Is the war in Afghanistan Justified?

This is the "normal practice" that Nazis and Japanese were hung for.

attempting to justify yet another US illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.

The Taliban, the very worst of the Taliban, were the US's guys

and it was only when they told US business interests to go fly a kite that they became terrorists/bad guys and the US all of a sudden became interested in human rights; same as what is going on in the ME right now.

The US has never, even though they promised, time and again, provided any proof that Osama binLaden and Al Qaeda were responsible for 9/11. None, nada, nashi, sweet tweet, sweet **** all, nothing.

Quote:

WWII USA tactics of strewing tons of incendiaries throughout densely populated cities and starting a firestorm were far more lethal than a drone firing a precision missile at a group of huts.

You missed an important group of letters, which I've added for you.

but that doesn't stop the US from targeting civilians.

How come so few of you have the brains necessary to realize that you are causing these problems?

You can't show one case of the US targeting civilians in the past hundred years.

After the Cataclysm

Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology

The Political Economy of Human Rights - Volume II,

a book by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman

South End Press, 1979

The U.S. war in Indochina began as one of innumerable examples of counterrevolutionary intervention throughout the world. As a result of the wholly unanticipated level of resistance of the Vietnamese revolutionaries, and later their allies when the United States spread the war to the rest of Indochina, it was gradually transformed into one of the most destructive and murderous attacks on a civilian population in history, as the world's most powerful military machine was unleashed against peasant societies with extremely limited means of self-defense and lacking the capacity to strike back at the source of aggression.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Book_Excerpts/AfterCataclysm_Chom.html

Korean War Panel Finds U.S. Attacks on Civilians

SEOUL, South Korea — A commission charged with investigating wartime atrocities has found that American troops killed groups of South Korean civilians on 138 separate occasions during the Korean War.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/world/asia/10comission.html?_r=1

Published on Thursday, March 10, 2005 by the Associated Press
1945 Tokyo Firebombing Left Legacy of Terror, Pain
by Joseph Coleman

TOKYO -- For decades, Teruo Kanoh never revealed the terror locked in his heart the night in 1945 when American bombs turned Tokyo into a raging fireball. Then, three years ago, he slowly began releasing his demons in oil and watercolor.

In his vivid, unsparing paintings, U.S. warplanes shower the sky with rivulets of fire, and thousands of corpses � many of them women and children � clot Tokyo's main river. In one piece, flaming victims plummet in agony from a burning bridge.

The paintings are a gripping testament to the destruction as Japan prepares to mark the 60th anniversary this week of the March 9-10, 1945, air raid that killed an estimated 100,000 people in a single night of fire.

"Civilians are defenseless, and this is what it is like when they are killed," said Kanoh, who was 14 at the time and lost both parents and two younger sisters. "I want young people who haven't known war to think about this."

The Tokyo firebombing has long been overshadowed by the U.S. atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which preceded the Japanese surrender that ended World War II the following August. But the burning of the capital, which resulted in more immediate deaths than either of the nuclear bombings, stands as a horrifying landmark in the history of warfare on noncombatants.

More than 300 B-29 "Superfortress" bombers dropped nearly a half-million M-69 incendiary cylinders over Tokyo that night and early morning, destroying some 16 square miles of the city. The attack, coming a month after a similar raid on Dresden, Germany, brought the mass incineration of civilians to a new level in a conflict already characterized by unprecedented bloodshed.

The official death toll was some 83,000, but historians generally agree that victims unaccounted for bring the figure to around 100,000 � overwhelmingly civilians. It is widely considered to be the most devastating air raid in history.


http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0310-08.htm

AMERICAN HOLOCAUST
THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER
by Christopher Hitchens, Verso, 2001, $35 (Book Review)


"Kissinger is a thug, a crook, a liar and a murderer."
- Christopher Hitchens


The United States government is the most violent in the world and since 1945 has killed upwards of eight million people in the Third World. The Ribbentrop of the American Reich who arranged much of this genocide was Henry Kissinger, National Security Adviser and Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford Administrations. In this elegantly written and damningly accurate account, Hitchens charges Kissinger with war crimes, crimes against humanity and conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap and torture in the cases of Indochina, Bangladesh, Chile, East Timor and Cyprus.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. killed about 4.3 million people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. Kissinger and Nixon prolonged the war by four years (out of a total of eight) and expanded it to neutral Cambodia and Laos, destroying three countries "in a series of premeditated war crimes." Hitchens explains that the U.S. deliberately targeted civilians for bombings and ground attacks "as a matter of policy" (a violation of the Nuremberg Principles and the Geneva Convention). One particularly bloody U.S. slaughter called Operation Speedy Express which took place in early 1969 claimed to have killed 10,899 "enemy" yet captured only 748 weapons (all the Vietcong were armed). Kevin Buckley, a Newsweek correspondent in Vietnam at the time, reported that this discrepancy could be explained by "the conclusion that many victims were unarmed innocent civilians."

Not satisfied with killing civilians in Vietnam, Kissinger expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos where U.S. bombing and invasion resulted in up to one million and 350,000 deaths respectively. Although the U.S. military informed Kissinger that there would be substantial Cambodian civilian casualties, he told the Senate that Cambodian areas selected for bombing were "unpopulated," a blatant lie. Secretary of State William Rogers and Secretary of Defence Melvin Laird were highly skeptical about widening the war but Kissinger actually lobbied for the invasion of Cambodia and usurped the chain of command to take personal charge of the bombing. He beamed when giving Nixon reports on the bombing of Cambodia and seemed to be having "fun" with it according to the President.

Given the fact that the Vietnam War was mainly a prolonged massacre of Indochinese civilians by Washington, General Telford Taylor, chief prosecuting counsel for the U.S. at the Nuremberg trials, stated in 1971 that if the American statesmen and bureaucrats who designed the war in Vietnam were held to the standards of Nuremberg and Manila [where Japanese war criminals were tried] then "there would be a very strong possibility that they would come to the same end that he [General Yamashita, Japan's chief militarist in World War II] did." As Hitchens puts it, "it is not every day that a senior American soldier and jurist delivers the opinion that a large portion of his country's political class should probably be hooded and blindfolded and dropped through a trapdoor on the end of a rope."

In Chile too, Kissinger was personally involved in murder. Hitchens presents evidence confirming that Kissinger has direct responsibility for the assassination of General Rene Schneider, head of the Chilean army in 1970. In that year Salvador Allende was elected Chile's first Marxist President unleashing a U.S. strategy of destabilization and liquidation aimed at provoking a military coup. Allende was feared by U.S. corporations with investments in Chile including Anaconda and Kennecott, (two companies that controlled Chile's rich copper mines), ITT, Pepsi Cola and Chase Manhattan Bank. Donald Kendall, head of Pepsi, complained to Nixon about Allende. Nixon was beholden to Kendall for giving him his first corporate account as a lawyer. A series of meetings between Kissinger, Kendall and David Rockefeller (head of Chase Manhattan) "settled the fate of Chilean democracy." Nixon ordered that Allende (who had to be confirmed by the Chilean Congress before he could take office) was not to become President. However, General Schneider, a strict constitutionalist, strenuously opposed military coups so Kissinger and the CIA planned to have him kidnapped by fascist extremist officers in a way which would make it appear as if the Left had done this thereby panicking the Chilean Congress into denying Allende the Presidency. As Hitchens states, this was a "hitˆa piece of state-supported terrorism."

Generals Viaux and Valenzuela were given U.S.$120,000, machine guns and tear gas grenades by the CIA for the kidnapping of Schneider. The first two attempts failed but Kissinger insisted on a third which resulted in Schneider's murder on October 22, 1970. Kissinger told the Senate in 1975 that he "turned off" the kidnapping on October 15 but a recently declassified CIA cable dated October 20 shows that he continued to press for Schneider's elimination. In September 2001, General Schneider's family filed a U.S.$3 million lawsuit in Washington accusing Kissinger and Richard Helms (Director of the CIA in 1970) of "orchestrating covert activities that led to [Schneider's] assassination." Kisssinger's coup plans succeeded in 1973 when General Pinochet overthrew Allende and slaughtered about 130,000 Chileans during his 17-year reign of terror.

In Bangladesh also, Kissinger managed to combine genocide with a coup and an assassination (apparently his preferred foreign policy tools). With U.S. arms, training, military aid and encouragement the Pakistan army killed up to three million people in East Pakistan in 1971 which as a result became Bangladesh. The bloodshed took place because the Awami League, the main eastern political party, had the temerity to win a national election which gave the majority Bengali ethnic group(inhabitants of the eastern wing) political control of all of Pakistan. The Pakistan army and power structure which was dominated by the Punjabi ethnic group based in West Pakistan had no intention of handing power over to the Bengalis. The army arrested Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, leader of the Awami League, and started to butcher Bengalis in March. This sparked the exodus of ten million refugees to neighbouring India, Pakistan's rival. U.S. diplomats in East Pakistan implored Kissinger to stop the killing and rein in Pakistan which was Washington's client. Instead, Kissinger sent a message to General Yahya Khan, the Pakistani military dictator, thanking him for his "delicacy and tact." Nixon and Kissinger had set up a secret channel to China through Pakistan and did not want to disrupt this. They also disliked India for being non-aligned and wanted to prevent the emergence of an independent Bangladesh.

Kissinger's policy failed when India invaded East Pakistan in December 1971 and defeated the Pakistan army in a week, taking 90,000 prisoners of war. East Pakistan became a sovereign Bangladesh incurring Kissinger's resentment. The Secretary compared Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first President of Bangladesh, to Allende and prepared a similar fate for him. In an account which adds significant new information, Hitchens details a U.S.-sponsored military coup against Mujib in August 1975 which led to his murder and that of forty of his family members.

In December of the same year, Kissinger approved the Indonesian army's invasion of East Timor which resulted in the deaths of 200,000 East Timorese (one-third of the population). In 1974, Kissinger colluded in the overthrow and attempted assassination of President Makarios (another democratically elected leader) of Cyprus by the Greek military junta which invaded the island provoking a Turkish invasion. Thousands of Cypriots were killed in the conflict and Cyprus became divided. Having done much of his murdering for corporations, Kissinger, after leaving office, profited from his bloody record. He set up the firm of Kissinger Associates whose clients include ITT.

http://www.asadismi.ws/kissinger.html

A Special Supplement: Cambodia
JUNE 4, 1970
Noam Chomsky

The Cambodian Government White Paper of January, 1970 (see note 9) covers events up until May, 1969. Since then, there have been many further incidents. The American biologist Arthur Westing, who was investigating American defoliation in Cambodia (see note 9), inspected the site of one such incident shortly after it occurred last November. He describes this as a “particularly vicious” case. A village was attacked, and houses, a school, livestock, a hospital marked with a giant red cross on its roof, and a well-marked ambulance trying to retrieve wounded were all destroyed by bombs, rockets, and napalm. The ICC reported no evidence of the presence of Viet Cong, nor could the US produce any photographic (or other) evidence, despite daily reconnaissance flights. The US chargé suggested that “our pilots must have lost their cool”—for about forty-eight hours.

Westing speculates that the attack may have been “a punitive or retaliatory measure following the destruction of a US helicopter last October 24 and particularly of a US F-105 on November 14, both shot down in the course of attacking Dak Dam in casual and callous disregard of Cambodian neutrality.”14 The American government apologized and paid $11,400 in reparations. I shall return below to other recent incidents reported by Americans present at the scene


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1970/jun/04/a-special-supplement-cambodia/?page=2