history books: time to move on.

• Time for Americans to Wake Up

We end here with a quote by William Blum:

“Is history getting too close for comfort for the fragile little American heart and mind?

Their schools and their favorite media have done an excellent job of keeping them ignorant of what their favorite country has done to the rest of the world, but lately some discomforting points of view have managed to find their way into this well-defended American consciousness.”

The US Record on Human Rights

McCarthy, Students, Police & Prisons
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• McCarthyism

The US, in contrast to all other countries, has never been able to accept the validity or legitimacy of any form of government very different from its own, and US history for the past 60 years has been colored heavily by this.

It is unfortunate – but part of the “system” – that so many Americans either don’t know or appear to have forgotten their own history on this matter.

Since the late 1940s and early 1950s. the US was engaged in what we called “The Cold War” – which was an ideological war against socialism – and it existed only because of Americans’ inherent fear of any government system different than their own.

The McCarthy era, which persisted in some ways until the 1970s, was driven by a genuine and irrational fear of socialism, with disastrous results both inside the US and outside.

The US was almost hysterical with anti-communism, resulting in witch-hunts, censorship, and widespread human-rights abuses. Countless thousands of people were mercilessly harrassed, and ‘dissidents’ were jailed merely on suspicion of being communist sympathisers.

Those so charged were usually denied the right to see the evidence against them, and in many cases they were not even told what they were accused of.

Almost no attorneys were willing to defend these victims, because often the US courts would jail the lawyer along with his client.

Any accusation that a person was ‘soft’ on communism, made him instantly unemployable. Many people suffered bankruptcy, loss of employment, destruction of their careers, and even imprisonment, most often based on no evidence at all.

During this period the US actually became a fascist police state, with citizens watching and policing each other, informing on each other, in fact destroying each other’s lives.

Burn the Books and Propaganise the Media

Large lists of books were determined subversive and ordered destroyed. One US worker in five (half of all US households) was required to pass a ‘loyalty review’ – loyalty to the US. Anyone refusing, or failing, would lose his job and likely be imprisoned.

Children’s TV programs were seconded for the cause, teaching 3-year-old children to ‘hate the dreaded communists’. The world has seldom seen such a flood of evil government propaganda; this entire era was one of the most shameful, even if fear-driven, episodes in any country’s recent history.

But Let’s Criticise China

It is almost a bad joke when Americans today criticise China for jailing ‘dissidents’ when not very long ago, their own country was harrassing and jailing totally innocent people, most often with no evidence at all.

Once again, Americans, with their twisted moralistic Christianity, have an astonishing capacity for hypocrisy and selective amnesia, not only ready but eager to condemn other nations for what are in fact minor examples of America’s own sins.

China has little difficulty dealing with most other countries in the world today, but a main issue facing China is combating these irrational fears which still exist within the US, from that same right-wing element responsible for McCarthy and the cold war.

• Student Protests in the US are Typically Met With Gunfire

The US likes to make a great show of other countries’ methods of dispersing student protests or riots, but America has been one of the worst. That country had a long series of student protests during the Vietnam war, and in all cases armed troops simply opened fire on innocent students, with no attempt at dialogue or negotiation.

The Kent State University Massacre was perhaps the best known, but there were many others.

The Kent State Massacre – Kent State University, Kent, Ohio on May 4, 1970

University students gathered on the campus to protest the Vietnam war. Soldiers opened fire, killing and injuring many students.

The soldiers said they fired because they were under attack, but in fact the students were retreating, and most of them were shot in the back, some from as far as 100 meters away. The soldiers were cleared of any wrongdoing, and no charges were laid.

Jackson State Killings – Jackson State University, Mississippi, May 15, 1970

A group of students protesting the Vietnam war were confronted by 75 heavily-armed city and state police who opened fire, killing some students and seriously injuring 12 others.

The police were almost crazy, firing many thousands of shots, blowing out every window in nearby buildings with shotguns, and causing extensive damage in addition to the deaths and injuries.

Again, the police claimed they were under attack by the students and that there ‘may have been’ sniper fire. But the FBI search for evidence of snipers proved negative, and witnesses claimed there was no provocation for the police to begin firing on the students. There were no charges or arrests of the police involved.

But according to Americans, these crimes are all forgiven and forgotten because they have been discussed in the media. This is the same argument used to justify and forgive the current abominable US torture regime – the media reported it, so it’s ok now.

• Protestors and ‘Dissidents’

In 2012, American police harshly, and sometimes brutally, dispersed protesters of the “Occupy Wall Street” that had been proceeding for nearly two months.

The extremely harsh actions of law enforcement agents caused outrage on the Internet, and then in the streets. The campaign spread across other cities in the US, then to dozens of other nations, culminating in bloody riots and widespread fires in the UK.

Despite the fact that the protesters were supported by almost half of the US population, the authorities had no dialogue with them, preferring the language of batons and clubs, water cannons and tear gas. So much for “true democracy”.

Leading media outlets of the country tried to ignore the campaign for a long time, preferring to talk about the “march of democracy” in Libya and Syria, or the “bad policy” of Russia, China or Venezuela in dealing with political unrest.

According to Americans, protests in other countries are cries for freedom, fairness and good government, but when these same protests occur in the US, the protestors are described as criminals and terrorists fully deserving of police abuse.

In the meantime, of course, the US spends huge amounts of money and effort to ‘sponsor’ these dissidents in other countries, solely for the pleasure of being able to point an accusing finger at the ‘unfair’ treatment they receive at home.

• US Police Brutality is Legendary

The Rodney King Riots – Los Angeles, Ca, April 26, 1992

A black man was stopped by police for speeding, and LA police pulled him from his car, shot him twice with a TASER gun, then many officers gave him a merciless beating with their batons. Although the police denied the affair, it had been captured on video by a witness.

The city was outraged at the brutality of the local police, and when all officers were later acquitted (by a white jury) of any crimes, the city of Los Angeles and many other cities broke into riots to protest.

All that rage turned into the worst single episode of urban unrest in American history, which erupted on April 29, 1992, and before it ended a few days later, had left 53 people dead and $1 billion in damage.

Philadelphia Police Brutality – Philadelphia, PA, May 05, 2008

A Fox TV helicopter captured video of at least 12 and perhaps 14 Philadelphia police officers surrounding a car and dragging out three men to give them what became a viciously excessive beating which involved the three being kicked, stomped on, and struck up to 20 times each with night sticks. This incident was one of many occurring in the US during the past decade.

Not Excessive Use of Force – Multiple Occurrences 2000-2012

In the recent past, it has occurred repeatedly in various US cities that police have opened fire on an unarmed man and pumped more than 50 bullets into him, in each case the courts ruling that this ‘was not an excessive use of force’. In each case, no charges were ever laid.

In late 2012 in Miami, police shot an innocent and unarmed man more than 100 times, with no apparent evidence that he was dangerous. Again, the courts sided with the police and no charges were laid.

• Incarceration Nation

In addition to slavery, genocide, wars and torture, there is yet another place where the US can claim to be “the leader of the world”, and that is throwing people into prisons.

This American attitude is explained neither by a difference in criminality nor by the success of the policy.

Right-Wing America simply likes throwing people in jail, often for the most minor of offenses, and after three convictions a person will automatically be sent to prison for life.

Some Statistics

• The US imprisons the largest number of people in the world. One person in every 100 in the US is in prison, and about one person in every 30 is either in prison, on parole or probation, or some kind of correctional supervision.

• America has only 4% of the world’s population, but has 25% of the world’s prisoners in jails, and this rate is increasing. The US, with a little over 300 million people, today has a larger absolute number of prisoners in jails than does China – which has 1,400 million people.

• The average rate of incarceration in the US (per 100,000 of population) is almost 8 times that of China, Japan, and most Western countries. In fact, the rate is about 8 times higher than those countries listed by Amnesty International as having urgent human rights issues.

• The incarceration rate in the US is about 750, compared to an average of 135 for all European states, 100 for Canada, and 118 for China. The US rate is about 30 times higher than those nations with the lowest rates such as India.

• The US has more inmates than the leading 35 European countries combined.

• The US also has three times the number of police, on a percentage basis, than does China, and recent statistics showed that Washington, DC, with 500,000 people, has more murders in a year than does Shanghai with a population of more than 25 million.

The System is Both Racist and Sexist

The US imprisons the most women in the world, at least 3 times more than any other nation. In fact, the US incarcerates more women than the next twenty worst nations combined.

Moreover, the entire US so-called ‘justice system’ is deeply biased according to race. Black males (and females) are six times (600%) more likely to be imprisoned than whites. 60% of all US prisoners are black or Hispanic, though they are a minority in the population.

Social and Financial Costs

Even ignoring the terrible human and social costs of such a policy, US incarceration carries a huge (and bizarre) financial cost.

California, with one of the highest incarceration rates and a private prison system, spends about $50,000 per inmate per year. This compares with the approximately $8,000 it spends per student on higher education. In total, the US spends more on imprisoning people than it does on higher education.

The US justice and criminal systems are both blatantly racist and apparently out of control. And yet (White) Americans appear to be screaming for more of both.

Return to Index

• References and Reading

McCarthyism.

US Student Protests and Crackdowns.

Where Is the American Press?. In Miami, 12 Officers Shoot Haitian over 100 Times.

New York Times: A Country of Inmates..

Wikipedia chart of racial prisoners..

Economist Article. Too many laws, too many prisoners: Never in the civilised world have so many been locked up for so little.

US Department of Justice statistics.. WASHINGTON – A record 7 million people âor one in every 32 American adults were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the US Justice Department.

US Prison Brutality.. Statistics show that 22% of American prisoners have been raped while incarcerated.

The US Human Rights Record

Slavery, Racism and Genocide
________________________________________

• Slavery in the US

The propaganda machine tells us the US was a colony that had been founded on the principles of religious freedom and tolerance.

 

This man’s “crime” was to look at a white woman the “wrong way”
Just a slave who looked at a white woman . . . But in modern American history, slavery was very clearly connected to the American pursuit of economic, political and cultural supremacy. 

Some of the very first ships arriving in the new land of America were carrying slaves for the local market, as early as the 1600s.

Current estimates are that at least 12 million Africans were kidnapped and transported to the US for the local and hemispheric slave markets. Some historians put the number at over 20 million.

The slave trade, and the right to own slaves, was so embedded in the American psyche that the US fought its civil war over the issue.

Slavery was abolished by the end of the 1860s, but for another 100 years there was a huge backlash against black people resulting in terrorism, hangings, and countless laws intended to prevent economic and political competition by blacks.

From the late 1800s, the White-Supremacist Ku Klux Klan in the US South was notorious for decades for dressing in white sheets, abducting blacks from their homes, and either hanging them or tying them to crosses and burning them alive.

The Klan is still active in the US today, marking 170 years of spreading white-supremacist terror in the Southern US. Current estimates are that there are about 180 of these groups active today, with membership totalling about 8,000.

A current high-ranking US politician, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, was a Klan member – something he now says he regrets.

• Treatment of Black Slaves was Inhuman

According to one historian, Blacks were, “hanged, burned, beaten, tortured, murdered, chopped up, whipped, by human butchers, who cut and mangle the slaves in a shocking manner on the most trifling occasions, and altogether treat them in every respect like brutes.”

They used to “drive nails into a hogshead so as to leave the point of the nail just protruding in the inside of the cask. They would then put a slave into the cask, nail the lid shut, and roll it down a very long and steep hill.”

The slave owners would flog them to death, until they were just one mass of blood and raw flesh, thinking nothing more of it than of a dog being killed.

The stories of the immense and heartless cruelty done by white Americans to their black slaves, would make you shrink in horror at the inhuman savagery of it all.

But Americans will insist that their country was founded on Christian values, on ‘freedom and human rights’, and US congresswoman Michele Bachman tells us breathlessly that black slavery wasn’t so bad because it gave children an opportunity to grow up in a “family environment”.

Such blindness is as typical as it is incomprehensible.

• Things Didn’t Improve Much After Slavery was Abolished

Countless black men were either openly beaten to death or quietly murdered, for the crime of looking at a white woman. Often, it was the police who did the killing, and even the FBI mostly ignored the terrorism and lawlessness, preferring to find ‘communists’ instead.

Many thousands of black people were lynched in the US – murders committed publicly by the white community, usually because they accused blacks of “sexual madness and excess”. Often, just looking at a white woman was a reason to be killed.

• Racial Segregation is Institutionalised in the US

Segregation laws were enforced in the US until the 1960s and 1970s, mandating separate and inferior treatment of blacks compared to those provided for white Americans. The most important laws required that public schools, public places and public transportation, like trains and buses, have separate facilities for whites and blacks.

It was only the bitterly-contested Civil Rights Act of 1964 that finally tried to prevent outright discrimination and segregation against black people – having to ride in the back of the bus, not being served in ‘white’ restaurants, forbidden to use public facilities, colored children unable to attend ‘white’ schools.

But even with this, America has always remained deeply racist, and blacks were routinely abused and murdered with little recourse to justice. In fact, the last public vigilante lynching of a black man occurred in the US in the 1970s – not so long ago.

And today, thirty years after the civil rights era, the United States still remains a residentially segregated society in which Blacks and Whites inhabit different neighborhoods of vastly different quality.

• Racism in America is Alive and Well Today

Throughout its history, the US – and Americans – have always been alarmingly racist. The situation was worse in some parts of the nation than others, but that is neither excuse nor explanation.

Segregation, racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy were all in strong evidence, as were anti-black violence, including lynchings and race riots.

After the shooting in Arizona of a US politician, the the local sheriff said, “The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. Pretty soon we’re not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people willing to subject themselves to serve in public office.”

In a Der Spiegel Editorial, on January 9, 2011, the newspaper wrote of:

“the inherent aggressiveness of the American political culture, an aggressiveness that is itself anchored in a public that’s fearful of change and hostile to opposing viewpoints. Americans are looking at themselves in a mirror distorted by hatred and fear.”

In one famous event, that of the damage to the city of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, US media showed photos of white people roaming through their devastated city, with captions like “homeless citizens looking for food and water”.

But an almost identical photo of blacks carried the caption “Blacks looting the shops in New Orleans”. So the whites were just looking for food, but the blacks were theives wanting to steal TV sets.

In the US today, salaries for whites are much higher than for blacks, and the percentage of assets owned by blacks is minuscule compared to the white population. Many other inequities are common, mostly based on race.

And today, the racism continues essentially unabated against the blacks. More than two-thirds of all people in US prisons are black or Hispanic, and yet they make up only a small part of the total population. It is difficult to avoid concluding these people are targeted.

• Discrimination and racism against Asians

Many US immigration laws discriminated against the Asians – and still do – and at different points Chinese or other groups were banned from entering the US. For a long time, non-whites were prohibited from testifying in courts against whites, a prohibition the Americans graciously extended to the Chinese.

Access to United States citizenship was restricted by race, beginning with the Naturalization Act of 1790 which refused naturalization to “non-whites.” The situation has not improved all that much, though Americans are likely to protest this.

Obtaining a travel visa to the US is still extremely difficult for most Asians – and for all Chinese – on no sensible or justifiable basis. This is simply racism and American supremacy, coupled with the Americans’ tendency to give the finger to any nation unwilling to adopt its “universal values”. In other words, nations unwilling to be colonised and bullied by the US ‘national interest’.

Latin Americans didn’t fare much better. During The Great Depression, as many as one million persons of Mexican ancestry, most of whom were US citizens, were forcibly deported against their will.

• Racism as a factor in US foreign policy

The Nobel Peace Prize Winner, President Theodore Roosevelt declared, “The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages” and openly spoke of cementing the rule of “dominant world races.”

In line with the concepts of the “Manifest Destiny” of white Anglo-Americans to conquer lands inhabited by “inferior” races of Native Americans and Mexicans, and the “White Man’s Burden” of Europeans’ obligation to introduce civilization to the “primitive” people of Africa, Asia and the Pacific, American foreign policy in the early 20th century had racial overtones of a “superior” race destined to rule the world.

It can easily be theorised that racism has played a significant role in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and its treatment of the Arabs. Various critics have suggested that racism, along with strategic and financial interests, motivated the Bush Administration to attack Iraq.

• Wealth creation and Health Care Inequality

Massive racial differentials in account of wealth remain in the United States: between whites and African Americans – the gap is a factor of ten or more. Blacks, Asians and Latinos earn smaller incomes and own little in the US compared to whites.

Readers will note the US statistics on infant mortality and longevity, where both are far more favorable for whites than for other peoples. This is racist. It isn’t the rich Jewish kids who are dying early – it’s the Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and blacks. And they don’t matter. The white section of the population is ok.

There are major racial differences in access to, and in the quality of, health care provided. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that: “over 886,000 deaths could have been prevented from 1991 to 2000 if African Americans had received the same care as whites.”

Black babies are still nearly 2.5 times more likely than white babies to die before reaching their first birthday.

Inequalities in health care may also reflect a systemic bias in the way medical procedures and treatments are prescribed for different ethnic groups. The consistent and repeated findings that black Americans receive less health care than white Americans – particularly where this involves expensive new technology.

• Another Country’s View of US Racism

Here is an interesting article from Al Jazeera, the Arab publication that has recently been co-opted by US interests and is normally favorable in its views of America. See the reference at page bottom.

“Like the US as a whole, the land is soaked with religiosity and racism, but unlike the rest of the country, the land has been soaking in them for about 400 years.

The result is that religion and racism are completely natural features in the landscape of public affairs, and to it notice would be like noticing the air you breath and the water you drink, and doing that is to stand outside of the normal patterns of political life.”

• The Foundation of “Human Rights” in America

The newly established USA continued the policy of ruthless genocide that Columbus himself had begun, and that other European colonialists continued to perpetrate in his wake. Mass extermination was implemented to clear land for white settlers.

• The Only Good Indian is a Dead Indian

Anyone heard one single word from Obama about American Indians, Genocide and Human Rights at home?

It started, like all genocides, with the oppressor treating the victims as sub-humans.

It continued until almost all Natives were wiped off the face of the earth, along with much of the language, culture and religion of hundreds of tribes.

By about 1900 the native population had been reduced to 2.5% of its original numbers and 98% of the aboriginal land base had been expropriated.

By this sustained policy of genocide, the Native population had been reduced from as many as 12 million, to a little over 200,000.

Some US governments offered large rewards for the scalps of dead indians. It was so lucrative that in many areas murdering Indians became a flourishing business – and one of the best-paying jobs in America.

The US Founding Fathers and the great presidents of the United States shared at least one common characteristic – they all believed in white supremacy and promoted the extinction of all native Indians – a concept which exists among the US Far Right today.

• In the Words of the “Great” Presidents

George Washington…

“lay waste all the settlements around…that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed”. And don’t “listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected”. His troops would also skin the bodies of Natives “from the hips downward to make boot tops or leggings”.

Thomas Jefferson…

Indian resistance must be met with “the hatchet. And…if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe… we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated .. we shall destroy all of them”.

Theodore Roosevelt…

This great American hero and Nobel peace prize winner said that America’s extermination of the Indians and the theft of their land “was ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable”. He said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth”.

• We Forget, and Then We Lie

Since being spoken by some of America’s favorite leaders and heros, these words have conveniently been forgotten by US historians who prefer to rewrite their own history.

Wikipedia disingenuously tells us the American natives today are ‘flourishing’ on their lands, but the truth is rather different.

Almost all native tribes have been destroyed, all culture lost, and the few remaining are living on isolated lands, some subsisting by hunting and fishing, some running gambling casinos, and many performing insulting tribal dances to entertain tourists.

Many are burned-out, desolated drunks, and Native Indians have the highest suicide rate of all peoples in the world today.

It is to the everlasting good fortune of Tibetans that America was never successful in its persistent CIA-inspired efforts to ‘free’ Tibet. If it had succeeded, Tibet today would be the same haunted graveyard as is much of America.

• And How do Americans Feel About This?

Just as you would expect from people who believe they are racially and spiritually superior to everyone:

• “I agree that previous generations of Americans committed atrocities against Native American populations. I do not believe, however, that the current generation bears any responsibility – or owes an apology for the sins of the past.”

• “What bullshit. The Indians declared war on a technologically superior civilization – bad move.”

Return to Index
________________________________________

• References and Reading

Al Jazeera on US Racism.

This is an article published in Forbes Magazine on July 8, 2011, in which US Congresswoman Michele Bachman breathlessly tells us , or some such repugnant nonsense.

Michele Bachmann Salutes the Upside to Slavery.

The US Record on Human Rights

America’s Dirtiest Secrets
________________________________________
• There is Nothing Worse than a Reformed Drunk

We stated in an earlier article that America’s ‘human rights’ calculus excludes any atrocities committed outside its own borders and focuses only on what happens at home. That’s true today, but it wasn’t always like this.

In fact, all of the strident and self-righteous moralising about human rights emanating from the US today, is a relatively recent development that began only in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Prior to that time, the CIA, every branch of the US military, many Departments of the US government, and even some UN agencies like the WHO, were all very busy committing countless atrocities against the domestic US population.

It was only after evidence of many of these events escaped confinement and became public knowledge, that the US relocated its human-rights atrocities offshore.

And it was only then that Americans “got religion”, and began not only preaching their newly-assumed sanctity, but condemning other nations for what were often much smaller transgressions than these same Americans had practiced at home for so long.

• A Series of Unfortunate Events

We have briefly reviewed Black Slavery and the genocide of the Native population, but there is much more. Throughout the 20th century, and especially after World War 2, the US government initiated extensive programs of human experimentation that created an almost unbelievable litany of domestic human rights violations and atrocities.

Virtually all of these appear to have escaped the notice of most Americans – and also that of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose human-rights chastity and amnesia are almost legendary.

Few Americans seem aware of the many and long-lived CIA and US military programs of human experimentation on innocent and uninformed citizens, always without consent and most often with tragic results.

These included an extensive program of mind-control experiments, deliberate infection with live cancer cells, syphillis, gonorrhea and hepatitis, deliberate exposure to severe radioactivity and to many forms of biological, bacteriological and chemical pathogens.

The experiments encompassed brainwashing, torture, electroshock, nerve agents, drugs and exotic hypnosis experiments, surgical experiments, and a wide range of pharmacological “research”, all conducted on innocent, uninformed and helpless civilian victims ranging from newborn babies to adults.

• The Dirtiest Secrets in the US

For more than 100 years, there have been countless unethical experiments illegally performed on human test subjects in the US that were performed without the knowledge, consent, or informed consent of the test subjects.

These experiments included the deliberate infection of people with deadly or debilitating diseases, exposure to biological and chemical pathogens, human radiation experiments, injection with toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, tests involving mind-altering substances, interrogation/torture experiments, and a wide variety of others.

Many of these tests were performed on children and mentally disabled individuals. In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were deliberately selected from poor racial minorities. Many were prisoners, who were given no choice in participation.

Often, subjects were sick or disabled people, whose doctors told them they were receiving medical treatment, but instead were used as the subjects of harmful and deadly experiments. We will never know the total number who died.

Most of these human research programs were funded by the US government, especially the CIA, and the US military and federal or military corporations. They were highly secretive, and in most cases their existence was not discovered until they had been in operation for many years.

It would be many more years before court orders under the Freedom of Information Act would cause records to be released, but by then the CIA and the US military had destroyed most of the documents.

As noted elsewhere, it was only by filing and communication errors that records of some of these projects survived. We can therefore assume the available evidence covers only a minuscule portion of the violations and atrocities committed.

Many of these experiments continued until the late 1990s and beyond, and many people claim – and provide evidence – that they still continue today.

• American Nazis – Eugenics and Euthanasia

The Anglo-American Eugenics Movement contained and was the inspiration for later Nazis and their own “Race-Hygiene” laws

Few people are aware that the US conducted a long-running eugenics program designed to create a perfect (white) race, that resulted in countless thousands of forced sterilisations, and even deaths, of those considered racially or otherwise inferior.

Not only that, euthanasia reared its head – in polite company, too. A 1911 Carnegie Institute report recommended euthanasia as one of its “solutions” to the problem of cleansing society of unfit genetic attributes. The most commonly suggested method was to set up local gas chambers.

For the past 60 years, the world has been eager to condemn Germany for its master-race eugenics program and the various human experiments performed, but no one, least of all Americans, seems aware that Germany patterned both its eugenics program and those experiments on what it had seen in the US, and in fact directly copied many of them.

• The Initiators and “Sponsors” of these Atrocities

Support and funding for, and participation in, US eugenics programs and these secret and illegal human experiments, cut a very wide swath through American government and society.

US Government initiation and funding originated from agencies that include the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, the US Army, the US Navy, various branches of the US military, the US Atomic Energy Commission, various federal or military corporations, the US Public Health Service, and the UN World Health Organization.

Involved corporations include the Quaker Oats Company, Johnson & Johnson, the Dow Chemical Company, Raytheon Corporation, the Harriman railroad fortune, Dr. J.H. Kellogg (Kellog’s Foods), and various American pharmaceutical companies.

Other esteemed supporters included the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford foundation, and the Carnegie Institution. A list of famous individual supporters would include Alexander Graham Bell, Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, and Luther Burbank.

There were also various notable universities such as Harvard, the University of Rochester, the University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, Columbia University, Cornell University Medical School, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt University, Johns Hopkins University Hospital, as well as the full cooperation of many hospitals, schools, orphanages, prisons, and other health care institutions.

• And the Tools of Their Trade

The substances used included LSD, heroin, morphine, Benzedrine, marijuana, cocaine, PCP, mescaline, ether, nerve gases VX and Sarin, toxic chemicals such as zinc cadmium sulfide and sulfur dioxide, a variety of biological agents, sulfuric acid, scopolamine, mustard gas, radioactive isotopes, and various dioxins from Dow Chemical.

They also included electroshock, synthetic estrogens, cancer cells, animal sexual organs transplanted into humans, cow blood transfusions and much more.

Deliberately-transmitted diseases included syphillis, gonorrhea, hepatitis, cancer, bubonic plague, beriberi, cholera, whooping cough, yellow fever, dengue fever, encephalitis and typhoid.

And, true to their espionage origins, these studies all carried exotic names like Project MK-ULTRA, Project Paperclip, Project Bluebird, Project Artichoke, Operation Midnight Climax, Project Chatter, Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD), Operation Plumbbob, among others.

• Did They Know it was Wrong? Of Course They Did

The CIA leadership had concerns about discovery of their unethical and illegal behavior, as evidenced in a 1957 Inspector General Report, which stated:

Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repurcussions in political and diplomatic circles … 1957 CIA Inspector General Report

MK-ULTRA activities continued until 1973 when CIA director Richard Helms, fearing that they would be exposed to the public, ordered the project terminated, and all of the files destroyed.

However, a clerical error had sent many documents to the wrong office, so when CIA workers were destroying the files, some of them remained, and were later released under a Freedom of Information Act request by investigative journalist John Marks.

Nevertheless, because the records have almost all been destroyed, the numbers and identities of the victims will never be known.

A secret AEC document dated April 17, 1947, titled Medical Experiments in Humans stated:

“It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse reaction on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such fieldwork should be classified Secret.”

At the same time, the Public Health Service was instructed to tell citizens downwind from bomb tests that the increases in cancers were due to neurosis, and that women with radiation sickness, hair loss, and burned skin were suffering from “housewife syndrome”.

• And Let’s All Go Free

In none of the cases above, nor in other similar events, did any of these so-called government researchers face sanction for their crimes. Instead, the Department of Defense colluded with the Department of Justice to ensure no one was ever called to account.

As of 2007, not a single US government researcher had been prosecuted for human experimentation, and few victims of these US government atrocities have received compensation, or in many cases, even an acknowledgment of what was done to them.

In 1987 the United States Supreme Court ruled that a U.S. serviceman who was given LSD without his consent, as part of military experiments, could not sue the U.S. Army for damages.

This is also true for all the US soldiers who fought in the Iraq-Kuwait war, who were exposed to lethal doses of so-called ‘depleted’ uranium and have suffered terribly. The US government denies not only liability, but the existence of the mens’s illnesses.

To add insult to injury, President Obama’s government has declared the following, on the CIA’s deliberate infection with syphillis of thousands in Guatemala:

“The United States is committed to taking appropriate steps to address that wrong,” but a “lawsuit is not the proper vehicle – and this court is not the proper forum – through which the consequences of this shameful conduct may be resolved.”

And, so it doesn’t go unsaid, in none of these cases, was there any concerned discussion of “human rights”.
The US Record on Human Rights

Unethical Human Experimentation
________________________________________
The US has a history of at least 150 years of performing illegal, unethical and immoral experiments on live subjects at home. Countless US civilians have been exposed to astonishing procedures and pathogens.

Not only that, countless US servicemen have been deliberately exposed to biological pathogens, nuclear radiation of various forms, medical substances and other procedures, all without their knowledge or consent.

The admission of these appears only after many decades of secrecy and some are still denied. Much of the truth of all these will never now be known, since the US government ordered the destruction of all records.

These pages contain only a brief summary of the litany of illegal and immoral human experimentation carried out the by the US government and its various agencies, experiments that are by all accounts still continued today.

• Surgical experiments

Throughout the 1840s, J. Marion Sims, who is praised and honored in the US as “the father of gynecology”, performed surgical experiments on black women slaves – without anaesthesia.

The women – one of whom was operated on 30 times – regularly died from the experiments.

From 1913 to 1951, Dr. Leo Stanley, chief surgeon at the San Quentin Prison, performed a wide variety of experiments on hundreds of prisoners at San Quentin.

Many of the experiments involved testicular implants, where Stanley would take the testicles out of executed prisoners and surgically implant them into living prisoners.

In other experiments, he attempted to implant the testicles of rams, goats, and boars into living prisoners.

• Pathogens, Disease, and Biological Warfare Agents

In 1900 U.S Army doctors in the Philippines infected prisoners with bubonic plague and beriberi. In 1906, Professor Richard Strong of Harvard University intentionally infected 24 Filipinos with cholera and the plague.

He did this without the consent of the patients, and without informing them what he was doing. The subjects died.

In 1962, elderly patients in New York were injected with live cancer cells by Chester M. Southam, who in 1952 had done the same to prisoners at the Ohio State Prison, in order to “discover the secret of how healthy bodies fight the invasion of malignant cells”.

The administration of the hospital attempted to cover the study up, but the New York State medical licensing board ultimately placed Southam on probation for one year. Two years later, the American Cancer Society elected him as their Vice President.

• The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments

The Tuskegee syphilis experiment was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service. In the experiment, researchers offered more than 400 black males treatment for syphilis, but in reality did nothing for the men, even though they possessed penicillin which was known to cure the deadly disease at the time.

Those running the study prevented study participants from receiving treatment elsewhere, lying to them about their true condition, so that they could observe the effects of syphilis on the human body.

By the end of the study in 1972, almost all of the test subjects had died of syphilis and related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.

The study was not shut down until 1972, when its existence was leaked to the press, forcing the researchers to stop in the face of a huge public outcry.

• The Guatemala Syphilis Experiments

In the 1940s in Guatemala, US researchers backed by the US Public Health Service used prostitutes to infect prison inmates, insane asylum patients, and Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, in order to test the effectiveness of penicillin in treating sexually transmitted diseases.

At least 5,500 prisoners, mental patients, soldiers and children were drafted into the experiments, including at least 1,300 who were exposed to the sexually transmitted diseases syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid.

Approximately 700 people, including orphan children, were infected as part of the study sponsored by the US Public Health Service and the World Health Organization. The team was led by John Charles Cutler, who later participated in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.

Cutler chose to do the study in Guatemala because he would not have been permitted to do it in the US at the time.

For decades, the experiments remained secret until they were uncovered last October by Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby who was conducting research on the Tuskegee syphilis experiments carried out until 1972.

And, in one of the most cowardly and shameful acts, the Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton’s State Department have said:

“The United States is committed to taking appropriate steps to address that wrong, (but a) lawsuit is not the proper vehicle – and this court is not the proper forum – through which the consequences of this shameful conduct may be resolved.”

• Biological War Simulation on US Citizens

Newly declassified Pentagon Records – reported in Washington on Oct. 9, 2002, show the US often conducted open-air Biological and Chemical Weapons Tests on US civilians in the 1960s.

The tests included releasing deadly nerve agents in Alaska and spraying bacteria over Hawaii, according to the documents obtained. The United States also tested nerve agents in Canada and Britain in conjunction with those two countries.

The summaries of more than two dozen tests show that biological and chemical tests were much more widespread than the US military has previously acknowledged.

In 1950, in order to conduct a simulation of a biological warfare attack, the US Navy used airplanes to spray large quantities of the bacteria Serratia marcescens over the city of San Francisco.

These Serratia tests were continued until at least 1969. Numerous citizens contracted pneumonia-like illnesses, and at least one person died, but US courts ruled the government could not be sued.

In 1955, the CIA conducted a biological warfare experiment where they released whooping cough bacteria from boats outside of Tampa Bay, Florida, causing a whooping cough epidemic in the city, and killing at least 12 people.

In 1956 and 1957, several U.S. Army biological warfare experiments were conducted on the cities of Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida.

In the experiments, Army bio-warfare researchers released millions of infected mosquitoes on the two towns, in order to see if the insects could potentially spread yellow fever and dengue fever.

Hundreds of residents contracted a wide array of illnesses, including fevers, respiratory problems, stillbirths, encephalitis, and typhoid. Army researchers pretended to be public health workers, photographing and performing medical tests on the victims.

From 1950 through 1953, the US Army sprayed toxic chemicals over 6 cities in the United States and Canada, in order to test dispersal patterns of chemical weapons. Army records stated that the chemicals which were sprayed on the city of Winnipeg, Canada, included zinc cadmium sulfide.

• The US Declares War on its Own Military

From 1963 to 1969 as part of Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD), the U.S. Army performed tests which involved spraying several U.S. ships with various biological and chemical warfare agents, while thousands of U.S. military personnel were aboard the ships.

The personnel were not notified of the tests, and were not given any protective clothing. Chemicals tested on the U.S. military personnel included the nerve gases VX and Sarin, toxic chemicals such as zinc cadmium sulfide and sulfur dioxide, and a variety of biological agents.

Other experiments included a wide array of studies, involving things like feeding radioactive food or inserting radium rods into the noses of soldiers to test the response in the adenoids.

From 1942 to 1944, the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service conducted experiments which exposed thousands of U.S. military personnel to mustard gas, in order to test the effectiveness of gas masks and protective clothing.

In 1950, the CIA initiated Project Bluebird, later renamed Project Artichoke, whose stated purpose was to develop “the means to control individuals through special interrogation techniques”.

Project Bluebird researchers dosed over 7,000 U.S. military personnel with LSD, without their knowledge or consent, at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.

More than 1,000 of these soldiers suffered from several psychiatric illnesses, including depression and epilepsy, as a result of the tests. Many of them tried to commit suicide.

And of course, there are countless tens of thousands of US soldiers who were exposed to depleted uranium artillery shells and missile explosions during the first Gulf War, resulting in what is now called “Gulf War Syndrome”.

There appears to be little question that the severely debilitating illnesses and cancers these men experience, are a direct result of this exposure, but the US military denies not only responsibility but the existence of the diseases themselves.

• German documentary charges US used biological weapons in Korean War

In 1952, two international commissions which examined the war area with Soviet and Chinese help concluded that the US army had indeed used such weapons.

This was confirmed in written statements by US pilots who were held prisoner by Korea. Some of them appeared before the international press and repeated their confessions.

Norman Cournoyer, a colleague of Frank Olson (discussed elsewhere), confirmed that the American Air Force had indeed tested biological weapons during the Korean War.

• Human Radiation Experiments

Researchers in the United States have performed thousands of human radiation experiments to determine the effects of atomic radiation and radioactive contamination on the human body, generally on people who were poor, sick, or powerless.

Most of these tests were performed, funded, or supervised by the US military, Atomic Energy Commission, or US government agencies.

The experiments included a wide array of studies, involving things like feeding radioactive food to mentally disabled children or conscientious objectors, inserting radium rods into the noses of soldiers, deliberately releasing radioactive chemicals over U.S. and Canadian cities, injecting pregnant women and babies with radioactive chemicals, and irradiating the testicles of prison inmates, amongst other things.

It was only in 1994 that the US government formed its investigative Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments – due entirely to public outcry.

Between 1946 and 1947, researchers at the University of Rochester injected uranium-234 and uranium-235 into people to study how much uranium their kidneys could tolerate before becoming damaged.

• Nuclear Fallout Research

In 1957, atmospheric nuclear explosions in Nevada, which were part of Operation Plumbbob were later determined to have released enough radiation to have caused as many as 200,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer amongst U.S. citizens who were exposed to fallout from the explosions.
• The Eagerness to Bomb Japan

The US is fond of excusing its use of nuclear weapons in Japan by telling us it shortened the war, but in fact it did no such thing since the Japanese were ready to surrender and would likely have done so within days.

The nuclear bombs were dropped partly as a warning notice to Russia, but perhaps even more as a “once in a lifetime chance” to witness the effects of nuclear blasts on a human population.

There is no other explanation for what appeared to be an almost obscene eagerness on the part of the US to get to Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the H-Bombs were dropped, to ‘examine and catalog’ the results of their new monstrosity.

In reviewing the reports of the American presence in these two cities after the blasts, one cannot escape the conclusion that these so-called ‘scientists’ were almost as giddy as schoolboys in viewing their ‘masterpiece of war’, and too morally deformed to even consider the horror they had perpetrated.

And certainly we’ve never seen any discussion of human rights in this context emanating from any branch of the US government.

• Irradiation Experiments

Between 1960 and 1971, the Department of Defense funded non-consensual whole body radiation experiments on poor, black cancer patients, who were not told what was being done to them.

Patients were told that they were receiving a “treatment” that might cure their cancer, but in reality the Pentagon was attempting to determine the effects of high levels of radiation on the human body.

One of the doctors involved in the experiments, Robert Stone, was worried about litigation by the patients, so he only referred to them by their initials on the medical reports.

He did this so that, in his words, “there will be no means by which the patients can ever connect themselves up with the report”, in order to prevent “either adverse publicity or litigation”.

In 1963, University of Washington researchers irradiated the testes of 232 prisoners to determine the effects of radiation on testicular function. When these inmates later left prison and had children, some had offspring born with birth defects.

• Chemical Experiments

To test whether or not sulfuric acid, which is used in making molasses, was harmful as a food additive, the Louisiana State Board of Health commissioned a study to feed “Negro prisoners” nothing but molasses for five weeks. One report stated that prisoners didn’t “object to submitting themselves to the test, because it would not do any good if they did”.

From approximately 1951 to 1974, the Holmesburg State Prison in Pennsylvania was the site of extensive dermatological research operations, using prisoners as subjects.

Led by Dr. Albert M. Kligman of the University of Pennsylvania, the studies were performed on behalf of Dow Chemical Company, the U.S. Army, and Johnson & Johnson.

In one of the studies, Dow Chemical wanted to study the health effects of dioxin and other herbicides – which Dow was manufacturing for use in Vietnam at the time.

To satisfy Dow’s ‘professional curiosity’ Kligman injected dioxin – a highly toxic, carcinogenic component of Agent Orange, – into 70 prisoners (most of them black) and left them untreated for seven months. Dow Chemical paid Kligman $10,000 for his work.

• Pharmacological Research

From 1988 to 2008, the number of overseas clinical trials for drugs intended for American consumption increased by 2,000%, to approximately 6,500 trials.

These trials are often conducted in areas with large numbers of poor and illiterate people who grant their consent by signing an “X” or making a thumb print on a form.

These tests are rarely monitored by the FDA, and have in some cases proved deadly, such as a case where 49 babies died in New Delhi, India during a 30-month trial.

The cost of testing in countries without safety regulations is much lower; and, due to lax or nonexistent oversight, pharmaceutical corporations can easily suppress research that demonstrates harmful effects, and report only positive results.

In 1942, the Harvard University biochemist Edward Cohn injected 64 Massachusetts prisoners with cow blood, as part of an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Navy.

Return to Index

• References and Reading

Wikipedia listing of US human experimentation.

The US Record on Human Rights

Experiments on Children
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The items below have been extracted from other articles on this subject. The references and additional reading material are listed elsewhere in this series.

From the late 1800s and early 1900s – until the present – American physicians, most often with the support and funding of the US government and military, have been illegally experimenting with pregnant mothers, babies and young children, infecting them with various pathogens, and often killing their unwitting “subjects” in the process.

• Infecting Children With Sexual Diseases

In 1895, the New York pediatrician Henry Heiman intentionally infected two “idiots” (mentally disabled boys) – one 4-year-old and one 16-year old – with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment.

In 1896, Dr. Arthur Wentworth performed spinal taps on 29 young children, without the knowledge or consent of their parents, at the Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts to discover if doing so would be harmful.

In Hawaii, a California physician injected twelve young girls under the age of 12 with syphilis.

John Charles Cutler, who later participated in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, infected about 700 people, including orphan children, as part of the study sponsored by the US Public Health Service and the World Health Organization. Cutler chose to do the study in Guatemala because he would not have been permitted to do it in the US.

A review of the medical literature of the late 19th and early 20th century found that there were more than forty reports of experimental infections of children with gonorrheal culture, including some where gonorrheal organisms were applied to the eyes of sick children.

• Hepatitis, Tuberculosis, and More

In 1908, three Philadelphia researchers infected dozens of children with tuberculin at the St. Vincent’s House orphanage in Philadelphia, causing permanent blindness in some of the children, and painful lesions and inflammation of the eyes in many of the other children. In the study, they referred to the children as “material used”.

From the 1950s to the mid-1970s, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis.

Researchers at the Laurel Children’s Center in Maryland tested experimental acne medications on children, and continued their tests even after half of the children developed severe liver damage from the medications.

From 1988 until the present, American pharmaceutical companies moved their clinical trials overseas, to test the safety of drugs intended for American consumption, but to avoid civil and criminal liability for these illegal experiments. And with good reason, because many of their “tests” proved deadly, such as one in New Delhi where 49 babies died during a 30-month trial.

• Electroshock, Mind Control and Sexual Abuse

From early 1940 until 1953, Dr. Lauretta Bender, a highly respected pediatric neuropsychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, performed electroshock experiments on more than 500 children aged from 3–12 years.

Electroconvulsive treatment was used at Bellevue Hospital until and then at Creedmoor State Hospital Children’s Service until 1969. Children became violent and suicidal as a result of the treatments.

Dr. Ewan Cameron of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada, who conducted some of the most reprehensible experiments for the CIA’s MK-ULTRA project, saw to it that many of the children in his “care” were also sexually abused, often by several men.

One of the children was filmed numerous times performing sexual acts with high-ranking federal government officials, in a scheme set up by Cameron and other MK-ULTRA researchers, to blackmail the officials to ensure further funding for the experiments.

• “Studying” Radioactivity

The US military funded experiments like feeding radioactive food to mentally disabled children and injecting pregnant women and babies with radioactive chemicals to study the transmission of radioactivity and pathogens through the placental barrier.

Immediately after World War II, researchers at Vanderbilt University gave 829 pregnant mothers in Tennessee what they were told were “vitamin drinks” that would improve the health of their babies.

In fact, the ‘drinks’ were mixtures containing radioactive iron, to determine how fast the radioisotope crossed into the placenta. Many children died from cancers and leukemias.

From 1946 to 1953, at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Massachusetts, in an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the Quaker Oats corporation, 73 mentally disabled children were fed oatmeal containing radioactive calcium and other radioisotopes, in order to track “how nutrients were digested”.

The children did not know they were being fed radioactive chemicals, and were told by hospital staff and researchers that they were joining a “science club”.

In 1953, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) ran studies on the health effects of radioactive iodine in newborns and pregnant women at the University of Iowa.

In one study, researchers gave pregnant women radioactive iodine-131 – knowing this would cause spontaneous abortions – in order to study the women’s aborted embryos to discover at what stage, and to what extent, radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier.

• Killing Foetuses at Harvard

At Harvard University, researchers began performing experiments where they tested diethylstilbestrol, a synthetic estrogen, on pregnant women at the University of Chicago.

The women experienced an abnormally high number of miscarriages and babies with low birth weight. None of the women were told that they were being experimented on.

• And Let’s All Go Free

In none of the cases above, nor in other similar events, did any of these so-called government researchers face sanction for their crimes. Instead, the Department of Defense colluded with the Department of Justice to ensure no one was ever called to account.

And, so it doesn’t go unsaid, in none of these cases, was there any concerned discussion of “human rights”.

The US Record on Human Rights

CIA Project MK-ULTRA
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• Mind Control, Brainwashing and Torture Experiments

The United States government funded and performed numerous psychological experiments, especially during the Cold War era, to help develop more effective torture and interrogation techniques for the U.S. military and the CIA.

In studies running from 1947 to 1953, which were known as Project Chatter, the U.S. Navy began identifying and testing truth serums, which they hoped could be used during interrogations of Soviet spies.

Some of the chemicals tested on human subjects included mescaline and the anticholinergic drug scopolamine.

• Operation MK-ULTRA

MK-ULTRA came to light in the spring of 1963 during a wide-ranging survey of the CIA’s technical services division, when John K. Vance, a member of the Central Intelligence Agency inspector general’s staff, discovered that the agency was running a research project that included administering LSD and other drugs to unwitting human subjects.

MK-Ultra was a code name declassified in the 1970′s Church Committee where the public was informed that thousands of people, patients from hospitals, mental health patients, prisoners in the so-called US ‘justice system’. Even public citizens were selected and used for testing without their consent.

This program was carried out illegally by the CIA, and the testing included torture, drugs and exotic hypnosis experiments in an effort to explore the mind, propaganda and other related patterns. Testing was conducted from the 1950s to the 1990s, and some individuals claim – with evidence – that they persist today.

One part of the operation included CIA-sponsored scientists creating an assassins program, wanting to kidnap an individual, conduct hypnosis and other MK-ULTRA techniques, then send them to a country to assassinate the leaders.

Another part of the CIA mind-control project was aimed at finding a “truth serum” to use on communist spies. Test subjects were given LSD and other drugs, often without their knowledge or consent, and some were tortured.

Apparently many people died – or were killed – as a result of these experiments, and at least one man, civilian biochemist Frank Olson, who was working for the government, was murdered for fear he would tell what he had seen.

The project was steadfastly denied by both the government and the CIA, but was finally exposed after investigations by the Rockefeller Commission. When this information became known, the US government paid many millions of dollars to settle the hundreds of claims and lawsuits that resulted.

• The Beginnings of a new US Depravity

In 1953, the CIA placed several of its interrogation and mind-control programs under the direction of a single program, known by the code name MK-ULTRA, after CIA director Allen Dulles complained about not having enough “human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques”.

The MK-ULTRA project was under the direct command of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and received over $25 million for hundreds of experiments on human subjects at eighty different institutions.

In a memo describing the purpose of one MK-ULTRA program subprogram, Richard Helms said:

“We intend to investigate the development of a chemical material which causes a reversible, nontoxic aberrant mental state, the specific nature of which can be reasonably well predicted for each individual.

This material could potentially aid in discrediting individuals, eliciting information, and implanting suggestions and other forms of mental control.” Richard Helms, internal CIA memo

• Brainwashing and Mind Control

Inspired by thoughts of a brainwashing program, the CIA began experiments on mind control. The most notorious part involved giving LSD and other drugs to American subjects without their knowledge or against their will, causing many to commit suicide.

However, the operation involved far more than this. Funded in part by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, CIA research included propaganda, brainwashing, public relations, advertising, hypnosis, and other forms of suggestion.

In 1950, the US government established the first program to develop human mind control techniques. Known under a variety of codenames, this program was designed to exert such control, according to declassified documents, that an individual would do another’s bidding, “against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature such as self-preservation.”

25 years later, the Rockefeller Commission uncovered CIA plans for “programmed assassins” and said that MK-ULTRA led to American citizens being drugged, kidnapped and tortured on American soil.

• Operation Paperclip – Interrogation by War Criminals

Both MK-ULTRA and ARTICHOKE grew out of “Operation Paperclip,” in which Nazi scientists were smuggled into the US to provide the government with information on everything from rocket science to germ warfare to torture and interrogation techniques.

The CIA sought new methods of interrogation. “In 149 separate mind-control experiments, researchers used hypnosis, electroshock treatments and drugs, including marijuana, morphine, Benzedrine and mescaline.

Test subjects were usually people who could not easily object-prisoners, mental patients and members of minority groups-but the agency also performed many experiments on other people without their knowledge or consent.”

In addition, thousands of people were used, without their knowledge or consent, for experiments with LSD, mescaline, morphine, seconal, atropine and other drugs. The CIA even ran its own brothels in order to lure its victims.

As the inspector general of the US Army later stated in a report to a Senate committee: “In universities, hospitals and research institutions” an “unknown number of chemical tests and experiments” … were carried out with healthy adults, with mentally ill and with prison inmates.”

• The Life and Death of Frank Olson

By 1950 Frank Olson was a scientist who had been working on the MK-ULTRA Project, and also was aware of this group’s experiments in the late 1950 to assess the efficacy of certain bacterial strains on human beings, including the US military’s use of biological pathogens.

In 1975, as this information was exposed, the US government apparently panicked through fear their use of biological weapons in North Korea would become public knowledge.

Olson had apparently also witnessed the deaths of subjects during drug injections and various torture experiments, and had begun expressing moral misgivings about his work.

The CIA and US military feared he might take that knowledge public, so they had him killed.

LSD was administered to Olson a week or so before his death, then again on the day he died. He was apparently clubbed on the head, then thrown out of a high-floor hotel window. The CIA initially claimed it to have been a sucide, but the truth escaped.

In a bid to stave off “a devastating PR problem”, then US President Johnson held a private meeting with Olson’s family at the White House, to apologise for Olson’s death, admitting that the CIA gave Dr. Olson LSD before he was murdered.

The CIA paid $750,000 in hush money to Olson’s family, on condition that they cease pursuing any further the facts surrounding Olson’s death.

Return to Index

• References and Additional Reading

The Sleep Room’s Missing Memories.

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the Manchurian Candidate.

US used biological weapons in Korean War.

YouTube video on MK-ULTRA.

The US Record on Human Rights

More CIA Mind-Control Projects
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• CIA Project Bluebird

In 1950, the CIA initiated Project Bluebird, later renamed Project Artichoke, whose stated purpose was to develop “the means to control individuals through special interrogation techniques”, “way[s] to prevent the extraction of information from CIA agents”, and “offensive uses of unconventional techniques, such as hypnosis and drugs”.

The purpose of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that stated, “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self preservation?”

The project studied the use of hypnosis, forced morphine addiction and subsequent forced withdrawal, and the use of other chemicals, among other methods, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects.

In order to “perfect techniques for the abstraction of information from individuals, whether willing or not”, Project Bluebird researchers experimented with a wide variety of psychoactive substances, including LSD, heroin, marijuana, cocaine, PCP, mescaline, and ether.

In 1952, professional tennis player Harold Blauer died when injected with a fatal dose of a mescaline derivative at the New York State Psychiatric Institute of Columbia University, by Dr. James Cattell.

The United States Department of Defense, which sponsored the injection, worked in collusion with the Department of Justice, and the New York State Attorney General to conceal evidence of its involvement for 23 years.

Cattell claimed that he did not know what the army had given him to inject into Blauer, saying: “We didn’t know whether it was dog piss or what we were giving him.”

• CIA Project QK-HILLTOP

In 1954, the CIA’s Project QK-HILLTOP was created to study brainwashing techniques, and to develop effective methods of interrogation.

Most of the early studies are believed to have been performed by the Cornell University Medical School’s human ecology study programs, under the direction of Dr. Harold Wolff.

Wolff requested that the CIA provide him any information they could find regarding “threats, coercion, imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, ‘brainwashing’, ‘black psychiatry’, and hypnosis, or any combination of these, with or without chemical agents”.

According to Wolff, the research team would then:

…assemble, collate, analyze and assimilate this information and will then undertake experimental investigations designed to develop new techniques of offensive/defensive intelligence use … Potentially useful secret drugs (and various brain damaging procedures) will be similarly tested in order to ascertain the fundamental effect upon human brain function and upon the subject’s mood …

“Where any of the studies involve potential harm of the subject, we expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place for the performance of the necessary experiments.” (Dr. Harold Wolff, Cornell University Medical School)

• Operation Midnight Climax

Operation Midnight Climax was initially established by Sidney Gottlieb and placed under the direction of Narcotics Bureau officer George Hunter White (under the alias of Morgan Hall) for the CIA as a sub-project of Project MKULTRA, the CIA mind-control research program that began in the 1950s.

Another of the MKULTRA subprojects, this one consisted of a web of CIA-run safehouses in San Francisco, Marin, and New York which were established in order to study the effects of LSD on unconsenting individuals.

Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass.

Several significant operational techniques were developed in this theater, including extensive research into sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the possible use of mind-altering drugs in field operations.

The safehouses were dramatically scaled back in 1962, following a report by CIA Inspector General John Earman that strongly recommended closing the facility. The San Francisco safehouses were closed in 1965, and the New York City safehouse in 1966.

• Operation MK-DELTA

A special procedure, designated MK-DELTA, was established to govern the use of MK-ULTRA materials abroad. Such materials were used on a number of occasions.

Because MKULTRA records were destroyed, it is impossible to reconstruct the operational use of MK-ULTRA materials by the CIA overseas; it has been determined that the use of these materials abroad began in 1953, and possibly as early as 1950.

Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MK-ULTRA/MK-DELTA materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes.

The US Record on Human Rights

The Sleep Room’s Missing Memories

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• The Sleep Room’s Missing Memories

This was part of a secret program of CIA-sponsored brainwashing and mind-control known as MK-ULTRA, transplanted to Canada to avoid US liability, and unknown even to the Canadian government.

It involves unknowing mental patients subjected to “modern” torture involving massive electroshock therapy, drug injections, and chemically-induced, month-long comas meant to destroy their memories of themselves and their families.

This was a human catastrophe that permanently and totally stripped more than 300 Canadian people of their identities. See ‘The Sleep Room’s Missing Memories’ in the References at bottom.

In 1957, with funding from a CIA front organization, Dr. Ewan Cameron of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada began MKULTRA Subproject 68. His experiments were designed to first “depattern” individuals, erasing their minds and memories – reducing them to the mental level of an infant – and then to “rebuild” their personality in a manner of his choosing.

To achieve this, Cameron placed patients under his “care” into drug-induced comas for up to 88 days, and applied numerous high voltage electric shocks to them over the course of weeks or months, often administering up to 360 shocks per person.

He would then perform what he called “psychic driving” experiments on the subjects, where he would repetitively play recorded statements, such as “You are a good wife and mother and people enjoy your company”, through speakers he had implanted into blacked-out football helmets that he bound to the heads of the test subjects (for sensory deprivation purposes).

The patients could do nothing but listen to these messages, played for 16–20 hours a day, for weeks at a time. In one case, Cameron forced a person to listen to a message non-stop for 101 days.

Using CIA funding, Cameron converted the horse stables behind Allen Memorial into an elaborate isolation and sensory deprivation chamber which he kept patients locked in for weeks at a time.

Cameron also induced insulin comas in his subjects by giving them large injections of insulin, twice a day for up to two months at a time. Several of the children who Cameron experimented on were sexually abused, in at least one case by several men.

One of the children was filmed numerous times performing sexual acts with high-ranking federal government officials, in a scheme set up by Cameron and other MKULTRA researchers, to blackmail the officials to ensure further funding for the experiments.

• References and Additional Reading

The Sleep Room’s Missing Memories.

The US Record on Human Rights

Eugenics in America
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• American Nazis – Eugenics and Euthanasia

Few people are aware that the US conducted a long-running eugenics program designed to create a perfect (white) race, that resulted in countless thousands of forced sterilisations, and even deaths, of those considered racially or otherwise inferior.

Not only that, euthanasia reared its head – in polite company, too. A 1911 Carnegie Institute report recommended euthanasia as one of its “solutions” to the problem of cleansing society of unfit genetic attributes. The most commonly suggested method was to set up local gas chambers.

• The History of Eugenics in the United States

Eugenics, the social movement claiming to improve the genetic features of human populations through selective breeding and sterilization, based on the idea that it is possible to distinguish between superior and inferior elements of society, has played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States.

Eugenics was widely accepted in the U.S. academic community. By 1928 there were 376 separate university courses in some of the United States’ leading schools, enrolling more than 20,000 students, which included eugenics in the curriculum.

Most popular in the early 20th century, it was considered a method of establishing order and uniformity in the population. By popularizing the idea of an ideal genetic character, the eugenics movement gave people something to strive towards. It shaped the social character of the times, moving society to value the norm.

Early proponents of eugenics believed that, through selective breeding, the human species should direct its own evolution.

They tended to believe in the genetic superiority of Nordic, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples; supported strict immigration and anti-miscegenation laws; and supported the forcible sterilization of the poor, disabled and “immoral”.

The American eugenics movement received extensive funding from various corporate foundations including the Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, J.H. Kellogg, and the Harriman railroad fortune. Famous proponents included Alexander Graham Bell, Stanford president David Starr Jordan and Luther Burbank.

The movement favored immigration restriction and sterilization as primary methods. Some favored the segregation of inferior population sectors, and some entertained the idea of extermination.

Many US States including New York, Massachusetts, Virginia and California, and many American universities had deep ties to the eugenics movement, which aimed to improve the human race much as livestock is bred.

In all, more than 30 states passed legislation supporting sterilization as part of a eugenic program. The official numbers of surgeries exceeded 65,000, and targeted groups included the “feeble-minded,” “imbeciles” and the “socially inadequate.”

The passion for eugenics faded after the war as news of the Nazi atrocities came to light. But American legislators still propose sterilization from time to time as a remedy to “social problems”.

• Unfit vs. Fit Individuals

Both class and race factored in to eugenic definitions of “fit” and “unfit.” By using intelligence testing, American eugenicists asserted that social mobility was indicative of one’s genetic fitness.

This reaffirmed the existing class and racial hierarchies and explained why the upper-to-middle class was predominately white. Middle-to-upper class status was a marker of “superior strains” of humanity.

In contrast, eugenicists believed poverty to be a characteristic of genetic inferiority, which meant that that those deemed “unfit” were predominately of the lower classes.

Since poverty was associated with prostitution and “mental idiocy”, women of the lower classes were the first to be deemed “unfit” and “promiscuous”. These women, who were predominately immigrants or women of color, were discouraged from bearing children, and were encouraged to use birth control.

• Compulsory Sterilization

In 1907 Indiana passed the first eugenics-based compulsory sterilization law in the world. Thirty US states would soon follow their lead, and many US states sterilized “imbeciles” for much of the 20th century.

The most significant era of US eugenic sterilization ended in the mid-1960s, by which time more than 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation.

• Euthanasia Programs

One of the methods that was commonly suggested to get rid of “inferior” populations was euthanasia. A 1911 report by the famed Carnegie Institute suggested euthanasia as one of its solutions to the problem of cleansing society of unfit genetic attributes.

The most commonly suggested method was to set up local gas chambers.

However, many in the eugenics movement did not believe that Americans were ready to implement a large-scale euthanasia program, so many doctors had to find clever ways of subtly implementing eugenic euthanasia in various medical institutions.

For example, doctors at an institution in Lincoln, Illinois fed its incoming patients milk infected with tuberculosis (reasoning that genetically fit individuals would be resistant), resulting in 30-40% annual death rates. Other doctors practiced eugenicide through various forms of lethal neglect.

In the 1930s, there was a wave of portrayals of eugenic “mercy killings” in American film, newspapers, and magazines.

In 1931, the Illinois Homeopathic Medicine Association began lobbying for the right to euthanize “imbeciles” and other defectives. The Euthanasia Society of America was founded in 1938.

• Influence on Nazi Germany

For the past 60 years, the world has been eager to condemn Germany for its master-race eugenics program and the various human experiments performed.

But no one, least of all Americans, seems aware that Germany patterned both its eugenics program and those experiments on what it had seen in the US, and in fact directly copied many of them.

Eugenics was practiced in the United States many years before this was initiated in Nazi Germany, and US programs provided much of the inspiration for the latter.

Moreover, it was the famed US Rockefeller Foundation that helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs, including the one that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

During the Nuremberg trials, several of the Nazi doctors and scientists who were being tried for their human experiments, stated that the inspiration for their work had come from studies that they had seen performed in the United States.

Many of them cited the influence of American eugenics programs on their policies, and mentioned Buck v. Bell in their testimony.

• From California to Germany

After the eugenics movement was well established in the US, it spread to Germany.

Eugenicists from California, which had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than all other US states combined, began producing literature promoting eugenics and sterilization and sending it overseas to German scientists and medical professionals.

A favorable report on the results of sterilization in California was published by the biologist Paul Popenoe and was widely cited by the Nazi government as evidence that wide-reaching sterilization programs were feasible and humane.

Author Stefan Kühl has detailed the consensus between Nazi Race Politicians and eugenicists in the US, and pointed out that US eugenecists understood Nazi policies and measures as the realization of their own goals.

Upon returning from Germany in 1934, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe bragged to a colleague:

“You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program.

Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought.

I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.

• And it Didn’t Stop There – CIA Operation Paperclip

In 1945, as part of Operation Paperclip, the US government recruited 1,600 Nazi scientists, many of whom had not only practiced eugenics but had performed various kinds of human experimentation in Nazi concentration camps.

The scientists were offered immunity from any war crimes they had committed for the Nazis, in return for doing research for the US government. After their arrival in America, these Nazi scientists continued their human experimentation for their new CIA masters.
• The Work of Legal Historian Paul Lombardo

Georgia State University legal historian Paul Lombardo spent 30 years researching the US involuntary sterilization laws that led to the often undisclosed sterilization of Americans deemed unfit.

In February 1980. Lombardo, then a graduate student at the University of Virginia, picked up a newspaper to read as he ate breakfast.

The article he read was about two sisters sterilized in the 1920s by the state of Virginia for being “feeble-minded.” The younger sister hadn’t even known she’d had a tubal ligation. She didn’t learn until she was in her late 60s that the surgery hadn’t been for appendicitis.

The older, more famous sister – Carrie Buck – was the subject of the now infamous lawsuit over the legality of the operation, Buck v. Bell, that was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Although Carrie Buck was the first victim of a 1924 sterilization law, 8,300 Virginians had involuntary sterilization until the practice was stopped in the 1970s and the law repealed in 1974.

• And it Isn’t Over Yet

With genetics playing an increasingly important role in science, Lombardo and other bioethicists fear the lessons of the eugenics debacle matter more than ever.

University of Maryland historian Steven Selden worries about how we will handle the ethical questions of possible genetic “improvements” to humanity. “We’re going to revisit all the ethical conundrums that were inherent in the eugenics movement as we move forward.”

The US Human Rights Record

Torture – The American Dream

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• The US has Always Been Involved in Torture

U.S. Forces waterboarding Philippinos in 1906; After WWII Japanese were tried for war crimes for the same

 

CIA Torture Session
US torture in Iraq. Note the electric prod held to the man’s genitals. Note his screaming in pain. The world seemed surprised to learn of the US complicity in torture in Iraq. 

But in fact, the US has been actively engaged in torture since at least the 1940s.

After the Second World War, the US not only imported hordes of military scientists – beginning with Werner von Braun who designed the US missile and space programs.

The US also imported and protected many condemned German and Japanese war criminals, especially those skilled in torture methods.

When the US overthrew the government in Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah, they also designed and installed his dreaded Savak Secret Police – which was especially famous for torture.

According to researchers, not only did the US design this secret police and torture regime, they actually managed it on a daily basis, down to the selection and running of agents.

The CIA in the Philippines and Indonesia developed a massive 1000-page torture manual based on direct experimentation that was subsequently distributed for decades to all their dictator-puppets in Central and South America.

It was until at least well into the 1980s that the US CIA was distributing its euphemistically-titled “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual – 1983″, teaching its dictators all the fine points of how to torture their own people.

And it was in Central and South America that the CIA participated so actively in the training of torture methods, even bringing many “students” to the US to study and practice, so the US could export the savage brutality to its colonies.

The US actively taught, and supported, torture as a means of civilian control, including the numerous CIA-sponsored “death squads” in Central America. None of this is a secret any longer.

• American Media Admission of US Torture Programs

This is an interesting article from the Los Angeles Times, published on May 3, 2009: See the reference at bottom of page.

The US has had a 45-year history of torture. The difference between American involvement in South American atrocities in 1964 and ‘enhanced interrogation’ now is that modern-day US officials appear proud of themselves.

• US Torture In Iraq

“This was our greatest moment. We detained suspected terrorists indefinitely without charges (many of whom were innocent), without lawyers, without a hearing. We tortured many and sent many to foreign venues where greater torture could be inflicted.

We gave military trials to 3 of the more than 700 we imprisoned. Of those tried before military courts, two are free, one remains in prison. We broke the Guinness World Record for the number of times we waterboarded one suspect.”

Americans, with their perverted moralistic Christianity, are the worst of peoples for their hypocrisy and selective amnesia. Their nation was built on slavery, genocide, war and military colonisation, on child labor and brutal capitalism.

But as soon as they stop doing any one of those things, Americans immediately suffer total amnesia about their own dirty past and begin to loudly condemn any other nation doing what they themselves were doing only yesterday.

• Torture in Taiwan

It is not generally known, but Taiwan is among the locations in Asia where the US spread its torture regime.

When the US decided to abandon China and Mao after the Second World War, and to throw its lot in with Chiang Kai-Shek, American torture methods were taught and implemented in Taiwan as well. According to one American author:

“At the time, I was researching a book on the United States’ role in the spread of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. Tom Daschle arranged for me to inspect the senator’s files, and I spent an evening reading accounts of U.S. complicity in torture.”

He tells us the stories came not only from Iran, Greece and the Americas, but also from Taiwan.

• Operation PAPERCLIP – German and Japanese war criminals

While other American and European agencies were hunting down Nazi war criminals for arrest, the US intelligence community was smuggling them into America, unpunished, for their use against the Soviets. The same was true with Japanese war criminals.

Between 1945 and 1955 alone, more than 500 scientists and other specialists with Nazi ties were brought to the US, many because of their experience in torture and ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods.

• The CIA’s First Torture Manual

In 1963, the CIA had synthesized many of the findings from its MK-ULTRA psychological research program into what became known as the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook, which cited the MK-ULTRA studies, and other secret research programs as the scientific basis for their interrogation methods.

Cameron regularly traveled around the U.S. teaching military personnel about his techniques (hooding of prisoners for sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation, humiliation, etc.), and how they could be used in interrogations.

Latin American paramilitary groups working for the CIA and U.S. military received training in these psychological techniques at places like the School of the Americas, and even today, many of the torture techniques developed in the MKULTRA studies and other programs are being used at U.S. military and CIA prisons such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

In the aftermath of the Congressional hearings, major news media mainly focused on sensationalistic stories related to LSD, “mind-control”, and “brainwashing”, and rarely used the word “torture”.

But these CIA researchers were a rational group of men who had run torture laboratories and medical experiments in major U.S. universities, and who had tortured, raped, and psychologically abused young children, driving many of them permanently insane.

Medical professionals gathered and collected data on the CIA’s use of torture techniques on detainees, in order to refine those techniques, and to “to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies”, according to a report by Physicians for Human Rights.

Sleep deprivation tests were performed on prisoners in 48-, 96- and 180-hour increments. Doctors also collected data intended to help them judge the emotional and physical impact of the techniques so as to “calibrate the level of pain experienced by detainees during interrogation” and to determine if using certain types of techniques would increase a subject’s “susceptibility to severe pain.”.

The CIA denied the allegations, claiming they never performed any experiments on anybody. And of course, the CIA Director ordered all the records destroyed, so the whole truth can never now be known.

But it continues unabated:

In August 2010, the U.S. weapons manufacturer Raytheon announced that it had partnered with a jail in Castaic, California in order to use prisoners as test subjects for a new non-lethal weapon system that “fires an invisible heat beam capable of causing unbearable pain.”

• And Yet More . . .

Torture is now solidly installed in America’s repressive arsenal, not in the shadows where it has always lurked, but up front and central, vigorously applauded by prominent politicians.

Covertly, there was always plenty of torture, just as there were assassinations, high and low. After World War Two the CIA’s predecessor, OSS, imported Nazi experts in interrogation techniques.

• A systemic US policy of torture that dates to the Cold War

US officials looked at Nazi human experimentation and in 1945, the US Navy recruited Dr Kurt Plotner, who had supervised human experimentation at the Dachau concentration camp, to continue his interrogation “research”.

The military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) embarked on a quest to find sharper tools to break down prisoners and extract confessions.

The US military quickly found it was not exotic potions that worked. It is rather that if you put someone in a room, strip them naked and don’t give them food for a week or two, they will be willing to confess to anything. The military found that after 12 hours participants became susceptible to suggestion.

The US military then aunched its Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (Sere) programme – supposedly designed to inoculate soldiers against the stress of torture.

Starting in 1953, students in Sere were hooded, nearly drowned, positioned into painful and sexually explicit positions, subjected to abuse focusing on their race and religion, and held in solitary confinement for days at a time.

The methods centred on self-inflicted pain, sensory deprivation and humiliation to render victims delirious, dependent and highly suggestible. Training camps were opened around the world – in South Korea in 1953 and in Britain in 1954.

While the US military tortured its own soldiers, the CIA embarked on a programme to discover powerful drugs to control the body and mind, mostly using LSD. After these programmes failed miserably, the agency turned to the techniques used by the military.

According to the CIA’s 1963 Kubark counter-intelligence interrogation training manual, techniques “succeed even with highly resistant sources [by] inducing regression of the personality to whatever earlier and weaker level is required for the dissolution of resistance”.

• By 1971 more than 100,000 foreign officers had been trained in torture

From the late 1950s, the CIA and US military exported their torture methods to US allies in south east Asia and importantly Latin America via counter-insurgency training programmes.

Torture techniques were deployed in the Vietnam War in the form of the Phoenix programme, which aimed to “root out the Communist infrastructure in Vietnam”. It was a CIA creation.

Making a pyramid of naked people is not authorised explicitly – but enforced nakedness and ritualising humiliation is. Sleep deprivation is authorised by the commanding generals as is the use of dogs against Muslims.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 legalised these methods of torture for use by the CIA in secret prisons. Today hypothermia, forced standing, sleep deprivation and simulated drowning are legal tools in the interrogator’s toolbox.

Since 2001, more than 800 allegations of abuse have surfaced and at least 34 US-held prisoners have been murdered while in custody.

Sleep deprivation and forced standing inflict enormous damage. Although it sounds innocuous, sleep deprivation is one of the cruellest forms of torture. Waterboarding, a form of mock execution, cruelly fuses both the mental and physical.

In fact, these people are in “torture labs”, as the new US ‘black’ installation in Indonesia which pretends to be a “freedom medical facility”.

Just as the US was obscenely eager to get to Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the H-Bombs were dropped, to ‘examine and catalog’ the results of their new monstrosity, so the US is still obscenely eager to test, examine and catalog the results of their new torture methods.

• Israel Does it; Why Can’t We?

The American liberal conscience began to make its accommodation with torture in June, 1977, which was the month the London Sunday Times published a major expose of torture of Palestinians by the Israeli armed forces and the security agency, Shin Bet.

Suddenly American supporters of Israel were arguing that certain techniques – sensory deprivation, prolonged stress positions while hooded, incarceration in “cells” the size of packing crates, etc – somehow weren’t really torture, or were morally justifiable torture under “ticking time bomb” theory.

Ahead lay the repellent spectacle of Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, and a supposed liberal defender of civil rights, recommending to Israel the notion of “torture warrants”.

The targets of the warrants being “subjected to judicially monitored physical measures designed to cause excruciating pain without leaving any lasting damage.”

One form of torture recommended by the Harvard professor was “the sterilized needle being shoved under the fingernails.”

• Practice in the Prisons

On the home front torture as a drastic mode of social control flowered luxuriantly in the America’s prison system, whose population began to rocket up in the 1970s to its present 2.5 million total.

Sanctioned male rape goes hand in hand with increasingly sadistic solitary confinement with prolonged sensory deprivation – a condition in which some 25,000 prisoners are currently being driven mad.

Return to Index
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• References and Reading

U.S. has a 45-year history of torture – LA Times.

US Way of Torture.

US Torture. The abuse of prisoners

The US in Iraq: A worse record than Saddam’s. These “Men of War” are so morally deformed that anything is possible

The Shaming of America. Details Exposed of the Brutality of the US War in Iraq.

Humiliate, strip, threaten. Military interrogation manuals discovered

How the CIA protected Nazi murderers.

Records: U.S. Protected Nazi Gestapo Agents.

The CIA and Nazi War Criminals.

The US Human Rights Record

The School of the Americas
________________________________________
• The School of the Americas

One part of this almost unbelievable US torture scandal is the little-known U.S. Army “School of the Americas”, located in Fort Benning, Georgia, which trains Latin American military officers and soldiers to subvert their governments and kill hope in their own countries.

This so-called ‘university’ is also known as the “School of Dictators,” and has produced thousands of dishonorable graduates linked to terror, torture, massacres and military death squads.

Founded by the United States in 1946, the SOA was initially located in Panama, but in 1984 it was kicked out under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty and moved to the army base at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Then-President of Panama Jorge Illueca called it “the biggest base for de-stabilization in Latin America,” and a major Panamanian newspaper dubbed it ” The School of Assassins.”

• Americans Know, But Don’t Care

In September 1996, under intense public pressure, the Pentagon was forced to release SOA training manuals advocating torture, extortion, blackmail and the targeting of civilian populations. According to a Washington Post story at the time:

“Used in courses at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, the manual says that to recruit and control informants, counterintelligence agents could use fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum.”

In the 1990s, there were extensive investigations exposing the SOA’s practices and its connections to brutal dictators, but the publicity has died and efforts to shut down the school have failed.

The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. And these ‘operations’ certainly did not stop by 1987; if anything, they accelerated.

• School of Assassins, USA

The school still exists, but is rarely mentioned in the US today, and their attitude now is, ‘We can do anything we want, anywhere we want’.

Today, SOA instructors and students are recruited from the cream of the Latin American military establishment. The School trains up to 2,000 dictators and their military each year and, since its inception in 1946, more than 60,000 military dictatorship personnel have graduated.

The SOA curriculum includes courses in psychological warfare, counterinsurgency, interrogation techniques, and infantry and commando tactics. Presented with the most sophisticated and up-to-date techniques by the US Army’s best instructors, these courses teach military officers and soldiers of Third World countries to subvert the truth, to muzzle union leaders, activist clergy, and journalists, and to make war on their own people.

It prepares them to subdue the voices of dissent and to make protesters submit. It instructs them in techniques of marginalizing the poor, the hungry, and the dispossessed. It tells them how to stamp out freedom and terrorize their own citizens. It trains them to destroy their people’s hope of good government.

The impact of SOA graduates on Latin American freedom has been devastating. Armed with sophisticated training, modern US weapons, and up-to-date techniques of control and surveillance, graduates of the SOA have terrorized their own countries for many decades.

• And the US Continues to Spread ‘Democracy’ and ‘Human Rights’

When they return to their home countries, graduates of the SOA hold a rather unique and peculiar view of their countrymen. They look upon priests, social workers, journalists, and intellectuals, as subversives, dangerous to the system that keeps these dictators and their US sponsors in power.

Graduates of the SOA have been among the most repressive tyrants in Latin America, and their actions have been some of the most cruel and violent. Typically, the countries with the worst human rights records send the most soldiers to this School.

In Guatemala, a small country of 10 only million, the indigenous Mayan population endured the greatest suffering in Latin America. During more than 30 years of US-sponsored brutality and civil war, hundreds of thousands were slaughtered.

Most of the high-level military officers involved in all these acts of terror and murder during this period were trained for this in the USA, at the ‘School of the Americas’.

• People and Sausages

In one famous case, these US ‘freedom-loving, democratic leaders’, arrested thousands of civilians for opposing the brutality of the government. They stripped everyone naked and handcuffed people together in groups of about 50.

They raped all the women, then loaded the people – still all handcuffed together in a long chain – into a military transport plane. They flew the plane to 3,000 meters, and threw out of the plane the person at the end, so they would all fall into the ocean in a long string like sausage links.

Maybe US President Ronald Reagan gave them a medal for showing American ingenuity and creativity.

• Students and Graduates

The US-sponsored dictators from Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela, have all sent thousands of soldiers to this school.

In all these countries, the “graduates” of this US “school” have committed countless thousands of murders, massacres – especially of women and children, assassinations, deaths by torture, ‘disappearances’.

They were trained to overthrew the legitimate governments in their countries, were supplied with money arms and weapons to do so, and were then heavily supported by the US.

The education they received was in torture and terrorising their population, and in obeying American ‘national interests’ by permitting US companies to plunder their nations.

All have been bitter enemies of all human rights, and many organised the famous CIA-sponsored “death squads” that roamed these nations slaughtering civilians by the tens of thousands. There is probably no accurate record of the millions killed.

The picture is even worse when we consider the now widely-available information that from the time of the Vietnam war the CIA financed much of this activity by trafficking in cocaine, opium and heroin, importing much of it into the US to be sold to Mafia drug dealers.

• When Will This End?

Americans who condemn world terrorism, torture and the abuse of human rights, should be condemning their own government instead of criticising other nations.

One place for them to begin is to demand the closing of this abominable school of brutal dictatorships, terrorism and torture.

Return to Index

• References and Reading

This article is adapted from information at Third World Traveler Original Article Here.

Training Camp for Dictators.From the Socialist Worker.

The US Record on Human Rights

CIA Atrocities
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• A Short List of CIA Atrocities

The CIA has committed thousands of illegal and immoral acts around the world, including almost unfathomable mass murder and countless acts of terrorism and torture.

Former CIA agent John Stockwell wrote that “The CIA and the big corporations were, in my experience, in step with each other”, as they have been for many decades.

He wrote that “the CIA had been running thousands of operations over the years. There have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations, all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries.

But they are all illegal and they all disrupt the normal functioning, often the democratic functioning, of other societies.”

It is now well-known that the CIA recruited Nazi war criminals for their expertise in torture and interrogation. The CIA is widely known as the “Cocaine Import Agency” for many good reasons.

This agency has instructed over 100,000 people in various dictatorships on the finer points of torture, having produced a 1,000-page torture manual that was circulated among US puppet states for decades.

The CIA has been instrumental in overthrowing almost 4 dozen governments around the world, assisting the US military and US government in installing pliant dicatorships.

The CIA has engaged in assassination and covert chemical and biological warfare, among other things. The list of known crimes and atrocities is almost endless, and only Heaven knows of the list that has never become public knowledge.

• Operation Northwoods

Operation Northwoods was a series of false-flag operation proposals that originated within the United States government in 1962. The proposals called for CIA operatives to commit acts of terrorism in US cities and elsewhere.

These acts of terrorism were to be blamed on Cuba in order to create public support for a war against that nation.

One of the more ingenious proposals, and one which is typical, involved filling a passenger plane with US college students, sending it off-course over Cuba, then shooting it down, blaming the Cubans for this atrocity and using it to justify a war of invasion.

The CIA was apparently very angry that then US President John F. Kennedy, refused to agree to their proposal.

Those who suspect the CIA of having engineered and helped execute the 9-11 World Trade Center tragedy, are not mindless ‘conspiracy theorists’. We cannot say that the CIA did in fact carry out this act, but it certainly is the kind of thing they would do.

• Some Inside Documentation

The late Steve Kangas compiled in the 1990s the following disturbing list of CIA crimes around the world: A timeline of CIA atrocities. You can read many more such lists and articles in the References below.

Not long after, Mr. Kangas allegedly committed suicide in a 39th floor bathroom at One Oxford Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, immediately outside the offices of foundations run by known CIA operative Richard Mellon Scaife.

• One Example of so Many – The Tragedy of Laos

In Laos, from the 1950s to the 1970s, the CIA attempted one military coup per year trying to nullify Laos’ democratic elections, trying to remove the Pathet Lao, who had enough popular support to be a member of any coalition government.

In the late 50s, the CIA created a clandestine army of Asian mercenaries to attack the Pathet Lao. After suffering numerous defeats, the US began bombing the country, dropping more bombs on Laos than all the U.S. bombs dropped in World War II.

A quarter of all Laotians eventually became refugees, many living in caves.

Return to Index

• References and Reading

The CIA – The World’s Largest Criminal Organisation. A series of 24 articles from varied news sources, listing some of the CIA’s worldwide atrocities.

CIA atrocities.

A timeline of CIA atrocities.

Subject: A Timeline of CIA Atrocities.

CIA Holocaust Claims Twenty Million Victims.

The atrocities done to Latin America by the US. It is no wonder they hate the governments (past and current) of America.
The CIA is a Terrorist Organisation. The CIA: America’s Premier International (and Domestic) Terrorist Organization
More CIA Links. Links to Further Documents Concerning the CIA (for those few who want to know what it really is and does)

CIA Drug Trafficking.

The CIA and Cocaine. The CIA and Cocaine: Some Quotes

Vietnam, the CIA’s Illegal Drug Trafficking, and JFK’s Assassination. An Overview of Michael Collins Piper’s “Final Judgment”
The CIA murders two young boys. Little Rock, police officers murdered two teenage boys because they witnessed a police-protected drug drop. The drop was part of a drug smuggling operation based at a small airport in Mena, Arkansas.

CIA: ROGUE AGENCY RUN AMUCK. A compendium of websites, books, press releases, and deductions describing alleged CIA nefarious actions.

The Frank Olson Murder.

Rumsfeld & Cheney’s Dirty Little Spy Secret.

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the Manchurian Candidate.

Confessions of an Economic hit man.

US-Supported Dictatorships

No Democracies Here
________________________________________
Article by 龙信明

Readers should try to remember that this is only one act of a continuous play that has been on stage for a century now. These are all facts of history, and the essential facts are not in dispute by anyone – including the US state department.

The US has always had a fond affection for repressive dictators, tyrants and corrupt puppet-presidents, who have been aided, supported, and rewarded handsomely for their loyalty to US interests.

US tax dollars and US-backed loans have made billionaires of some, while others are international drug dealers who also collect CIA paychecks. I am unaware of occasions where the US government was held responsible in any way for supporting and protecting some of the worst human rights violators in the world.

These men usually rise to power through bloody ClA-backed coups, and rule by terror and torture. Their troops receive arms, training and advice from the CIA and other US agencies. It is US military support that guarantees their hold on power – and the fact that they provide free access to US corporations to exploit their countries’ resources.

The US has, over the years, installed, financed, supported with cash and arms, 45 bloody dictators. In 13 of those cases, the US overthrew a legitimate functioning democracy for the sake of installing one of their own dictators who would be more pliable to US foreign policy.

In several cases when the population of a country revolted and overthrew the US-installed dictaor, the US sent in their warships to put down the revolution and re-install their dictator once again.

Even worse, the US has sent in CIA hit squads to assassinate a democratically-elected leader who wanted to eliminate colonialism in his country – Patrice Lumumba in the Congo comes to mind, and there may be others.

The US not only often installed, but in each case protected, both politically and militarily, and supported with arms, cash and military training, the corrupt dictatorships of:

Abacha, General Sani —————————-Nigeria
Amin, Idi —————————————-Uganda
Banzer, Colonel Hugo —————————–Bolivia
Batista, Fulgencio ——————————-Cuba
Bolkiah, Sir Hassanal —————————–Brunei
Botha, P.W. ———————————South Africa
Branco, General Humberto ————————Brazil
Cedras, Raoul ————————————Haiti
Cerezo, Vinicio ——————————Guatemala
Chiang Kai-Shek ———————————Taiwan
Cordova, Roberto Suazo ————————-Honduras
Christiani, Alfredo —————————El Salvador
Diem, Ngo Dihn ———————————-Vietnam
Doe, General Samuel —————————-Liberia
Duvalier, Francois ——————————–Haiti
Duvalier, Jean Claude—————————–Haiti
Fahd bin’Abdul-’Aziz, King ——————–Saudi Arabia
Franco, General Francisco ———————–Spain
Hassan II—————————————-Morocco
Hussein, Saddam ——————————–Iraq
Khan, Yahya————————————-Pakistan
Marcos, Ferdinand ——————————-Philippines
Martinez, General Maximiliano Hernandez ———-El Salvador
Mobutu Sese Seko ——————————-Zaire
Noriega, General Manuel ————————–Panama
Ozal, Turgut ————————————-Turkey
Pahlevi, Shah Mohammed Reza ——————-Iran
Papadopoulos, George —————————Greece
Park Chung Hee ———————————South Korea
Pinochet, General Augusto ———————–Chile
Pol Pot——————————————Cambodia
Rabuka, General Sitiveni ————————-Fiji
Montt, General Efrain Rios ———————–Guatemala
Salassie, Halie ———————————-Ethiopia
Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira ———————-Portugal
Somoza, Anastasio Jr. —————————Nicaragua
Somoza, Anastasio, Sr. ————————–Nicaragua
Smith, Ian ————————————–Rhodesia
Stroessner, Alfredo ——————————Paraguay
Suharto, General ——————————–Indonesia
Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas ——————–Dominican Republic
Videla, General Jorge Rafael ———————-Argentina
Zia Ul-Haq, Mohammed ————————–Pakistan

Here are some countries where the US military and/or CIA financed and led revolutions to depose legitimate democracies and install a dictator (in Zaire, they did the assassination themselves): Bolivia Brazil Haiti Spain Philppines Zaire Guatemala Iran Greece Chile Fiji Nicaragua Indonesia The Congo

There are also cases where the US military and CIA intervened to prevent the citizens of a country from getting rid of a dictator and returning to democracy. The Dominican Republic comes to mind as one of the more shameful episodes in US history.

• Our Friends – People like US (Pun Intended)

And what about the quality of these newly-installed dictators? Well:

• Trujillo in the Dominican Republic was a convicted rapist.
• In El Salvador, the US installed Roberto D’Aubuisson, whom a US Ambassador called a “pathological killer”.
• Of Somoza in Nicaragua, Franklin Roosevelt said, “Somoza may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.”

An estimated 50,000 killed during the Nicaraguan “revolution”, 120,000 exiled and 600,000 made homeless, and this was only the beginning. Nicaragua was one of the few cases where international pressure on Jimmy Carter’s government forced the US to abandon military and political support for one of their favorite dictators.

• Alfredo Cristiani of El Salvador was famous worldwide for his motto – “Be patriotic-kill a priest”.
• Ferdinand Marcos – Phippines

The US candidate for Philippines dictator, under President Lyndon Johnson, Ferdinand Marcos began his career in prison at age 21 for the murder of the man who had beaten his father in the local election.

Starting in 1950, the US CIA funded several decades of academic research into “the relative usefulness of drugs, electroshock, violence, and other coercive techniques” to discover a new method of psychological torture – perhaps the most significant revolution in this cruel science during the past four centuries. Instead of a simple physical brutality, these units practiced a distinctive form of psychological torture with wider implications for the military and its society.

The CIA’s thousand-page torture manual, distributed to military regimes in Latin America for over 20 years, taught psychological tactics to break down what the Agency called a victim’s “capacity to resist”. Through “persistent manipulation of time,” the interrogator can break a victim’s will, driving the victim, in the CIA’s words, “deeper and deeper into himself, until he is no longer able to control his responses in an adult fashion.”

The CIA created in the Philippines “a closed, tight-knit, psychotic club of martial-law enforcers, and few could rival their psychopathic interrogations.”

in 2008, lawyers for Philippine victims of human rights abuses under CIA-supported Marcos said Friday they regretted a U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning lower court rulings that gave the victims the right to money stashed by Marcos in the United States.
• Mohammad Reza Pahlevi – Iran

With the support of US President Eisenhower, Allen Dulles used the CIA to topple the elected government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq and install the Shah. With Dulles’ encouragement, he forced all people to join his party or go to jail. Thousands were imprisoned or murdered. His agents raided a religious school and hurled hundreds of students to their deaths from the roof.

His secret police agency, SAVAK, was created in 1957 and managed by the CIA at all levels of daily operation, including the choice and organization of personnel, selection and operation of equipment, and the running of agents. Torture methods included:

• electric shock
• whipping
• beating
• inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum
• tying weights to the testicles
• the extraction of teeth and nails.

Iran under the Shah became a devoted US ally and a base for spy operations on the border of the Soviet Union.

In 2000, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright stated: “In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister, Mohammed Massadegh. The Eisenhower Administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons; but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.”

No Kidding.
• P.W. Botha – South Africa

Reagan significantly increased military expenditures and support, but Botha had some bad habits that Reagan ignored:

(1) Cutting off the ears, noses, and limbs of civilians

(2) He would:
• round up 10 year old boys
• kill their parents in front of them
• rape young women while they watched
• then recruit them to fight in his army
• Mobutu Sese Seko – Zaire

Zaire’s first President, Patrice Lumumba, seemed to be too socialist and US companies feared they might lose control of Zaire’s cobalt, copper and diamonds.

So the CIA assassinated Lumumba and replaced him with Mobutu, who had been the US’s main man in Central Africa. He imprisoned and tortured, but the US Congress continued to reward his work against communism and his warm reception of American corporations.

• General Suharto – Indonesia

Suharto was one of the most brutal dictators in history. He ruled for 32 years and continued his savage atrocities under the support of 7 US presidents: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton.

President Lyndon Johnson authorised a CIA-organized coup that brought Suharto to power in 1965, and the CIA then supervised while Suharto exterminated three million Indonesian communist party members.

They hacked the alleged subversives to death with machetes. Entire populations of towns and villages were herded to central locations and massacred. Children would be asked to identify communists who would then be executed on the spot.

In addition to the half million people who were killed outright after the coup, another 750,000 were arrested and tortured. Ultimately, one million people died in one of the most savage mass slaughters of modern political history. The US continues to this day to train and arm the Indonesian military with the latest high-tech equipment. The US has also recently opened a new “black” “Peace Medicine” installation in Indonesia that is almost certainly a torture laboratory.

• Mohammed Zia Ul-Haq – Pakistan

Zia executed his elected predecessor, Zulfigar Ali Bhutto in 1979, and by 1984 Pakistan was furnishing 70% of the world’s high grade heroin. That same year, George Bush addressed a group of Pakistani officials and praised the government of President Zia for its anti-narcotics program.

Henry Kissinger called Pakistan a “frontline state defending free people everywhere’, in spite of its record of jailing and torturing dissidents. Pakistan under Zia was the largest recipient of US. aid, of which over half was for weapons. Zia died in a mysterious (CIA induced?) plane crash in 1988.

• Yahya Khan – Pakistan

One more US-backed genocidal dictator. Khan initiated a massive campaign of genocide, targeting Muslims, Hindus, Bengali intellectuals, students and political activists. While President Nixon looked the other way, 3 million people were killed in a few months along with another 400,000 women who were raped.

• General Efrain Rios Montt – Guatemala

One in a long series of dictators who ran Guatemala after the Dulles brothers and United Fruit, backed by the CIA, removed democratically-elected President Jacobo Arbenz.

Montt had given $500,000 to Reagan’s 1980 campaign, and his henchman, Mario Sandoval Alarcon, the Godfather of Central American death squads, was a guest at Reagan’s first inaugural celebration.

The U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala said “Guatemala has come out of the darkness and into the light”.

• General Augusto Pinochet – Chile

“Democracy is the breeding ground of communism”.

Pinochet deposed and assassinated democratically elected President Salvador Allende in 1973, in a bloody coup which was carefully managed by the CIA and ITT. Tens of thousands of Chileans were tortured, killed, and exiled since then.

• Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez – El Salvador

“It is a greater crime to kill an ant than a man.”

Martinez initiated an anti-communist massacre that left 40,000 peasants dead and wiped out the country’s Indian culture. Roadways and drainage ditches were littered with bodies. U.S. warships were stationed off-shore, ready to send in Marines to aid the General in case he ran into serious opposition.

This entry was posted in ANGLO-AMERICAN EUGENICS AND NAZIS, ANGLO-AMERICAN GENOCIDE, CRITICAL ISSUES OF OUR TIMES, Distraction and Destruction, IMPERIAL HUBRIS AND HYPOCRISY, Imperialism and Colonialism, Indigenous Peoples and Genocide, International Law and Nuremberg Precedents, LECTURES AND PAPERS IN CHINA, MSM, REAL HISTORY UNCOVERED, SKULL AND BONES, US AND HUMAN RIGHTS, Weapons of Mass Deception. Bookmark the permalink.

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