On March 16, President Joe Biden called Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin a war criminal. How is this different from the white-supremacist Sen. Lindsey Graham demanding Putin’s assassination?
One week later, Biden ordered flags lowered to half-mast across the United States upon the death of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Albright has been called an unindicted war criminal. Albright was known as the Butcher of Serbia.
In the former Yugoslavia, the 1998-1999 conflict there is called by some “Madeleine’s War.” Albright, a key member of the Clinton administration, championed the 78-day bombardment of Yugoslavia by NATO — which started exactly 23 years ago this month.
Before that in Iraq. Here’s what Albright, then Clinton’s Secretary of State, said in 1996 on the CBS show “60 Minutes” in an interview with Lesley Stahl:
Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
Madeleine Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it”.
The actual figure given by a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization report in 1995 was that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died as a result of the U.S. sanctions. But to war criminal Albright, “the price is worth it.”
Children died because Iraq was forbidden by sanctions to import so-called dual-use items like chlorine, which is used to purify water and treat sewage. As a result typhoid and other water-borne diseases soared.
The notorious interview is known around the world for its defense of mass murder. But you won’t find any mention of it in the New York Times’ obituary of Albright.
This is the great, liberal New York Times, that claims to include “all the news that’s fit to print.” Nobody should trust its coverage of the war drive against Russia.
The 81 million people who voted against Trump and racism shouldn’t trust Joe Biden, either. Racist Lindsey Graham is trying to stop Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson from becoming the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.
But when it comes to Russia, Biden and Graham see eye-to-eye.
Why aren’t Kissinger, Cheney & Bush arrested?
If Biden is so concerned about war criminals, why hasn’t he had Henry Kissinger arrested? The former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor committed war crimes on three continents.
Millions more people were killed in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam because Kissinger and Nixon refused to sign a peace treaty until 1973. If they had signed the same treaty in 1969 ― as Vietnam asked them to ― 20,000 less GIs would have come home in a box.
Kissinger gave the go ahead for the original 9/11, the bloody overthrow of the elected socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973.
“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” said Kissinger. “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”
That’s self-determination according to the U.S. State Department and Wall Street.
“You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende,” Kissinger told the dictator Pinochet, who had thousands tortured to death.
Kissinger also gave a green light for the Indonesian dictator Suharto to invade East Timor. One out of three people in East Timor were killed.
Kissinger wanted to invade Cuba for its military support of the People’s Republic of Angola in defeating the Nazi army of then-apartheid South Africa.
Angola saved thousands of African lives by sending the CIA mercenary Costas Georgiou to the firing squad and thus intimidating other killers for hire.
U.S. and NATO-paid mercenaries have flocked to Ukraine. Alongside fascist gangs like the Azov Battalion, they are propping up Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has banned every political party except his own.
Let’s not forget the war crimes of Dick Cheney and the Bush family. Former Vice President Cheney called the torture of thousands of Muslims to be “enhanced interrogation.” Cheney’s sidekick ― befuddled White House occupant George W. Bush ― presided over a million people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
George’s daddy ― President George H.W. Bush ― invaded Panama. The Pentagon never revealed the number of people killed there.
Earlier as CIA director, Daddy Bush had Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 bombed on Oct. 6, 1976. All 73 people on board were killed; it was a revenge murder for Cuba’s support of African liberation.
Capitalism built on war crimes
War crimes made America “great.” Over a hundred Indigenous nations were invaded.
Massacres started with the Pilgrims and extended beyond Wounded Knee. Keeping the political prisoner-of-war Leonard Peltier in jail for 46 years is a war crime.
The African Holocaust never stopped either. U.S. and world capitalism was built upon it.
Wall Street became the country’s financial center by being the banking house for Southern slave owners. While today New York City has municipal green markets, it once operated a slave market on Wall Street.
By recognizing Belgian King Leopold’s “Congo Free State,” U.S. President Chester Arthur provided political cover for murdering 8-to-15 million Africans for rubber profits. President Dwight Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.
Locking up 2.2 million people is a war crime. As a U.S. Senator, Joe Biden pushed through the 1994 “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act” that guaranteed imprisoning hundreds of thousands more Black, Indigenous and Latinx people.
Stealing half of Mexico was a war crime. In the so-called Mexican-American War of 1846-48, a slave-holders’ army invaded Mexico, which was an abolitionist nation. General Zachary Taylor’s artillery pounded the city of Matamoros, killing hundreds of civilians. Villages were pillaged and plundered. In the end the U.S. occupied and took all or parts of the current states of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and Arizona. Millions of acres of Mexican land were stolen from the Indigenous Peoples and Mexican farmers who lived there; more than a hundred thousand died. South Carolina’s John Calhoun, speaking in praise of the seizure of Mexican land, declared, “Ours is the government of the white man!”
A rerun of Yugoslavia?
President Biden was directed to call President Putin a war criminal because the Pentagon wants a rerun of the Yugoslavia tragedy.
NATO planes bombed Yugoslavia, the last socialist country in Europe, for 78 days in 1999. Yugoslavia’s elected President Slobodan Milošević was kidnapped and framed on war crimes charges because he resisted NATO.
Milošević died suddenly just as it looked like he could win an appeal. For some observers this was reminiscent of Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassin Jack Ruby dying suddenly after he was granted a new trial.
The Pentagon wants to give President Putin the same treatment or just be assassinated. To the banksters that run the United States, it’s intolerable that the six million square miles of the Russian Federation isn’t occupied by U.S. and NATO troops.
Neither Joe Biden nor the New York Times has ever denounced the deaths of over 14,000 people in the Donbass. This real war crime was committed at the hands of a Ukrainian regime supported by the U.S. and NATO.
The Russian Federation is giving indispensable help to anti-fascists in Ukraine. Don’t be fooled by the capitalist media. Hands off Russia and the Donbass!
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