On Roosting Chickens: A History of US Empire

On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality

by Ward Churchill

AK Press (2003)

Book Review

With the massive evidence compiled by the 9-11 Truth movement over the last two decades,* the book’s original premise has ceased to be relevant in 2020. Long time American Indian activist Ward Churchill took the title of this book from his infamous 2001 essay “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.”  In the latter (and in Chapter 1), Churchill argues that the 9-11 attacks were a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful US foreign policy. The essay would lead to his dismissal from the University of Colorado-Boulder in 2017.

By the time this book was published in 2003, both Thierry Meyssan (The Big Lie) and Nafeez Ahmed (The War on Truth) had published books questioning the official version of 9-11. As of February 2002, there was also a thriving 9-11 Unanswered Questions movement, which would be the precursor to 9-11. I’m a little surprised Churchill would have no knowledge of activists who were already challenging the official story in 2003.

That being said, the book’s second and third chapters are invaluable. Chapter 2 compiles all US military actions from 1776 on. Chapter three documents all known US violations of international law dating from the 1945 founding of the United Nations.

After 1947, this list includes the use of CIA interventions to overthrow lawful governments:

• US invasion and occupation of sovereign Native American territories – 46
• US military actions against US civilians during protests, rebellions, riots, and strikes (including WACO, Ruby Ridge, and the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle) – 23
• US troop deployment to put down slave revolts: 5
• US military actions against
  • North Africa – 15
  • Mexico (excluding the US-Mexican War, which forced Mexico to give up have its territory) – 29
  • France (including 1961 attempted assassination of DeGaulle) – 4
  • Spain (excluding Spanish American War) – 6
  • Cuba (following Spanish American War) – 5
  • Canada – 1 (1837 border clash)
  • Pacific Island (excluding Hawai’i and Philippines) – 5
  • Greece – 3
  • South America – 19
  • China (excluding participating in civil war against Mao) – 15
  • Sub-Saharan Africa – 8
  • Turkey – 2
  • Central America – 19
  • Japan (prior to World War II) -3
  • Korea (prior to World War II) – 33
  • Hawai’i – 3
  • Haiti (prior to deposing Prime Minister Aristide in 1991) – 4
  • Philippines – 4
  • Dominican Republic -5
  • Cuba (prior to Cuban revolution – incursions following the Bay of Pigs are too numerous to count) – 2
  • USSR – 2
  • Greenland/Iceland – 1 each
  • Italy – 1
  • Iran (prior to 1953 CIA coup) – 1
  • Albania – 1
  • Syria – 1 (failed CIA coup in 1956)
  • Indonesia – 2
  • Cyprus – 1
  • Lebanon – 2
  • Grenada – 1
  • Australia – 1

Chapter 3 is a chronological history of UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions condemning the US. It includes censures  for using napalm and Agent Orange in Vietnam, for using torture and the death penalty in US prisons, for their refusal to support the UN declaration for the elimination of racism, for their illegal blockade against Cuba, and for their illegal invasions of Angola, Panama and Nicaragua.

The chapter also includes countless Security Council and General Assembly resolutions condemning South Africa (not only for Apartheid but for the illegal invasion and occupation of Namibia and Angola) and Israel (for their illegal occupation of Palestine and the Golan Heights, their illegal invasion and 20+ year occupation of Lebanon, and their illegal deployment of nuclear weapons).

Here Churchill also covers Clinton’s illegal war against Yugoslavia, debunking most of the pro-war propaganda about alleged Serbian genocides. And finally the illegal 1972 CIA coup against democratically elected Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam (after he withdrew Australian troops from Vietnam). I was unaware prior to reading this book that John Kerr,** the Australian governor general responsible for removing Whitlam from office was a long time CIA asset.

---

*See https://stuartbramhall.wordpress.com/2020/02/13/making-sense-of-9-11/

**In Australia and New Zealand, the Governor General is appointed by the British monarch and technically has the authority to overrule Parliament. See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/23/gough-whitlam-1975-coup-ended-australian-independence

 

 

Revisiting NATO Atrocities in Yugoslavia

Why? Revisiting NATO Atrocities in Yugoslavia

RT (2014)

Film Review

This documentary is about the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. The nightly bombing went on for 78 days and killed 2,000 civilians, including 88 children. Most Americans are totally unaware of this shameful chapter in US history. Despite claims to the contrary NATO bombers clearly targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure, destroying more than 300 schools, factories and hospitals. Bill Clinton’s political justification for the bombing was “regime change,” ie the ouster of the “vicious dictator” Milosevic.

The film intersperses interviews with grieving survivors with bizarre clips from US mainstream media coverage.

Clinton’s bombing campaign on Yugoslavia constitutes a war crime as it was never approved by the UN Security Council. Russia and China both indicated they would veto a Security Council resolution – in retaliation NATO forces bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

The Hidden History of Smallpox Vaccine

Suzanne Humphries – Dissolving Illusions

Dr Suzanne Humphries (2017)

In this video, board certified nephrologist Suzanne Humphries explodes the myth that mass vaccination was responsible for eradicating small pox in the developed world.

She begins by describing the vaccine’s development by Edward Jenner in the 18^th century. Jenner’s decision to inject children with pus from cows infected with cowpox was based on his theory, which has never been proven, that it would protect them from developing smallpox.

A close examination of the medical literature reveals Jenner’s vaccine was never effective against the most virulent form of smallpox. In England an 1871 outbreak of smallpox, after 33 years of compulsory vaccination (leading to unprecedented levels of sickness and death in healthy children), would lead to first anti-vaccine movement by outraged parents. By 1889 when they finally overturned compulsory vaccination, only 15% of parents were complying with the law – they preferred risking imprisonment and seizure of their property to jeopardizing their children’s lives.

Humphries goes on to discuss more recent smallpox outbreaks in vaccinated populations – in 1945 in 100% vaccinated US troops and in 1972 in Yugoslavia, where over 95% were vaccinated.

Most interesting, however, is her description of George W Bush’s abortive attempt to mass vaccinate Americans in 2003. This initiative was based on alleged intelligence that “terrorists” were planning to attack the US with weaponized smallpox virus.

The project was scrapped after the CDC ruled that patients would have to give informed consent acknowledging the vaccine was more likely to kill them than small pox (the CDC predicted 285 deaths in otherwise healthy individuals). The required package insert revealed that small pox vaccine is contraindicated in patients under 18 and those with a personal or family history of heart disease, diabetes or elevated cholesterol.

Humphries maintains that smallpox vanished from the developed world (in 1979) for the same reason as other infectious illnesses, such as typhoid, scarlet fever and cholera. The infectious epidemics that scourged 18^th and 19^th century slums were largely the product of contaminated drinking water, near-starvation diets, overcrowding and poor hygiene. As smallpox virus is only transmitted through direct physical contact, most 19th century cases were transmitted by doctors, nurses and carers who failed to wash their hands.

At the end of her talk, Humphries compares doctor’s superstitious attitudes towards non-evidence based vaccinations to blood letting, another common medical treatment in the 19^th century. Owing to the power of Big Pharma and the failure of medical schools to expose students to the extensive  medical literature about vaccination drawbacks, doctors (like Humphries) who raise legitimate concerns about vaccine safety continue to be treated like criminals and quacks.

Bill Clinton’s War Against Yugoslavia

The US War on Yugoslavia

Michael Parenti (1999)

This talk, one of my favorites, is 1999 talk about about US empire. It offers quite a stark depiction of a US foreign policy consisting primarily of continual wars of aggression against democratic governments that thwart Wall Street Interests in exploiting their natural resources and labor force.

Parenti begins with a brief overview of colonization, starting with Western Europe’s colonization of the Slavic peoples and England’s colonization of Ireland. He goes on to to describe how India and Africa both enjoyed advanced and wealthy (far more wealthy than Europe) civilizations until they were invaded by European armies and their economies destroyed.

He proceeds with a detailed inventory of America’s continual invasions, bombing campaigns and covert wars around the world. The last half of the presentation focuses on the deliberate break-up of Yugoslavia by the US security state, demolishing the myth perpetuated by the Clinton administration and the US media that ethnic conflict was the cause of the Balkan wars.

Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Wall Street elites tolerated a socialist state in Yugoslavia (with free health care, education and public transport and housing) because they viewed Yugoslavian president Josip Tito’s independent socialism as a buffer against the Soviet Union.

The initial US attack against Yugoslavia was economic, when Bush senior, in 1990, persuaded Congress to end lending credits to the Yugoslav government. The legislation they passed stipulated that US banks could only loan money to autonomous Yugoslav regions (Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia, etc) provided they declared independence and formed autonomous republics.

Parenti notes the new law was implemented somewhat unevenly, so that only right wing fascist governments qualified for loans. By 1992, internal sanctions against Serbia had resulted in 70% unemployment, widespread malnutrition and collapse of the health care system.

He goes on to provide fresh insight into the background of Slobodan Milosovic – who Clinton described as the “new Hitler” – an anti-communist banker who was the CIA’s first choice to run Serbia. When Milosovic refused to fully embrace US colonization, he was systematically demonized by the Clinton administration and corporate media. In 2006, he would die in prison in the Hague.* The war crimes he was accused of were never substantiated.

Parenti also details the NATO carpet bombing of Serbia (designed to maximize civilian casualty by targeting life support infrastructure, such as power and water filtration plants), the CIA penetration of the Kosova Liberation Army (enabling them to corner the European heroin market), Noam Chomsky’s support for Clinton’s war against Serbia, and the notorious Sarajevo false flag operation (actually carried out by Muslim extremists) used to justify the NATO war against Serbia.

---

*There is strong evidence he was covertly assassinated: Did NATO’s Kangaroo Court Poison Milosevic?

The Persecution of Chess Champion Bobby Fischer

Bobby Fischer Against the World

Directed by Liz Garbus (2011)

Film Review

I first saw this intriguing documentary, produced in the Netherlands, on Maori TV. What stands out most clearly for me is that Fischer and his mother both suffered from obvious Asperger’s syndrome. The disorder, described as a type of high functioning autism, was first identified by Austrian pediatrician Hans Aspgerger (1906-1980). It wasn’t identified in English speaking countries until 1981, nine years after Fischer’s famous battle with Russian Boris Spassky for the World Chess Championship.

Had Fischer’s condition been recognized at the time, I’m sure his supporters would tried harder to protect him from the callous exploitation the Nixon administration and global media subjected him to.

The documentary traces Fischer’s early life as a chess prodigy (he was the US chess champion at 15), his alternating bizarre/provocative behavior and brilliance during the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match in Iceland, and his descent into social isolation and paranoia immediately afterwards.

Prior to seeing this film, I had no idea Fischer was exiled from the US in 1992 after he was charged (and threatened with prison and a $1 million fine) with violating President George H W Bush’s executive order imposing economic sanctions on Yugoslavia.  The incident leading to the grand jury indictment was a revenge match with Boris Spassky in Sveti Stefan and Belgrade Yugoslavia.

In 2004, at the behest of the US State Department, he was arrested by Japanese immigration authorities. He appealed to a supporter in Iceland, and their government granted him asylum.

He died in 2008 at age 64 after refusing treatment for benign prostatic hypertrophy.

 

---

*The US covert war on Yugoslavia, which became overt military aggression under Bill Clinton, was the first American exercise in regime change after the fall of the Soviet Union. See The War Crimes of Bill Clinton

Untold History of the US – Bush and Clinton Squandered Peace

Part 9 of Oliver Stones Untold History of the United States covers the Bush senior and Clinton presidency

Bush Senior Presidency

Stone begins by exploring the role of Bush’s father Prescott Bush and other Wall street figures in supporting the rise of Hitler and the Nazi war machine. The list of Wall Street corporations that supplied money, weapons, chemicals, tanks, aircraft and other material support to the Third Reich is a long one: Ford, IBM, GM, Hearst, Standard Oil, Dupont, Kodak, United Fruit, Westinghouse, Douglas Aircraft, ITT, GE, Singer, International Harvester, Union Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, JP Morgan and the Bank of International Settlements.

Many of these companies demanded (and received) reparations when the Allies bombed their German factories.

Stone devotes much of this episode to the fall of totalitarian rule in Eastern Europe (1989-91), which he describes as the largest peaceful revolution in history. He also discusses the military coup by Boris Yeltsin that shut down parliamentary rule in the Russian Federation and the role of Wall Street, the World Bank, IMF and a handful of Russian oligarchs in systematically stripping the Russian people of their industrial wealth. During this period, many Russians died of malnutrition and medically preventable illness. The life expectancy would drop from 67 to 57 for men and from 76 to 70 for women.

Bush senior, surrounded by anti-Soviet hawks (eg Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who would go on to found Project for a New American Century) rebuffed all Gorbachev’s overtures for world peace. Stone maintains Gorbachev would never have been forced out of office if Bush had supported him.

The Clinton Presidency

Instead of delivering the promised “peace dividend” when the Cold War ended, Clinton initiated a new wave of defense spending and multiple military interventions overseas. Among them

• He launched a war on Yugoslavia to gain access to Caspian Sea oil for US oil companies.
• He authorized numerous bombing raids on Iraq, supposedly as enforcement of the no-fly zone in regions controlled by Kurds and Shiite rebels.
• He began expanding NATO to former Eastern Bloc countries to enable US oil companies to build pipelines to transport Russian oil to Europe.
• He ordered 75 cruise missiles (at $750,000 each) to be fired on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory and Zawhar Kili Camp in Afghanistan to distract public attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Bush and Clinton: Squandered Peace – New World Order

The War Crimes of Bill Clinton

The Weight of Chains

Boris Malagurski (2010)

Film Review

The deliberate demonization of the Serbian people by the Clinton administration has been a special interest ever since I cared for Serbian PTSD victims in the mid-nineties. At the time there were rumors the US was after oil in the Caspian basin. Until I saw this documentary, I was unaware of the bloodthirsty ruthlessness of US policy in Yugoslavia. Nor that Clinton, like his successors George W Bush and Barack Obama, was guilty of war crimes. The film also sheds important light on current US policy in Ukraine.

The Weight of Chains is about the deliberate break-up of Yugoslavia in the 80s and 90s to enable its transformation into a US colony, like Iraq and Afghanistan. The cover story blaming Serbian barbarism for the conflagration in Bosnia and Kosovo was pure fabrication by the Clinton administration and US media.

Under Marshall Tito (1943-1980), Yugoslavia enjoyed an ethnically diverse society in which Muslim Turks, Croatians, Serbians, Hungarians, Albanians and other ethnic minorities lived side by side and intermarried. It was a very prosperous nation, thanks to a mixed economy that combined central economic planning with private enterprise, worker cooperatives and a generous welfare state. Tito, who stubbornly resisted Russian pressure to join the Soviet bloc, was one of the founders of the non-aligned movement.*

Enter the NED

Shortly after Tito’s death in 1980, President Reagan signed a secret memorandum declaring his intention to transform Yugoslavia into a “market economy” (translation: US colony for Wall Street investors). The first salvo in this campaign was to send in the CIA-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), to finance pro-US opposition groups, journalists, trade unionists and the G17. The latter was a group of World Bank economists who seized control of the Yugoslavian economy by inducing corrupt officials to enter into unpayable loans. By the late 1980s, the G17 had imposed deep cuts on all social services and forced 1,100 industries into bankruptcy. Those that weren’t totally wiped out were sold to foreign investors at rock bottom prices.

Thanks to these austerity cuts, by 1990 Yugoslavia’s unemployment rate had soared to 20%. When the government appealed to the US for debt relief, Bush senior cut off all aid to Yugoslavia. Under US pressure, the IMF only agreed to fund right wing ultranationalist groups in six autonomous regions (Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Bosnia) – provided they declared independence from Yugoslavia. The Bush senior administration also illegally supplied arms to Croatian fascists who would seize control of Croatia and the Muslim Bosniaks who controlled Bosnia.

Accordingly Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in 1992 and Bosnia in 1992.

US-Inspired Ethnic Cleansing

Despite constant denunciation of the Serbian people (as fascist thugs) by the Clinton administration and Senator Joe Biden, the real culprits were fascist American thugs. In 1995, the Clinton administration financed and armed the Croatian government to carry out the largest act of ethnic cleansing in history in the Serbian enclave of Krajinia. Thanks to the American-inspired Operation Storm, 2,000 Serbs were killed and 250,000 were driven from their homes over a period of 84 hours. One of my patients, whose sister was massacred during Operation Storm, only survived because his Muslim neighbors hid him and his children from the Croatian army.

The Weight of Chains also deconstructs the alleged Serb atrocities committed at Srebrenica (where equal numbers of Serbs and Muslims died), which the US would use to justify NATO intervention.

Enter Osama bin Laden

Following Serbian independence, Clinton armed and trained the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army,** with the assistance of Osama bin Laden and heroin-trafficking Mujahideen from Afghanistan. The President’s chief motivation was to further destabilize Serbia to open it up to US investment.

When Slobodan Milosevic refused to sign a peace agreement accepting US occupation of Serbia, Clinton committed further violations of international law by using NATO aircraft to bomb Serbian civilians and deliberately target civilian infrastructure that included power grids, schools, hospitals and water filtration plants.

Enter George Soros

Following Milosevic’s surrender in June 1999, the World Bank immediately sent in an army of World Bank lawyers to privatize Serbia’s most valuable state-owned assets. Soros and his cronies were particularly keen on getting the Trercha mining interest into western hands, with its rich coal, copper, zinc, cadmium, gold and silver resources.

The film concludes by examining the dire economic consequences (ie massive debt, industry closure and joblessness) for Eastern European countries whose business elites opt to join the EU and NATO. For example, the EU forced the Czech Republic to close their sugar industry because it was more profitable to import Cuban sugar. While the French destroyed the Hungarian vineyards by dumping cheap wine into their market, forcing Hungarian wine growers to sell their vineyards to English investors at bargain basement prices. After Slovenia joined the EU in 2004, they experienced massive layoffs after most of their factories were privatized and moved overseas. In 2009, Croatia (like Greece) was forced to start selling their islands to pay off their debt.

*The Non-Aligned Movement is a group of states which aren’t formally aligned with or against any specific power bloc.
**Kosovo is a disputed territory within Serbia in which ethnic Albanians make up 80-90% of the population.