Presidents Day! USA Honors 12 Commanders-in Chief Prosecutable For Wrongful Deaths In 26 Nations

By Jay Janson

18 February, 2014
Countercurrents.org

Eminent historian Prof. Noam Chomsky, has said over and over again, without provoking much negative outcry, "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged." U S Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg trials of Germans in 1945, felt obliged to point out that "these laws are not meant only for Germans, but for the citizens of all nations." Why do Americans not get it?

Eminent historian Prof. Noam Chomsky of M.I.T.,  various times voted world's most famous intellectual in international polls,  has said over and over again, without provoking much negative outcry, "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."

Principle I of Nuremberg Principles under which Nazi leaders were tried and executed, to which all nations are signatories and, by article six of US Constitution became part of the US Constitution and law of the United States of America reads as follows:  "Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law  is responsible therefore and liable to punishment."

Principle III states:  "The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State  or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law." US Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg trials of Germans in 1945, felt obliged to point out that "these laws are not meant only for Germans, but for the citizens of all nations." The following lists only the greatest and fully documented crimes of each US president Americans are called to honor on Presidents Day.

TRUMAN: -

Harry Truman,  even though the Japanese were already defeated,  criminally ordered atom bombs dropped on civilians in two Japanese cities, after the US Air Force had criminally fire bombed sixty other  Japanese cities   The atom bombing was afterward condemned by Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur. - Truman criminally had the US Army invade Korea, well after the Japanese surrender had ended the war, overthrowing the democratically elected Korean government the departing Japanese military governor had permitted to be formed (ending forty years of a US non-recognition of Korea but as territory of Imperial Japan).[1] - Truman criminally cut Korea in two parts and installed in the South a brutal and murderous dictatorship that would massacre nearly 200,000 communists, socialists, unionists, farmers and citizens against the partition of their nation, in the years BEFORE armed forces of the North reunified Korea in five short weeks. - Truman again ordered a second invasion of Korea that with bombing flat the whole peninsula north and south took the lives of nearly three million Korea men, women and children. - Truman after witnessing the founding of an independent Vietnam, betrayed US highly decorated ally Ho Chi Minh, and brought back in the French Colonial Army in US ships and financed what would be an eight year French attempt to reconquer their colony which during the war fascist France had administered under the Japanese. - In Greece Truman betrayed those who fought against the Nazis and aided funded a right wing military takeover that brought subsequent years of deadly dictatorship.

EISENHOWER:

- Dwight Eisenhower had CIA, with bombing, overthrow the first democratically elected and popular president of Guatemala for the benefit of the United Fruit Company which owned or controlled most of the country. (Secretary of State Dulles and his CIA Head brother were both investors in United Fruit.) Massacres went on for decades afterward. - Eisenhower allowed or ordered the CIA to assassinate the popular Patrice Lumumba first president of an independent Congo, used US planes to help Belgium and other European interests initiate a reign of terror and genocidal confusion has taken more than six million lives and still goes on today. [see relevant CIA opened files]  - Eisenhower ordered a CIA operation led by agent Kermit Roosevelt that with British M16 overthrew Iran's popular democratic government and installed a dictator Shah, who as a lucrative US ally had CIA trained secret police torture and murder until the Iranian people rose up to face death by the thousands to force him to flee the country. - 'Ike' initiated the bombing of tiny Laos, that would eventually make it the most heavily bombed nation in history. - Eisenhower had CIA plan an invasion of Cuba. - In accusing Dwight Eisenhower of criminally forcing the permanent division of Vietnam, with all the subsequent injury and sorrow it brought, by blocking the all Vietnam elections promised the Vietnamese who had defeated the US backed and funded French Colonial Forces, a court would probably quiet naturally have asked why he did this in spite of his knowing (as he publicly admitted in his memoirs that "had the election taken place Ho Chi Minh would have received more than 80 percent of the vote." (Only on his last day in office did Eisenhower reveal the pressure upon him from the military industrial complex that must have brought him to commit these crimes against humanity and advised Americans to beware of the Military Industrial Complex.

KENNEDY: -

John Kennedy facilitated the ascension to power in Congo of the murderous tyrant Mobutu, whose bloody reign lasted for decades. - Kennedy sent armed advisors into Vietnam and ordered the first bombings of South Vietnam and sent in combat troops. His cabinet and generals okayed the assassination of the no longer useful dictator Diem and replacement by a general. - Kennedy gave the go ahead for the Eisenhower planed invasion of Cuba that include US bombing with unmarked warplanes, killing more than 900 Cuban men and women defenders. - Even after bringing the world to the brink of annihilation to remove Soviet missiles in Cuba, afterward he had brother an Attorney General Robert run a program of sabotage and attempted assassination of Cuba's hero Fidel Castro. [see pertinent opened CIA files]

JOHNSON: -

Lyndon Johnson ordered what can only be seen as a genocide in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, second only in magnitude to the Nazi WW II Holocaust. By the time he left office more than three million innocent men, women and children had been killed by as much as a half-million US soldiers (at highest troop level) with air and naval support. (US Chief Council for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi criminals, General Telford Taylor, told a CBS interviewer in  19  that he would have be glad to prosecute US fliers shot down while bombing Vietnam.)[2]

- Johnson ordered the invasion and subsequent two year occupation of the Dominican Republic to prevent reinstallation of its overthrown and popular President. Thousands of Dominicans died.

- Johnson sent an aircraft carrier and large naval presence to Brazil to back the overthrow of a popular democratic government by Brazilian military and fascists that held repressive power through 1985, a crime against peace by Nuremberg Principles law. - Under Johnson the CIA has been documented to have been deeply criminally involved in Suharto's massacre of at least a half million Indonesians in the name of anti-communism. 

NIXON: -

Richard Nixon continued the genocide in what was French Indochina, heightening the bombing of North Vietnam and secret and horrific high altitude carpet bombing of Cambodia. At a trial of US genocide in Indochina, Nixon would have been charged with overseeing the murder of more than a million innocent citizens in their very own beloved country, as often as not in their own villages and homes. - A jury of judges could have listened to a self-incriminating tape of  Nixon explaining his strategy to his White House Chief of Staff:  "I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, "for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button " and Ho Chi Minh  himself will be in Paris  in two days begging for peace."  - Another taped Nixon instructions to his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger incriminated him in a crime against humanity in Chile: "I want you to make the economy of Chile scream." Nixon would easily have been incriminated in an investigation of CIA homicidal crimes in Chile during his presidency. [see CIA opened files on Nixon] - In October 1969, the Nixon administration indicated to the Soviet Union that "the madman was loose" when the United States military was ordered to full global war readiness alert (unbeknownst to the majority of the American population), and bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons flew patterns near the Soviet border for three consecutive days.[3]

FORD: -

Gerald Ford, was guilty of giving deadly criminal orders to American officials in Vietnam advising if not also fighting against so called Viet Cong, even though the US Armed Forces had officially been withdrawn. South Vietnam was a criminally created puppet state dictatorship of Washington kept in power by killing enough of its own people as the French had done.

Ford, ordered a belated show-the-flag,  after-the-fact,  retaliatory  air strike that took many Cambodian lives, though the crew of the captured American merchant ship  Mayaquez  had already been released after having been well fed by Cambodians, who had terribly little food themselves. He is guilty of causing the death of many of the attacking US Marines and airmen as well.

CARTER:  -

Jimmy Carter ordered a secret CIA attack on the US friendly government of Afghanistan, initiating what would be thirty-five years of death and destruction that has not yet ended. He instructed the CIA to train, arm and fund fighters of various war lords who were against their girls and women being educated in schools built by the new women-liberating government in Kabul. Carter had the CIA use fundamentalists in a campaign of terror, often executing teachers. These war lords included one famous for throwing acid in the faces of young women 'improperly' attired. Under Carter the CIA involved the secret services of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in this criminally created from outside beginning of civil war. Carter was insidiously convinced by his advisor, David Rockefeller confident, Zbigniew Brzezinski that this CIA effort and involvement would sucker the Soviets into making the mistake of intervening to aid the attacked Kabul government.[4] - Carter provide large amounts of weapons and ammunition to US backed dictatorship in Nicaragua and El Salvador, knowing it was being used against a persecuted population. Send dictator General Suharto the military equipment including attack bombers that were need for Suharto genocidal invasion of East Timor.  - Carter would have been charged a responsible massacres in  General Chun's military dictatorship in South Korea crushing the democracy movement in Kwangju. Paratroopers carried out three days of barbarity killing up to  thousand people. The US received two requests for assistance: the citizens committee that had called for democracy requested help in negotiations; General Chun requested the release of 20,000 troops under US command to join the storm troopers. Carter honored the latter request and US naval and air units were deployed in a further show of US support for the military dictatorship of a man who South Korea would years later sentence to death.  - Carter's heartless statement explaining that there was no need to dispense [Nixon promised] monies to Vietnam to repair damage caused by the U.S. nor to apologize to the Vietnamese people, as “the destruction was mutual,”  would have been seen as self-incrimination for the suffering his nation was obliged to relieve. -  National Security Advisor to President Carter  Zbigniew Brzezinski ,  "began to look more favorably toward Saddam Hussein as a potential counterweight to the Ayatollah Khomeini and as a force to contain Soviet expansionism in the region." A search for documentation might show Carter giving the green light for an invasion of Iran by Saddam Hussain that took place while Carter was still in office. 

REAGAN: -

Ronald Reagan ordered the paratrooper and naval invasion of the tiny island state of Grenada that took the lives 94 people,  18 of whom were killed in the accidental bombing of a Grenadian mental hospital. Nearly eight thousand soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines had participated in Operation Urgent Fury, which even US European Allies denounced. The entire population of Grenada was less than 100,000. - Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya,  murdering a hundred Libyans including a daughter of  its revolutionary leader Gaddafi, in an attempt to assassinate her father. - The United States under the Reagan administration was found guilty of war crimes against Nicaragua by the International Court of Justice and ordered to pay reparations. Reagan is also liable for not recognizing the conviction. - Reagan had US warships bombard villages on the hills around Beiruit, Lebanon at an unknown cost of life. - Reagan authorized the creation of a so-called Contra army of guerrillas to attack Nicaragua from neighboring bases in Honduras committing atrocity after atrocity against civilians in rural areas. -   Presiding Judge reading the conviction of Guatemalan dictator General Rios Montt, [a favorite of Reagan] "he knew about everything that was going on and he did not stop it, despite having the power to stop it from being carried out." US President Ronald Reagan also had the power, greater power, to stop the massacres being perpetrated by dictator General and President Rios Montt, instead, m idway through the eighteen months of horrific massacres, Reagan  visited  Rios Montt  in Guatemala City and praised him as "a man of great personal integrity and commitment. Who was more guilty? There are all kind of documents that implicate Reagan in the genocide Mont was found guilty. -  In El Salvador, despite evidence that by 1984, 65,000 civilians had been murdered by the National Guard and right-wing paramilitary forces, President Reagan's national Bipartisan Commission on Central America justified massive military support.  - Ronald Reagan in his second year in office removed Iraq from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism to ease the transfer of dual-use technology to that country in support of Saddam Hussein's horrific war on Iran. Central Intelligence Agency secretly directed armaments and hi-tech components to Iraq through false fronts and friendly third parties such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait, and they quietly encouraged rogue arms dealers and other private military companies to do the same. The United States actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing U.S. military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that Iraq had the military weaponry required. The United States also provided strategic operational advice to the Iraqis to better use their assets in combat... The CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of non-U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq. Reagan allow the sale of the components to make the gas Saddam used on Iranian troops and civilians.[5]

BUSH I: -

George H. W.  Bush I was responsible for  100,000 Iraqis retreating from Kuwait, being shot in the back from the air. Among them were may refugees. - Bush I ordered an invasion of Panama, US forces killing up to a thousand Panamanians . - Bush I  ordered the bombing of beautiful and wealthy Baghdad back a century incomprehensively targeting the understructure of the cities utilities. - As previously Vice-President under Reagan, Bush was involved in tightened relations with Saddam Hussain.  Did Bush, subsequently deliberately lead Iraq into actions that led to war in the Gulf, with the aim of achieving military pre-eminence in the region, and a New World Order founded on the threat and use of American military force? Former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark, who made a 2,000 mile journey through the war-torn Gulf, provides the most convincing evidence yet that this is the case, in his book  The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf,  a scathing indictment of America's foreign policy leading up to the war, of the war's devastating human and environmental consequences, and of the Allied war crimes committed during the attack on Iraq.  - Already as Vice-President then as president, Bush I worked toward a corporate  U.S. goal to transform Yugoslavia into a Third World  region, a cluster of weak right-wing principalities with the following  characteristics beginning in ernest after the death of Tito, to make that republic of six nationalities   incapable of charting an independent course of self-development; make its  natural resources completely accessible to transnational corporate  exploitation, including the enormous mineral wealth in Kosovo; to create a n impoverished but literate and skilled pop working at subsistence  wages, a cheap  labor pool that would help depress wages in Western  Europe and elsewhere; to d ismantle petroleum, engineering, mining, fertilizer, pharmaceutical, construction, automotive, and agricultural industries so they no  longer offer competition against Western producers;  to abolish Yugoslavia's public sector  services and social programs, using the same 'shock therapy" imposed  on the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet  Union; to replace the social wage with a neoliberal global free  market;  eliminating local banks access to Central Banks  and IMF sabotaging local production a process that would deliver still greater wealth and power  into the hands the speculative investment banking industry led from Wall Street.[6] - Bush I would have to answer for the crimes committed by CIA while he was Head of the CIA.

CLINTON: -

Bill Clinton can be  indicted for firing a missile into the metropolitan home of a one-and-half year-old child as part of his  sudden killer air strikes on Baghdad's center killing a total of six, including a well known poet immediately after  individuals were arrested and only accused of attempting to assassinate former US President George Walker Bush in Kuwait. Further self-indicting himself, President  Clinton announced that he ordered precautions to "minimize loss of innocent lives." Twenty-four missiles were fired into a large crowded city and only eight people were reported killed, so apparently the US military succeeded in following his directive. - Clinton ordered an air strike that destroyed  only pharmaceutical factory in all of the Sudan on a CIA report that it also made explosives.  - B  Bill Clinton ordered  Serbia bombed for 78 days, from 8,000 to 9,0000 or more sorties. More than 500 civilians were killed.  Nearly everything was struck, causing massive destruction and disruption; besides  known or suspected military sites,  power plants,  factories,  transportation,  telecommunications facilities,  vital infrastructure, including roads, bridges and rail lines,  fuel depots,  schools,  a TV station,  China's Belgrade embassy,  hospitals,  government offices,  churches,  historic landmarks, and  other targets in cities and villages throughout the country.

- Under "acts injurious to citizens of another country" as crimes against humanity would fall  the entrapment of Latin Americans and American workers in further impoverishment with NAFTA, subjugating Haitians to famine producing American ‘investments'  overseeing the economic and CIA pressure to breakup what had been for nearly a half century a pleasant, easy going, non-alined and only lightly and peacefully communist Yugoslavia.[6]

BUSH II:

- George Walker Bush ordered what would be a genocidal crime against humanity in bombing, invading, occupying, and destroying whole cities in this oldest of civilizations. He did not even bother to get the okay from the colonial powers subservient UN Security Council, not that that would have affected it being a Nuremberg Principles punishable crime. - Bush II ordered or okayed a CIA sponsored invasion of Haiti and the kidnapping of its popular priest president, cause many deaths and a chaos that would cost thousands of lives continuing on even today. -  When, within few weeks after the 9/11 attack, the leaders of the two Pakistani Islamist parties negotiated with Mullah Omar and bin Laden for the latter's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for the 11 September attacks, Bush let it be known that he refuse the offer himself, on his own, and proceeded to bomb, invade and attempt to occupy and govern the whole nation of Afghanistan under the lie that Afghanis had some thing to do with the Saudi Arabians who  had trained in American and suicide themselves flying US captured airliners into the Trade Towers in New York. Saudi Arabians in Afghanistan, including the accused Osama bin Laden, had been brought in, armed and funded by the US. All this is beside the point of any possible justification for an attack on any nation. Bush is guilty of the death of tens thousands of entirely innocent Afghanis. - Bush II is prosecutable for the great theft of natural resources by US corporations, the imposing phony elections under occupation and protecting a drug lord invested administration by murdering the fighters of the formally de facto recognized Taliban government that defeated the US funded war lords engaged in a cataclysmic civil war after the final defeat of the Kabul government two years after withdrawal of its Soviet ally.

OBAMA:

- Barack Obama ordered the destruction of the government of Libya's defense forces as he continued to fund a CIA program, which in coordination with its several branches in European and Middle Eastern nations, was running a phony show of rebellion in the prospering citizenry of the 53rd highest quality of life of all nations on Earth using hired known and experienced terrorists. Obama sought to justify his crimes with the most easily disproven statements and absurd lies, e.g. "Libya has been suffering under Gaddafi for forty years," continuing absurd lies right up to the British and French warplane assisted primitive assassination of the Libya's revolutionary hero and Chairman of the African Union. [7] [8] (Obama being so young, it does not seem possible that Obama will escape prosecution and conviction under Nuremberg Principles law.) 

- For two bloody years, Obama has mercilessly been having CIA do, with allied secret services in a dozen countries of the Colonial-Neo-colonial powers, the same as it in Syria as it did in Libya, namely funding massacres and even more devastation in Syria. He will soon be unmasked 

- If Obama should try to defend record in his Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libyan drone murders of his chosen suspected terrorist besides common law, US laws, the US Constitution and Nuremberg Principle international law the video recording of a presidential candidates debate in which he eagerly was the first to quickly raise his hand in assenting that as President he would not be dismayed from ordering a assassination strike on an important enemy leader even if he knew innocent bystanders would be killed as well. Needless to point out that no one is entitled to murder other, let alone on the pretext that that person might be intending harm to Americans. Obama has fingered for death, even an American religious  minister and his son, not even accused of committing a crime. 

- Obama's egotistical use of the first person pronoun in crediting himself with ordering crimes will facilitate his being tried for multiple mass murders and murdering collaterally with undeniable foreknowledge.  

- It seems redundant to list the crimes against peace each of his treats to nuclear bomb Iran, or bomb Korea or Syria.
In addition, most of these presidents have maintained a criminal and life endangering embargoes and crippling sanctions on North Korea, Cuba and Iran. Principle Six of the Nuremberg Principles in describing crimes against humanity includes: " inhumane acts done against any civilian population." And all it would seem for one directive or another must have been involved in the genocide US foreign policy has brought to Somalia, first during the Cold War and thereafter supporting with constant military intervention various war lord governments.

Lastly, it best be noted that there are no war crimes involved, since there has not been a war declared since the Second World War. By definition, you can't have a war crime without a war. As Ron Paul has told the nation over and over again on network news programs, all the illegal use of US military in police actions or humanitarian intervention since and including Korea have been unconstitutional and therefor criminal. Martin Luther King said US atrocity wars and covert genocide on three continents since 1945 were meant to maintain unjust predatory investments. Former US Attorney General under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson calls US foreign policy the greatest crime against humanity since those of the Nazis, Japanese and other fascists during World War II, and that justice must eventually be served, punishments allotted, compensation and reparations paid for massive wrongful death, injury, destruction of property and theft of natural resources. And this will make further investment in wars unprofitable and wars inoperable. [9][10]

So much for honoring war criminals instead of restricting a celebration of Presidents Washington and Lincoln until 1971. As for Americans who carried out the criminal orders of US presidents since 1945,  Principle IV states: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him". This principle could be paraphrased as follows: "It is not an acceptable excuse to say 'I was just following my superior's orders'".  After the prominent, high profile event of the Nuremberg Trials, that excuse is now referred to by many as "Nuremberg Defense"

As to Americans who did not follow any of these presidents orders,

Prosecutable US Crimes against Humanity in Korea | Dissident Voice

dissidentvoice.org/.../prosecutable-us- crimes - against - humanity-in-k orea/ ? Mar 30, 2013 -
2 U.S. Nuremberg Trials Prosecutor Would Have Proudly Prosecuted McCain as a War Criminal 

Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials is reported as having said that he would be proud to lead the prosecution of U.S. pilots captured in Vietnam. Robert Richter, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, and political director for CBS News from 1965 to 1968 recently wrote in Bomber Pilot McCain: War Heroism or War Crimes? published by Institute for Public Accuracy, October 15, 2008, writes, I will never forget how stunned I was when Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, told me that he strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals — and that he would be proud to lead in their prosecution. Richter noted that McCain has repeatedly invoked his record in the Vietnam War during the campaign, but that the effect of bomber pilots like McCain and of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign has not been sufficiently scrutinized. An ardent opponent of the Vietnam conflict, Taylor spoke with me in the fall of 1966 when I was looking into producing a documentary on this controversy for CBS News, where I was their National Political Editor. While he did not mention any pilot's name, then U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander John McCain, who was captured a year later, would have been among the group Taylor wanted to prosecute. … Taylor's argument was that their actions were in violation of the Geneva conventions that specifically forbid indiscriminate bombing that could cause incidental loss of civilian life or damage to civilian objects. Adding to the Geneva code, he noted, was the decision at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two: military personnel cannot defend themselves against such a charge with a claim that they were simply following orders. The charge that U.S. pilots also had bombed hospitals and other civilian targets, turned out to be correct and was confirmed by the New York Times ‘ chief foreign correspondent, Harrison Salisbury. In late 1966 Salisbury described the widespread devastation of civilian neighborhoods around Hanoi by American bombs: ‘Bomb damage … extends over an area of probably a mile or so on both sides of the highway … small villages and hamlets along the route [were] almost obliterated'. … In one of his autobiographies McCain wrote that he was going to bomb a power station in ‘a heavily populated part of Hanoi' when he was shot down. … http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/10/us-nuremberg-trials-prosecutor-would-have-proudly-prosecuted-mccain-as-a-war-criminal/

See also: War Hero or War Criminal?

By Robert Richter

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21028.htm #

3
The Nukes of October: Richard Nixon's Secret Plan to Bring Peace to Vietnam Jeremi Suri,Wired Magazine,2/23/2008
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-03/ff_nuclearwar?currentPage=all

4

The outrageous strategy to destroy Russia | Zbigniew  Brzezinski : the  ...

There Was No Libyan Peaceful Protest - Information Clearing House

KING CONDEMNED OUR ATROCITY WARS

Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign

Principle V of the Nuremberg Principles states, "Any person charged with a crime under international law has the right to a fair trial on the facts and law."

Tweet