The Crimes of Empire

Carl Boggs

Description

Imperial nations advance their own interests by exploiting other societies. To those on the receiving end this is obvious, while inside the empire, a powerful ideological system of justification tends to hide all but the worst excess.



Carl Boggs argues that that the US began life two centuries ago as a nascent colonialist regime plundering and conquering the Native Tribes. The Indian wars were followed by perpetual militarism and warfare fuelled by a deep sense of national exceptionalism. The Crimes Of Empire examines several trends in this process, and illustrates the new depths plumbed since 9/11.



Violation of international agreements, treaties and laws, the use of prohibited weapons, support for death squads and torture are just some of the practices that America uses to prove technical superiority and media control, thus prolonging the American nightmare.
Foreword by Peter McLaren

Preface

Introduction

1. Crimes Against Peace

2. Warfare Against Civilians

3. War Crimes By Proxy

4. Weapons Of Mass Destruction

5. A Tale Of Broken Treaties

6. War-Crimes Tribunals: Imperial Justice

7. Torture And Other Atrocities

Conclusion: Empire Or Survival?

Postscript: The Routinization Of Mass Murder

Notes

Index

Sujets

• International Relations
• Political Science
• USA
• United States of America
• General officer
• General
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 02 février 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849644389
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

THE CRIMES OF EMPIRE Rogue Superpower and World Domination

Carl Boggs

Foreword by Peter McLaren

First published 2010 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

www.plutobooks.com

Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Copyright © Carl Boggs 2010

The right of Carl Boggs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 2946 8 978 0 7453 2945 1

Hardback Paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, 33 Livonia Road, Sidmouth, EX10 9JB England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Foreword by Peter McLaren Preface

Introduction

1 Crimes Against Peace  Forgetting Nuremberg  Superpower Ethics  Descent into Lawlessness

2 Warfare against Civilians  World War II and its Legacy  “Collateral Damage” or Mass Murder?  Aerial Terrorism: From Tokyo to Baghdad  A Pattern of Atrocities  A Culture of Denial

3 War Crimes by Proxy  A History of Aiding and Abetting  Central America: Second-Hand Terrorism  Yugoslavia: “Humanitarian” Warfare  Israel: Client–State Outlawry  Perpetual War

4 Weapons of Mass Destruction  Economic Sanctions: Terror by Other Means  The Nuclear Madness Continues ALegacyofToxicWarfare  The Biowarfare Option  Empire and Barbarism Postscript:TheWMDCommission

5 A Tale of Broken Treaties  Lawlessness: An American Legacy  Subverting the United Nations  Genocide Accords: The Great Retreat

vii xiii

1

26 27 34 44

48 49 52 64 73 83

89 90 93 97 100 110

112 115 117 126 133 137 138

144 147 153 159

vi CRIMES OF EMPIRE THE

 Imperialism in Space  Global Warming: The Triumph of Corporate Profits 6 War-Crimes Tribunals: Imperial Justice  The Nuremberg Precedent—and Beyond  NATO’s Hague Travesty  The Hussein Tribunal: Counterfeit Justice  The International Criminal Court  The U.S. Assault on International Law

7 Torture and Other Atrocities  The Historical Labyrinth  Guantanamo: The New Devil’s Island  Abu Ghraib: Chamber of Horrors  Mercenary Terrorism  Outlawry and Denial

Conclusion: Empire or Survival?

Postscript: The Routinization of Mass Murder Notes Index

166 169

176 176 180 190 196 199

207 209 217 223 232 237

241

249 262 277

Foreword

In a nation beset by financial meltdown—stemming from the catastrophicdeclineofWallStreetandtheglobalcrisisoffinancial capital in September and October 2008—and marked by wildly undulating peaks and troughs within its moral history, this book might be something most American readers will studiously want to avoid. That would be a regrettable error of judgment indeed. This powerfully illuminating volume by storied leftist author Carl Boggs is precisely what is needed at this precipitous historical moment that reaches further than the shores of the Americas and encompasses the very heart of what we have come to call civilization. The United States bears no small responsibility in fomenting the current climate of fear and repression. The crimes of empire of which Boggs speaks are not peccadilloes but reflect the quiddity of the American soul. This is a book about criminal behavior. Not the crimes that my grandmother used to read about inTrue Detective magazine, a Du Maurier cigarette smoldering on her lower lip. After all, these are not, for the most part, isolated crimes involving bank tellers, love triangles or clerks in the neighborhood liquor store shot over a bottle of malt whiskey and aBaby Ruth. The criminal behavior featured in this book illustrates a contempt of the law that runs deep inside the structural unconsciousness of U.S. society; so deep, in fact, that it remains unacknowledged as such, or even mistaken for its opposite—the protection of liberty and freedom, not just for U.S. citizens (although they appear to be democracy’s preferred customers) but for all of humanity, including the United States’ colonial valets. These are systematic, widespread, and officially sanctioned crimes that are designed from the outset to kill and maim thousands of people in whatever theaters are deemed appropriate by the U.S. administration and military, employing what is unmistakably the most feared and powerful war machine ever created. The use of remote-controlled drone Predators that kill one enemy target for every 70 civilians killed; the use of bunker-busting bombs, cluster bombs, radioactive weapons such as depleted uranium shells, napalm, white phosphorous, and weapons of mass destruction that have over the last 50 years left millions dead; the arming and

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viii  THE CRIMES OF EMPIRE

funding of death squads in places such as East Timor, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras (especially the CIA-created “Battalion 316”), Colombia, Bolivia, Angola, and Mozambique; “free-fire zones”; the massacres carried out by the infamous “Tiger Force” of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division; the American-style death squads of Iraq’s “Salvador Option”; the Chicago police dungeons, the practice of waterboarding that can be traced back to the U.S. conquest and occupation of the Philippines (1899–1902); extra-legal operations such as the CIA’s Operation Phoenix (that assassinated between 20,000–40,000 civilian Vietnamese “activists” between 1967 and 1971); and, more recently, executive assassination rings under the aegis of the Joint Special Operations Command that engage in preemptive and proactive attacks on foreign nationals in their own countries—all of these actions taken by the United States over the past centuries send an unmistakable message to the world: The U.S. is ready and willing to employ vast arsenals of death to protect its geostrategic and financial interests around the world. That the leading violator of international legality and prime perpetrator of international outlawry can view its own legacy with so few official admonishments is shocking to the rest of the world. To take just one example, it would require 69 walls the size of the Vietnam memorial to list all the Vietnamese who were killed in that war. The hooded figure standing on a stool at the U.S. Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq—wires to administer electric shocks dangling from underneath a blanket draped over his outstretched arms, on whose broken figure the imprint of the depraved brutality of the U.S. military was so dramatically augmented—haunts the blood- splotched corridors of our national memory. Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded by CIA “interrogators” 183 times in one month in 2003—a torture technique so heinous that it provokes the victim to gasp for air when being suffocated (it is considered a war crime under U.S. law and illegal under international agreements signed bytheU.S.).Wewillrememberthesecrimesthatwerenotlabeled as torture when undertaken by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies but were decried as such when used by other countries such as Japan and the Soviet Union (the U.S. convicted Japanese torturersforwaterboardingU.S.troopsafterWorldWarII).We will remember images of naked prisoners covered in feces forming a human pyramid for the amusement of U.S. guards, or a naked prisoner on his hands and knees being led around on a leash

FOREWORD ix

by a female soldier. We will remember the accounts of female interrogators wiping red ink disguised as menstrual blood on the faces of Muslim prisoners, or a naked detainee lying on a wet floor, handcuffed, and having objects shoved up his rectum. Or the coffins where detainees were confined along with insects described to them bytheirinterrogatorsasvenomous.Wewillremembertheseacts which were not designed to extract information so much as to strike fear into the hearts and minds of all those who would oppose U.S. interests, domestic and abroad. But we can have no memory of those who died during interrogations by the U.S. military, which according to John Sifton amounts to at least 100 post-9/11 detainees, whose alleged murders were left uninvestigated and prosecuted by the Bush Justice Department, even when the CIA Inspector General referred a case (see Sifton’s article, “The Bush Administration Homicides”; available at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs- and-stories/2009-05-05/how-many-were-tortured-to-death). Of course, the top levels of government had given its imprimatur, and it is likely that this also involved key Democrats as well. While U.S. military personnel participating in the torture of detainees are required, when necessary, to apply sub-xyphoid thrusts or to undertake tracheotomy procedures during waterboarding, Sifton reports that at least half of these deaths were deliberate homicides. Many pundits in the U.S. media, for example Thomas Friedman, justify the torturing of Al Qaeda operatives because they represent a special cadre of fiends, whose martyrdom tactics require a special barbarism (see Friedman’s article “A Torturous Compromise,”New York Times, April 28, 2009; available at: http://www.nytimes. com/2009/04/29/opinion/29friedman.html).When,aftertherelease of four formerly secret torture memos, President Barack Obama announced—“[I]t is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution” —itsetupaterribleprecedentthathauntsthelegacyofthoseWorld WarIIGermansoldierswhosoughttobeexcusedfromprosecution for their participation in crimes against humanity because they were merely following orders and relying in good faith upon the advice of their superior officers—a defense clearly rejected during the trials of Nazi war criminals held at Nuremburg. Torture is clearly and plainly a crime against humanity. Granting immunity to torturers in the face of such crimes robs the U.S. government of its humanity as much as the prisoners it tortured.