We Demand a Nuremberg Trial for the Americans

by Robert Edwards 

ESA No47, 
July/August 2013

The United States is both feared and hated throughout the world. That should be self-evident. No nation has wielded such power since the dawn of human history, in terms of military hardware and advanced technical expertise.

“American interests” determine policy and anyone that stands in the way of these interests is in very serious danger.

The United States: World Enemy Number One

When a leading American politician told us that the United States does not spy on its own people, he was forced to apologise not long after and confess that it does.

America persecutes its dissidents mercilessly and will hunt them down obsessively. The recent case of Edward Snowden is the latest example. Like Bradley Manning before him, Snowden exposed the criminal nature of the United States, the illegality at its very core.

Instead of studying the message within these exposures, they decided to “shoot the messenger”. Is it treason to speak the truth, especially where a crime is committed, and to let the whole world know the United States is run by evil, wicked men?

How can the United States regard as property, material they have acquired illegally? Spying on people entails stealing personal details without the owner’s knowledge or consent. Snowden is not the criminal in this case.

The moral argument is always paramount in these cases and those who stand for rights and justice against tyranny are the heroes and champions.

Bradley Manning is one of those rare heroes whose conscience determined his actions. Who can forget that footage taken from a helicopter gunship in Iraq, murdering Iraqi civilians and journalists by firing on them indiscriminately? Over the intercom we heard a colleague urging on the man on the trigger to kill more. We all saw it and we should be sickened by it. A one off? No way. American society is obsessed with gun ownership and the compulsion to shoot something or someone. I recall, in the early days of the Iraqi occupation, US soldiers using the phrase “turkey shoot”. It was a reference to the murderous activities of these US soldiers in Iraq, terrorising the population, torturing and murdering them. These soldiers are psychopaths and they are trained to become psychopaths. It is the reason so many discharged soldiers later suffer from mental illness. Their consciences weigh very heavily just a little while later and all they have are memories of the atrocities in which they were involved or party to. British soldiers suffer the same way.

All of this is condoned by the US Administration. Extraordinary rendition, one of those American gobble-de-gook phrases, a euphemism for torturing someone using the facilities of another country, is sanctioned by the state. A former aide to George W. Bush said without these methods, including water-boarding, they would not have advanced so quickly. A man under torture will say anything to stop the cruel torment. It is acknowledged under International Law that torture is unacceptable. More than that, the results from torture are never reliable.

So why do they do it? Because they can? Because they are sadistic psychopaths? Probably. Only a psychopath could behave that way.

United States foreign policy is based on permanent war. It is the neo-con strategy for imposing “freedom and democracy” on the rest of the world. Dreamed up by a gang of Jewish former Trotskyites, they took their global/internationalist perspective onto a different level. From the permanent revolution of their student days to permanent war as US policy.

There is also big money in war. The bigger the war, and the more destruction, the bigger the rewards. Not only the spoils of war in terms of natural resources but the big contracts for rebuilding the infrastructure. Then there is this massive armaments industry and all the people involved in it. The military/industrial complex describes this partnership between big money and the means to terrorise the world. It is the greatest threat to world peace.

Another aspect to American criminality is the systematic rape of Iraqi women by US soldiers. This is, perhaps, the most degrading act anyone could endure. We know of these rapes through the egotistical custom of filming these crimes as a kind of trophy. It is more commonplace than we would like to admit.

Rape as a weapon of war was Stalin’s policy in 1945 as Russians swept across East Prussia and on to Berlin. It was motivated solely by revenge. The many rapes and other sexual abuse perpetrated by the US Army were of a different nature.

In March 2006, four US soldiers raped a 14 year old Iraqi girl, murdering her and her entire family ... a 5 year old child included. A cover-up ensued, concealing the presence of two child victims.

The world was earlier shocked on learning the abuses conducted within the walls of Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. The US commander of the prison was suspended but refused to shoulder all the blame for the inhuman treatment of prisoners there. She implicated the CIA and private US government contractors in the beatings and torture of inmates, as well as the rape of Iraqi women.

The CIA link is the most interesting here. A commander of a Military Police Brigade revealed a directive from the Military Intelligence and the CIA   that focused on successful interrogations. It was no coincidence that only weeks before the Abu Ghraib abuses occurred, a team of CIA, Military Intelligence and private contractors under US authority entered Abu Ghraib with their “main and specific mission to give the interrogators new techniques to get more information from detainees”.

CBS News released the photographs showing torture and sexual abuse at the prison. Iraqi POWs were sexually assaulted using objects such as truncheons. President Obama was instrumental in blocking the release of thousands of photographs depicting every indecency, abuse, torture and rape.

Of the photographs that were released, one shows a US soldier raping a female prisoner while another shows the rape of a male prisoner by a male translator.

The Daily Telegraph offered an explanation for the suppression of about 2,000 other photographs taken at Abu Ghraib after interviewing the former army officer who headed the inquiry into Abu Ghraib. The newspaper commented, “the graphic nature of some of the images may explain President Obama’s attempts to block the release of over 2.000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published”.

Obama changed his mind on releasing the photographs because he believed the safety of US soldiers would be at risk. He said, “The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to inflame anti-American public opinion and to put our troops in greater danger”.

This concealment of American criminal activity in both Iraq and Afghanistan is also linked to the United States refusal to sign up to the International Criminal Court at the Hague.

The existence of the facility at Guantanamo Bay is also illegal under International Law. Men are imprisoned there for years without charge or trial. It is a blatant suspension of habeas corpus. These men are also tortured regularly.

When Obama cried about “inflaming anti-American public opinion” over the release of graphic photos depicting torture and rape, he is clearly helpless over the continuing abuse of human rights going on in Guantanamo Bay ... or Gitmo, as it is affectionately called.

This attempt to conceal the ugly, dark side of the American government’s internal and external activities has created a shadow government that cares nothing for the sensibilities, rights or humanity of others. It is, literally, if you are not with us ... then you are ... dead!

Secrecy is more important than justice to the US secret state. People like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden acted morally ... they did the right thing. People prefer transparency and honesty to being spied on without knowing it.

Some of us in the long political struggle are not too surprised. In fact, we are so conditioned that we talk on the phone with that possibility of it being “tapped” ever present. It is not paranoia because the secret state has been doing it since the days of Alexander Graham Bell. They used to mainly target troublesome trades unionists and left wing politicians who had a liking for the Soviet Union. According to the facts emerging from the NSA and GCHQ, we are now all targets of the secret state, whether you are a trade unionist or a lefty MP. Social control must be total.

The American excuse that releasing all this information threatens national security does not hold water. What this does, though, is something far more valuable. It exposes evil. It exposes the hard faced men behind the scenes.

In retrospect, our relationship with the United States has been disastrous for both us and the rest of Europe. The Cold War was marked, again, by American interests and the “Merkan way of life”. We became Americanised and British Prime Ministers became lap dogs to the Ugly American in charge of the Oval Office.

Nikita Krushchev offered an olive branch in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War. He told the Americans that the Russians would withdraw all Soviet forces from Eastern Europe if the Americans would do the same in Western Europe. The United States turned him down.

They wanted to keep their bases in Britain and in Western Germany. They were just getting the taste for imperialism and sending troops around the world ... to Korea and to Indo-China. They were ‘anti-communist’ and were using it as a bogeyman to scare people, just as they promote this bogus war on terrorism today. America is the real terrorist. The real problem has always been the United States and its policy of permanent war.

Our natural ally is to the East, as part of our continental land mass. Russia is an advanced civilised power, rich in culture and intensely proud of its achievements. Its people are naturally friendly and courteous. Have you ever heard an American be polite, apart from the insincere and ubiquitous “have a nice day”? It is in their bastardised language, this slack disregard for the feelings of others ... demonstrated in their foreign policy and the way they treat non-Americans.

Our other natural ally is in the Muslim world and a religion that opposes usury and therefore is the deadliest enemy of debt slavery.

Anyone who opposes usury and debt slavery is on the right path. It is the curse of the entire world and the greatest challenge of today.

copyright©2013 Robert Edwards