You said that if the Nuremberg principles were applied, every post-World War II president would be indictable. It’s probably true.
-Can we run down them real fast? What did Eisenhower do that would indict him?
-Eisenhower overthrew the conservative nationalist government of Iran with a military coup. He overthrew the first and last democratic government in Guatemala by military coup and invasion, leading to years of… In Iran it led to 25 years of brutal dictatorship, finally overthrown in 79. In Guatemala it led to massive atrocities which are still continuing. That's after almost 50 years. In Indonesia, this was not known until recently, but he conducted a major clandestine terror operation of the post-war period, up until Cuban and Nicaragua, in an effort to break up Indonesia and strip off the outer islands where most of the resources are, and undermine what was then considered as the threat of Indonesian democracy. Indonesia was too free and open. It was allowing a political party of the poor to participate. They were gaining a lot of ground, so Eisenhower supported and helped instigate a military rebellion in the outer islands. This is just for starters. These are all indictable offenses.
-What about Kennedy? Kennedy was one of the worst. Kennedy, first of all, invaded South Vietnam. During the Eisenhower administration they had blocked a political settlement in 1954, and instituted a kind of Latin American- style terror state which had killed maybe 60 or 70 thousand people by the end of the Eisenhower period, and it had instigated a response, a reaction that Kennedy recognized couldn't be controlled internally, so he simply invaded. In 1962, about a third of the bombing missions were carried out by the US Air Force in the South by US planes with South Vietnamese insignia but US pilots. He authorized napalm. He began the use of chemical weapons to destroy food crops. They began programs which drove millions of people into what amounted to concentration camps. That's aggression. In the case of Cuba it was just a massive campaign of international terrorism which almost led to the destruction of the world, led to the missile crisis, and we can continue. Again, these are all indictable offenses. Johnson?
-Well, Johnson expanded the war in Indochina to the point where he ended up probably leaving three or four million people dead. He invaded the Dominican Republic to block what looked like a potential democratic revolution there. He supported the Israeli occupation in its early stages. Again, we can go around the world. Take, let’s say Carter.
-I’ll get there but Nixon’s next. Nixon we don't even have to talk about. We can skip that one, OK? Ford then.
-Well, Ford was only there for a short time but long enough to endorse the Indonesian invasion of East Timor which became about as close to genocide as anything in the modern period. They pretended to oppose it, but secretly supported it, in fact not so secretly. Immediately after the invasion the US did join the rest of the world in formally condemning it at the Security Council, but ambassador Moynihan was kind enough to explain to us in his words that his instructions were to render the United Nations utterly ineffective in any actions it might take to counter the Indonesian invasion and he says proudly that he did this with considerable success, and his next sentence says in the next few months it seems that about sixty thousand people were killed and then he goes off to the next topic. That's the first few months. It went on to probably hundreds of thousands. Formally the US announced the boycott of weapons but secretly it increased the supply of weapons including counterinsurgency equipment so that the Indonesians could consummate the invasion. That's just a short period in office but that's indictable, seriously, in fact. That’s a major war crime.
-Carter?
Carter increased, as the Indonesian atrocities were increasing — they peaked in 1978 — Carter's flow of weapons to Indonesia increased. When Congress imposed human rights restrictions — by then there was a human rights movement in Congress to block the flow of advanced weaponry to Indonesia — Carter arranged through Mondale, the vice president, to get Israel to send US Skyhawks to Indonesia to enable Indonesia to complete what turned out to be near genocide, killing maybe a quarter of the population or something. In the Middle East, Carter had just won the Nobel Prize. His great achievement was the Camp David agreements. The Camp David agreements are presented as a diplomatic triumph for the United States. In fact, they were a diplomatic catastrophe. At Camp David the United States and Israel accepted finally Egypt’s 1971 offer which the US had rejected at the time except that now it was worse from the US-Israeli point of view because it included the Palestinians. In order get Israel to accept Egypt’S 1971 offer, after a major war and atrocities and so on, Carter raised military and other aid to Israel to more than fifty percent of total aid worldwide. Israel used it at once in exactly the way they said they were going to do, as every sane person knew, as an opportunity to attack their northern neighbor, first in 1978 then in 1982, and to increase integration of the occupied territories. And that's for starters. We can continue.
-Reagan?
-I don't think we have to talk about that one, either. I mean Reagan is the first president to have been condemned by the International Court of Justice for what they called the unlawful use of force, meaning international terrorism, in the war against Nicaragua. Again, that's just for starters. The Security Council endorsed it in two resolutions, both of which were vetoed by the United States. [George H.W.] Bush?
-Well, we can begin with the invasion of Panama. The invasion of Panama, which according to the Panamanians killed about 3,000 people. Since it's never investigated, who knows if that's true or not. This was done in order to kidnap a disobedient thug who had been supported by the United States right through his worst atrocities.
-Noriega.
-Noriega, who was brought to Florida and tried for crimes that he had committed mostly on the CIA payroll. OK, that's aggression. You could go into the details of the war in Iraq, but there were plainly opportunities for… they might not have worked, but there were opportunities for diplomatic settlement which the Bush administration refused to consider, and, incidentally, the press would not report, with a single exception: Long Island Newsday, which did report the whole story throughout accurately, and it is the only newspaper in the country to have done so. The Bush administration then did attack and the attack was carried out and in a manner which is criminal under the laws of war. They attacked infrastructure. If you attack New York City and you destroy the electrical system, the sewage systems and so on, that amounts to biological warfare, and that's the nature of the attack. Then came a sanctions regime, which was mostly Clinton, but began with Bush, which by conservative estimates killed hundreds of thousands of people while strengthening Saddam Hussein. That takes us off to Clinton. That's the beginning. That's by no means the end. We could run through it. That one case suffices, but there are plenty of others.
-[GW] Bush? Let’s go on with Clinton. One of Clinton's very minor escapades was sending a couple of cruise missiles to the Sudan to destroy what they knew to be a pharmaceutical plant. There was no intelligence failure. According to the only estimates we have from the German ambassador and the regional director of Near East Foundation, which does field work in Sudan, both of them estimated several tens of thousands of deaths from one cruise missile. Very serious. If somebody did that to us, we’d regard it as bad news, and again we can continue. In the Middle East, for example, Clinton began by declaring past UN resolutions, in the words of his administration, “obsolete and anachronistic” because we're finished with that. No more international law. Then comes a period called a peace process except that during the peace process Israeli settlement, which means settlement paid for by the US taxpayer and supported by US military aid and diplomacy, continually increased. The most extreme year was Clinton's last year: the highest level of settlement, the highest since 1992. Meanwhile the territories were cantonized and broken up into small regions with infrastructure projects and new settlement. I don't know what you call that, but it's under military occupation, and if anyone else was doing it, we would call it a crime, and again we can continue.
