Historical Tradition of American Empire War and Genocidal Crimes Against Humanity
Historical Tradition of American Empire War and Genocidal Crimes Against Humanity
By Joachim Hagopian
Global Research, July 30, 2014
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1973 was an important year. The last official US military troops came home from Vietnam and President Nixon imposed the petrodollar on OPEC nations as the international currency. This secured a guaranteed US extortion fee on all oil purchasing throughout the world by all nations. Nixon’s right hand man and fellow war criminal Henry Kissinger along with the CIA engaged in state sponsored terrorism when Chile’s democratically elected President Salvador Allende was assassinated and replaced by the notorious military dictator General Pinochet in October 1973. During this war criminal’s 17-year reign of terror, 3,200 people were murdered, up to 80,000 Chileans were interned and as many as 30,000 were tortured.
The US government has been guilty of a longstanding unbroken pattern of backing bloodthirsty antidemocratic dictators who regularly commit crimes against humanity towards their own citizens. Since the US at will violates international law in its relentless commission of war crimes, birds of a feather flocking together has America just as frequently promoting, installing and endorsing with blind eye similarly inclined murderous, dictatorial regimes. Invariably by poor example, the US Empire leads as the world’s number one violator of human rights, causing other militant tyrannical nations to simply follow suit. US Empire wouldn’t have it any other way.
Those few nations with leaders courageous enough to actually operate independently in the best interests of their people are always punished, bullied and intimidated into submission. If coercive pressure fails to gain the nation’s compliance, wars, coups de tat and/or assassinations inevitably follow. Nations like Venezuela especially under the late Hugo Chavez as well as Iran have incurred the Empire’s wrath for resisting and defying America’s power. And now that the cold war is back in full swing, Putin and Russia are especially being targeted since Putin not only defies US hegemony but he has outsmarted Obama in his feeble bungling, weak ways. Yet on Empire pressure alone, Europe knuckles under every time in its empty rhetoric joining in the conspiracy to make Putin the world’s villain. Truth still matters and the world is increasingly seeing through the West’s hypocrisy and lies.
An integral built-in component causing such widespread heinous human rights violations is the infamous US training school for state sponsored terrorism and torture that is the US Army School of the Americas located at Fort Benning, Georgia. For many decades the US has been systematically teaching and training Latin American dictators and their military junta leaders to applying their newly learned skills terrorizing, torturing and murdering thousands upon thousands of its own citizens. It is now euphemistically called Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. But changing the school’s name to avoid negative publicity and global criticism is but a feeble and shameless attempt to continue its business as usual. After all, terrorism must go on.
Throughout the 1980’s the US methodically trained Latin American death squad commando units that President Reagan affectionately called his “freedom fighters,” unleashed on the El Salvadoran and Nicaraguan countrysides killing 75,000 in El Salvador alone and forcing one million out of its total six million residents to flee the country. Notorious war criminal Colonel James Steele acting as chief advisor was the American officer in charge and most responsible. And because fellow war criminals Rumsfeld and Cheney admired his methods using unspeakable pain to get detainees to talk in the 80’s, Steele was called back into service in Iraq in 2003 to implement that same “Salvadoran option” with yet another war criminal General David Petraeus. As a major back in the 80’s eager to learn Steele’s brand of counterinsurgency skills, Petraeus made a special trip down to Central America to learn from the cold steel-eyed torture master himself.
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Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/historical-tradition-of-american-empire-war-and-genocidal-crimes-against-humanity/5393997