Tag: war criminals

This Corrupt Biden Pardon May Already Have Caused Innocent Deaths

Former President Joe Biden’s last-minute clemency decisions included pardoning his son Hunter, Joe Biden’s siblings and their spouses, and commuting the capital sentences of almost every federal prisoner on death row. They have drawn a boatload of public attention and justified criticism. Indeed, some will likely cost people their lives. 

That is clear in the pardon Biden issued to arms trafficker Viktor Bout. Last October, The Wall Street Journal reported that, in August 2024, the Houthis in Yemen sent emissaries to Moscow to purchase $10 million in automatic weapons. There, according to the WSJ’s sources (which included a European security official), the Houthi agents met Viktor Bout, an infamous arms trafficker responsible for perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Bout once was the Number 2 person on America’s Most Wanted List, right after Osama bin Laden, to whom Bout had sold weapons. As Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun explained in their book Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible, Bout was a former Soviet Air Force lieutenant colonel.

After the Soviet Union fell, he made a career out of selling military-grade weapons such as disassembled attack helicopters, tanks, surface-to-air missiles, anti-tank rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, artillery rounds, AK-47 automatic rifles, sniper rifles, and night-vision equipment. He became “the preeminent figure atop the world’s multibillion-dollar contraband weapons sale, an underground commerce that is outpaced in illicit profits only by global narcotics sales.” 

Bout sold weapons to any despot with cash. He “was chummy with a succession of African dictators, including Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, the latter of whom paid him in conflict diamonds and whose child soldiers operated the antique Antonov cargo planes that Bout sold him,” Yahoo News Senior Correspondent Michael Weiss wrote. 

In Sierra Leone, for example, Bout supplied the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), with weapons that enabled RUF fighters “to carry out campaigns that were as chilling and destructive as their names: ‘Operation No Living Thing’ and ‘Operation Pay Yourself.’” Those were led by commanders who “dubbed themselves with equally mordant nicknames: Kill Me Quick, Superman, Poison, Mosquito, and Mosquito Killer.” Thousands of “survivors” were maimed by the RUF, which “often mocked their victims before amputating their limbs” by “asking them if they wanted to be ‘short-sleeved’ or ‘long-sleeved.’” 

Bout eventually was arrested for offering to sell 700–800 surface-to-air missiles and 20,000–30,000 automatic weapons to undercover federal agents posing as Colombian guerillas. Convicted of conspiring to kill U.S. nationals, and of conspiring to support a terrorist organization, Bout was sentenced to a lengthy prison term. 

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Johnson and Schumer Invite War Criminal and Mass Murderer To Address Congress

Mark this most recent event as yet another piece of evidence that Israel literally owns the U.S. Congress.

From Politico:

Netanyahu accepts Congress’ invitation to speak despite blowback.

Tensions have been mounting in recent weeks after Speaker Mike Johnson announced his plan to invite Netanyahu to address Congress

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday accepted an invitation from congressional leaders to address a joint session, a decision that has sparked tension within the Democratic Party over Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

In a post to X, formerly known as Twitter, Netanyahu wrote that he was looking forward to the opportunity to “present the truth” to Congress about the “just war” that Israel has been waging in Gaza since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, when 1,200 Israelis were killed and 240 others were taken hostage. In the months following Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip, at least 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian health authorities, while millions of others have fled from their homes.

“I am very moved to have the privilege of representing Israel before both Houses of Congress and to present the truth about our just war against those who seek to destroy us to the representatives of the American people and the entire world,” Netanyahu wrote.

Tensions have been mounting in recent weeks after Speaker Mike Johnson announced his plan to invite Netanyahu to address Congress. The Democratic Party has splintered over U.S. support for Israel in its ongoing war in Gaza, particularly after recent strikes in a designated safe zone for Palestinians in the southern city of Rafah that reportedly killed at least 45 people.

Progressives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has been outspoken in his disapproval of U.S. military support for Israel’s war, denounced the invitation.

“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. He should not be invited to address a joint meeting of Congress. I certainly will not attend,” Sanders wrote in a post to X.

Sanders also referenced the International Criminal Court’s seeking arrest warrants for both Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar for alleged war crimes committed on both sides.

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Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies

Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100.

Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. Whatever hesitation a state execution provokes, even over a man such as McVeigh — necessary questions about the legitimacy of killing even an unrepentant soldier of white supremacy — his death provided a measure of closure to the mother of one of his victims. “It’s a period at the end of a sentence,” said Kathleen Treanor, whose four-year-old McVeigh killed. 

McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century. 

The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds. 

“The Cubans say there is no evil that lasts a hundred years, and Kissinger is making a run to prove them wrong,” Grandin told Rolling Stone not long before Kissinger died. “There is no doubt he’ll be hailed as a geopolitical grand strategist, even though he bungled most crises, leading to escalation. He’ll get credit for opening China, but that was De Gaulle’s original idea and initiative. He’ll be praised for detente, and that was a success, but he undermined his own legacy by aligning with the neocons. And of course, he’ll get off scot free from Watergate, even though his obsession with Daniel Ellsberg really drove the crime.”

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Federal authorities arrest accused Liberian war criminal ‘Dragon Master’ living in Philadelphia

A Liberian immigrant living in Philadelphia has been arrested by federal authorities and charged with fraudulently hiding his background as a high-ranking member of a rebel group — he called himself “Dragon Master” — that is accused of committing atrocities during a Liberian civil war.

Laye Sekou Camara, of Southwest Philadelphia, is accused of lying about his background in 2011 to obtain a visa to enter the United States and then later to obtain a green card.

Camara then allegedly used the green card to falsely characterize his background on a Pennsylvania identification application in 2017, according to a criminal complaint submitted to Magistrate Judge Richard A. Lloret and publicly filed last week. Camara is charged with the use of an immigration document obtained by fraud.

In news accounts dating back to 2003, during and shortly after the conflict known as the Second Liberian Civil War, prosecutors say Camera is identified as a brigadier general with the rebel faction known as Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, or LURD. Liberia’s first civil war was fought for most of the 1990s and left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.

U.S. authorities have led the charge in recent years to bring Liberian war criminals to justice — particularly in Philadelphia, where thousands of refugees fleeing the conflict were relocated in the 1990s and 2000s.

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Legacy of Shame: Colin Powell’s Blood-Soaked Service to the Empire

Colin Powell just died from Covid-19. So we should expect a tsunami of eulogies from politicians, the mainstream media and even a few liberals who seem to enjoy sanitizing the murderous lives of the ruling class. Those of us on the left who refuse to play the games of polite society when it comes to war crimes will likely be chastised. And he will take his place among the “great generals” of the American Empire. All warmongering societies do this, so it should come as no surprise. But no amount of gushing tributes can erase the truth.

The man who helped whitewash the massacre of civilians at My Lai during the war against Vietnam, pushed hard for the Gulf War in the 1990s, and gave the green light to Ariel Sharon in his murderous assault on civilians in Jenin and land grabs in the occupied West Bank, also sold the war against Iraq at the beginning of this century with a fistful of lies. Iraq never attacked the US. It did not have “weapons of mass destruction.” But the Bush administration was salivating for blood and oil after the attacks on the US on the 11th of September, 2001. And any morsel of fiction that would justify their lust for violence was welcomed.

Powell would later blame his role in peddling these lies on an “intelligence failure.” This is the go-to excuse for the American military establishment, as we see with the latest atrocity they committed in Afghanistan, the recent drone bomb incineration of a family in Kabul after the disastrous pull out of American troops. Now that he is dead, he will not face justice at the Hague for these crimes. But really, no member of the American ruling class ever does.

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