EMPIRE OF CHAOS

WAR

Third World countries that the United States has, alone or together with others, attacked, bombed, invaded, and ruined.

"Coming to grips with U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola, and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies."

John Stockwell - former CIA officer - resigned from CIA in 1976

"There appears to be something about launching bombs or missiles from afar onto cities and people that appeals to American military and political leaders. In part it has to do with a conscious desire to not risk American lives in ground combat. And in part, perhaps not entirely conscious, it has to do with not wishing to look upon the gory remains of the victims, allowing American GIs and TV viewers at home to cling to their warm fuzzy feelings about themselves and their government."

William Blum

"Since World War Two the United States has attempted to overthrow more than fifty foreign governments, it has dropped bombs on the people of around thirty countries, has attempted to assassinate some sixty foreign leaders, helped to suppress dozens of populist or nationalist movements, has tortured many thousands, and seriously and illegally intervened in one way or another in virtually every country on the planet, in the process of which the U.S. has caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."

William Blum

"The manufacturers of armaments are not the only 'merchants of death.' To some extent, indeed, we all deserve that name. For in so far as we vote for governments which impose tariffs and quotas, in so far as we support policies of re-armament, in so far as we consent to our country's policy of economic, political and military imperialism, in so far even as we behave badly in private life, we are all doing our bit to bring the next war nearer.
The small, but politically powerful, minority of financiers and industrialists is interested in various forms of economic imperialism. By a judicious use of their resources, the capitalists of highly industrialized countries stake out claims for themselves within nominally independent countries. Those claims are then represented as being the claims of the respective nations, and the quarrels between the various financial interests concerned become quarrels between states. The peace of the world has frequently been endangered, in order that oil magnates might grow a little richer.
In the press, which is owned by rich men, the interests of the investing minority are always identified with those of the nation as a whole. Constantly repeated statements come to be accepted as truths. Innocent and ignorant, most newspaper readers are convinced that the private interests of the rich are really public interests and become indignant whenever these interests are menaced by a foreign power, intervening on behalf of its investing minority. The interest at stake are the interests of the few; but the public opinion which demands the protection of these interests is often a genuine expression of mass emotion. The many really feel and believe that the dividends of the few are worth fighting for."

Aldous Huxley in his book "Ends and Means", 1937

"American leaders are perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral. It's not that they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's that they just don't care. The same that could be said about a sociopath. As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to them ... then they just don't care about it happening to other people, including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come home-the ones who make it back alive-with Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. American leaders would not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered by such things."

William Blum

"United States military forces have killed more innocent foreign civilians than the forces of any other country since the end of World War II, an uncomfortable truth for a nation whose people overwhelmingly consider themselves liberators, even as their government has supported countless brutal dictatorships - some of them genocidal - around the world and overthrown democratically elected governments viewed as undesirable by Washington and elite American interests, mostly of the corporate variety."

Brett Wilkins, 2015

"The engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, but rather by the necessity to serve other imperatives: making the world safe for American corporations; enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of congress; preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model; extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible."

William Blum

"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force."

William Blum

AFGHANISTAN

"In the 1980s, Afghanistan had a genuinely popular government that was implementing widespread reforms. Labour unions were legalized, a minimum wage was established, hundreds of thousands of Afghans were enrolled in educational facilities, and women were freed from age-old tribal bondage and able to earn an independent income.
U.S. and Western imperialism, fearful of that kind of equitable distribution of wealth, supported the feudal landlords and fundamentalist mullahs to sow chaos across the country, giving rise to elements that later formed al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Afghan people were once more dealt a severe punishment by the forces of Western imperialism following 9/11, despite a lack of conclusive evidence linking either the Taliban or al-Qaeda to the attacks. 30 years of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan have left the people of Afghanistan impoverished, traumatized, and desperate."

T.J. Petrowski, 2015

"It is due to the wrong and devastating policies of the U.S. government and NATO countries that unfortunately today Afghanistan is a mafia state and ranked at the top of the most unstable and corrupt countries in the world."

Elizabeth DiNovella, 2009

"In 1973, the CIA stepped up its subversion in Afghanistan, working together with Pakistan and with the Shah of Iran, to try to control the new Afghan government.
... The CIA worked hand in hand with Afghan fundamentalists, who were linked with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim World League.
... Events moved rapidly, as the Islamists, supported by the Pakistani ISI and the US, launched an all-out campaign of terror in Afghanistan, assassinating hundreds of teachers and civil servants.
... US arms began flowing to the Islamists.
... An unprecedented campaign began to recruit, train, transport and pay tens of thousands of Islamic fighters-terrorists by any definition - to fight what were, from the Muslims' perspective, the occupying Soviets in Afghanistan, eventually bringing together communist China, Islamic Iran, Iranophobes Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and many more incongruous 'allies'. This policy went into high gear after 1979 - in secret and illegally.
... Fundamentalists were recruited to Afghanistan from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. 22-year-old Osama bin Laden joined what he may at least initially have been unaware was a US-sponsored jihad, following his own agenda to liberate Muslim lands from foreign occupation.
... The number of CIA-Saudi sponsored religious schools (madrassahs) increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000.
... Once the Afghan operation got going, Pakistan became the conduit for virtually all the money, arms and fighters.
... In March 1985, Ronald Reagan issued the secret National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 166, which authorized stepped-up covert military aid to the Mujahideen. The supply of arms increased from 10,000 tons in 1983 to 65,000 tons annually by 1987. NSDD 166 was the largest covert operation in US history.
... The US was to bring in men and material from around the Arab world and beyond into Afghanistan. The most hardened and ideologically dedicated men were sought on the logic that they would be the best fighters. Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the Jihad. The US plan for jihad was a Saudi dream-come-true. The Saudis were eager to see Afghanistan as a Saudi-groomed Sunni Islamic state beside Pakistan as a counterweight to Shia Iran. The US showed no concern for the long term implications of destroying the fragile Afghan state, satisfied with creating a Vietnam-like quagmire for the Soviet Union in order to destroy it.
... When the United State took over drug law enforcement in Afghanistan, opium production increased dramatically. All of a sudden Afghan heroin is flooding the US and Europe. It still is. You can say it's a coincidence, except that all the opium warlords are on the CIA payroll."

Eric Walberg, 2011

"Afghanistan is the world's largest producer of opium. Poppy cultivation increased 10 percent, to 201,000 hectares in 2016, while eradication declined significantly; the 2016 crop yielded an estimated 4,800 metric tonnes of raw opium, a 43% increase over 2015. The Taliban and other antigovernment groups participate in and profit from the opiate trade, which is a key source of revenue for the Taliban inside Afghanistan; widespread corruption and instability impede counter-drug efforts. Most of the heroin consumed in Europe and Eurasia is derived from Afghan opium."

Francesco Cossiga, former Italian President, 2017

"With the U.S. occupation in Afghanistan, opium production, which the Taliban had nearly eliminated for the single year of 2001, reached a new high of five thousand six hundred tons in 2006."

Peter Dale Scott

"It's hard to overstate the magnitude of the failure of American reconstruction in Afghanistan. While the U.S. has occupied the country for seven years and counting, and efficiently set up a network of bases and prisons, it has yet to restore to Kabul, the capital, a mud brick city slightly more populous than Houston, a single one of the public services its citizens used to enjoy. When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, they modernized the education system and built power plants, dams, factories, and apartment blocs, still the most coveted in the country."

Ann Jones, 2009

"Although there has been no attempt to conduct a serious mortality study in Afghanistan as there was in Iraq but using similar techniques to arrive at the body count, approximately 130,000-150,000 Afghan soldiers and police were killed. As for innocent civilians, the estimate is about 875,000 to have been killed since 2001, with a minimum of 640,000 and a maximum of 1.4 million."

Consortium News, 2018

"Today, U.S. soldiers who are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan are not dying for their country; they are dying for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. They are dying for the greed of the oil cartels, for the expansion of the American empire, for the political ambitions of the president. They are dying to cover up the theft of the nation's wealth to pay for the machines of death."

Howard Zinn

"Since the US and Britain "freed" Afghan women from the oppressive Taliban regime in 2002, life is just as bad for most, and worse in some cases.
Girls as young as six are being married into a life of slavery and rape, often by multiple members of their new relatives. Banned from seeing their own parents or siblings, they are also prohibited from going to school. With little recognition of the illegality of the situation or any effective recourse, many of the victims are driven to self-immolation - burning themselves to death - or severe self-harm.
Violent attacks against females, usually domestic, are at epidemic proportions. More than 60 per cent of marriages are forced. 57 per cent of brides are under the age of 16.
The illiteracy rate among women is 88 per cent with just 5 per cent of girls attending secondary school.
Maternal mortality rates - one in nine women dies in childbirth - are the highest in the world alongside Sierra Leone. And 30 years of conflict have left more than one million widows with no enforceable rights, left to beg on the streets alongside an increasing number of orphans. Afghanistan is the only country in the world with a higher suicide rate among women than men."

Terri Judd, 2008

"The anti-American feelings in Afghanistan are not just coming from conservative or religious elements. These feelings stem from the actions and military operations of the foreign troops. The anti-western sentiment is directly because of the military actions, the civilian casualties, and the lack of respect by foreign troops for Afghan culture."

Shukria Barakzai, a female member of the Afghan parliament, 2008

"The proceeds of the Afghan heroin trade are the source of wealth formation outside Afghanistan, largely reaped by powerful financial and business/criminal interests within Western countries. This process of wealth accumulation resulting from the drug trade is sustained and supported by the US "War on Terrorism". Decision-making in the US State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon is instrumental in supporting this highly profitable multibillion dollar trade, third in commodity value after oil and the arms trade."

Michel Chossudovsky

"When the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, there was an immediate hike in the amount of heroin that was flowing out of the country. According to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, after the US invasion in 2001 opium production in Afghanistan rose from 7,606 hectares in 2001 to 193,000 hectares in 2007. Now that the CIA has control of Afghanistan, 93% of the world's heroin comes from inside its borders."

John Vibes, 2015

"If you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, you'll see that the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It's what it's about. It's about money, it's about oil, it's not about democracy."

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, 2009

"The United States has no intention of getting out of Afghanistan. It is building one of its fortress embassies in Kabul, Afghanistan, just as it is building a $1 billion embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. Just as it has built an enormous fortress in Baghdad, Iraq. Whatever happens to American ground troops who eventually will be withdrawn, will make no difference to the significance of the violent American presence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and in Iraq. These are seen as places where the United States will have a permanent presence - a strategic position - where it will be able to monitor, and perhaps influence, and perhaps control the influences of its imperial rivals."

John Pilger

"It is estimated that 130,000 - 150,000 Afghan soldiers and police were killed in the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. As for innocent civilians, the estimate is about 875,000 to have been killed since 2001, with a minimum of 640,000 and a maximum of 1.4 million."

Nicolas JS Davies, 2018

"The war on Afghanistan of almost two decades has become an entitlement program for the arms industry, accomplishing nothing, killing countless peasants, and lacking purpose other than maintaining an unneeded empire and funneling money to the Complex."

Fred Reed, 2018

"There is ample evidence that, when it comes to the freedom of women, education levels, governmental services, relations among ethnic groups, and quality of life-all were infinitely better under the Afghan communists than under the Taliban or the present government of President Hamid Karzai."

Chalmers Johnson, 2008

"One of the hidden objectives of the war In Afghanistan was effectively to restore the CIA sponsored drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over the drug routes."

Michel Chossudovsky in his book " America's War on Terrorism"

"Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.
... The government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban.
... Today the situation of women is as bad as ever. Victims of abuse and rape find no justice because the judiciary is dominated by fundamentalists."

Afghan peace activist Malalai Joya, 2009

CAMBODIA

"The United States' bombing of Cambodia caused such widespread death and devastation that it was critical in Pol Pot's drive for power. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed."

John Pilger

"The Khmer Rouge in all likelihood would never have come to power, nor even made a serious attempt to do so, if not for the massive America carpet bombing of Cambodia in 1969-70 and the US-supported overthrow of Prince Sihanouk in 1970 and his replacement by a man closely tied to the United States.
... The United States supported Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge for several years after they were ousted from power by the Vietnamese in 1979. This support began under Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and continued under Ronald Reagan."

William Blum

"Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?"

Henry Kissinger

"What the United States has done to Cambodia is greater evil than we have done to any country in the world."

Pete McClosky, California Congressman

"I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the Khmer Rouge."

Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1981

"Neither the United States nor its friends nor those who are caught helplessly in its embrace are well served when its leaders act, as Nixon and Kissinger acted, without care. Cambodia was not a mistake; it was a crime."

William Shawcross

"Does one American in 1,000 or in 100,000, realize that, whereas the Germans dropped 80,000 tons of bombs on Britain in more than five years of war (and we thought it was barbaric), we dropped 100,000 tons on Indochina in the single month of last November, when Nixon restricted the bombing because of the Paris "peace" talks; and that under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon we have dropped a total of 7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos- vastly more than we and the British let loose on Germany and Japan together in World War II? It was done in the name of "a just peace," of course. Has not Nixon said it dozens of times, his face on the TV screen frozen in unctuousness, as he sent his troops to invade Cambodia/Laos or as he ordered his bombers to resume unloading tens of thousands of tons of lethal bombs on a country which had no Air Force with which to defend itself?"

William Shirer

"The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, butchered more than a million people in Cambodia. The Communist Khmer Rouge were eventually ousted by Vietnamese troops, whereupon the Reagan administration quietly shifted its support to Pol Pot's army-a cynical and outrageous foreign policy maneuver that provoked little comment in the U.S. media at the time."

Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon

"The Cambodian Communist Party or Khmer Rouge, a revolutionary movement led by Pol Pot, gained power in Cambodia after the terrible destruction and disorganization brought about by the US destabilization campaign in Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 with its intensive, secret and illegal bombing. Between 1975 and 1978 the Pol Pot regime turned all its efforts to constructing a purified Khmer rural society. It forced the urban population to move to the countryside and executed at least 200,000 people, many of them deemed to be contaminated with imperialism or Vietnamese blood or culture. Intellectuals, professionals, civil servants and cultural leaders were systematically eliminated. Forced labor on construction and agricultural schemes, starvation and disease killed another 1.5 million Cambodians. About one Cambodian in five was exterminated. The Government's ruthless hold on power continued until it was driven from office by the Vietnamese invasion of 1979."

Terrorism: No-Nonsense guide

"As a result of the expanded and intensified bombing campaigns, it has been estimated that as many as 350,000 civilians in Laos, and 600,000 in Cambodia, lost their lives."

Christopher Hitchins

"New evidence from US government documents, declassified in 1987, leaves no doubt that the bombing of Cambodia caused such widespread death and devastation that it was critical in Pol Pot's drive for power. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed."

John Pilger

"If the United States had refused to help Lon Nol after the coup in 1970, he would have collapsed. I would have returned and stopped the war. It didn't happen because Nixon and Kissinger didn't want Sihanouk back. There are only two men responsible for the tragedy in Cambodia today, Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger.
Lon Nol was nothing without them and the Khmer Rouge were nothing without Lon Nol. But the results were the opposite of what they wanted. They demoralized America, they lost all of Indochina to the Communists, and they created the Khmer Rouge."

William Shawcross

"In 1970, the Khmer Rouge's numbers were in the 100s; in the ensuing social chaos accompanying the heavy U.S. bombing and Sihanouk's removal, traditional Cambodian society simply dissolved and the Khmer Rouge's numbers multiplied. As covertly as possible the USA supported the Khmer Rouge throughout its devastating rule over Cambodia."

Douglas. F. Dowd

"US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger supervised the carpet bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s which killed more than half-a-million civilians and paved the way for the Khmer Rouge victory two years later. Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan all supported the regime after it was driven from power. And China supplied Pol Pot with weapons throughout the 1980s. Because of this the genocide was buried for nearly 20 years. The Khmer Rouge survived until 1992."

Wayne Ellwood

"In 1969, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor, Henry A. Kissinger, unleashed B-52 carpet bombing for over fourteen months against a people who still tilled the soil with water buffalo. The 3,500 bombing sorties resulted in 600,000 deaths. The American bombing of Cambodia was a closely guarded secret primarily because the U.S. was not at war with Cambodia.
Not only did Nixon and Kissinger not seek the necessary approval from Congress to bomb Cambodia, they tried to conceal the bombing not only from the American public but Congress as well.
Dozens of towns, villages, and hamlets were destroyed and burnt to ensure that they could no longer serve as a base or sanctuary for communist forces. There was no attempt to discriminate between innocent Cambodians and the enemy during these assaults.
Cambodia was being systematically demolished, and the Khmer Rouge, hitherto a marginal element, were becoming a significant force with substantial peasant support in inner Cambodia, increasingly victimized by U. S. terror.
Following the bombing, many peasants were so outraged at the United States and their puppet leader in Cambodia that they chose to join the Khmer Rouge, a marginal revolutionary communist group whose ranks swelled to a major force. After taking power, the Khmer Rouge unleashed a reign of terror killing over one million people."

David Model

"From 1961-1971, dioxin-containing defoliant Agent Orange was used, mainly in the South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Millions of gallons were sprayed with devastating consequences because dioxin is one of the most toxic known substances, a potent carcinogenic human immune system suppressant. It accumulates in adipose tissue and the liver, alters living cell genetic structures, causes congenital disorders and birth defects."

Stephen Lendman

"Although the Khmer Rouge are fully responsible for the atrocities which they committed in Cambodia, the United States must at least accept some responsibility for creating the conditions that provided the Khmer Rouge with the opportunity to rise to power. Before the American-South Vietnamese bombing and invasion of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge were a marginal force of about 3,000. The death and destruction resulting from the actions of the United States and South Vietnam drove hundreds of thousands of peasants into the arms of the Khmer Rouge giving them the strength to eventually take over the government."

David Model

"In 1975 Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge whose leader Pol Pot launched a genocide that rivaled the earlier purges of Hitler and Stalin. The Khmer Rouge, with vigorous support from the CIA, killed 1.5 million Cambodians."

Dean Henderson

"The word "hypocrisy" barely begins to cover the Carter administration's support for Pol Pot's insurgents as they fought the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, followed by support for the Khmer Rouge's retention of Cambodia's UN seat - even as the US denounced Khmer Rouge genocide.
... It was easy enough for human rights leaders to denounce the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. What was far harder was acknowledging American responsibility for what had happened. And yet already at the time of the American invasion and bombing of Cambodia in 1970, witnesses of the flight of peasants to Phnom Penh to escape the B-52s and the shattering of their traditional livelihoods were warning of the horrors such brutalization might bring in its wake. In the end, this was another awful chapter in the very old story of how savage warfare not only destroys a society but also opens the way for the rise of a small, fanatical, brutal leadership capable of horrific atrocities rationalized by ideology."

James Peck

"U.S. bombing of Cambodia had already been underway for several years in secret under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, but President Nixon openly began bombing in preparation for a land assault on Cambodia.
... Immense damage was done to the villages and cities of Cambodia, causing refugees and internal displacement of the population. This unstable situation enabled the Khmer Rouge, a small political party led by Pol Pot, to assume power.
... The Khmer Rouge's role in the deaths of millions in Cambodia was made possible by the the U.S. bombing of that nation which destabilized it by death, injuries, hunger and dislocation of its people.
... So the U.S. bears responsibility not only for the deaths from the bombings but also for those resulting from the activities of the Khmer Rouge - a total of about 2.5 million people. Even when Vietnam latrer invaded Cambodia in 1979 the CIA was still supporting the Khmer Rouge."

James A. Lucas

"You should tell the Khmer Rouge that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand in the way. We are prepared to improve relations with them. Tell them the latter part, but don't tell them what I said before."

Henry Kissinger speaking to a Thai Foreign Minister, 1975

"When the bombing began Cambodia was a neutral nation, therefore, to bomb it would be illegal in U.S. law. For that reason, it was kept secret even from the pilots doing the bombing.
The bombing began on March 17, 1969. By the time it ended, 14 months later, 3,630 bombing raids-raids not flights-had been carried out by flights of 50 or so 8-engined B-52s flying mostly from Guam or Okinawa.
When the planes took off the pilots had been given "legitimate" targets in Vietnam; as they reached Vietnam, they were given coordinates by radio - in Cambodia. We know that from the sworn testimony of one of the pilots."

William Shawcross

"Between 1975 and 1979, 2,035,000 "educated" people in Cambodia were rounded up and shot. During the short four years of its rule in Cambodia, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge government murdered over 31 percent of the entire Cambodian population."

Charlie Robinson

"I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive Secretaries of State in the modern history of this country. Kissinger's actions in Cambodia, when the United States bombed that country, overthrew Prince Sihanouk, created the instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to come in, who then butchered some three million innocent people, was one of the worst genocides in the history of the world. "

Senator Bernie Sanders

"More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. However, in the mainstream media, Kissinger is described as a key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century. Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his "statecraft". Only when we recognise the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry."

John Pilger

IRAQ

"The United States and its officials aided and abetted by others engaged in a continuing pattern of conduct from August 6, 1990 until this date to impose, maintain and enforce extreme economic sanctions and a strict military blockade on the people of Iraq for the purpose of injuring the entire population, killing its weakest members, infants, children, the elderly and the chronically ill, by depriving them of medicines, drinking water, food, and other essentials in order to maintain a large US military presence in the region, and dominion and control over its people and resources including oil.
... The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its [former] Prime Minister John Major and other officials have committed a crime against humanity as defined in the Nuremberg Charter against the population of Iraq.
... The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its Prime Minister John Major and other officials have committed genocide as defined in the Convention against Genocide against the population of Iraq including genocide by starvation and sickness through use of sanctions."

International Court On Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the UN Security Council, Madrid, November 1996

"American air power pounded the hell out of Iraqi armor and buildings with depleted uranium rounds... I have been in and around buildings destroyed by depleted uranium rounds, as well as vehicles, armored personnel carriers, tanks and corpses... During the invasion, we were also exposed to severe sandstorms, which meant that we were breathing in sand for days, sand that more than likely contained depleted uranium."

James Gilligan, United States Marine Corps, 2008

"The [Iraq] sanctions, imposed for a decade largely at the insistence of the United States, constitute a violation of the Geneva Convention... For more than ten years the United States has deliberately pursued a policy of destroying the water treatment system of Iraq, knowing full well the cost in Iraqi lives."

Professor Thomas Nagy

"The United States never intended to rebuild Iraq. The United States has a long record of bombing nations, reducing entire neighborhoods, and much of cities, to rubble, wrecking the infrastructure, ruining the lives of those the bombs didn't kill. And afterward doing shockingly little or literally nothing to repair the damage."

Gen. William McCoy, Army Corps of Engineers

"Today, U.S. soldiers who are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan are not dying for their country; they are dying for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. They are dying for the greed of the oil cartels, for the expansion of the American empire, for the political ambitions of the president. They are dying to cover up the theft of the nation's wealth to pay for the machines of death."

Howard Zinn

"It is estimated that 2.38 million Iraqis have been killed since 2003, as a result of the criminal American and British invasion of Iraq. However, that is not the upper number given, which could reach as high as 3.4 million."

Nicolas JS Davies, 2018

"The assault on Fallujah, Iraq, was one of the most horrific war crimes of our time. Washington determined to make an example of the largely Sunni city. This is called "exemplary" or "collective" punishment and is, according to the laws of war, illegal."

Tom Eley, WSWS, 2010

"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. Americans and their British puppets have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East."

British playwright Harold Pinter, 2005 Nobel Lecture

"During the 1990s Bill Clinton rained bombs on Iraq in what were euphemistically called the 'no fly zones'. At the same time he imposed a medieval siege called economic sanctions, killing perhaps a million people, including a documented 500,000 children. Almost none of this carnage was reported in the so-called mainstream media."

John Pilger

"Famine threatens four million people in sanctions-hit Iraq - one fifth of the population... The human situation is deteriorating. Living conditions are precarious and are at pre-famine level for at least four million people ... The deterioration in nutritional status of children is reflected in the significant increase of child mortality, which has risen nearly fivefold since 1990."

UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) report on the effect of U.S. sanctions on Iraq, September 1995

"Sanctions closed down the entire Iraqi economy and devastated the people. Iraqi families could not buy food or medicine or school books or basic household commodities. Children starved and died. Literacy was wiped out in a single generation. The future of the country was ravaged in all parts. It was deliberate cruelty and a mockery of the humanitarian principles embodied by the United Nations."

Susan Lindauer in her book "Extreme Prejudice"

"Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it."

Noam Chomsky

"If a private individual were to intentionally kill innocent children, most everyone would recognize that as the epitome of evil. Yet, rarely is there an U.S. op-ed or an editorial commenting on the evil of killing Iraqi children with the sanctions that the U.S. government enforced for more than 10 years.
... During the decade Iraqi children were dying, from U.S. sanctions year after year, there were few op-eds and editorials in the U.S. mainstream press pointing out the evil in killing innocent children. It's almost as if the deaths of those children were considered to be no big deal, especially since the killings were part of an ongoing sanctions policy, which has become a well-established part of U.S. foreign policy. The notion was that killing children by sanctions was different from lining them up against a wall and shooting them or exploding a bombing within their midst.
... The sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s continued killing Iraqi children all the way through 2003, when the U.S. military, using the 9/11 attacks to garner support, invaded Iraq to achieve the regime change that the sanctions - and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children - had failed to achieve. That regime-change invasion has resulted in another million or so dead people, including children, not to mention the number injured, maimed, tortured, assassinated, executed, or exiled or who have had their homes or businesses destroyed."

Jacob G. Hornberger, 2017

"Iraq's post invasion (2003-2007) excess under five mortality has been estimated at over one million. In Afghanistan, post invasion, at 1.9 million (2001-2007)."

Felicity Arbuthnot, Global Research, 2008

"The Israelis are skillful at exploiting Arab rivalries and turning Arab against Arab. The Kurdish tribes, for example, inhabit the mountains of northern Iraq. Every month, a secret Israeli envoy slips into the mountains from the Iranian side to deliver $50,000 to Kurdish leader Mulla Mustafa al Barzani. The subsidy insures Kurdish hostility against Iraq, whose government is militantly anti-Israel."

Jack Anderson, 1972

"There was no one left to kill in Iraq."

General Norman Schwartzkopf after the Basra Road bloodbath
Operation Desert Storm, 2003

"This was an insane war [Iraq] that brought us low economically, morally. ..We went to war against a guy [Saddam Hussein] who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. It was a total pretext. It's inexplicable, and there you go to Cheney, there you go to Bush, there you go to the Jewish neo-cons who wanted to remake the world."

journalist Carl Bernstein, speaking before a roundtable at MSNBC in 2012 about the Iraq War

"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. "

Paul Wolfowitz, U. S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, 2003

"Most people look at Vietnam and Iraq as defeats. But the corporations made a huge amount of money off Vietnam, the military industry, huge corporations, the construction companies. And, they're doing it in a very big way in Iraq. So the corporatocracy, the people that are in fact insisting that our young men and women continue to go to Iraq and fight, they're making a tremendous amount of money. These are not failures for them; they're successes from an economic standpoint"

John Perkins

"The United States and its 'coalition' allies attacked Iraq in 1991. Up to a quarter of a million people were killed or died during and immediately after the attack. As a direct result, child mortality in Iraq doubled.
More than 1.8 million people have been forced from their homes, and Iraq's electricity, water, sewage, communications, health, agriculture and industrial infrastructure have been 'substantially destroyed', producing 'conditions for famine and epidemics'."

John Pilger

"Oil was not the only motivation for the American invasion and occupation [of Iraq] , but the other goals have already been achieved -- eliminating Saddam Hussein for Israel's sake, canceling the Iraqi use of the euro in place of the dollar for oil transactions, expansion of the empire in the Middle East with new bases.
American oil companies have been busy under the occupation, and even before the US invasion, preparing for a major exploitation of Iraq's huge oil reserves. Chevron, ExxonMobil and others are all set to go. Four years of preparation are coming to a head now. Iraq's new national petroleum law -- written in a place called Washington, DC -- is about to be implemented. It will establish agreements with foreign oil companies, privatizing much of Iraq's oil reserves under exceedingly lucrative terms. Security will be the only problem, protecting the oil companies' investments in a lawless country. For that they need the American military close by."

William Blum, 2006

"Kuwaiti oil minister Sheikh Saud Nasir al-Sabah's daughter was the Kuwaiti woman who had told the U.S. Congress in October 1990 that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking Kuwaiti babies from their incubators. Her shocking testimony had been a major factor in getting U.S. popular support for Operation Desert Storm. That incident was later exposed as a PR stunt."

F. William Engdahl

"On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11, there was never any evidence to prove that."

former Vice President Dick Cheney, on Fox News, June, 1, 2009

"Before the Persian Gulf War, Iraq was a rapidly developing country, with free education, ample electricity, modernized agriculture, and a robust middle class. According to the World Health Organization, 93 percent of the population had access to health care. The devastation of the Gulf War and the sanctions that preceded and sustained such devastation changed all that."

Joy Gordon, Harpers, 2002

"During the Gulf War of 1991 the United States dropped some ninety thousand tons of bombs on Iraq in the space of forty-three days, intentionally destroying the civilian infrastructure, including eighteen of twenty electricity-generating plants and the water-pumping and sanitation systems."

Chalmers Johnson

"The allied bombardment had had a "near apocalyptic impact" on Iraq and had transformed the country into a "pre-industrial age nation," which "had been until January a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society."

a UN inspection team, in William Blum's book "Killing Hope"

"The dissolution of Syria and Iraq into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon is Israel's primary target on the Eastern front. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run, it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel.
An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and Lebanon.
In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul and Shiite areas in the South will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north."

Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist, in 1982 article for World Zionist Organization

LAOS

"The CIA flew opium and heroin all over Indochina to serve the personal and entrepreneurial needs of the CIA's various military and political allies, ultimately turning numerous GIs into addicts. The operation was not a paragon of discretion. Heroin was refined in a laboratory located on the site of CIA headquarters in northern Laos. After a decade of American military intervention, Southeast Asia had become the source of 70 percent of the world's illicit opium and the major supplier of raw materials for America's booming heroin market."

William Blum

"It seemed that everyone knew what was going on in Laos, except for the American public. And Americans didn't know about it because the media were willingly keeping it secret."

Walter J. Smith, a U.S. Air Force non-commissioned officer in Laos

"As a result of the expanded and intensified bombing campaigns, it has been estimated that as many as 350,000 civilians in Laos lost their lives."

Christopher Hitchins

"The U.S. military released 297 million cluster bomblets over Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Thirty years later these bomblets continue to kill farmers in their fields and children unfortunate enough to find a 'plaything'."

Robert Weitzel

"Between 1964 and 1973, the US Air Force dropped 260 million cluster bombs on Laos, or the equivalent of a fully-loaded B-52 bomber's payload dropped every eight minutes for nine years."

rawstory.com

"The Laos operation is something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective."

U. Alexis Johnson, US Under Secretary of State in 1971
about American carpet-bombing of Laos which killed hundreds-of-thousands of civilians

"During the Vietnam War the CIA and special units of the US military worked with the Meo tribesmen in Laos to secure control over the heroin routes of South East Asia. The CIA then used the drug revenues, laundered through CIA banks to finance other covert operations and intelligence activities."

F. William Engdahl

"From 1961 - 1971, dioxin-containing defoliant Agent Orange was used, mainly in the South [Vietnam], Cambodia and Laos. Millions of gallons were sprayed with devastating consequences because dioxin is one of the most toxic known substances, a potent carcinogenic human immune system suppressant. It causes congenital disorders and birth defects, and contributes to diseases like cancer and diabetes.
In 1970, U.S, Operation Tailwind used sarin nerve gas in Laos."

Stephen Lendman

"Air America re-supplied the CIA-created Meo [Hmong] Army in Laos, which fought a proxy war for the US against the communist Pathet Lao, who had overrun the Plain of Jars region in 1964. Air America ferried weapons into remote Meo villages, then returned to its base at Long Tieng loaded with opium grown by the villagers."

Dean Henderson

"A blueprint for American strategy in the War on Terror was the 1959-1975 secret war in Laos, where the CIA worked with hundreds of civilian contractors who flew spotter aircraft, ran ground bases and operated radar stations in civilian clothes while raising its own private army among the Hmong to fight the pro-communist Pathet Lao."

Jeremy Kuzmarov

"From 1964 to 1973, the United States flew 580,000 bombing missions over Laos. The ostensible targets were Vietnamese communist troops and Pathet Lao forces. In practice, however, the targets were anything that moved.
A third of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to explode on impact, thus becoming UXO. Some of the most harmful munitions were cluster bombs, which were dropped inside casings meant to open in mid-air and spread the "bomblets" over a wide area. About 80 million cluster bombs didn't detonate; less than one percent of all UXO has been cleared.
Unexploded ordnance is just one legacy of intensive American bombing of Laos when the United States dropped two million tons of bombs on the country - more than twelve times the amount of bombs dropped on Japan during World War II. Laos is, per capita, the most heavily bombed country on Earth.
Is the United States doing anything to help clean up the bombs it dropped and assist the victims of its atrocities? Hardly. To date, the US has allocated $85 million to help get rid of the UXO - nowhere near the amount required and a pathetic figure compared to the $18 million (inflation-adjusted) the United States spent per day bombing Laos."

Brett S. Morris

"The CIA was running the Golden Triangle narcotics business during the Vietnam War. The heroin being sold to American soldiers in Vietnam was coming from the CIA's clients in Laos. The CIA was protecting the major opium producers in the Golden Triangle, just like they've been protecting the major drug dealers in Afghanistan for the last fifteen years."

Douglas Valentine

"John Foster and Allen Dulles backed a series of covert operations against two of East Asia's most prominent neutralists, Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia and Prince Souvanna Phouma of Laos."

Stephen Kinzer

LIBYA

"The Libyan revolution was portrayed as an extension of the Arab Spring, and NATO involvement was framed in humanitarian terms.
The fact that the CIA was actively working to help the Libyan rebels topple Gaddafi was no secret, nor were the airstrikes that Obama ordered against the Libyan government. However, little was said about the identity or the ideological leanings of these Libyan rebels. Not surprising, considering the fact that the leader of the Libyan rebels later admitted that his fighters included Al-Qaeda linked jihadists who fought against allied troops in Iraq.
... After Gaddafi was overthrown, the Libyan armories were looted, and massive quantities of weapons were sent by the Libyan rebels to Syria. The weapons, which included anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles were smuggled into Syria through Turkey, a NATO ally."

scgnews.com, 2014

"The real policy is to break up countries in the Middle East, and leave them in turmoil with warring factions like Libya and Syria today. And, the same in Iraq."

Paul Craig Roberts, 2012

"Libya was once one of the most prosperous nations in Africa, former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi made the "mistake" of challenging the U.S. petrodollar system by creating a gold-backed pan-African currency known as the dinar. Following his ouster, Libya was transformed into a failed state where there is still no clear government, terrorism runs rampant and slaves are now openly traded in public."

Nicolas JS Davies, 2018

"Before 9-11 there were reportedly seven countries left in the world whose central bank was not under Rothschild control: Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, North Korea and Iran. By 2003, however, Afghanistan and Iraq were swallowed up by the Rothschild octopus, and by 2011 Sudan and Libya were also gone."

Pete Papaherakles, 2012

"Libya was once one of the most prosperous nations in Africa, former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi made the "mistake" of challenging the U.S. petrodollar system by creating a gold-backed pan-African currency known as the dinar. Following his ouster, Libya was transformed into a failed state where there is still no clear government, terrorism runs rampant and slaves are now openly traded in public."

Whitney Webb, 2017

"Libya was the most prosperous and successful nation in Africa. It had one of the biggest reserves of gold in the world before NATO's takeover. A big bulk of those reserves is now sitting in the vaults of the Bank of England - the Bank of Rothschilds -in the City of London.
... NATO, US, France, UK, Qatar, and every other nation involved in the overthrow of Gaddafi's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya took a thriving, first-rate, self-reliant Arab nation and turned it into a miserable failed state with Al-Qaeda and ISIS savages terrorizing its population and balkanizing Libya."

Alexander Azadgan, 2018

"As of 2006, Libya had the largest proven oil reserves in Africa, some 35%, larger even than Nigeria."

F. William Engdahl, 2014

"The conflict in Libya is a CIA operation, not a legitimate protest of the Libyan people. It's an armed rebellion that has no support in the capital city Tripoli. It's taking place in the east where the oil is and is directed at China."

Paul Craig Roberts, 2011

"The rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) did not happen overnight, nor by accident. It was the logical result of the United States continuing its strategy of proxy warfare it had carried out against Libya."

Tony Cartalucci

"It is estimated that 250,000 Libyans were killed in the war, violence and subsequent chaos that the U.S. and its allies unleashed in Libya in February 2011, and which continues to the present day. The maximum estimate of all deaths is 360,000."

Nicolas JS Davies, 2018

NICARAGUA

"Thanks mostly to an invasion by murderous 'Contra' squads, who were paid, armed and directed by the CIA, Nicaragua has been returned to its status under the Washington-sponsored Somoza dictatorship: that of the poorest, most indebted country in Latin America. Gone are the literacy programmes, the child mortality figures, the 'barefoot doctors', the improving community schools, the agricultural co-operatives."

John Pilger

"The most important effect of the Reagan policy was the tremendous destruction it wreaked on Nicaragua. Approximately 30,000 Nicaraguans were killed and tens of thousands others were wounded, a death total higher in per capita terms than that suffered by the United States in the Civil War, World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined."

Thomas Carothers

"In 1932, a coup in El Salvador - with United Fruit sponsorship - exterminated 300,000 peasants who had risen up in revolt against the conditions in which they were forced to live. For forty years, the United Fruit Company stood behind the regime of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua."

DOPE, INC

"Washington continued to prop up the Nicaraguan Somoza dictatorship with loans. The Pentagon created, trained, and armed the National Guard, and nearly all Guard officers spent their last year of training in U.S. schools in the Panama Canal Zone.
The money, the training, and the arms Nicaragua received from the United States were used to repress the poor people in the slums and rural areas by imprisonment, torture, and death.
... During Somoza's presidency, the Somoza family alone owned 8,260 square miles, or more than 5 million acres, an area approximately the size of El Salvador. The Somozas controlled an equally disproportionate share of the country's industry; they owned Nicaragua's twenty-six biggest companies.
... According to conservative estimates, some thirty thousand Nicaraguans died in the four decades prior to the 1978-79 civil war for opposing the government of Anastasio Somoza and his sons Luis and Anastasio II."

Penny Lernoux in her book Cry of the People

"After five years of Sandinista rule, infant mortality dropped to the lowest level in Central America. Over 85 percent of the population had learned to read and write at least on a third-grade level as a result of a crash literacy program acclaimed by UNESCO. The number of schools had doubled since the overthrow of Anastazio Somoza. The Sandinistas also initiated sweeping agrarian reform, emphasizing basic grains and crops for local needs rather than export-a development strategy that brought Nicaragua close to food self-sufficiency.
... In addition, the Nicaraguan government banned DDT and other harmful sprays, while neighboring states still serve as dumping grounds for U.S.-made chemical toxins. Strides in Nicaraguan health care won praise from the United Nations and other international groups. The World Health Organization lauded Nicaragua's success in nearly eliminating polio, measles and diphtheria, and reducing infant mortality. But many of these achievements were subsequently eroded-along with the Sandinistas' popularity-as the Nicaraguan government diverted its resources in an effort to defend itself from attacks by U.S.-financed mercenary forces. "Unfortunately," said former contra leader Edgar Chamorro, "the contras bum down schools, homes and health centers as fast as the Sandinistas can build them."

Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources

"The main tactical issue mulled over in the U.S. press with respect to Nicaragua's 1990 elections was how to channel millions of dollars to the political opposition - covertly via the CIA or openly through the National Endowment for Democracy. That such meddling - whether overt or covert - might compromise the integrity of the Nicaraguan electoral process was never mentioned by most mainstream journalists, who seemingly took for granted that it's perfectly fine if the U.S. government interferes in the affairs of other countries."

Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources

"The US is the only nation on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism - in Nicaragua."

John Pilger

"Democracy has been our goal in Nicaragua, and to reach it we have sponsored the killing of thousands of Nicaraguans."

Jack Beatty, Atlantic Monthly editor

"The people of Nicaragua did not become anti-Semitic by the influence of a new kind of bananas they have begun to grow. The Sandinista movement does not need such questionable justifications in order to achieve popularity-the fact that Somoza's regime is so corrupt and dirty is sufficient grounds for any reasonable man to support, either openly or covertly, those fighting Somoza. If more and more Nicaraguans are hating Israel more and more, it is not because they have become anti-Semitic suddenly. The reason is different: Because more and more of their children are being killed or wounded by weapons "made in Israel."

Israeli Daily Davar (on the eve of Somoza's overthrow in the 1980s)

"It is common knowledge in the United States and throughout the world that the power ruling the "banana republics" of Central America is and has been the United Fruit Company - United Brands. It is no exaggeration to say that every coup that has taken place in the region was backed by the fruit company, which ran the nations of Central America mercilessly as slave-labor plantations. In 1932, a coup in El Salvador-with United Fruit sponsorship-exterminated 300,000 peasants who had risen up in revolt against the conditions in which they were forced to live. For forty years, the United Fruit Company stood behind the regime of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua."

from the book 'DOPE, INC'

"Israel has active relations with many Third World countries, mainly because of its vigorous sales of military equipment and its close ties to the United States, which small countries seek to exploit. Israel at times also acts as a surrogate for the United States in activities in which Washington wishes to conceal its involvement. A dramatic example is the Iran-Contra affair in which Israel shipped weapons to Iran and the profits were used to finance the Nicaraguan Contras in contravention of congressional restrictions.
... Israel has courted and befriended such brutal despots as General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte of Chile, Roberto D'Aubuisson of El Salvador, General Romeo Lucas Garcia of Guatemala, Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti, Anastasio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua, and General Aifredo Stroessner of Paraguay."

Paul Findley

"The U.S.-backed Contra war in Nicaragua killed some 30,000 Nicaraguans, a percentage of their population equivalent to 2 million dead Americans."

Stephen M. Walt

"Once the state of Israel was established, the flow of weapons through Nicaragua into Palestine was reversed: A sizable part of the Israeli armaments industry (an estimated 60%) was pumped back into the Central American "banana dictatorships." Israeli weapons and military hardware sustained the Somoza regime when it came under attack and permitted Somoza to carry out his scorched earth policy against his own population.
... Israeli weapons to Somoza were funneled under the cover of the Israeli Maritime Fruit Company, through the services of Max Fisher's associates... And when the United Brands mafia determined to dump the traditional dictators of the previous half-century, the same flow of Israeli and East Bloc originating arms began to flow into the Sandinistas and Moscow-backed narcoterrorist groups in Guatemala and El Salvador."

from the book 'DOPE, INC'

*****

the quotes below are from David Model's book 'Lying For Empire'

"After the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua overthrew the corrupt and brutal dictator Somoza, the United States organized, trained, and supplied a guerrilla force known as the Contras in order to restore a friendly government in Nicaragua."

"The United States breached the OAS charter when it mined the harbours of Nicaragua and when it organized a guerrilla force to undermine the government of Nicaragua."

"When the Sandinistas took power, the educational system in Nicaragua was one of the poorest in Latin America. Limited spending on education and severe poverty forced many children into the labour market before their education was complete. By the time Somoza went into exile only 65 percent of primary school-age children were enrolled in school and only 22 percent of those who attended primary school completed the full six years. In rural areas, most secondary schools had only one or two grades and there was a 75 percent illiteracy rate. To improve the educational system, the Sandinistas doubled the proportion of GNP spent on primary and secondary schools, increased the number of teachers, and built more schools. Using volunteer teachers, the Sandinista government succeeded in reducing the illiteracy rate from 50 percent of the population to 23 percent. Enrollment in colleges skyrocketed from 11,142 students in 1978 to 38,570 in 1985.
Health care was a disaster under the Somoza regime with many Nicaraguans having limited or no access to modern health care. The Sandinistas completely restructured the entire health care system by spending substantially more on health care, increasing the number of students entering medical school from 100 to 500, building five new hospitals, and building 363 primary health care clinics.
The Sandinistas, who had themselves been victims of the brutal dictatorship of Somoza, were determined to construct new political institutions and to introduce a new constitution which guaranteed human rights.
All these progressive measures were interpreted by the new American President, Ronald Reagan, as symptoms of communism requiring immediate action by the United States."

"The purpose of the Contras was not to defeat the Sandinista army in battle but to use terrorist tactics to destroy infrastructure, health, and educational services. Their intention was not to confront Sandinistas but to blow up bridges, power plants, oil pipelines, ports, schools, health clinics, grain silos, irrigation projects, and farmhouses. The underlying purpose of these acts of terrorism was to destroy the morale of the Nicaraguan people and to force the Nicaraguan government to divert a high proportion of its budget to defence as discussed in detail below. Diverting government resources to the war, forcing the Sandinistas to cut back on their reform programs, had a considerable negative impact on the people of Nicaragua.
Noam Chomsky, in Understanding Power
Why do we have to get rid of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua? In reality it's not because anybody really thinks that they're a communist power about to conquer the Hemisphere - it's because they were carrying out social programs that were beginning to succeed, and which would have appealed to other people in Latin America who want the same things."

"Nicaragua was a victim of the Cold War and also of the American obsession with creating client states in Latin America. According to U.S. policy-makers, whenever Latin American countries experimented with progressive reforms they were communist and a threat to American corporate interests. Then the mighty American military and intelligence machine jumped into action. Human rights and respect for the sovereignty and political independence of other states dropped off the radar screen. All that remained was American self-interest."

PHILIPPINES

"Upon taking the Philippines from Spain in 1898, the US then fought a bloody three-year war against Filipino rebels. In Luzon alone over 600,000 people were killed by American troops or died from war-related diseases and privations- as the war against the guerrillas became a war against the people who supported the guerrillas. US General Arthur MacArthur issued a proclamation renouncing "precise observance of the laws of war." Among other things, MacArthur's troops tortured and executed prisoners (civilians included), destroyed crops, food stores, domestic animals, boats, and whole villages, and forced tens of thousands of Filipinos into "relocation camps."

Michael Parenti

"In early 2003 then-Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz called the Philippines the "second front in the War on Terror." Since then tens of thousands of Muslim villagers have been forcibly displaced and hundreds have been tortured, killed, or disappeared. As a result Muslim guerrilla activity has increased.
In October 2003, during a visit Bush cited the Philippines as a model for the rebuilding of Iraq. Forgetting to mention the U.S. invasion of the Philippines in 1898 and 13-year pacification campaign when upwards of one million Filipinos died, Bush described the Philippines as a "model of democracy"-albeit a bonafide death squad democracy. "

James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya, 2006

"You never hear of any disturbances in Northern Luzon, Philippines, because there isn't anybody there to rebel. That country was marched over and cleared out. The good lord in Heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under the ground; our soldiers took no prisoners; they kept no records; they simply swept the country and wherever or however they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him."

a Republican member of Congress in 1899, gave an eyewitness report on the US invasion of the Philippines

"In the United States, the first militarist tendencies appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Before and during the Spanish-American War of 1898, the press was manipulated to whip up a popular war fever, while atrocities and war crimes committed by American forces in the Philippines were hidden from public view."

Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire

"After the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, Philippine conservative ruling elites aided by the United States moved quickly to reinstate the pre-dictatorship political system that had since Spanish colonial rule allowed them to entrench their economic dominance over society.
Smarting from the lessons of Marcos' dictatorship, and seeing that authoritarianism was not necessarily the most effective way to maintain their collective grip on power, the elite leaders restored civil liberties, but restricted democracy to mere electoral contests that remained structurally skewed in their favor.
Dubbed variably as "low-intensity democracy," "limited democracy," or "polyarchy" by academics, the post-1986 consensus became both the linchpin of stability and the source of legitimacy for Philippine ruling elites."

Herbert Docena, 2006

"As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines - at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict - Elihu Root, our Secretary of War, was saying: 'The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness'."

Howard Zinn

"Of all post Marcos regimes, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's is the most discredited and detested,
Under Arroyo, the Philippines has been rated near or at the top of the most dangerous countries for journalists and activists. The country has likewise been rated as the most corrupt in Asia and one of the most corrupt in the world."

Marya Salamat, 2010

"Our men have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up .... Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to "make them talk," and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later... stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses."

a dispatch from the Philadelphia Ledger's Manila correspondent in 1901

"Filipino rebels. In Luzon alone over 600,000 people were killed by American troops or died from war-related diseases and privations-as the war against the guerrillas became a war against the people who supported the guerrillas. US General Arthur MacArthur issued a proclamation renouncing "precise observance of the laws of war." Among other things, MacArthur's troops tortured and executed prisoners (civilians included), destroyed crops, food stores, domestic animals, boats, and whole villages, and forced tens of thousands of Filipinos into "relocation camps."

Michael Parenti, Sword and Dollar

"A de-facto civilian-military alliance has been ruling the Philippines since the declaration of Martial Law by Marcos in 1972. In the 1960s most economists considered the Philippines to be the most economically progressive nation in Southest Asia. With the advent of the liberalization of the economy, it has become and remains one of the poorest and most socially polarized country in Asia, with a per capita GDP of $950 per year, about half of Thailand's. With over 50 percent of total private assets controlled by 15 extended super-rich families, it is one of the most unequal societies in the world. In stark contrast to the rest of Asia, there has been no economic progress in the past two decades. "

James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya, 2006

"I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem... And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land... We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields, burned their villages, turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors, (and) subjugated the remaining ten million by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket."

Mark Twain, October 15, 1900, about the U.S. invasion and occupation of the Philippines

"A U.S. military counterinsurgency document. It gave instructions on how to create terror; this was the way they put it. And they described methods used in the Philippines in the campaign against the Huks in 1900.
In the case of the Philippines they were talking about leaving the bodies by the rivers. So you mutilate the bodies, you cut them, you amputate, and then you display the bodies on the riversides to stir terror in the population. "

Allan Nairn, 2016

"The 1899-1902 conquest of the Philippines killed some 200,000 to 400,000 Filipinos, most of them civilians."

Stephen M. Walt

"An American weekly magazine, the San Francisco Argonaut defended the atrocities of American troops in the Philippines in 1902 by exulting over the enormous riches and fertility of the islands, then noted: "But unfortunately they are infested by Filipinos. There are many millions of them there, and it is to be feared that their extinction will be slow .... Let us all be frank. We do not want the Filipinos. We want the Philippines."

Michael Parenti, Sword and Dollar

"Since President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo joined the U.S. global "war on terrorism," the Philippines has become the site of an ongoing undeclared war against peasant and union activists, progressive political dissidents and lawmakers, human rights lawyers and activists, women leaders, and a wide range of print and broadcast journalists. Because of the links between the Army, the regime, and the death squads, political assassinations take place in an atmosphere of absolute impunity. The vast majority of the attacks occur in the countryside and provincial towns. The reign of terror in the Philippines is of similar scope and depth as in Colombia. Unlike Colombia, the state terrorism has not drawn sufficient attention from international public opinion.
Between 2001 and 2006 hundreds of killings, disappearances, death threats, and cases of torture have been documented by the independent human rights center, KARAPATAN, and the church-linked Ecumenical Institute for Labor Education and Research. Since Arroyo came to power in 2001, there have been 400 documented extrajudicial killings."

James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya, 2006

"Far from being a model for nation building and democracy ... the Philippines epitomizes an American foreign policy based on dubious premises and false promises.
American troops committed atrocities, attacked civilians, and destroyed their crops and villages.
By the time the war ended in 1902 (although intermittent fighting lasted for decades), more than four thousand Americans, twenty thousand rebels and perhaps two hundred thousand civilians lay dead. And the relationship of the United States to the rest of the world had permanently changed.
It was only in 1946 that the Philippines were granted independence, though the State Department's own briefing papers, distributed just this week [October 2003] to the Bush entourage, still state that "U.S. administration of the Philippines was always declared to be temporary.
In the intervening years, the U.S. government has continued to support a succession of antidemocratic, repressive regimes in the Philippines."

historian Clifford Kuhn

"Kill everything over 10. Criminals because they were born ten years before we took the Philippines."

Teddy Roosevelt, 1901, supported the Spanish-American War

"The newly "installed" Gloria Macapagal Arroyo quickly instituted a neo-liberal program of privatizations, drastic cuts for public education and public hospitals, and onerous value-added taxes that impacted the poor and lower middle-class. By 2005 the Philippine total external and internal debt ballooned to over $100 billion dollars and yearly debt servicing exceeded 30 percent of the budget. Even 8 million overseas Filipino workers (including a significant section of the educated professionals) sending home $12.5 billion of remittances in 2005 could not begin to cover debt servicing. The Philippines bears the dubious distinction of being the only country in Asia to have seen a drop in per capita GDP during and since the heady years of the "Asian Tiger" boom.
Macapagal Arroyo's family and friends have been implicated in the same levels of corruption as those attributed to the deposed President Estrada."

James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya, 2006

SOMALIA

"U.S. involvement in Somalia has a long history and reached a climax in the early 1990s, when the U.S.-supported military dictatorship of Siad Barre was overthrown, plunging the nation into civil war.
Thanks to Somalia's strategic location for global oil markets at the mouth of the Red Sea, the U.S. became involved. Somalia remained in a state of anarchy for 16 years until a coalition of Islamic courts took over the capital in 2006. However, this government was soon overthrown by Ethiopia with U.S. support.
Current U.S. anti-terrorism policy in Somalia, which includes the use of airstrikes, has been blamed for worsening the nation's conflict and its burgeoning humanitarian crisis, having driven the nation into famine."

Whitney Webb

Somalia was invaded by mercenaries ffrom Ethiopia, trained, financed, armed and directed by US military advisers.
... More than one million people have been made internal refugees, and 3.5 million people, half of Somalia's population, are facing famine. Fighting has turned Mogadishu into a ghost town. About 700,000 people have fled - out of a population of up to 1.5 million.

James Petras, 2007

"Four U.S. oil companies are quietly sitting on a prospective fortune in exclusive concessions to explore and exploit tens-of-millions of acres of the Somali countryside ... nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia's pro-U.S. president Mohammed Said Barre' was overthrown. But, the Bush Administration and the State Department insist that the U.S. military mission in Somalia is strictly humanitarian. "

Michael Parenti, 1993

"Many European, US and Asian shipping firms signed dumping deals in the early 1990s with Somalia's politicians and militia leaders. This meant they could use the coast as a toxic dumping ground. This practice became widespread as the country descended into civil war. European companies found it was very cheap to get rid of the waste."

Mike Whitney

"The Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, which was sanctioned by the US government, has destroyed virtually all the life-sustaining economic systems which the population has built for the last fifteen years."

Abdi Samatar, professor of Global Studies at the University of Minnesota

"One piracy was foreign fishing piracy by foreign trawlers and vessels, who at the same time were dumping industrial waste, toxic waste and, it also has been reported, nuclear waste.
The other piracy is the shipping piracy. When the marine resources of Somalia were pillaged, when the waters were poisoned, when the fish was stolen. The fishermen felt that they had no other possibilities or other recourse but to fight the properties and the shipping of the same countries that have been carrying on the fishing piracy and toxic dumping.
Toxic dumping, industrial waste dumping, nuclear dumping occured in Somali waters in the '70s, in the '80s, in the '90s - companies wanted to get rid of waste because of very strict environmental rules in their countries. So these wastes have been carried to Somalia.
The world knows, but it doesn't do anything about it."

Mohamed Abshir Waldo - a consultant and analyst is Kenyan of Somali origin

"In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas."

Johann Hari, Independent UK, 2009

"The ICU [Islamic Courts Union] was a relatively honest administration, which ended warlord corruption and extortion in Somalia. Personal safety and property were protected, ending arbitrary seizures and kidnappings by warlords and their armed thugs. The ICU is a broad multi-tendency movement that includes moderates and radical Islamists, civilian politicians and armed fighters, liberals and populists, electoralists and authoritarians. Most important, the Courts succeeded in unifying the country and creating some semblance of nationhood, overcoming clan fragmentation."

James Petras, 2008

"Somebody is dumping nuclear material off the coast of Somalia. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury. Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply."

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia

"The Islamic Courts that brought six months of peace in Somalia, a semblance of peace, the best Somalis have seen since the civil war has started, were toppled by the Ethiopian government, the Ethiopian troops, with the help of Bush administration."

Sadia Ali Aden, Somali American writer and human rights activist

"George W Bush backed Ethiopia in an invasion of Somalia, basically an Ethiopian-US invasion of Somalia. Now Obama is pumping in new arms, new weapons, into the midst of the killing and chaos there. The already disastrous level of hunger and starvation is increasing. Obama's body count probably exceeds that of Bush."

Allan Nairn, 2010

"In 2006, the Bush Administration pushed Ethiopia to invade Somalia with an eye on crushing the Union of Islamic Courts," which is exactly what happened, and Somalia has been a 'failed state' mired in civil war ever since."

Andrew Gavin Marshall, 2011

"The estimate of the true number of people killed in Somalia since 2006 must be somewhere between 500,000 and 850,000, with most likely about 650,000 violent deaths."

Nicolas JS Davies, 2018

"Somalia is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants...and secretly imprison them offshore, aboard U.S. warships. The British civil-rights group Reprieve contended that as many as 17 U.S. warships may have doubled as floating prisons since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks."

journalist Paul Salopek, 2008

"The US is perceived as backing the Ethiopian intervention in Somalia unconditionally. The US and Ethiopia are very close partners in the war on terror in the region in the Horn of Africa, and the fact that Ethiopian forces have also been committing serious abuses and that these abuses have been met with utter silence in Washington by the US, creates the perception among many Somalis that the US doesn't care what the cost of this war is on civilians and really has no concern for the welfare of ordinary Somalis. "

Leslie Lefkow of Human Rights Watch's Horn of Africa research team, 2008

"Somalia on the Horn of Africa was invaded by US forces in the early 1990s and for the past three decades has been destabilized by relentless American military aggression from naval, air and drone strikes in a so-called 'war on terror'."

Finian Cunningham

"The Somalia piracy is a symptom; it's not the disease. The piracy is resulted from illegal fishing and toxic waste dumping, nuclear waste dumping. And what the international community needs to do is introduce a resolution banning all these nations to stop the illegal fishing and the illegal toxic waste dumping in Somalia."

Sadia Ali Aden, Somali American writer and human rights activist

"The piracy that has exploded in the waters off of Somalia are a result of the massive toxic waste dumping and over-fishing done by European and American and other major shipping lines, and have served as an excuse for the militarization of the waters."

Andrew Gavin Marshall, 2011

"The United States, treating Somalia primarily as a battlefield in the global war on terror, has pursued a policy of uncritical support for transitional government and Ethiopian actions, and the resulting lack of accountability has fueled the worst abuses."

Human Rights Watch, 2008

"European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks in Europe by overexploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300million-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving."

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia

SUDAN & SOUTH SUDAN

"In April 2005 Sudan's government announced it had found oil in South Darfur, a major geopolitical event which major US and European media "forgot" to mention when discussing the sudden new "Darfur conflict."
Washington, using US Secretary of State Colin Powell, an African-American, to deliver the message, began accusing the Khartoum regime of "genocide" in Darfur, though no independent proof was given. Only Washington and the NGO's close to it used the term "genocide" to describe Darfur. If they could get a popular acceptance of the charge of genocide, it opened the possibility for drastic "regime change" interventions by NATO and by Washington in Sudan's sovereign affairs. The Washington Darfur smear campaign soon enlisted Hollywood stars like George Clooney in this effort. Washington and NATO launched a campaign to argue for a de facto NATO occupation of the region.
In 2004, Chad's dictator Idriss Deby launched the initial strike that set off the conflict in Darfur, using members of his elite Presidential Guard who originate from the province. He provided all-terrain vehicles, arms and anti-aircraft guns to Darfur rebels fighting the Khartoum government in southwest Sudan. The US military support to Deby was the trigger for the Darfur bloodbath. Khartoum reacted and the ensuing tragic debacle was unleashed in full force.
... In 2011 a new "republic" was declared in southern Sudan titled The Republic of South Sudan. It (conveniently for the Pentagon) controlled a major part of Sudan's oil flows to China."

F. William Engdahl, 2014

"The U.S. pushed South Sudan to secede from Sudan in 2011, as South Sudan held 75 percent of Sudan's oil reserves - the largest oil reserves in all of Africa. Analysts argued that the U.S. sought to create an independent South Sudan in order to dislodge Chinese claims to Sudanese oil, as the Chinese had previously signed oil contracts with the (now Northern) Sudanese government.
Just two years later, however, South Sudan dissolved into a deadly civil war that has killed tens of thousands and displaced more than 1.5 million."

Whitney Webb , 2017

"US policy was instrumental in the break-up of Sudan into Northern and Southern states in 2011-2012. That, in turn, has wrecked the economies of both states and fomented conflicts, leading to massive displacement of communities.
It can never be underestimated the extent of underdevelopment that Africa has been historically hobbled with from American and European colonial and neocolonial economic exploitation."

Finian Cunningham

"Beginning in 1999, China's major investments in oil extraction in Sudan began to sound alarm bells in Washington. Construction of a 900-mile long pipeline to carry oil from fields in southern Sudan to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where it was loaded onto tankers bound for China, was not viewed favorably by certain powerful circles in the United States or the UK. When China then discovered a major new potential oilfield in Sudan's southwest Darfur Province, it was time to begin to draw the noose around the neck of Sudan.
In April 2005, Sudan Energy Minister Awad al-Jaz told reporters in Khartoum that an oil field had been found in southern Darfur, and it was expected to produce 500,000 barrels of oil per day within weeks. It was estimated by international geologists to be part of a huge complex of oil fields in a basin that went from Darfur into neighboring Chad and on to Cameroon, perhaps one of the world's largest oil discoveries outside Saudi Arabia. Almost immediately, gangs of militia swept across the unmarked desert border from Chad, armed and aided by Western intelligence services and spreading murder, rape and chaos in the region. Washington had begun its Operation "Darfur Genocide." The ultimate aim was to provide an excuse to bring NATO troops into one of China's most promising new oil regions."

F. William Engdahl, 2014

"Before 9/11 there were reportedly seven countries left in the world whose central bank was not under Rothschild control: Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, North Korea and Iran. By 2003, however, Afghanistan and Iraq were swallowed up by the Rothschild octopus, and by 2011 Sudan and Libya were also gone."

Pete Papaherakles, 2012

"Africa is vastly rich in natural resources but the continent has paid a terrible price for this wealth. In the past decade horrendous wars in Angola, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Liberia have been fuelled by fighting for control over diamonds, timber, gold, minerals and oil."

Katharine Ainger, 2004

"Failing in its attempt to pressure Sudan to break its ties with China, Washington turned its guns on Khartoum directly. They launched a massive campaign to save Darfur.
... Washington and its NGOs charged Khartoum with genocide, as a pretext for bringing UN/NATO troops into the oil fields of Darfur and southern Sudan. Oil, not human misery, was behind Washington's new interest in Darfur."

F. William Engdahl

SYRIA

"In Syria, by 2017, after more than six years, the war had created untold destruction of Syria's cities, deaths into many hundreds of thousands, more than 6 million internally displaced within Syria, and almost 5 million refugees outside of Syria, in Turkey, and across the EU."

F. William Engdahl

"The National Security Establishment created the Syrian crisis as part of a long term strategy to defend Israel and help effectuate its racist, expansionist policies, while gobbling up the region's resources and countering Russian influence."

Douglas Valentine, 2017

"In 2009, Bashar Assad announced that he would refuse to sign an agreement to allow a Qatar/Turkey pipeline to run through Syria.
Assad further enraged the Gulf's Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian-approved pipeline running from Iran's side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. This pipeline would make Shiite Iran, not Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran's influence in the Middle East and the world.
... Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria."

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., 2016

"In Yemen the U.S. and France are helping Saudi Arabia in its massive air war against Houthi Shi'ites. And it's the case in Syria, the scene of the most destructive war game of them all, where Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states are channeling money and arms to Al Qaeda, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh), and similar forces with the full knowledge of the U.S."

Daniel Lazare , 2015

"[The Syrian conflict as a war for control of the region's resources with] the west, Gulf countries and Turkey supporting Assad's opposition, while Russia, China and Iran support the regime.
If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria, and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime."

a study by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency - August 12, 2012

"Two members of the Turkish parliament, high-level American sources and others admitted that the Turkish government - a NATO country - carried out the chemical weapons attacks in Syria and falsely blamed them on the Syrian government; and high-ranking Turkish government admitted on tape plans to carry out attacks and blame it on the Syrian government."

Washington's Blog March 30, 2016

"The reason ISIS is in Iraq and Syria is that the US equipped ISIS and sent ISIS to overthrow Assad when the British Parliament and the Russian government blocked Obama's planned invasion of Syria. ISIS is Washington's creation, just as is Al Qaeda."

Paul Craig Roberts, 2017

"Syria has been in the throes of a U.S.-led regime change effort for the better part of six years - a conflict that has ravaged one of the most prosperous nations in the Middle East and turned it into the latest battleground for a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia.
Since the 2011 "uprising," the U.S. has continuously funded and armed opposition groups in Syria along with several extremist groups, many of which have since joined terrorist organizations like Daesh (ISIS) and the al-Nusra Front."

Whitney Webb , 2017

"It is estimated that at least 1.5 million people have been killed so far in Syria."

Nicolas JS Davies, 2018

"The Syrian White Helmets, a so-called "first emergency responder" NGO, was a fake. It was created by an ex-British military intelligence officer and financed by the US government via the CIA-tied United States Agency for International Development (USAID). White Helmets operators were repeatedly exposed filming fake videos of sarin poison gas victims, all aimed to build a case for war crimes and genocide against al-Assad."

F. William Engdahl

"The American war against Syria and its covert actions against Iran are part of a larger strategy to weaken and encircle Russia.
... The goal of the American elite is to make Syria, and then Iran, and then Russia join the ranks of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq. The plan is to smash it into ethnic and religious lines, and to fuel fighting between these groups for many years."

Douglas Valentine, 2017

"The primarily UK Foreign Office-funded White Helmets, since their creation in 2013, is a faux first-responder organisation, established in Turkey and trained by an ex-British military mercenary.
... The majority of Syrians living in the heavily populated areas of Syria have never heard of the White Helmets.
... The White Helmets are one of the biggest propaganda heists ever seen in recent colonialist history. To suggest this organisation is "unarmed and neutral" is fraudulent. To suggest they are humanitarian is inaccurate and misleading as their videos demonstrate minimal paramedic expertise and maximum cinematic exploitation. They are a rag tag collection of armed fighters, co-opted into the terrorist and extremist gangs that are occupying areas of Syria and persecuting the civilians of those areas.
... The real Syria Civil Defence has none of the funding of the their US, British, NATO intelligence shadow state counterpart, but they have ten thousand times the integrity. They are recognised and respected by the Syrian people as the ones they call when they are in trouble. They are the officially recognised Syria civil defence that has received accolades for its global humanitarian excellence. In Syria, they are irreplaceable, despite the best efforts of the US, British, NATO and Gulf state organised crime syndicate."

Vanessa Beeley, 2017

VIETNAM

"I want Vietnam bombed to smithereens. If we draw the sword, we're going to bomb those bastards all over the place. Let it fly, let it fly."

President Richard Nixon, 1972

"If development was measured not by gross national product, but a society's success in meeting the basic needs of its people, Vietnam would have been a model. That was its real "threat." From the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to 1972, primary and secondary school enrollment in the North increased sevenfold, from 700,000 to almost five million. In 1980, UNESCO estimated a literacy rate of 90 percent and school enrollment among the highest in Asia and throughout the Third World."

John Pilger

"By 1970, Vietnamese babies were being born without eyes, with deformed hearts and stumps instead of legs. Six pounds of toxic chemicals per head of population were dumped on the people of Vietnam."

William F. Pepper in his book "An Act of State: the Execution of Martin Luther King"

"During the Vietnam War the CIA and special units of the US military worked with the Meo tribesmen in Laos to secure control over the heroin routes of South East Asia. The CIA then used the drug revenues, laundered through CIA banks, to finance other covert operations and intelligence activities."

F. William Engdahl

"In Vietnam, the US. dropped several times more tons of bombs than were used in all of World War II by all sides.
In mid-June, 1994, the Vietnamese government announced that three million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians had been killed in the war, four million injured, two million made invalids."

Michael Parenti

"The peasants watched as we supported a ruthless dictatorship in South Vietnam which aligned itself with extortionist landlords and executed its political opponents. The peasants watched as we poisoned their water, bombed and machine-gunned their huts, annihilated their crops, and sent them wandering into the towns, where thousands of homeless children roamed the streets like animals, begging for food and selling their mothers and sisters to American soldiers.
... We have destroyed their land... We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators."

Martin Luther King, 1967

"Vietnam was a war of rampant technology directed against a Third World people. It was a war in which the United States dispatched its greatest ever land army, dropped the greatest tonnage of bombs in the history of warfare, pursued a military strategy deliberately aimed at forcing millions of people to abandon their homes and used chemicals in a manner that profoundly changed the environment and genetic order. Some two-and-a-half million people were killed, and many more maimed and otherwise ruined."

John Pilger

"In Vietnam, we terrorized peasant villages with bombing attacks using napalm and cluster bombs. We supported dictators and death squads in Chile and El Salvador, Guatemala and Haiti. In Iraq, more than 500,000 Children died as a result of economic sanctions the United States insisted on."

Howard Zinn

"What the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times. Primitive peoples with savagery in their hearts have to be helped to understand the true basis of a civilized existence."

David Lawrence, editor of U.S. News and World Report 1966

"What happened to Vietnamese society was largely the result of the war. It destroyed the old, traditional government and customs and practices. The war came close - politically if not physically - bombing them back to the Stone Age."

Senator William Fulbright

"Most people look at Vietnam and Iraq as defeats. But the corporations made a huge amount of money off Vietnam, the military industry, huge corporations, the construction companies. And, they're doing it in a very big way in Iraq. So the corporatocracy, the people that are in fact insisting that our young men and women continue to go to Iraq and fight, they're making a tremendous amount of money. These are not failures for them; they're successes from an economic standpoint"

John Perkins

"Does one American in 1,000 or in 100,000, realize that, whereas the Germans dropped 80,000 tons of bombs on Britain in more than five years of war ... under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon we have dropped a total of 7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos- vastly more than we and the British let loose on Germany and Japan together in World War II? It was done in the name of "a just peace," of course. Has not Nixon said it dozens of times, his face on the TV screen frozen in unctuousness, as he sent his troops to invade a new country - Cambodia, Laos - or as he ordered his bombers to resume unloading tens of thousands of tons of more lethal bombs on a country which had no Air Force with which to defend itself?"

William Shirer

"In Vietnam, Anti-personnel' technology was deployed with impunity; the bombs which sprayed needles into flesh and organs and were difficult to detect in X-rays created little fuss. Although millions of gallons of Agent Orange were dumped on Vietnam during the 1960s, the outcry about its genetic and environmental effects came only as the war was ending.
Death squads, which were expertly organised in Vietnam. An estimated 50,000 South Vietnamese were systematically murdered by assassins working for the CIA's 'Phoenix Programme'."

John Pilger

"In Vietnam between 1962 and 1971, an estimated 20 million gallons of defoliants were sprayed on 8 million acres of forests and crops. More than three thousand villages were contaminated, and 60 percent of the defoliants used were agent Orange."

Marie-Monique Robin in the book "The World According to Monsanto

"In excess of 1,300,000 Vietnamese people were killed, and many others were maimed for life."

William F. Pepper in his book "An Act of State: the Execution of Martin Luther King"

YEMEN

"Yemen is a country under attack by an undeclared coalition comprised of Saudi Arabia, the United States, the United Kingdom, the EU, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel. While the Yemeni people are under attack, they are simultaneously being collectively punished by the illegal sanctions imposed by a corrupt United Nations.
... The UN sanctions imposed upon Yemen are being exploited by the Saudi coalition to collectively starve and punish 27 million Yemeni people.
... To compare Saudi Arabia's belligerent actions in Yemen to Nazi Germany's undeclared wars of aggression prior to WWII is no exaggeration. Likewise, is the failure of a corrupt UN to censure Saudi Arabia for its flagrant violation of international law, the Nuremberg Principles and the entire Geneva Convention.

Vanessa Beeley, 2016

"In Yemen the U.S. and France are helping Saudi Arabia in its massive air war against Houthi Shi'ites.
... Western leaders encourage this violence yet decry it in virtually the same breath."

Daniel Lazare , 2015

"The Saudi/UAE/US-coalition has launched over 230,000 airstrikes in Yemen, killing civilians and targeting hospitals, schools, markets, and camps for the internally displaced.
Over 600,000 civilians have been killed or injured in Yemen since the Saudi/UAE/US-coalition began its attacks in 2015. The U.S.-backed Saudi-led coalition's blockade on Yemen has also triggered an epidemic of disease and famine across the country."

Ahmed Abdul Kareem, 2018

"Barack Obama oversaw the largest exportation of homicidal weapons to the Middle East ever undertaken by a single US president. Saudi Arabia wasted no time in using its U.S. military provisions to lay Yemen to waste. Together with Obama's use of drones in Yemen, the result has been a horrific civil war in which many civilians have been killed and many civilian structures destroyed."

Laurie Calhoun, 2017

"As Yemen's population has teetered on the brink of mass starvation in recent months, the United States has played a crucial role in enabling the Saudi strategy responsible for that potential humanitarian catastrophe.
U.S. administrations have prioritized the US's alliance with the Saudis and their Gulf allies over the lives of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis under imminent threat of starvation.
The Saudi coalition has pursued a war strategy of destroying agricultural, health and transportation infrastructure and by choking off access to food and fuel for most of Yemen's population. The United States has enabled the Saudis to pursue that strategy by refueling the Saudi-led coalition planes bombing Yemen and selling the bombs. Equally important, however, the US has provided the political-diplomatic cover that the Saudis need to carry out this ruthless endeavor without massive international blowback.
The Saudi coalition revealed the essence of its strategy in Yemen: to impose extreme hardship on the population in Houthi-controlled governorates. The strategy included not only bombing raids that targeted Yemen's fragile infrastructure for transportation, food production and medical care, but a naval blockade, ostensibly to prevent any arms from reaching Yemen, but also clearly intended to limit severely the population's access to foodstuffs and fuel."

Gareth Porter, 2017

"In March 2015, Saudi Arabia, while enjoying the support of the United States and Britain, without any approval by the UN Security Council, unleashed an armed aggression against Yemen.
Saudi Arabia introduced an economic blockade against Yemen, thus inflicting unspeakable suffering upon the peaceful population of Yemen. That is why Riyadh should be held responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths caused by malnutrition.
... Of the 27 million people living in Yemen, almost 20 million people experience an acute shortage of food, which means they are being starved to death."

Martin Berger, 2017

"Yemen has been turned into an apocalyptic hell-hole from nearly three years of American-backed Saudi aggression against that country, including maintaining a sea, air and land blockade on the whole nation - a massive war crime - resulting in millions of children starving or dying from cholera and other preventable diseases."

Finian Cunningham, 2017

"Yemen is yet another war being fought over resources whose primary victims are the innocent people, and above all the children of Yemen whose sunken eyes, distended, starving bellies and bird-like limbs are a stark reminder of the cruelty of the corporatist-imperialist elite."

Vanessa Beeley, 2016

"While the U.S. is not leading the fight in Yemen, it has ardently backed the war's aggressor - Saudi Arabia - from the beginning and has supplied the Saudis with billions of dollars in weapons, as well as occasionally bombed locations in Yemen to aid their Gulf allies.
In addition, the U.S. has turned a blind eye to the Saudis' numerous war crimes in Yemen, despite the enormity of the tragedy unfolding there, including blocking aid shipments and consequently triggering widespread famine. The U.S. has been eager to see Saudi influence continue in Yemen - as it was prior to the conflict - due to Yemen's location, which grants it control over the strategic strait of Bab al-Mandab, a chokepoint for the Saudi oil trade."

Whitney Webb, 2017

"What is happening in Yemen is not merely a violent conflict between combating forces for power, but the willful subjugation of millions of innocent civilians to starvation, disease and ruin.
... Seven million people face starvation, and 19 out of 28 million of Yemen's population are in desperate need of humanitarian aid.
... More than 10,000 Yemenis have been killed, and nearly 40,000 injured. UNICEF reports nearly 300,000 cholera cases, and a joint statement from UNICEF and the World Health Organization declares the infection is spreading at a rate of 5,000 new cases per day.
... The blockade of imports of food, medicine, and fuel, which Yemen is completely dependent on, is making the situation dire beyond comprehension. If humanitarian aid is not provided immediately, millions of children will starve to death."

Alon Ben-Meir, 2017

"It is estimated that 175,000 people have been killed in Yemen since the Saudi Arabia and UAE bombing started, with a minimum of 120,000 and a maximum of 240,000. Disease, starvation and other related deaths are spiralling out of control in Yemen with millions displaced and fighting a daily battle just for survival."

Nicolas JS Davies, 2018

"The United States shares responsibility with the Saudi-led coalition for the Yemeni deaths from starvation that will result from the Saudi war strategy, because of the coalition's dependence on US support."

Gareth Porter, 2017

"The House of Saud, is waging a genocidal war of aggression that has already destroyed entire swathes of Yemeni cultural heritage and decimated entire communities... By now, we can see clearly how this is yet another ethnic cleansing programme being endorsed, fuelled and defended by the United States and her allies in the UK, EU, Israel, and the neighbouring Gulf States, the majority of whom participated in this dirty war."

Vanessa Beeley, 2016

"A process of degeneration is well underway in the present day, led largely by the US and its coterie of allies among the NATO alliance and oil-rich Arab dictatorships. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen are but some of the evil fruit from the poison that is coursing through international relations.
That a defenceless, impoverished country such as Yemen can be openly bombed by hundreds of US-supplied F-15 fighter jets - and for that criminality to be widely endorsed - is a sure sign that the world is once again sliding into the abyss of rampant criminality and the possibility of a more catastrophic all-out war."

Finian Cunningham, 2015
 

YUGOSLAVIA

"President Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days and nights in a row. His military and political policies destroyed one of the most progressive countries in Europe. And he called it humanitarian intervention.
... The main purpose of the bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999 was to make life so difficult for the Yugoslav public that support of the government of Slobodan Milosevic would be undermined. This is the classic definition of 'terrorism', as used by the FBI, the CIA, and the United Nations: the use or threat of violence against a civilian population to induce the government to change certain policies."

William Blum

"Yugoslavia's relatively prosperous industrial base with an economy that was three-fourths publicly owned, could no longer be tolerated to compete with western capitalist production. Secession and war accomplished the goal of breaking up Yugoslavia into small rightwing client states under the economic domination of transnational corporations."

Michael Parenti

"Directing and encouraging ethnic cleansing, playing one nationality off of another, bombing civilian infrastructure and murdering civilians in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, these acts engaged in by the U.S. and its NATO allies took place under the pleasant halo of 'humanitarian intervention.'"

Paul D'Amato, Dissident Voice, 2008

"In the year 2000, a strange new political phenomenon emerged in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia in the former Yugoslavia. On the surface, it seemed to be a spontaneous and genuine political 'movement.' In reality, it was the product of techniques that had been under study and development in the US for decades.
... In Belgrade several specific organizations were key players: the National Endowment for Democracy and two of its offshoots, the International Republican Institute, tied to the Republican party, and the National Democratic Institute, tied to the Democrats. While claiming to be private Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), they were, in fact, financed by the US Congress and State Department. Armed with millions in US taxpayer dollars, they were moved into place to create a synthetic movement for 'non-violent change."

F. William Engdahl in his book "Full Spectrum Dominance"

"The bombing war in Yugoslavia in 1999 violates and shreds the basic provisions of the United Nations Charter and other conventions and treaties; the attack on Yugoslavia constitutes the most brazen international aggression since the Nazis attacked Poland... The United States has discarded pretensions to international legality and decency, and embarked on a course of raw imperialism run amok."

William Rockler, former prosecutor of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal

"Yugoslavia was the only country in Eastern Europe that would not dismantle its welfare state and public sector economy. It was the only one that did not beg for entry into NATO. It was - and what's left of it, still is - charting an independent course not in keeping with the New World Order."

Michael Parenti, 2001

"The decision to destroy Yugoslavia as a country and carve it up into a number of small proxy states was taken by the Reagan administration in the early 1980s. National Security Decision Directive (NSDD 133) entitled "US Policy towards Yugoslavia." set the foreign policy framework for the destabilization of Yugoslavia's model of market socialism and the establishment of a US sphere of influence in Southeastern Europe.
... A series of covert intelligence operations were implemented... These covert operations were combined with the destabilization of the Yugoslav economy. The application of strong economic medicine under the helm of the IMF and the World Bank ultimately led to the destruction of Yugoslavia's industrial base, the demise of the workers' cooperative and the dramatic impoverishment of its population."

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 2008

"The main purpose of the bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999 was to make life so difficult for the public, that support of the government of Slobodan Milosevic would be undermined. This is the classic definition of 'terrorism' as used by the FBI, the CIA, and the United Nations: the use or threat of violence against a civilian population to induce the government to change certain policies."

William Blum

"The Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia developed from an impoverished, underdeveloped, feuding region into a stable country with an industrial base, full literacy and health care for the whole population.
... In 1991, Washington encouraged, financed and armed right-wing separatist movements in the Croatian, Slovenian and Bosnian republics of the Yugoslav Federation. In violation of international agreements Germany and the U.S. gave quick recognition to these secessionist movements and approved the creation of several capitalist ministates.
... Washington initiated a wild propaganda campaign claiming that Serbia was carrying out a campaign of massive genocide against the Albanian majority in Kosovo. The Western media was full of stories of mass graves and brutal rapes.
U.S./NATO officials under the Clinton administration issued an outrageous ultimatum that Serbia immediately accept military occupation and surrender all sovereignty or face NATO bombardment of its cities, towns and infrastructure. When, at a negotiation session in Rambouillet, France, the Serbian Parliament voted to refuse NATO's demands, the bombing began.
In 78 days the Pentagon dropped 35,000 cluster bombs, used thousands of rounds of radioactive depleted-uranium rounds, along with bunker busters and cruise missiles. The bombing destroyed more than 480 schools, 33 hospitals, numerous health clinics, 60 bridges, along with industrial, chemical and heating plants, and the electrical grid."

Sara Flounders, 2008

"Since the 1991 US-NATO war aggression against Yugoslavia using highly toxic and radioactive uranium projectiles, the enormity of this war crime becomes clear: In Serbia, aggressive cancer among young and old has reached epidemic proportions.
... Every day a child suffers from cancer. The entire country is contaminated. By harming the genetic material (DNA) generation after generation, malformed children will be born.
... Due to the long degradation process of radioactivity and toxicity, waste from the uranium and nuclear industries - mainly DU from isotope 238 - are stored in secure landfills for a very long time. To reduce the high cost, DU is given free of charge to interested parties such as the military. DU has characteristics that are particularly attractive for the defense industry: The DU projectiles - developed according to German technology - have a high penetrating power because of the high density of the metallic uranium and are particularly suitable for breaking steel armor and underground concrete bunkers. DU is also a flammable material that ignites spontaneously when penetrating an armor plate and at 3000 degrees Celsius burns to uranium oxide dust while releasing highly toxic and radioactive substances (uranium oxide).
This uranium oxide aerosol with particle sizes in the Nano scale reaches the human body through the air, water and, in the long term, through the food chain.
... In the lungs, the DU dust particles are also attached to the red and white blood cells and thus reach all organs of the body, including the brain, the kidney and the testes, so that in many organs cancer is produced and the genetic material (DNA) irreversibly damaged. The strong carcinogenicity of DU is due to the synergistic effects of chemo- and radio toxicity. Through the placenta, the DU can also reach an unborn child and cause serious harm to it. Potential long-term damage includes genetic defects in infants, childhood leukemia, cancer and kidney damage."

Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, 2017

"For over 40 years, Washington had quietly supported Yugoslavia, and the Tito model of mixed socialism, as a buffer against the Soviet Union. As Moscow's empire began to fall apart, Washington had no more use for a buffer - especially a nationalist buffer which was economically successful, one that might convince neighboring states in eastern Europe that a middle way other than IMF shock therapy was possible. The Yugoslav model had to be dismantled, for this reason alone, in the eyes of top Washington strategists. The fact that Yugoslavia also lay on a critical path to the potential oil riches of central Asia merely added to the argument."

F. William Engdahl

"The motive behind the intervention in Yugoslavia was not NATO's new found humanitarianism, but a desire to put Yugoslavia - along with every other country - under the suzerainty of free market globalization."

Michael Parenti in his book "Masters of War"

"When Kosovo proclaimed its "independence" in February [2008] , the Western media hailed the provocative dismemberment of Serbia, a move that completed the destruction of Yugoslavia by the United States, the European Union and NATO, as an exemplary means to bring "peace and stability" to the region.
If by "peace" one means impunity for rampaging crime syndicates or by "stability," the freedom of action with no questions asked by U.S. and NATO military and intelligence agencies, not to mention economic looting on a grand scale by freewheeling multinational corporations, then Kosovo has it all!
From its inception, the breakaway Serb province [of Kosovo] has served as a militarized outpost for Western capitalist powers intent on spreading their tentacles East, encircling Russia and penetrating the former spheres of influence of the ex-Soviet Union. As a template for contemporary CIA destabilization operations in Georgia and Ukraine, prospective EU members and NATO "partners," Kosovo should serve as a warning for those foolish enough to believe American clichés about "freedom" or the dubious benefits of "globalization."

Tom Burghardt, 2008

"In November 1990, under pressure from the Bush administration, the U.S. Congress passed the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act. The new U. S. law provided that any part of Yugoslavia failing to declare independence from Yugoslavia within six months of the act would lose all U.S. financial support. The law demanded separate elections, supervised by the U.S. State Department, in each of the six Yugoslav republics. It also stipulated that any aid go directly to each republic, and not to the central Yugoslav government in Belgrade. In short, the Bush administration demanded the self-dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation. They were deliberately lighting the fuse to an explosive new series of Balkan wars.
Using groups such as the Soros Foundation and NED, Washington financial support was channeled into often extreme nationalist or former fascist organizations that would guarantee a dismemberment of Yugoslavia...The stage was set for a gruesome series of regional ethnic wars which would last a decade and result in the deaths of more than 200,000 people."

William Engdahl in his book "A Century of War"

"Yugoslavia remained the only nation in the region that would not voluntarily discard what remained of its socialism and install an unalloyed free-market system. It also proudly had no interest in joining NATO. The US goal has been to transform the FRY into a Third World region, a cluster of weak right-wing principalities."

Michael Parenti

"The fate of Kosovo had already been carefully laid out prior to the signing of the 1995 Dayton agreement. NATO had entered an unwholesome 'marriage of convenience' with the mafia. "Freedom Fighters" were put in place. The narcotics trade enabled Washington and Bonn to finance the Kosovo conflict with the ultimate objective of destabilizing the Belgrade [Yugoslavia] government and fully recolonizing the Balkans.
... The application of strong 'economic' medicine' under the guidance of the Washington based Bretton Woods institutions [International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and World Trade Organizaton (WTO)] had contributed to wrecking Albania's banking system and precipitating the collapse of Albania's economy. The resulting chaos enabled American and European transnationals to carefully position themselves. Several western oil companies including Occidental, Shell and British Petroleum had their eyes riveted on Albania's abundant and unexplored oil deposits. Western investors were also gawking Albania's extensive reserves of chrome, copper, gold nickel and platinum."

Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa in an article on the Kosovo war

"The US success in removing Serbia's president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 proved to the US State Department and intelligence community that their new model for covert regime change via nonviolent coup d'états worked. It seemed to be the ideal model for eliminating regimes opposed to US policy. It did not matter if a regime had been popular or democratically-elected. Any regime was potentially vulnerable to the Pentagon's new methods of warfare."

F. William Engdahl

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