August 10
Agent Orange Day


A MONTH TO REMEMBER

On August 6th we shall commemorate the 64th anniversary of the
dropping of the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima that caused the
instant death of 100,000 and left many thousands severely scarred by
radiation.

Three days later on August 9th, the second atomic bomb dropped on
Nagasaki and caused the death of 70,000, again leaving many
thousands severely scarred.

On August 10th the people of Vietnam and its friends around the world will commemorate the 48th anniversary of the beginning of the spraying of the chemical Agent Orange.

For ten-years the spraying
continued over areas of South Vietnam resulted in the deaths of many
thousands in the wombs of the mothers, and many thousands of
abnormal births.

Today in Vietnam nearly four million Vietnamese
people are seriously affected by illnesses and disabilities as a direct
result of the use of Agent Orange.

This was a war crime by the United
States of America and one that has affected a third generation of
Vietnamese, and will soon, if not already, affect a fourth.

It is a crime that remains unpunished despite being taken before the
courts in the US including the US Supreme Court.

But in the highest court, that of World Opinion,
the thirty-seven chemical companies
headed by Monsanto, and the US Government, stand condemned.

We cannot and must not allow Justice to be denied to the Vietnamese
victims of Agent Orange.

We call on you, the reader of this appeal, to
send letters to the US Embassy, calling upon the US Government to
accept their responsibility for the damage caused by Agent Orange and
compensate the victims and their families.

Len Aldis
Secretary of the Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society

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Vietnam designates Agent Orange Day
Vietnam designated Aug. 10 the country's first Vietnamese Agent Orange Victims Day to draw attention to millions suffering from the effects of the defoliant used by U.S. forces during the Vietnam War.

Photo exhibit leads into Agent Orange day
A photo exhibition documenting the crippling effects Agent Orange has had on millions of Vietnamese victims opens in Ho Chi Minh City today as the country prepares for its first Orange Day, August 10.

Japanese donates film on deadly toxin US used in Vietnam
A Japanese woman, whose American husband is suspected to have died of exposure to Agent Orange, has donated a 70-minute documentary on the toxic chemical to the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange.

Int’l support for AO/Dioxin victims pours in

SIGN THE
ONLINE PETITION
FOR JUSTICE FOR
AGENT ORANGE VICTIMS:
http://www.petitiononline.com/Monsanto/petition.html

Sign for Vietnamese AO victims

Honduras: Military Coup Engineered By Two US Companies?

By John Perkins

The big companies are determined to stop what they call a ‘leftist revolt’ in this hemisphere. In throwing out Zelaya they are sending frightening messages to all the other presidents who are trying to raise the living standards of their people. Continue

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Our Suicide Bombers

Thoughts on Western Jihad

By John Feffer

In America's first war against Islam, we were the ones who introduced the use of suicide bombers. Indeed, the American seamen who perished in the incident were among the U.S. military's first missing in action. Continue

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Books That Counter Our "Training" To Make War

By John Pilger

These are extraordinary times. Flag-wrapped coffins of 18-year-old soldiers killed in a failed, illegal and vengeful invasion are paraded along a Wiltshire high street. Victory in Afghanistan is at hand, says the satirical Gordon Brown. Continue

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“Well What If There Is No Tomorrow…

By Kurt Osterhoff

....

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

- Martin Luther King, Beyond Vietnam speech, April 4, 1967

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”

....Are his words any less relevant today than they were forty years ago?

Gulf of Tonkin was an Inside Job

We now know the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which provided the pretext for President Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War, was a lie – the alleged attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats against US war ships did not occur and our government no longer denies this.

Suppose shortly following this incident a determined group of conscientious truth seeking citizens had done their own independent investigative research and within the course of a couple years constructed a very compelling case, based on credible circumstantial evidence, exposing Gulf of Tonkin for the staged false flag event that it was. Suppose further, while no mainstream or left gatekeeper media outlets of the time would agree to help in exposing this monumental lie, that these citizen investigators had something on the order of today’s internet at their disposal – a relatively cheap interactive means of reaching at least some of the population. And lastly, let’s suppose they’d successfully reached Dr. King with the details of this shocking revelation.

Would Dr. King have spoken this awful truth about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident publicly? Should we believe he would have dared drop such a bombshell in his Beyond Vietnam speech? Or would he have recoiled from it, believing, with the JFK assassination and all that followed still very much on people’s minds, that he would too easily be marginalized by his many powerful detractors for embracing and spreading a truth sure to be savagely maligned as conspiracy theory? Could public perception considerations ever have trumped the telling of such an important and relevant truth for a man like Martin Luther King?

Déjà Vu All Over Again

Fast forward thirty-seven years from the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. If our government is to be believed, on the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen Arab hijackers wielding box cutters successfully commandeered four commercial passenger jetliners, not long afterwards slamming two into the World Trade Center towers, one into the Pentagon, and crash diving another (allegedly after struggling with passengers that had stormed the cockpit) into the ground in a remote area near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The official narrative also attributes the destruction of WTC towers I, II, and building 7, each of which collapsed neatly into their own respective footprints at near freefall speed, to structural damage, fire, and falling debris originating from the impact of the two planes said to have hit WTC I and II.

Is the government’s official version of the events of 9-11 credible?

Fortunately, we are not simply left to wonder, as there is now a large and impressive body of diligent investigative research done by a loose-knit group of private citizens known as the Truth Movement.

Here’s a small sample of video links highlighting some of this research: September Clues (90 min); Enlightening the Shadows (8 min); 9-11 NIST Report Debunked (20 min); Ret US Major General on the Pentagon hit (5 min); Shanksville (10 min); Architects and Engineers for Truth (16 min); Dr. David Ray Griffin interview (60 min); Sibel Edmonds: Kill the Messenger (52 min).

A Deafening Silence

After even a cursory objective examination of the accumulated evidence contradicting the official story, the utter absurdity of what we’ve been asked to believe by our own government concerning the events of 9-11 becomes painfully obvious.

Further pain is felt in the realization that there is apparently no longer a free press (if there ever was one) in America. If we had one they would certainly be exposing the 9-11 cover-up. As things stand, it’s been nearly eight years and still nothing from either corporate mainstream, or left gatekeeper media – their silence is deafening.

This, of course, like the 9-11 investigative work, leaves responsibility for the dissemination of these and other important truths to fall squarely upon us, the citizenry. And we should treat it the same way Dr. King would have: as a duty.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

- Martin Luther King, Beyond Vietnam speech, April 4, 1967

Time is not on our side, it rarely is. Please do what you can to help spread important truths.

Continue

UN-American Activities

"We'll know our disinformation program is
complete when everything
the American public believes is false."

— William Casey, CIA Director
(from first staff meeting, 1981)

The U.S. leaders who have initiated
and conducted this criminal war
should be tried and jailed for war crimes.












The propagandists who facilitated
the war should be asked who they work for.

"Are you now, or have you ever been,
a member of the Central Intelligience Agency?"

"On television the voices of dissent can’t be counted upon to match the studio drapes or serve as tasteful lead-ins to the advertisements for Pantene Pro-V and the U.S. Marine Corps.
What we now know as the “news media” serve at the pleasure of the corporate sponsor, their purpose not to tell truth to the powerful but to transmit lies to the powerless."

— Lewis Lapham













We call for a
Truth Commission
in the United States

The people of South Africa did it, why can't we?

http://www.newamericandream.net

Blackwater: Murder, Inc.

Blackwater accused of murder

in 'crusade to eliminate Muslims'

By Keith Olberman and Jeremy Scahill

....To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.....

Continue

The Great Hiroshima Cover-Up

And the Nuclear Fallout for All of Us Today

By Greg Mitchell

August 06, 2009 "Huffington Post"

I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child....They didn't want the general public to know what their weapons had done.

Continue

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Hiroshima Day:

America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years

By Daniel Ellsberg
August 06, 2009 "Truthdig"

.......For a great many Americans still, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are regarded above all with gratitude, for having saved their own lives or the lives of their husbands, brothers, fathers or grandfathers, which would otherwise have been at risk in the invasion of Japan. For these Americans and many others, the Bomb was not so much an instrument of massacre as a kind of savior, a protector of precious lives.

Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effective—as constituting just means, in effect just terrorism, under the supposed circumstances—thus legitimating, in their eyes, the second and third largest single-day massacres in history. (The largest, also by the U.S. Army Air Corps, was the firebombing of Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, which burned alive or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians. Most of the very few Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as appropriate in wartime.)

To regard those acts as definitely other than criminal and immoral—as most Americans do—is to believe that anything—anything—can be legitimate means: at worst, a necessary, lesser, evil. At least, if done by Americans, on the order of a president, during wartime. Indeed, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction—and believes that it was fully rightful in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.

Even if the premises of these justifications had been realistic (after years of study I'm convinced, along with many scholars, that they were not; but I'm not addressing that here), the consequences of such beliefs for subsequent policymaking were bound to be fateful.

They underlie the American government and public's ready acceptance ever since of basing our security on readiness to carry out threats of mass annihilation by nuclear weapons, and the belief by many officials and elites still today that abolition of these weapons is not only infeasible but undesirable.....

....There was a close analogy with the Manhattan Project. Its scientists—most of whom hoped the Bomb would never be used for anything but as a threat to deter Germany—were driven by a plausible but mistaken fear that the Nazis were racing them. Actually the Nazis had rejected the pursuit of the atomic bomb on practical grounds in June 1942, just as the Manhattan Project was beginning.

Similarly, I was one of many in the late '50s who were misled and recruited into the nuclear arms race by exaggerated, and in this case deliberately manipulated, fears of Soviet intentions and crash efforts.

Precisely because I did receive clearances and was exposed to top-secret intelligence estimates, in particular from the Air Force, I, along with my colleagues at the RAND Corp., came to be preoccupied with the urgency of averting nuclear war by deterring a Soviet surprise attack that would exploit an alleged "missile gap."

That supposed dangerous U.S. inferiority was exactly as unfounded in reality as the fear of the Nazi crash bomb program had been, or, to pick a more recent example, as concern over Saddam Hussein's supposed WMDs and nuclear pursuit in 2003.

Working conscientiously, obsessively, on a wrong problem, countering an illusory threat, I and my colleagues distracted ourselves and helped distract others from dealing with real dangers posed by the mutual and spreading possession of nuclear weapons—dangers which we were helping make worse—and from real opportunities to make the world more secure.

Unintentionally, yet inexcusably, we made our country and the world less safe.

Eventually the Soviets did emulate us in creating a world-threatening nuclear capability on hair-trigger alert. That still exists; Russian nuclear posture and policies continue, along with ours, to endanger our countries, civilization and much of life itself.

But the persistent reality has been that the nuclear arms race has been driven primarily by American initiatives and policies and that every major American decision in this 64-year-old nuclear era has been accompanied by unwarranted concealment, deliberate obfuscation, and official and public delusions.

I have believed for a long time that official secrecy and deceptions about our nuclear weapons posture and policies and their possible consequences have threatened the survival of the human species.

To understand the urgency of radical changes in our nuclear policies that may truly move the world toward abolition of nuclear weapons, we need a new understanding of the real history of the nuclear age.

Using the new opportunities offered by the Internet—drawing attention to newly declassified documents and to some realities still concealed—I plan over the next year, before the 65th anniversary of Hiroshima, to do my part in unveiling this hidden history.

Continue

Activists blast Agent Orange hypocrisy, renew justice appeal

Do Duc Diu, a war veteran from Quang Binh Province, walks with his two surviving children. Of his 15 children, 12 have died due to what were suspected to be Agent Orange-related maladies. Continual pressure should be maintained on the United States and multinational chemical companies to seek justice for Agent Orange victims, two international activists have stressed.

They told Thanh Nien Daily that the spraying of Agent Orange by the US Army was an instance of a dangerous chemical that has caused devastating consequences for millions of Vietnamese citizens and the country’s natural environment. This is an undeniable fact, they asserted adding that the international community, particularly US citizens, should take appropriate action to demand long-denied reparations for Vietnamese victims. “There should be, and for the most part there is, universal acceptance that dioxin is a dangerous chemical. The US military was responsible for the dissemination of Agent Orange and dioxin throughout southern Vietnam,” said Dr. Wayne Dwernychuk, a senior Canadian environmental scientist. “Human health studies are not necessary to determine the dangers to people in Vietnam... this has been determined, so initiation of significant cleanup at all affected former US military installations where Agent Orange was present should proceed as rapidly as possible,” he said. Dwernychuk’s arguments were echoed by American activist Merle Ratner, Co-Coordinator of the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign. Ratner quoted Professor Jordan Paust, a prominent scholar of international law, as saying, “Use of poison by any means is a war crime under customary and treaty-based international law.” Agent Orange was “both a poison and a chemical weapon, since it was used as a weapon aimed at destroying the land and depriving the people of food,” Ratner added. “While weapons of mass destruction is generally used to refer to large scale weapons like atomic bombs, I believe that chemical weapons which keep on killing and maiming from generation to generation can also be considered weapons of mass destruction,” she said. Both Dwernychuk and Ratner stressed that the right action must be being taken by the right people to redress the environment of Vietnam and the harm caused to its citizens. “There is a saying in the environmental business... ‘The polluter should pay’... in this instance, in Vietnam with dioxin contamination, the people of Vietnam should have some assistance to ease the financial, ecological, and human health burdens of the significant ‘pollution’ caused by the US military in their use of Agent Orange in Vietnam,” Dwernychuk said. He felt the US’s refusal to pay any compensation to Vietnamese Agent Orange victims while doing so for its own veterans could have to do with avoiding legal liability “something the US has been avoiding for decades by saying there is ‘no scientific link between AO exposure and health issues in Vietnam’.” Ratner pointed fingers specifically at two US major chemical companies that Vietnamese victims have filed lawsuits against, Dow Chemical and Monsanto. “We have called for an international corporate campaign focusing on the two largest companies – Dow and Monsanto – which will bring public pressure on these corporate giants until they compensate their victims in Vietnam,” she said. She said it was unjust and immoral for these companies to deny and evade their liability towards Vietnamese victims while coming to out-of-court settlements with US veterans for “a small amount.” “We also think that the children and grandchildren of US veterans and Vietnamese Americans exposed to Agent Orange, who currently receive nothing from the US government should also get help,” she said. No respect for international law Asked why the lawsuit brought by the Vietnamese victims against the chemical companies keeps loosing, Ratner was scathing in her reply. “The suit brought by the Vietnamese victims lost in court because the law in the US favors property owners over ordinary people and doesn’t respect international law very much,” she said. “That US veterans were able to get a settlement where Vietnamese victims were not, also testifies not to a different strategy, but to the racism of the US court system which considers people of color, in the US and especially abroad, as less deserving of justice.” The fact that the US has been reluctant to recognize its past mistakes is also quite explicable, according to Ratner. “Speaking for myself, I would say that the US has not been willing to recognize its past crimes because it is still committing these sorts of crimes! While the US’ war crimes and crimes against humanity in Vietnam were particularly heinous, it has continued committing such acts all over the world.” For the US to recognize and atone for its past crime, Ratner said “it has to reorient itself from a system based mainly on profit to a system based on the common needs of humanity.” Never give up While Ratner said she is convinced that justice will prevail for Vietnamese victims, Dwernychuk was a little bit more cautious. “One should not give up ‘hope.’ At one point in time, say 20 years ago, it was probably ludicrous to suppose the US would provide ‘any’ funds to Vietnam for war-related ‘damage’ ... it has happened, albeit miniscule, but it has happened,” he said. “The important feature of potential justice is that the Agent Orange issue is not ‘put to bed’, or placed in a file labeled IGNORE.” He said “addressing the ‘hot spot’ cleanup issue at former US bases is paramount to extract these areas out of the food chain of humans who may be living in the area, or downstream of contaminated regions. Only then will ‘normal’ bilateral relations exist between the two countries.” Ratner said people all over the world can also take action to support the victims of Agent Orange in many ways. “In the US they can join the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign in working for justice and compensation from both the US government and the chemical companies by going to: www.vn-agentorange.org. In the rest of the world, they can join or start a local Agent Orange organization and put pressure on Dow & Monsanto by writing letters, demonstrating at their offices, etc,” she said. “In Vietnam, people can join with the organization representing the country’s three million Agent Orange victims, the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA): http://www.vava.org.vn/” AGENT OF TERROR Agent Orange, named after the color of the stripe on the barrels in which the defoliant sprayed by American forces during the Vietnam War was stored, contained tetrachlorodibenzop dioxin (known as TCDD), one of the most poisonous chemicals ever made by man. Agent Orange has caused reproductive problems, birth defects, cancer and other diseases in affected people on both sides of the war. Between 1961 and 1971, the US Army sprayed some 80 million liters of the defoliant, containing 366 kilograms of the highly toxic dioxin, over 30,000 square miles of southern Vietnam. By the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, nearly 4.8 million Vietnamese people had been exposed to Agent Orange, causing 400,000 deaths. Millions more have suffered devastating long-term health effects, including cancer and genetic defects. Reported by An Dien - Jon Dillingham Activists blast Agent Orange hypocrisy, renew justice appeal Continual pressure should be maintained on the United States and multinational chemical companies to seek justice for Agent Orange victims, two international activists have stressed.

Agent Orange Causes Media Blindness

By Dave Lindorff

Agent Orange victim July 28, 2009 - The Smirking Chimp http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/22983 Agent Orange, the herbicide used as a weapon by US military forces in Vietnam for nearly a decade to defoliate vast stretches of inhabited forest and jungle in an effort to deprive the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces of both cover and a supportive populace, has long been known to have caused a large number of serious and debilitating diseases, many of them passed on to children of those exposed. But now it also appears to cause a peculiar blindness among American journalists. This is demonstrably the case at the New York Times, where a report in Saturday's edition on new Agent Orange links being found to Parkinson's Disease and ischemic heart disease noted that it could lead to many more Vietnam War Era veterans being eligible for disability benefits and treatment, but completely failed to mention the significance of the discovery for the millions of Vietnamese who were also exposed to the chemical--and for their descendants. The new link was announced in a report by a 14-member committee of the Institute of Medicine, which had been asked to determine what conditions might be traced to exposure to the chemical that had been "used to clear stretches of the jungle" in Vietnam. As the article noted, since 1994, the Institute of Medicine has to date found 17 medical conditions that can be traced to exposure to Agent Orange, "13 of which qualify veterans for service-connected disability benefits." There's a lot wrong with this article, as written by Times reporter Janie Lorber (though admittedly we can't know what is her responsibility and what is the handiwork of the newspaper's editors). For starters, the benign-sounding description of how Agent Orange was used--"to clear stretches of the jungle"--makes it sound like the kind of thing President George W. Bush used to do when he was down at his "ranch" in Crawford, TX "clearing brush," or like grounds-keeping work at the local golf course. In fact, what the US military was doing was defoliating vast tracts of inhabited forest in South Vietnam, in an effort both to make it hard for enemy troops to hide, and to drive peasants into strategic hamlets where they could be controlled, and prevented from providing assistance to Vietnamese fighters. There was no effort made to keep the defoliant away from people--civilians or enemy fighters--indeed, people were, at least indirectly, the targets. It would, indeed, have made no sense to defoliate areas where there were no people. It is certainly true that the Defense Department showed absolutely no concern about sending American troops out into the sprayed areas, where hundreds of thousands or soldiers and marines were exposed to the residue of the spraying, and it is true that the Defense Department and the US government spent millions of dollars after the war battling efforts by desperately ill veterans in a futile effort to deny legal responsibility for their ailments, and to deny any link between those ailments and Agent Orange. (A friend, the late Dorothy Thompson, was one of the lead attorneys in the successful fight to win compensation from the government for veterans who suffered from Agent Orange-related disease.) But how can any honest journalist or news organization write about this sordid chapter in America's criminal use of chemical weapons without even mentioning its impact on the enemy, or on huge numbers of wholly innocent civilians? To this day, the US has refused to accept any responsibility for the victims in Vietnam of its chemical warfare in that country, despite the fact that millions have suffered and continue to suffer from the results, including innocent children born long after the war was over, and of course many older people who have long since died of their diseases. It is no surprise, of course, that the US government would decline to accept responsibility for its actions, or even to discuss the issue. The Vietnam War was the first war in which the US clearly was defeated, and there is no desire to even think about it, much less about the evils which were done by America in the fighting of it. And as a federal agency, it's perhaps understandable, though still inexcusable, that the Institute of Medicine panel examining Agent Orange's impacts would fail to note its impact on the people of Vietnam, and focus instead only on veterans. But the media, and particularly the New York Times, have no excuse whatsoever -even if the Institute of Medicine report is incomplete--for failing to mention the obvious point that, as bad as Agent Orange was for the troops who dispensed it, and who had to fight in areas where it had been used, it was far, far worse for the people upon whom it was actually dispensed. Unless, of course, the problem is that the Times and its reporters and editors are also victims of the chemical, and it is also causing journalistic blind spots.

:: Article nr. 56444 sent on 29-jul-2009 11:40 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=56444

:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

CAMBODIA REVISITED:
Elusive Justice & Elusive Truth

Bruce McPhie, August 1, 2009

Cambodia is a fascinating country to visit, with a long and turbulent history, friendly people, and delicious food. It has a striking natural beauty, with the mighty Mekong River, the unique Tonle Sap Lake, and a landscape of sugar palms, white cattle and green rice fields among rural villages where time seems to have stood still. Against this stunning backdrop are the encouraging signs of progress and development out of poverty that is most evident in the major cities.

I have just returned to Viet Nam, after leading another tour group to Cambodia. This was my first tour to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap in five years, so it was most satisfying to see the positive changes taking place in the country, as well as to catch up again with some familiar faces and places.

The world may know something about the amazing grandeur of the Khmer Empire from the 9th-13th centuries, when a number of kings and numberless labourers built the legendary Angkor Wat and dozens of other mind-blowing temples and public works. Now a UNESCO World Heritage site, the impressive temple ruins near Siem Reap attract tourists from near and far.

The world may also know something of the darker side of more recent Cambodian history, especially the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot from 1975-1979, when around 2 million people, some 1/5 of the country’s entire population, met an untimely and tragic death. The UN Human Rights Commission in 1979 described the genocidal crimes of the Khmer Rouge as “the worst to have occurred anywhere in the world since Nazism.” But then did nothing.

Most people may know the film “The Killing Fields”.

But few seem to know, or remember, that most of the world has Cambodian blood on its hands - for most of the world, at one time or another, supported the Khmer Rouge. Of course, they would prefer you not to know, or remember, that shameful and incriminating truth.

We should know of these things, and never forget the past, as this is the key to understanding the present and the future. So a visit to Cambodia is incomplete without visiting Tuol Sleng, the infamous S-21 prison, now a Genocide Museum, in the capital city Phnom Penh. Here, a former high school, once a place of dignity and learning, became a gruesome political prison and torture centre of the Khmer Rouge regime, one of many throughout the country.

Ironically, many of the top leaders of the Khmer Rouge were themselves former school teachers, including Duch, director of S-21, who graduated top of mathematics class at his university and became a teacher and vice-principal in the 1960s. After 1997, and under a new name, he was recruited by the American Refugee Committee to work inside a refugee camp in Thailand, and became a born-again Christian. He has since confessed to his crimes against humanity, and is on trial at the ongoing Cambodian War Crimes Tribunal.

Then, for a sobering reflection, and to pay respects to the memory of the dead, you should make the short journey out of Phnom Penh to Cheung Ek, the best-known of the many “Killing Fields”. Here, more than 15,000 prisoners from S-21, including children, were sent to their brutal deaths. Walking around even today, there are still fragments of the prisoner’s bones in the dirt path under your feet, and scraps of clothing blowing in the breeze.

But we should also know that those complicit in genocidal war crimes in Cambodia go way beyond just Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime – although they will certainly not be standing before the Cambodian War Crimes Tribunal to answer for their crimes.

They include war criminal Henry Kissinger, architect of the massive US bombing of the Cambodian countryside, including with chemicals. During 1973 alone, US B-52 bombers from Guam and Thailand dropped nearly twice as many tons of bombs on rural Cambodia as the United States had dropped on Japan in World War 2. This utterly devastated and brutalized the country, and was a potent factor in bringing the Khmer Rouge to power. But Kissinger won’t be in the dock, as he is now advising the Barack Obama Administration on ‘national security’.

The world soon knew about Cambodia's "Killing Fields" under Pol Pot, but did nothing. Along with the millions of Cambodians who died, many thousands of Vietnamese were also innocent victims of Pol Pot's purges, both in Cambodia and in cross-border massacres inside Viet Nam.

In 1979, the Vietnamese Army helped overthrow Pol Pot, thus ending the "Killing Fields” regime – requested by and with the assistance of Cambodians. The rest of the world, with few exceptions, falsely accused Viet Nam of "invading" Cambodia, and then directly or indirectly supported the armed guerrilla resistance led by the Khmer Rouge. The killing continued for many more years, prolonged by much of the world, but led primarily by the governments of the United States of America, both Republican (Ronald Reagan) and Democrat (Jimmy Carter).

The new Cambodian government, desperately trying to rebuild all that Pol Pot and war had destroyed, suffered an international economic embargo, with almost the only aid coming in from Viet Nam, the USSR and few others. Even the United Nations denied development assistance. The UN has withheld development aid from only one third world country: Cambodia.

Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge even retained Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations, and continued a terror war against the new Cambodian government for another two decades. The Khmer Rouge was effectively aided and assisted in this by many governments, often secretly, including the US, China, Britain, ASEAN, Thailand, Singapore, Germany, and even Australia.

The UN “peace process” in 1990 was an expensive but futile exercise in legitimizing the Khmer Rouge as an equal in the political process – no mention of the G-word (“genocide”) was allowed. Pol Pot was free to continue the killing, protected by Thailand and the US, until his reported death in 1998.

Not everyone will know these ugly truths because they are often sanitized out of public consciousness and polite conversation, although they are well-documented in numerous reputable history books. Regrettably, the twin evils of historical amnesia and deliberate misinformation still cloud this tragic chapter in Cambodian history. Even the casual tourist visiting Cambodia today, is unlikely to be told these embarrassing truths.

Evils justified by the realpolitik of the Cold War continue now in the bogus ‘War on Terror’. Until war crimes of the past are properly acknowledged, how can we ever hope to end war crimes of the present and the future?

While in Cambodia, I bought another excellent book to add to my extensive library on Indochina. This one is called Getting Away With Genocide? - Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, by Tom Fawthrop & Helen Jarvis [Pluto, London, 2004]. As the book makes shockingly clear, it is not only Justice that is elusive....it is also Truth.

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	Hiroshima Day Rally on Saturday 8 August Hiroshima Day Rally on Saturday 8 August, 1pm State Library, Swanston Street, Melbourne, Australia. Steven Starr, a visiting scientist from the US will be joined by Dave Sweeney of the ACF and Felicity Hill from WILPF on the speakers' platform. Read more

Nestlé: Major violations of basic union rights around the world

For growing numbers of Nestlé workers around the world, it's "Good Food - Good Life - Goodbye to Union Rights in the Workplace". The IUF and its affiliates are currently fighting against major violations of basic rights at Nestlé in Indonesia, India, Korea and Hong Kong. Support our Struggle! Stop Nespressure!

For the past two years at Nestlé INDONESIA, the union has been requesting negotiations for badly needed changes to the collective agreement. Management has responded by creating a fake union and pressuring workers to join it.
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Brilliant!
Read all this article, and understand the world we live in! . . .

Iran : Riding The "Green Wave"

By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

Instead of U.S. citizens asking the question, What should we do about the current situation in the United States of America? (extended to those parts of the world that suffer beneath its myriad forms of violence and oppression), the Campaign for Peace and Democracy asks: "What should we do about the current situation in Iran?"

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Capitalism sucks! Bring on Socialism! . . . .

A $100 million bonus: Citigroup is considering paying a $100 million bonus -- to one guy. This is the same Citigroup that received $45 billion in bailout money. The same Citigroup that will soon be 34% owned by the U.S. government. The same Citigroup that has lost 95% of its share value since 2007.

*

Iran: Which Side Are You On?

By William Bowles

What is depressing is that the left is having this argument in the first place! In this sense then, the arguments on the left have been an unqualified success, for the Empire that is, for they have diverted attention away from the US and its allies attempts to install a regime favourable to the West. Instead, we bicker about which side to back and find ourselves the unwitting accomplices of the Empire regardless of which side we support.

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*

America's Wars
How Serial War Became the American Way of Life
By David Bromwich

David Bromwich, who writes regularly and incisively for the Huffington Post and the New York Review of Books, points out, the U.S. now regularly imagines itself as a serial warrior into the distant future.

On July 16, in a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the "central question" for the defense of the United States was how the military should be "organized, equipped -- and funded -- in the years ahead, to win the wars we are in while being prepared for threats on or beyond the horizon." The phrase beyond the horizon ought to sound ominous.

Was Gates telling his audience of civic-minded business leaders to spend more money on defense in order to counter threats whose very existence no one could answer for? Given the public acceptance of American militarism, he could speak in the knowledge that the awkward challenge would never be posed.

We have begun to talk casually about our wars; and this should be surprising for several reasons. To begin with, in the history of the United States war has never been considered the normal state of things.

For two centuries, Americans were taught to think war itself an aberration, and "wars" in the plural could only have seemed doubly aberrant. Younger generations of Americans, however, are now being taught to expect no end of war -- and no end of wars.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

War Criminals: Theirs and Ours

This is from a chapter of the book

'Rogue State: A Guide to
the World's Only Superpower', by William Blum

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11742.htm

War Criminals: Theirs and Ours

I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as
a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side.
US General Curtis LeMay, commander of the 1945 Tokyo fire bombing operation.[1]

On December 3, 1996, the US Justice Department issued a list of 16 Japanese citizens who would be barred from entering the United States because of "war crimes" committed during the Second World War.....

....we are faced with the fact that any number of countries would be justified in issuing a list of Americans barred from entry because of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity".

Such a list, of those still alive in 2005, might include:

William Clinton, president, for his merciless bombing of the people of Yugoslavia for 78 days and nights in 1999, taking the lives of many hundreds of civilians, and producing one of the greatest ecological catastrophes in history; for his relentless continuation of the sanctions and rocket attacks upon the people of Iraq; and for his illegal and lethal bombings of Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, and Afghanistan.

General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, for his direction of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia with an almost sadistic fanaticism ... "He would rise out of his seat and slap the table. ‘I've got to get the maximum violence out of this campaign -- now!'"[4]

George H. W. Bush, president, for the death of more than a million innocent Iraqi citizens, the result of his 40 days of bombing in 1991, the deliberate ruination of the public water supply, the widespread use of depleted uranium weapons which has brought continuing suffering to many thousands of American servicemen and to many more Iraqis, and for the institution of draconian sanctions against Iraq, which lasted 12 years.
For his unconscionable bombing of Panama in 1989, producing widespread death, destruction and homelessness, for no discernible reason that would stand up in a court of law or a court of public opinion.

General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for his prominent role in the attacks on Panama and Iraq, the latter including destruction of nuclear reactors as well as plants making biological and chemical agents. Hardly more than a month had passed since the United Nations, under whose mandate the United States was supposedly operating in Iraq, had passed a resolution reaffirming its "prohibition of military attacks on nuclear facilities" in the Middle East.[5] In the wake of the destruction, Powell gloated: "The two operating reactors they had are both gone, they're down, they're finished."[6] He was just as cavalier about the lives of the people of Iraq. In response to a question concerning the number of Iraqis killed in the war, the good general replied: "It's really not a number I'm terribly interested in."[7]
For his part in the cover up of war crimes in Vietnam by troops of the same brigade that carried out the My Lai massacre.[8]

General Norman Schwarzkopf, Commander in Chief, U.S. Central Command, for his military leadership of the Iraqi carnage in 1991; for continuing the carnage two days after the cease-fire; for continuing it against Iraqis trying to surrender.

Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state under Reagan; a tireless campaigner and propagandist for the vilest of dictatorships, death squads, and torturers in Central America and Pinochet's Chile; a spinmeister for the ages, who wrestled facts into ideological submission. "When history is written," he declared, "the Contras will be folk heroes," he wrote of the terrorists who carried out multiple atrocities against the people of Nicaragua.[9]

Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense for seven years under Reagan, for his official and actual responsibility for the numerous crimes against humanity perpetrated by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean, and for the bombing of Libya in 1986.

Lt. Col. Oliver North, assigned to Reagan's National Security Council, for being a prime mover behind the Contras of Nicaragua, and for his involvement in the planning of the completely illegal invasion of Grenada, which took the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians.

Henry Kissinger (who has successfully combined three careers: scholar, Nobel peace laureate, and war criminal), National Security Adviser under Nixon and Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford, for his Machiavellian, amoral, immoral roles in the US interventions into Angola, Chile, East Timor, Vietnam, and Cambodia, which brought unspeakable horror and misery to the peoples of those lands.

Gerald Ford, president, for giving his approval to Indonesia to use American arms to brutally suppress the people of East Timor, thus setting in motion a quarter-century-long genocide.

Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, a prime architect of, and major bearer of responsibility for, the slaughter in Indochina, from its early days to its extraordinary escalations; and for the violent suppression of popular movements in Peru.

General William Westmoreland, Army Chief of Staff, for the numerous war crimes under his command in Vietnam. In 1971, Telford Taylor, the chief US prosecutor at the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal, cited the "Yamashita" case as grounds for indicting Westmoreland. Following the war, a US Army Commission had sentenced Japanese General Tomayuki Yamashita to be hanged for atrocities committed by his troops in the Philippines. The Commission held that as the senior commander, Yamashita was responsible for not stopping the atrocities. The same ruling could of course apply to General Powell and General Schwarzkopf. Yamashita, in his defense, presented considerable evidence that he had lacked the communications to adequately control his troops; yet he was still hanged. Taylor pointed out that with helicopters and modern communications, Westmoreland and his commanders didn't have this problem.[10]

And the Bush administration, some of them are still at it, even as you read this: George W. Bush, president, Richard Cheney, vice president, Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, Colin Powell, Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor, for the awful horrors and grave suffering they deliberately brought down upon the heads of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, who had done them no harm; for the unending lying they engaged in, in an attempt to enlist American and world support for these atrocities.

The crime of bombing
As mentioned in the "Bombings" chapter, the bombing of cities from airplanes goes not only unpunished but virtually unaccused. This is a legacy of World War II. The Nuremberg and Tokyo judgments are silent on the subject of aerial bombardment. Since both sides had played a terrible game of urban destruction -- the Allies far more successfully -- there was no basis for criminal charges against the Germans or Japanese, and in fact no such charges were brought. But as Telford Taylor has asked: "Is there any significant difference between killing a babe-in-arms by a bomb dropped from a high-flying aircraft, or by an infantryman's point-blank gunfire? ... The aviator's act [is described] as more ‘impersonal' than the ground soldier's. This may be psychologically valid, but surely is not morally satisfactory."[11]

No one ever thinks they're guilty of anything ... they're all just good ol' patriots
"Asked whether he wants to apologize for the suffering he caused, he looks genuinely confused, has the interpreter repeat the question, and answers ‘No'. ... ‘I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.'"
Journalist Nate Thayer interviewing a dying Pol Pot, 1997 [12]

"I tell you how I feel. I would like to be remembered as a man who served his country, who served Chile throughout his entire life on this earth. And what he did was always done thinking about the welfare of Chile."
General Augusto Pinochet, under house arrest in England, 1998 [13]
(While Pinochet was being held, George H.W. Bush, the Pope, and the Dalai Lama all called for his release.)

How to deal with the unthinkable
At the close of World War II, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East held a trial in Tokyo of former Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo. His lawyer asked why Tojo's crimes were any worse than dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At that moment, the prosecution interrupted the Japanese translation and ordered the removal of the remarks in the official trial record and in the press.[14]

Another unthinkable
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ("Genocide Convention"), adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948: "The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish." The Convention then goes on to define genocide as certain acts, listed therein, "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such."

Missing from this list is perhaps the most significant manifestation of genocide in modern times: the extermination of people because of their political ideology. The Nazis became notorious for their slaughter of Jews and Gypsies, but German fascism, as in Italy, Spain, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, and elsewhere, was firstly and primarily directed against socialists and communists, regardless of any other characteristic. (Hitler, in any event, largely equated Jews and communists.)

As can be seen in the chapter on "Interventions" and in other chapters -- from China and the Philippines in the 1940s to Colombia and Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the United States has long been practicing this politicide. However, the CEOs of The World's Only Superpower can rest easily. There will be no international convention against it, and no American official will ever have to answer to a court for it.

Yugoslavia -- another war-crimes trial that will never be
Beginning about two weeks after the US-inspired and led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia began in March, 1999, international-law professionals from Canada, the United Kingdom, Greece, and the American Association of Jurists began to file complaints with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands, charging leaders of NATO countries and officials of NATO itself with crimes similar to those for which the Tribunal had issued indictments shortly before against Serbian leaders.

Amongst the charges filed by the law professionals were: "grave violations of international humanitarian law", including "wilful killing, wilfully causing great suffering and serious injury to body and health, employment of poisonous weapons and other weapons to cause unnecessary suffering, wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages, unlawful attacks on civilian objects, devastation not necessitated by military objectives, attacks on undefended buildings and dwellings, destruction and wilful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences."

The Canadian suit named 68 leaders, including William Clinton, Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, Tony Blair, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, and NATO officials Javier Solana, Wesley Clark, and Jamie Shea. The complaint also alleged "open violation" of the United Nations Charter, the NATO treaty itself, the Geneva Conventions, and the Principles of International Law Recognized by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

The complaint was submitted along with a considerable amount of evidence to support the charges. The evidence makes the key point that it was NATO's bombing campaign which had given rise to the bulk of the deaths in Yugoslavia, provoked most of the Serbian atrocities, created an environmental disaster, and left a dangerous legacy of unexploded depleted uranium and cluster bombs.

In June, some of the complainants met in The Hague with the court's chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour of Canada. Although she cordially received their brief in person, along with three thick volumes of evidence documenting the alleged war crimes, nothing of substance came of the meeting, despite repeated follow-up submissions and letters by the plaintiffs. In November, Arbour's successor, Carla Del Ponte of Switzerland, also met with some of the complainants and received extensive evidence.

The complainants' brief in November pointed out that the prosecution of those named by them was "not only a requirement of law, it is a requirement of justice to the victims and of deterrence to powerful countries such as those in NATO who, in their military might and in their control over the media, are lacking in any other natural restraint such as might deter less powerful countries." Charging the war's victors, not only its losers, it was argued, would be a watershed in international criminal law.

In one of the letters to Arbour, Michael Mandel, a professor of law in Toronto and the initiator of the Canadian suit, stated:

Unfortunately, as you know, many doubts have already been raised about the impartiality of your Tribunal. In the early days of the conflict, after a formal and, in our view, justified complaint against NATO leaders had been laid before it by members of the Faculty of Law of Belgrade University, you appeared at a press conference with one of the accused, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who made a great show of handing you a dossier of Serbian war crimes. In early May, you appeared at another press conference with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, by that time herself the subject of two formal complaints of war crimes over the targeting of civilians in Yugoslavia. Albright publicly announced at that time that the US was the major provider of funds for the Tribunal and that it had pledged even more money to it.[15]

Arbour herself made little attempt to hide the pro-NATO bias she wore beneath her robe. She trusted NATO to be its own police, judge, jury, and prison guard. In a year in which General Pinochet was still under arrest, which was giving an inspiring lift to the cause of international law and justice, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, under Arbour's leadership, ruled that for the Great Powers it would be business as usual, particularly the Great Power that was most vulnerable to prosecution, and which, coincidentally, paid most of her salary. Here are her own words:

I am obviously not commenting on any allegations of violations of international humanitarian law supposedly perpetrated by nationals of NATO countries. I accept the assurances given by NATO leaders that they intend to conduct their operations in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in full compliance with international humanitarian law. I have reminded many of them, when the occasion presented itself, of their obligation to conduct fair and open-minded investigations of any possible deviance from that policy, and of the obligation of commanders to prevent and punish, if required.[16]

NATO Press Briefing, May 16, 1999:

Question: Does NATO recognize Judge Arbour's jurisdiction over their activities?
Jamie Shea: I think we have to distinguish between the theoretical and the practical. I believe that when Justice Arbour starts her investigation [of the Serbs], she will because we will allow her to. ... NATO countries are those that have provided the finance to set up the Tribunal, we are amongst the majority financiers.

The Tribunal -- created in 1993, with the US as the father, the Security Council as the mother, and Madeleine Albright as the midwife -- also relies on the military assets of the NATO powers to track down and arrest the suspects it tries for war crimes.

There appeared to be no more happening with the complaint under Del Ponte than under Arbour, but in late December, in an interview with The Observer of London, Del Ponte was asked if she was prepared to press charges against NATO personnel. She replied: "If I am not willing to do that, I am not in the right place. I must give up my mission."

The Tribunal then announced that it had completed a study of possible NATO crimes, which Del Ponte was examining, and that the study was an appropriate response to public concerns about NATO's tactics. "It is very important for this tribunal to assert its authority over any and all authorities to the armed conflict within the former Yugoslavia."

Was this a sign from heaven that the new millennium was going to be one of more equal justice? Could this really be?

No, it couldn't. From official quarters, military and civilian, of the United States and Canada, came disbelief, shock, anger, denials ... "appalling" ... "unjustified". Del Ponte got the message. Her office quickly issued a statement: "NATO is not under investigation by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. There is no formal inquiry into the actions of NATO during the conflict in Kosovo."[17] And there wouldn't be, it was unnecessary to add.

But the claim against NATO -- heretofore largely ignored by the American media -- was now out in the open. It was suddenly receiving a fair amount of publicity, and supporters of the bombing were put on the defensive. The most common argument made in NATO's defense, and against war-crime charges, was that the death and devastation inflicted upon the civilian sector was "accidental". This claim, however, must be questioned in light of certain reports. For example, the commander of NATO's air war, Lt. Gen. Michael Short, declared at one point during the bombing:

If you wake up in the morning and you have no power to your house and no gas to your stove and the bridge you
take to work is down and will be lying in the Danube for the next 20 years, I think you begin to ask, "Hey, Slobo
[Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic], what's this all about? How much more of this do we have to withstand?"[18]

General Short, said the New York Times, "hopes that the distress of the Yugoslav public will undermine support for the authorities in Belgrade."[19]

At another point, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea declared: "If President Milosevic really wants all of his population to have water and electricity all he has to do is accept NATO's five conditions and we will stop this campaign."[20]

After the April NATO bombing of a Belgrade office building -- which housed political parties, TV and radio stations, 100 private companies, and more -- the Washington Post reported:

Over the past few days, U.S. officials have been quoted as expressing the hope that members of Serbia's economic elite will begin to turn against Milosevic once they understand how much they are likely to lose by continuing to resist NATO demands.[21]

Before missiles were fired into this building, NATO planners spelled out the risks: "Casualty Estimate 50-100 Government/Party employees. Unintended Civ Casualty Est: 250 -- Apts in expected blast radius."[22] The planners were saying that about 250 civilians living in nearby apartment buildings might be killed in the bombing, in addition to the government and political party employees.

What do we have here? We have grown men telling each other: We'll do A, and we think that B may well be the result. But even if B does in fact result, we're saying beforehand -- as we'll insist afterward -- that it was unintended.

The International Criminal Court
Following World War II there was an urgent need for a permanent international criminal court to prosecute those accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, but the Cold War intervened. Finally, in 1998 in Rome, the nations of the world drafted the charter of The International Criminal Court.

American negotiators, however, insisted on provisions in the charter that would, in essence, give the United States veto power over any prosecution through its seat on the Security Council. The American request was rejected, and primarily for this reason the US refused to join 120 other nations who supported the charter.

The ICC is an instrument Washington can't control sufficiently to keep it from prosecuting American military and government officials. Senior US officials have explicitly admitted that this danger is the reason for their aversion to the proposed new court,[23] although most commonly US government spokespersons speak of "frivolous lawsuits".

They know they have no legal or moral argument to explain why the United States and its officials should be exempt from international law and justice, so they insist that all such indictments would be "frivolous" or "politically motivated"; i.e., without sufficient merit to take seriously and undertaken purely out of some perverse anti-Americanism.

Their real concern of course is not that charges of war crimes will be made against American civilian and military officials "frivolously", but that they will be made "seriously" and that there are indeed quite a few American officials who would qualify.

But this is clearly not the problem with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. It's Washington's kind of international court, a court for the New World Order.

The key human right promoted abroad by the United States is the right to shop. Washington tries to sell the notion that respect for human rights arises organically from free-market economics.

NOTES
1.  The New Yorker, June 19, 1995, p.48
2.  Washington Post, December 4, 1996, p.1 
3.  Leonard A. Cole, Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests over
Populated Areas (Maryland, 1990), p.12-14  
4.  Washington Post, September 21, 1999, p.1
5.  United Nations General Assembly Resolution: "Establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free
zone in the region of the Middle East", December 4, 1990, Resolution No. 45/52.
6.  New York Times, January 24, 1991, p.11
7.  Ibid., March 23, 1991
8.  Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in May Lai (Viking, New York, 1992),
p.175, 209-13
9.  LA Weekly (Los Angeles), March 9-15, 1990, p.12
10.  New York Times, January 9, 1971, p.3
11.  Telford Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam: an American Tragedy(New York, 1970), p.140-43
12.  Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong), October 30, 1997, p.15, 20
13.  Sunday Telegraph (London), July 18, 1999, interview with Pinochet
14.  Washington Post, May 25, 1998, p.B4
15.  This and most of the other material concerning the complaints to the Tribunal
mentioned here were transmitted to the author by Mandel and other complainants.
16.  Press Release from Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour, The Hague, May 13, 1999.
17.  The Observer (London), December 26, 1999; Washington Times, December 30 and 31, 1999;
New York Times, December 30, 1999
18.  Washington Post, May 24, 1999, p.1
19.  New York Times, May 13, 1999, p.1
20.  NATO press conference, Brussels, May 25, 1999
21.  Washington Post, April 22, 1999, p.18
22.  Ibid., September 20, 1999, p.1
23.  New York Times, December 2, 1998, p.1; January 3, 2000


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