By Robert Fantina | Aletho News | December 24, 2014
It might be easy to assume that the United States’ ignoring of the horrific suffering in Palestine, suffering it caused by its military and financial support of Israel, is just part of the general racism inherent in U.S. culture. Despite civil rights laws, and the U.S.’s self-proclaimed status as a free country, the world knows that racial inequality is rife within U.S. society. This racism has been on ugly display with the recent killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Gardner in New York City, both unarmed African-Americans, and both killed by white police officers. That a grand jury in each jurisdiction failed to see any reason to indict either of them just adds evidence to the blatant fact of institutional racism in the U.S.
The U.S. has three main reasons, it will tell the world, for assisting a suffering people: 1) an oppressed people are struggling for the basic right of self-determination, as in Iraq in 2003; 2) a war or other destructive conflict has ended, and either or both parties are in need of support to rebuild homes and infrastructure, as it did following World War II (we don’t need to mention here that the U.S. caused a lot of that destruction), or 3) a natural disaster has hit, causing death, homelessness and leaving a major population at risk of starvation and disease, as in Haiti, in 2005.
However, as noble as these lofty goals are, they are not universally applied. Let us look at one nation that is experiencing events in each of those categories, and is yet to see any assistance from the United States.
The people of Palestine were expelled from over 50% of their nation’s lands over sixty years ago.
They had no say in this decision, received no compensation for the loss of their homes, farms and lands, and were driven into refugee camps. Since that time, hundreds of thousands more have been driven from their homes; their schools, hospitals, mosques and museums have been destroyed, and they now live under occupation in a small fraction of the land that comprised their nation for centuries. During the original expulsion, at least 10,000 Palestinians were killed. Since that time, tens of thousands more have been killed, with no one held accountable for these deaths.
Genocide is defined as the eradication of a people and their culture; it is clear that what has been happening to the people of Palestine is genocide.
Resistance by the Palestinians, a legal right for an occupied people according to international law, takes many forms. There are weekly non-violent demonstrations in the West Bank, yet ‘non-violent’ may not be the correct term. Palestinians demonstrate non-violently, but IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) terrorists will arrest, shoot and kill these demonstrators. In the Gaza Strip, some materials can be smuggled in to build what Dr. Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors and a vocal advocate for the rights of the Palestinian people, calls ‘enhanced fireworks’. These are sometimes shot into Israel, with little or no effect.
So this oppressed population, seeking the basic right of self-determination, would, it might seem, be eligible for U.S. support. After all, back in 2012, then Secretary of State (and probable 2016 Democratic presidential candidate) Hillary Clinton said this in regard to Syria: “We reject any equivalence between premeditated murders by a government’s military machine and the actions of civilians under siege driven to self-defense.” Now, would it be unrealistic to consider a brutally occupied nation to be ‘under siege’? Would not such a people, as Mrs. Clinton so eloquently expressed, be ‘driven to self-defense’? One might think so.
Well, since for some bizarre reason the Palestinians don’t qualify for U.S. help under the first criterion, let us look at Door Number 2: war or other destructive conflict.
What occurred in the Gaza Strip in July and August of this year was not a war; it was simply a slaughter. Israel, with the full backing of the U.S., which has provided it with a powerful military system, with as many of the world’s most highly advanced weapons as Israel wants, bombed and invaded Palestine, a country with no army, navy or air force. Independent sources have said that the destruction is the worst that has been seen anywhere in decades; thousands died, and tens of thousands were rendered homeless. Electricity is available for only a few hours a day, and much of the water is not fit to drink.
This must be viewed as a destructive conflict. Yet, curiously, the U.S., with such a huge percent of the world’s wealth, has not rushed in. Yet it continues to send Israel aid at the rate of nearly $9 million dollars every single day.
Well, it seems that, for some inexplicable reason, Palestine still doesn’t qualify for U.S. largesse. Let’s look at the third reason the U.S. says it rushes in to assist: natural disasters.
Following Israel’s fifty-one day bombardment and invasion of Palestine, rains caused flooding, which further eroded the quality of drinking water, and risked disease. In addition, the tens of thousands of people who were rendered homeless by Israel’s attack had to find shelter where they could: in buildings still standing that may have been damaged to the point of being unsafe; by quickly assembling make-shift shelters from whatever parts of destroyed buildings they could use, or by crowding in with anyone lucky enough to still have a home. This, it would seem, is the kind of suffering that provides countless photo opportunities for U.S. politicians to showcase their concern for the less fortunate.
And yet, the amount of aid sent to Palestine by the U.S. remains at zero. Why, any intelligent person may ask, is this the case?
One hates to be crass, but with the U.S’s elected officials, there is no greater priority than their own re-election. The right of self-determination, freedom, human rights, the basic survival needs of a suffering people all take a distant back seat to the grasping, clutching need to gain every dollar possible for re-election campaigns. And the Israeli lobby, through the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is extremely generous to the elected officials it has bought and paid for. And these officials don’t come cheap. Between 2008 and 2014, Israel lobbies’ contributions to U.S. senate campaigns cost a whopping $12,036,252. And to purchase members of the House of Representatives, those lobbies spent $4,961,445 in just two years (2012 – 2014).
So, one would be unfair indeed to say that the U.S., in causing and then ignoring the horrific suffering of the Palestinian people, was merely acting out its own inherent racism. After all, these are Arabs we’re talking about, which might lead one to that conclusion. But no, that is an unjust characterization of U.S. governance. We can all be assured that, if there were a rich, powerful American Palestine Political Affairs Committee (APPAC), the U.S. would be pouring billions of dollars into Palestine, sending advisors, providing a peace-keeping force to prevent Israeli aggression, supporting every proposal the United Nations advanced that favored Palestine. U.S. presidents would speak at APPAC conventions, say how they are ‘Palestinian in their hearts’, and describe the U.S. as Palestine’s closest ally.
So it isn’t racism, after all. While recent domestic events should remove any doubt anyone may have still had that the U.S. is a racist society, one must not blame that racism for the way the U.S. treats Palestine. No, that is a result of greed, not racism. One must keep one’s vices straight.
One looks in vain for U.S. citizens to remove the blood-stained glasses, and see the U.S. clearly. Its elected officials don’t represent anyone but the powerful lobbies who buy their offices. The nation doesn’t stand for peace and freedom, but for corporate profits and the wars that enrich the already rich. And human rights aren’t worthy of consideration, if they stand in the way of power or profit. This is the U.S. as it is today, and always has been.
The US Senate has unanimously passed a bill supplying Israel with military equipment that would enable it to execute an air strike on Iran. The bill, titled the US-Israel Strategic Partnership Act, includes the sale of advanced aerial refueling tankers, which refuel fighter jets in midflight – necessary for Israeli fighter jets to reach targets in Iran. This is particularly noteworthy since the Bush administration had refused to provide Israel with refueling tankers.
The sale of the refueling tankers follows a 2013 arms sale to Israel that included V-22 Ospreys. Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution stated shortly after the sale that Ospreys are “the ideal platform for sending Israeli special forces into Iran.”
The bill, which was also passed in the House earlier this year, expands the US weapons stockpile in Israel by a value of $200 million, to a total of $1.8 billion. Israel used weapons from this stockpile during its most recent military operation against Gaza, “Operation Protective Edge.” Israel also used the stockpile during its 2006 invasion of Lebanon.
The bill has generated concern among experts. Mike Coogan, legislative coordinator at US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, told us that the air refueling capabilities, expanded satellite cooperation, and access to US satellite data that the bill would grant Israel “sounds quite dangerous.”
“It sounds like a formula for attacking Iran.”
The bill may also be in violation of the Leahy Law, which prohibits US weapons exports to military units responsible for consistent human rights violations. Israel’s most recent major military offensive, “Protective Edge,” would seem to have violated elementary human rights. […]
Coogan was also critical of the expanded access to weapons stockpiles that the bill would afford Israel. He said, “it’s morally, financially, and legally problematic to continue to give Israel access to the weapons stockpiles, particularly in light of how they used them in their war on Gaza this summer.”
“It looked like, for a time, the Obama admin actually suspended a shipment of weapons to Israel – specifically, hellfire missiles – but then apparently started to resend those. But the thought behind the original suspension was that Israel was using it in violation of international law and US law.”
“I think it was shown by numerous human rights organizations that Israel was using ammunition stored in those forward-deployed stockpiles in clear violation of US and int’l law. So it’s a mystery to us why a country of laws – purportedly – would continue to give Israel access to weapons that it uses in flagrant violations of those laws.” … Full article
Ken Klippenstein can be reached on Twitter @kenklippenstein or via email: ken@readersupportednews.org
Paul Gottinger can be reached on Twitter @paulgottinger or via email: paul.gottinger@gmail.com
Israel was asked by the UN General Assembly on Friday to compensate Lebanon for $856.4 million in oil spill damages it caused during the July 2006 war.
The non-binding vote, which passed 170-6 with three abstentions, asks Israel to offer “prompt and adequate compensation” to Lebanon and other countries affected by the oil spill’s pollution.
While General Assembly votes are non-binding, they reflect broader international opinion without the possibility of veto by world powers like in the Security Council.
The resolution indicated that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon “expressed grave concern at the lack of any acknowledgment on the part of the government of Israel of its responsibilities vis-a-vis reparations and compensation” for the oil spill.
Lebanon’s permanent representative to the UN Nawaf Salam hailed the resolution, the Lebanese National News Agency reported.
“Lebanon considers this to be a major progress,” Salam said. “This resolution also paves the way for further compensation into other areas of damage (health, ecosystem services as habitat, potential groundwater contamination, and marine diversity), that were not considered in the current calculated amount.”
“Furthermore, its adoption asserts the will of the overwhelming majority of the international community to hold countries responsible for their internationally wrongful acts,” he added.
“We affirm that Lebanon will continue to mobilize all resources and resort to all legal means to see that this resolution is fully implemented, and that the specified compensation is paid promptly.”
In a statement, Israel condemned the resolution as “[serving] no purpose other than to contribute to institutionalizing an anti-Israel agenda at the UN,” Israeli media reported.
The oil spill was caused by Israel’s air force when it bombed oil tanks near a coastal Lebanese power plant during its fierce month-long war with Hezbollah resistance fighters.
The attack flooded the Mediterranean coastline with 15,000 tons of oil, according to the United Nations.
The adopted resolution cited $856.4 million (700 million euros) in damages caused by the oil spill, accounting for inflation of a October 2007 estimate by the United Nations Secretary General that reported the spill caused $729 million in damage.
Lebanon bore the brunt of the spill, but the Syrian coast and other Mediterranean countries have suffered as well, the UN said.
The oil slick made by the spill “has had serious implications for livelihoods and the economy of Lebanon,” the resolution said.
The UN asked Lebanon to continue clean-up efforts and the international community to increase funding for its environmental restoration.
The US, Australia, Canada and Israel were among the six states that voted against the UN text.
A court in Argentina has handed down life sentences to four former military officers for committing crimes against humanity during the 1970s’ US-backed military dictatorship in the South American country.
On Thursday, the court in the capital, Buenos Aires, found the four guilty of “illegal deprivation of liberty, torture, rape and homicide,” involving 204 people out of the total 2,500 held at the Vesubio detention center between 1976 and 1978.
The four defendants are former colonels Federico Minicucci and Jorge Crespi, former intelligence officer, Gustavo Cacivio, and former colonel and prison official, Nestor Cendon.
The Vesubio detention center operated in the La Matanza district of Buenos Aires, until it was destroyed to prevent the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights from inspecting it during a country visit.
Famous comics writer, Héctor Oesterheld, author Haroldo Conti and filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer were among those who died in the prison.
Former Argentine Major Ernesto “Nabo” Barreiro has recently broken his 31-year pact of silence by revealing the locations of graves of people who disappeared under the military regime during the so-called “Dirty War” from 1976 to 1983.
Barreiro said some two dozen people are buried inside two large earthen ovens at a military base outside the central city of Cordoba.
Previous Argentine governments have failed to investigate crimes committed during the almost seven-year dictatorship due to the so-called Full Stop law, which saw an end to prosecutions. However, the law was repealed ten years ago.
The US-backed dictatorship in Argentina jailed, tortured and murdered dozens of people and forced thousands to flee the country during the war.
Federal courts are seeking the whereabouts of an estimated 30,000 people who were killed or abducted and presumed killed during the dictatorship.
On 17 July 2014 Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over the Eastern Ukraine.
Although the precise circumstances were at that point unknown the western media were quick to blame Ukrainian “rebels”. The means by which MH17 was destroyed, the media alleged, was a surface to air BUK missile supplied to the “rebels” by Russia. For a host of reasons it was almost certainly not a BUK missile that caused the crash. The stage was set however, for a demonization of Russia in general as the alleged supplier of the missile, and President Vladimir Putin in particular. The relentless propaganda enforcing this view has continued unabated to this day, although the evidential foundation for the allegations remains at best remote.
The Russians produced an initial denial of involvement. Four days after the tragedy however, as anti-Russian hysteria was escalating to extreme levels, the Russian military held a press presentation. The fact of this presentation was barely reported in the western media. The content, more importantly, was either ignored or misrepresented.
The Russians disclosed, inter alia, their radar and satellite data. These data showed that MH17 had been diverted from its scheduled route so that it flew directly over the war zone in eastern Ukraine. They asked for an explanation but one has never been forthcoming. These data also showed that MH17 had been shadowed during its last minutes by two SU25 fighter jets, a model flown by the Ukrainian air force. Again the Russians asked why this had happened.
The main response was a claim that the SU25 could not fly above 10,000 metres. Not only is this untrue, as an examination of military resources readily demonstrates, but the Wikipedia entry on the SU25 had been altered days before the shoot down to claim that the SU25’s operating ceiling was only 7000 metres. Again the western media ignored this obvious alarm bell.
The Russians further disclosed that at the precise time of the shoot down an American spy satellite was directly overhead the scene and would have recorded the sequence of events. The Russians invited the Americans to share these data with the official investigation that had been launched, but to date the Americans have failed to do so. Again, the western media are singularly incurious as to the reason for this lack of cooperation.
Under IATA Rules, the parties responsible for the investigation would be the Malaysians, as owners of the plane and home country of the airline, and the Ukrainians over whose territory the atrocity occurred. It was the Dutch however, who took the lead role, citing two facts: the plane had departed from Amsterdam; and they had suffered the largest number of their nationals as victims. The Malaysians were initially excluded from the inquiry for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained. They were finally invited to join the Joint Inquiry on 2 December 2014.
Instead, the initial inquiry group consisted of Ukraine, the Netherlands, Australia and Belgium. The Australians suffered the third largest loss of life but had no standing to be one of the investigatory nations, and certainly less of a claim than the Malaysians. The Australian Prime Minister and some other politicians had been at the forefront of making extreme allegations against Russia and President Putin. Why Belgium was included remains a mystery.
On 8 August 2014 these four investigating nations signed an agreement that the results of the investigation would not be published unless all four countries agreed. This gave one of the prime suspects in the atrocity, Ukraine, an effective veto over any investigations result that attributed blame to them. This is an astonishing situation and probably without precedent in modern air crash investigations.
More significantly however, is that the existence of this secret agreement was not announced by the Australian government, nor to the best of my knowledge has any report about the existence of the agreement or its extraordinary terms, been published in any mainstream publication.
The Dutch magazine Elsevier, under Dutch Freedom of Information laws, sought a copy of the agreement. On 19 November they announced that the request had been refused on the grounds that it “could endanger the relations with other countries involved.”
An Australian citizen (name redacted) wrote to the Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development (Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss) seeking a copy of the agreement. By letter dated 15 October 2014 the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) replied on behalf of the Minister, refusing the requester a copy of the agreement as its contents were “classified.”
The present writer wrote to DFAT on 21 August 2014 seeking a copy of the agreement of 8 August 2014 under the Freedom of Information Act. The department declaimed responsibility and said that they had passed my request on to the Attorney-General’s Department. This was odd, but even odder was advice from the Attorney General that my request had been passed in turn to the Australian Federal Police who were the responsible body.
This must be the first time in Australian history since 1901 that negotiations and agreements between sovereign nations had been conducted on Australia’s behalf by the Federal Police.
On 2 December 2014 the Australian Federal Police finally gave their decision on the FOI request. It was declined on the basis that disclosure of the document (which they acknowledged existed) under section 33 would, or could reasonably be expected to, cause damage to:
(i) the security of the Commonwealth; or
(ii) the defence of the Commonwealth; or
(iii) the international relations of the Commonwealth.
The refusal also relied upon section 37(1)(a) of the Act which exempts a document if it could reasonably be said to prejudice the conduct of an investigation.
Thirdly, the Federal Police relied upon section 37(1) (c) where disclosure could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of a person.
The fourth ground of refusal was under section 37(2)(b) which exempts disclosure where it might reasonably be expected to prejudice an investigation by disclosing methods of investigation or detection of unlawful activity.
In the circumstances of this case it is very difficult to see how any of those provisions would apply. The agreement, it should be remembered, is to give any one of the four investigating countries a veto over publication of the results. A final report would be entitled to withhold details of the investigation that would truly prejudice matters of national security.
An investigation of a crash of an aeroplane is however, carried out under IATA Rules and its procedures are well established and well documented. Whose life or safety might be endangered by releasing the agreement is unspecified.
One is left with the conclusion that 33 (iii) is the real ground and the “international relations” referred to are the difficulty Australia and other nations have got themselves into by prematurely blaming Russia when all of the emerging evidence points squarely at Ukraine.
Given the existence of this agreement it is difficult to see how anyone can have any confidence in whatever final report is published by the Dutch. The preliminary report was careful not to apportion blame or even state the cause of the crash other than to say that the plane was hit a by a large number of “high velocity objects” which were undefined.
Another major question is why have the mainstream media kept up a barrage of misinformation up to and including the recent G20 debacle, when they know, or ought to know that the investigation is a sham?
It is also difficult to see how the continued demonization of Russia and Mr Putin for manifestly geo-political reasons (and the probable reasons for the shoot down in the first place) represents any form of justice for the families of the 298 victims and in particular the 37 who were Australian citizens or residents.
It is clear that the Government’s professed support for Security Council Resolution 2116 (2014) for a “full, thorough, and independent internationalinvestigation into the incident in accordance with international civil aviation guidelines” is no more than window dressing for a much wider geopolitical agenda.
James O’Neill is a former academic who has practiced as a barrister for the past 30 years. He has a special interest in international human rights issues. He may be contacted at j.oneill@bigpond.net.au
Before dawn on December 20, 1989, U.S. forces descended on Panama City and unleashed one of the most violent, destructive terror attacks of the century. U.S. soldiers killed more people than were killed on 9/11. They systematically burned apartment buildings and shot people indiscriminately in the streets. Dead bodies were piled on top of each other; many were burned before identification. The aggression was condemned internationally, but the message was clear: the United States military was free to do whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted, and they would not be bound by ethics or laws.
The invasion and ensuing occupation produced gruesome scenes: “People burning to death in the incinerated dwellings, leaping from windows, running in panic through the streets, cut down in cross fire, crushed by tanks, human fragments everywhere,” writes William Blum. [1]
Years later the New York Times interviewed a survivor of the invasion, Sayira Marín, whose “hands still tremble” when she remembers the destruction of her neighborhood.
“I take pills to calm down,” Marín told the paper. “It has gotten worse in recent days. There are nights when I jump out of bed screaming. Sometimes I have dreams of murder. Ugly things.”
In the spring of 1989, a wave of revolutions had swept across the Eastern bloc. In November, the Berlin Wall fell. The Cold War was over. No country was even a fraction as powerful as the United States. Rather than ushering in an era of peace and demilitarization, U.S. military planners intensified their expansion of global hegemony. They were pathological about preventing any rival to their complete military and economic domination.
U.S. government officials needed to put the world on notice. At the same time, President George H.W. Bush’s needed to shed his image as a “wimp.” So they did what any schoolyard bully would: pick out the smallest, weakest target you can find and beat him to a bloody pulp. The victim is irrelevant; the point is the impression you make on the people around you.
Panama was an easy target because the U.S. already had a large military force in 18 bases around the country. Until 1979, the occupied Panama Canal Zone had been sovereign territory of the United States. The Panama Canal was scheduled to be turned over to Panama partially in 1990 and fully in 2000. The U.S. military would be able to crush a hapless opponent and ensure control over a vital strategic asset.
Washington began disseminating propaganda about “human rights abuses” and drug trafficking by President Manuel Noriega. Most of the allegations were true, and they had all been willingly supported by the U.S. government while Noriega was a CIA asset receiving more than $100,000 per year. But when Noriega was less than enthusiastic about helping the CIA and their terrorist Contra army wage war against the civilian population in Nicaragua, things changed.
“It’s all quite predictable, as study after study shows,” Noam Chomsky writes. “A brutal tyrant crosses the line from admirable friend to ‘villain’ and ‘scum’ when he commits the crime of independence.”
Some of the worst human rights abuses in the world from the early 1960s to 1980s did originate in Panama – from the U.S. instructors and training manuals at the U.S.’s infamous School of the Americas (nicknamed the School of the Assassins), located in Panama until 1984. It was at the SOA where the U.S. military trained the murderers of the six Jesuit scholars and many other members of dictatorships, death squads and paramilitary forces from all over Latin America.
The documentary The Panama Deception demonstrates how the media uncritically adopted U.S. government propaganda, echoing accusations of human rights violations and drug trafficking while ignoring international law and the prohibition against the use of force in the UN Charter. The Academy Award-winning film exposed what the corporate media refused to: the lies and distortions, the hypocrisy, the dead bodies, the survivors’ harrowing tales, and the complete impunity of the U.S. military to suppress the truth.
The propaganda started with the concoction of a pretext for the invasion. The U.S. military had been sending aggressive patrols into the Panama City streets, trying to elicit a response.
“Provocations against the Panamanian people by United States military troops were very frequent in Panama,” said Sabrina Virgo, National Labor Organizer, who was in Panama before the invasion. She said the provocations were intended “to create an international incident… have United States troops just hassle the Panamanian people until an incident resulted. And from that incident the United States could then say they were going into Panama for the protection of American life, which is exactly what happened. [2]
After a group of Marines on patrol ran a roadblock and were fired on by Panamanian troops, one U.S. soldier was killed. The group, nicknamed the “Hard Chargers,” was known for their provocative actions against Panamanian troops. Four days later, the invasion began. [3]
Targeting Civilians and Journalists
Elizabeth Montgomery, narrating The Panama Deception, says: “It soon became clear that the objectives were not limited only to military targets. According to witnesses, many of the surrounding residential neighborhoods were deliberately attacked and destroyed.” [4]
Witnesses recounted U.S. soldiers setting residential buildings on fire. Video footage shows the charred remains of rows of housing complexes in El Chorillo, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
“The North Americans began burning down El Chorillo at about 6:30 in the morning. They would throw a small device into a house and it would catch on fire,” recounted an anonymous witness in the film. “They would burn a house, and then move to another and begin the process all over again. They burned from one street to the next. They coordinated the burning through walkie-talkies.” [5]
People were crushed by tanks, captured Panamanians were executed on the street, and bodies were piled together and burned. Survivors were reportedly hired to fill mass graves for $6 per body.
Spanish photographer Juantxu Rodríguez of El País was shot and killed by an American soldier. Journalist Maruja Torres recounted the incident in the Spanish newspaper the next day.
“’Get back!’ the U.S. soldier yelled from his painted face brandishing his weapon. We identified ourselves as journalists, guests at the Marriot,” she wrote. “’We just want to pick up our things.’ He didn’t pay attention. The hotel, like all of them, had been taken over by U.S. troops. Those young marines were on the verge of hysteria. There was not a single Panamanian around, just defenseless journalists. Juantxu ran out running toward the hotel taking photos, the rest of us took shelter behind the cars. Juantxu didn’t return.”
While the professed aim of the operation was to capture Noriega, there is ample evidence that destroying the Panamanian Defense Forces and terrifying the local population into submission were at least equally important goals.
American officials had been told the precise location of Noriega three hours after the operation began – before the killing in El Chorillo – by a European diplomat. The diplomat told the Los Angeles Times he was “100% certain” of Noriega’s location “but when I called, SouthCom (the U.S. Southern military command) said it had other priorities.”
No one knows the exact number of people who were killed during the invasion of Panama. The best estimates are at least 2,000 to 3,000 Panamanians, but this may be a conservative figure, according to a Central American Human Rights Commission (COEDHUCA) report.
The report stated that “most of these deaths could have been prevented had the US troops taken appropriate measures to ensure the lives of civilians and had obeyed the international legal norms of warfare.”
The CODEHUCA report documented massively “disproportionate use of military force,” “indiscriminate and intentional attacks against civilians” and destruction of poor, densely-populated neighborhoods such as El Chorillo and San Miguelito. This gratuitous, systematic violence could not conceivably be connected to the professed military mission.
When asked at a news conference whether it was worth sending people to die (Americans, of course, not thousands of Panamanians) to capture Noriega, President George H.W. Bush replied: “Every human life is precious. And yet I have to answer, yes, it has been worth it.”
‘Flagrant Violation of International Law’
Several days later, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning the invasion. But the United States – joined by allies Great Britain and France – vetoed it. American and European officials argued the invasion was justified and should be praised for removing Noriega from power. Other countries saw a dangerous precedent.
“The Soviet Union and third world council members argued that the invasion must be condemned because it breaks the ban on the use of force set down in the United Nations Charter,” wrote the New York Times.
After this, on December 29, the General Assembly voted 75 to 20 with 40 abstentions in a resolution calling the intervention in Panama a “flagrant violation of international law and of the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the States.”
The Organization of American States passed a similar resolution by a margin of 20-1. In explaining the U.S.’s lone vote against the measure, a State Department spokesperson said: “We are disappointed that the OAS missed a historic opportunity to get beyond its traditional narrow concern over ‘nonintervention.’”
In the ensuing occupation, CODEHUCA claimed that “the US has not respected fundamental legal and human rights” in Panama. The violations occurred on a “massive scale” and included “illegal detentions of citizens, unconstitutional property searches, illegal lay-offs of public and private employees, and … tight control of the Panamanian media.”
Despite the international outrage, Bush enjoyed a political boost from the aggression. His poll numbers shot to record highs not seen “since Presidents Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower.” The President had authorized crimes against the peace and war crimes. Rather than being held accountable, he benefitted. So did the Pentagon and defense contractors who desperately needed a new raison d’ etre after the fall of Communism.
No longer able to use the fear-mongering Cold War rationales it had for the last 40 years, Washington found a new propaganda tool to justify its aggressive military interventions and occupations. Washington was able to appropriate human rights language to create the contradictory, fictional notion of “humanitarian intervention.”
“Washington was desperate for new ideological weapons to justify – both at home and abroad – its global strategies,” writes James Peck. “A new humanitarian ethos legitimizing massive interventions – including war – emerged in the 1990s only after Washington had been pushing such an approach for some time.” [6]
The stage was set for the even more horrific invasion of Iraq the following summer. Operation Gothic Serpent in Somalia, the NATO bombing of Serbia, Iraq (again), and the Bush and Obama interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq (a third time), Pakistan, Libya, Somalia (again), Yemen, Iraq (a fourth time) and Syria would follow.
The invasion of Panama caused unthinkable devastation to the people of Panama. Because of the U.S. military’s obstruction, the full extent of the death and destruction will never be known. The damage done to the legitimacy of international law compounded the devastation exponentially.
Indisputably, the U.S. invasion was aggression against a sovereign nation. Aggressive war was defined in the Nuremberg Trials as the “supreme international crime,” different from other crimes (like genocide or terrorism) in that it contains “the accumulated evil of the whole.” People convicted of waging aggressive war were sentenced to death by hanging.
Twenty five years later, the man who ordered the invasion of Panama, George H.W. Bush, enjoys a luxurious retirement at his Houston and Kennebunkport estates. He is considered by mainstream U.S. pundits to be a foreign policy moderate.
Works Cited
[1] Blum, William. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II – Updated Through 2003. Common Courage Press, 2008.
Elie Wiesel presents himself as a humanitarian whose personal narrative gives him special license to sermonize about tolerance and non-violence. Wiesel: “Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.” More Wiesel: “Never again becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow. Never again jail and torture. Never again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting of starving, frightened, terrified children.”
Yet Wiesel, the putative guardian of the weak and the innocent, is in conflict with Wiesel, the Zionist and shameless apologist for Israel’s on going ethnic cleansing campaign and serial butchery in Lebanon and Gaza. “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides.” In the Middle East Wiesel has made his choice and it is to champion the powerful against their victims and to defend the occupier against the dispossessed.
In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech Wiesel claimed to be sensitive to the plight of the Palestinians “but whose methods I deplore when they lead to violence. Violence is not the answer. Terrorism is the most dangerous of answers.” Wiesel denounced Palestinian terrorism but conveniently ignored his own membership in a Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, which he joined in Paris in 1947 as a translator, journalist and propagandist.
Obviously Wiesel knew the Irgun was a terrorist group when he became a member. Its European HQ fled Rome for Paris after an Irgun cell blew up the British embassy there. Furthermore by the time Wiesel joined the organization, it had established a reputation for bombing and shooting scores of innocent Arabs in Palestine. In the 1930s the Irgun planted deadly bombs in Arab marketplaces, most notably in Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. They also blew up buses and trains. By the mid-1940s the Irgun put the British colonial government in its sights. In 1946 the terrorist group killed 91 people in a Christmas bombing of the King David Hotel. They also kidnapped, tortured and hanged two British Army sergeants. And in an outrage which occurred after Wiesel joined the Irgun, the group killed some 254 unarmed Palestinian civilians at Deir Yassin in order to terrorize Palestine’s Christian and Muslim population and encourage their flight.
Despite working for a terrorist organization that was instrumental in driving the Palestinians from their homes during Israel’s so called War of Independence, Wiesel quite dishonestly asserted in a New York Times op-ed that “Incited by their leaders, 600,000 Palestinians left the country convinced that, once Israel was vanquished, they would be able to return home.” Not only did Wiesel know the truth about the Palestinian Nakba from his work for the Irgun, but when his piece appeared in the Times in 2001 Israeli historians like Benny Morris had already entirely debunked the myth of voluntary Palestinian flight. Further, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s autobiography revealed David Ben-Gurion’s order to drive out the Palestinians:
“While the fighting was still in progress, we had to grapple with a troublesome problem…the fate of the civilian population of Lod and Ramle, numbering some 50,000… We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question: ‘What is to be done with the population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said, ‘Drive them out!’… The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force…”
Lying about Israeli ethnic cleansing was not enough. Wiesel, ever the propagandist, even tried to discredit the Palestinian struggle against Zionism by conflating indigenous Arab resistance with Nazism. Wiesel wrote in his autobiography, All Rivers Flow to the Sea, “gangs loyal to the grand mufti, the pro-Hitler Haj Amin el-Husseini, former ally and protégé of Himmler, attacked Jewish villages and convoys.” Of course Wiesel said nothing about Avraham Stern, leader of an Irgun splinter group, the Lehi, who actually sought an alliance with the Nazis against Great Britain during World War II.
Wiesel has said “Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil” and “When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant”. Nevertheless in the face of the Palestinian struggle to end years of Israeli occupation, land theft and brutality, Wiesel, when he isn’t blaming Zionism’s victims, is either silent or indifferent: “…whenever Israeli police or soldiers react excessively to violence from Palestinian soldiers or civilians. I rarely answer.” And concerning the IDF facilitated massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon: “I don’t think we should even comment…” What ever happened to Wiesel’s signature commonplace “I swore never to be silent…”?
During this past summer’s Israeli assault on Gaza, Wiesel accused the Palestinians of using children as human shields, saying in a full page ad in the New York Times, “Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it’s Hamas’ turn.” Truth is, of course, the Israelis have not given up child sacrifice if it is Arab children doing the dying. And Israel’s exculpatory explanation that ‘the Arabs forced us to murder their kids’ has been used for a long time, for example to shield Israel from international criticism during bombing campaigns against Egypt in the early1970s and repeatedly in Lebanon.
As for Wiesel’s human shields accusation itself, western media reporting from inside Gaza during operation Protective Edge in August have pretty much discredited him. Were the four cousins playing soccer on the beach killed by Israeli naval gunfire human shields? What about the young children hit with a smart bomb while feeding the family ducks? Human shields too? And the 500 or so other dead children? Considering Israeli willingness to hit any target in Gaza from UN schools to water treatment plants to hospitals, why would Hamas bother to use kids as shields? The presence of civilians hasn’t deterred Israeli attacks in Gaza or elsewhere; good examples being the shelling of the UN compound at Qana in Lebanon and the bombing of Bahr el-Baqar primary school in Egypt
If Wiesel had a scintilla of humanity he would be honest enough to admit that Israel is killing children in Gaza because the Palestinians have chosen to resist Israeli ethnocide of which the long term siege of Gaza is an integral and essential part.
Wiesel has written repeatedly to defend Israeli government policy in Jerusalem. In 2001 Wiesel stated, “As for Jerusalem, would it not be better to resolve all other pending questions first and defer until a later time decisions about the fate of the holiest of cities?” More recently, in a 2010 letter to President Obama, Wiesel asking him not to “pressure” the Israelis to make concessions to the Palestinians in Jerusalem. Wiesel’s intent is clear: To buy time for the Israelis to finish their campaign of ethnic cleansing in the Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem. Wiesel, clearly a man not afraid to lie, even went so far as to claim,”… contrary to certain media reports, Jews, Christians and Muslims ARE allowed to build their homes anywhere in the city” to which Jerusalem resident and former MK Yossi Sarid replied, “Not only may an Arab not build “anywhere,” but he may thank his god if he is not evicted from his home and thrown out onto the street with his family and property…”
Wiesel states that Jerusalem “belongs to the Jewish people.” He asserts an exclusive Jewish claim to the city saying Jerusalem “is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture—and not a single time in the Koran,” as if this should somehow minimize Muslim veneration and attachment to the city. And he says nothing about the importance of Jerusalem to Christianity or that the place name appears 140 times in the New Testament. Wiesel may be right when he declared “No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.” But one may doubt he delivered the aphorism with self-criticism in mind.
Wiesel may also claim that “For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics,” but he knows better. The Israeli politicians who vastly expanded Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries after the 1967 war did so with politics and demographics in mind. And Wiesel himself is chairman of the advisory board of the settler run outfit Elad, whose current project is to drive Palestinians out of the Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan by fair means or foul.
Wiesel has been called a “contemptible poseur and windbag” and the “resident clown of the Holocaust circus.” Perhaps it would be more accurate to label him the personification of Nazi genocide in service of Zionism. And Zionism is the longest systematic violation of human rights in recent history. The ever so quotable Wiesel may proclaim “One person of integrity can make a difference,” but that person is not Elie Wiesel.
It has been more than three months since Israel halted its latest massacre in the Gaza Strip. The destruction wrought by Israel’s onslaught was nothing short of apocalyptic. “The destruction which I have seen coming here is beyond description”, said the UN Secretary General during his visit to Gaza. In a similar vein, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, stated, “I’ve never seen such massive destruction ever before.”
While many of the world’s crimes remain unknown and unacknowledged, the systematic and deliberate nature of Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians are both carefully documented and, by now, starting to enter the mainstream. Although the lofty rhetoric of the Israel Defense Force would have it that its most important mission is “saving human lives, both Israeli and Palestinian”, the human rights record and military doctrine of the Israeli army are too well-established for such slogans to be taken seriously.
According to UN figures, 2,192 Palestinians, including 1,523 civilians and 519 children, were killed during this summer’s operation. By the time the ceasefire was announced, there were “110,000 internally displaced persons living in emergency shelter and with host families. The UN estimated that about 18,000 housing units were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, leaving approximately 108,000 people homeless. A further 37,650 housing units were damaged.”
There is little doubt about the reason for this colossal death and destruction. The UN fact finding mission, headed by Richard Goldstone, concluded, that the Israeli offensive in 2008-2009 (Cast Lead) was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population”. According to the mission, Israel’s military doctrine involved the “application of disproportionate force and the causing of great damage and destruction to civilian property and infrastructure, and suffering to civilian populations.”
Significantly, the mission placed primary responsibility for the commission of these crimes, not on the individual soldiers that carried them out, but instead, on the political and military leadership of Israel. And as Israel, yet again in July-August 2014, in Operation Protective Edge, wielded its sledgehammer on the civilian population of Gaza, there’s no doubt that the mission’s conclusion is applicable this time around as well.
Indeed, UN Human Rights Chief Navi Pillay condemned Israel for its, as she put it, apparently deliberate violations of international law. Pillay referred to the findings of the previous UN mission of inquiry and noted, that “[t]he same pattern of attacks is occurring now on homes, schools, hospitals, UN premises.”
Although the death and destruction has ended for now, similar crimes are likely to continue, unless Israel’s impunity is properly challenged. As the Goldstone report noted, referring to crimes on both sides, “long-standing impunity has been a key factor in the perpetuation of violence in the region and in the reoccurrence of violations, as well as in the erosion of confidence among Palestinians and many Israelis concerning prospects for justice and a peaceful solution to the conflict”.
With an abundance of evidence of Israeli war crimes, the issue of criminal accountability for the Israeli leadership comes down to the political will of the international community to enforce the law.
Universal jurisdiction – a path towards accountability?
The prospects for the prosecution of Israel’s leadership in the International Criminal Court (ICC), however, appear bleak. The US is likely to veto any UN Security Council action on the matter. In addition, the Palestinian Authority is under pressure from the US and its allies not to invoke the jurisdiction of the ICC in order to prosecute crimes committed on Palestinian territory. The ICC’s prosecutor’s office has also been pressured not to open the case. However, even if the ICC fails to act, this need not be a nail in the coffin for efforts to pursue war crimes charges against the Israeli political and military leadership.
Many individual states have adopted the principle of universal jurisdiction and thus enabled their national courts to investigate and prosecute persons suspected of committing serious crimes regardless of their nationality, or where the crime was committed. This means that national authorities can step in to prosecute serious human rights violations anywhere in the world.
There are important precedents of how universal jurisdiction has been put into practice in the past. One of the major cases was against Chile’s former dictator Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006). In October 1998, a Spanish judge, Baltazar Garsón, issued an international arrest warrant for Pinochet for his responsibility for human rights violations during his years in office. Within a week, Pinochet was arrested in London.
In 2008, ten years after the indictment of Pinochet, a case against Alfredo Cristiani, the former president of El Salvador, and members of his military, was brought before a Spanish court. They were charged with the murder of six priests and human rights workers, their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador in 1989. The assassinations were carried out by the Atlacatl Battalion, a US-trained elite unit of the Salvadoran army.
Eventually, 20 Salvadoran soldiers were indicted for the murders.
There are other cases, including charges of genocide against Guatemalan strongman Rios Montt – also a US-ally, who president Ronald Reagan commended as “a man of great personal integrity and commitment”, and who, Reagan assured, wants to “improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.” Montt’s commitment to social justice was on display when his security and paramilitary forces slaughtered 166,000 Maya indians during the country’s 36-year-long civil war.
Israel has not remained immune from this practice either. In 2009, an arrest warrant for Israel’s former foreign minister Tzipi Livni was issued in London. Livni was acting foreign minister during Cast Lead in which Israeli forces killed roughly 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 400 children.
During Cast Lead, Livni boasted, that “Israel demonstrated real hooliganism during the course of the recent operation, which I demanded”. She also praised the army for “going wild” in Gaza. The British authorities, however, obstructed her arrest by granting her diplomatic immunity during her visit to the UK in 2011.
As Israel, during this summer, for the third time in five years, committed a massacre in Gaza, prompting worldwide condemnation, and with public opinion in Europe critical of Israel’s actions, it’s time for EU member states to heed the recommendation of the Goldstone report, and open “criminal investigations in national courts, using universal jurisdiction, where there is sufficient evidence of the commission of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Where so warranted following investigation, alleged perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted in accordance with internationally recognized standards of justice.”
It’s been nearly 40 years since what the American media called “The Fall of Saigon” and the Vietnamese referred to as the Liberation. I saw it then as the Fall of Washington.
The ghosts of Vietnam are back, thanks to two filmmakers with very different takes. The first is Rory Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy’s youngest daughter. Her one-sided account has already been nominated for an Oscar. The second is Tiana, an American of South Vietnamese origin, who made the film, From Hollywood To Hanoi, years ago to promote reconciliation between our two countries.
Tiana is finishing a movie called The General and Me, on her unlikely conversations (for someone from a virulently anti-communist family) with North Vietnam’s legendary and late General, Vo Nguyen Giap, a.k.a the “Red Napoleon,“ a.k.a the man whose military doctrines defeated the French Army, and later, the Pentagon’s brutal Vietnamization strategy.
Giap created the Vietnamese resistance Army at Ho Chi Minh’s request in 1944, and without training, became a military genius. Tiana has two other self-promoted US “geniuses” in her movie too: pathetic walk-ons by former US General William Westmoreland, and an arrogant ex-Defense Secretary, Robert MacNamara, who could not conceal his contempt for her.
Rory’s highly-hyped and well-funded movie depicts footage we have seen before of the hurried evacuation of US soldiers and some of their Vietnamese conscripts in a long and bloody war that was lost almost from its earliest days.
Rather than look at the reasons for that loss, Rory has, with support from HBO and PBS’s American Experience series, tried to present a heroic picture of Americans in their last days in Saigon, coping with a Mad Ambassador and in some cases rebelling against US policy.
(I have loved some of Rory’s work before, but this had ideological agenda written all over it.)
These two films, all these years later, mirror the cultural and political divides of the times with one film, in effect, rationalizing the war, and portraying the American military as compassionate, and the other, for one of the first times, offering views from the other side that Americans never heard.
Even if her Uncle JFK did escalate the war, despite his back and forth doubts, a member of the Kennedy Family is still treated as a cultural icon in a culture that can’t remember details of what happened yesterday, much less forty year ago. Rory’s work has been acclaimed; Tiana’s has not yet been seen. She labels the forgetting deliberate, what she calls, “Nam-Nesia.”
Gerald Perry writes in Arts Fuse:
“The mushy reviews of Last Days in Vietnam (a 94% Rotten Tomatoes approval rating) are extraordinarily similar. They praise filmmaker Rory Kennedy for documenting a forgotten moment of American history, the chaotic days in 1975 when the US raced to leave Saigon and South Vietnam steps ahead of the advancing North Vietnamese Army. And the critics are pumped up with pride at the stories Kennedy has uncovered of brave and noble American soldiers and a few anti-establishment American diplomats who helped evacuate many South Vietnamese–by boat, plane, and helicopter–who presumably would be enslaved or murdered by the Communist North Vietnamese.
What hardly anyone observed is that Kennedy, daughter of peacenik Robert Kennedy, is offering a flag-waving whitewash of the war in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese are characterized, with no exceptions, as Isis-like warriors murdering all their opposition on the way from Hanoi to Saigon. And, after entering Saigon, annihilating those who oppose them, or sending their enemies to re-education camps. The South Vietnamese? This amazed me: there is not any mention of the much-documented corruption of the various puppet governments, and of the South Vietnamese army as a coercive instrument of torture and killings. Each South Vietnamese ex-soldier who is interviewed is allowed to tell his shiny story, including a high-ranking officer. There’s no blood attached to any of them.”
This did not surprise me. In 1976, the anniversary of the American Revolution, I published a small book featuring the views of Vietnam’s top military strategists including General Vo Nguyen Giap called “How We Won The War.” It was based on articles I wrote in the aftermath of the defeat of the US–backed Saigon military in 1975. Predictably, it got no pickup. There were many post-mortems about what we did wrong but, few if any, about what they did right.
Surely, that story is historically more significant than how we cut tail and ran.
I wrote then:
“The American press was never much help in our efforts to find out more about those remarkable Vietnamese people who have now managed to out-organize, out fight, and defeat a succession of U.S. backed regimes. When the US media did recognize the other side’s existence, they did so with disdain, distortion and denigration… the U.S. never came to terms the fact it was defending a government which had no support and attempting to crush one that did.”
A group of LA-based film critics later wrote to PBS: “Rory Kennedy’s egregiously unbalanced, out-of-context, dubiously propagandistic Last Days in Vietnam is currently in theatrical release, a production of the PBS series, An American Experience. We are appalled by the extraordinarily one-sided nature of Kennedy’s rewrite of history that only shows the U.S. government’s and the Republic of Vietnam’s side of the story, and never offers the points of view of the millions of Americans who opposed the war and of those who fought on the side of the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam.”
So much for “balance!”
The protest was all for naught. Public Television retreated into its archive of knee-jerk form letters and responded to criticisms of one program with a defense that cited all the programs they ran, most decades old, while announcing that a new multi-million dollar series on Vietnam by their always well-funded doc superstar, Ken Burns, is in the works. Typical!
They avoided details like these:
Rory focused on the story of efforts to save allied officers and their families in a Saigon (“Arvin”) Army known for its corruption and brutality.
It cited atrocities allegedly committed by the Communists like the “Hue Massacre,” an event thoroughly investigated and exposed as false by US Vietnam Scholar Gareth Porter.
It cited violations of the Paris Peace agreement by the North without mentioning the many more egregious and concealed violations by the US-backed South Vietnamese forces.
It showed the madness and mania of US Ambassador Graham Martin as if he was an exception to a history of earlier US officials who escalated the war with massive casualties. It offered no historical context or background
It implied that all the people of Saigon would be butchered or imprisoned; that was not the case.
It referenced escaping ships racing to ConSon Island without mentioning that that Island off the coast of Saigon hosted, like Guantanamo does today, brutal prison camps filled with “tiger cages” where Vietnamese opponents of the military regime were kept, killed and tortured.
Perry asks:
“Where in this documentary are the anti-war voices of those who were American soldiers in Vietnam and became disillusioned by the terrible things we did there? Who in this film speaks of our random bombing of North Vietnam? Of the massacre at My Lai? And for the CIA, where is mention of the heinous tortures of South Vietnamese under CIA director William Colby? As for Kissinger, it’s madly frustrating to see his self-serving rhetoric go completely unchallenged. Where are you, Errol Morris, when needed? Instead, the world’s number one war criminal at large (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Chile, etc.) is a welcome and honored guest to this documentary commissioned by PBS’s American Experience.”
And, on and on!
It’s been 40 years. What have we learned? The Obama Administration, aided by our Secretary of State, a Vietnamese speaker no less, named John Kerry, once the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, had turned into an apologist for the American role in the war, and an arms salesman to Vietnam which fears the Chinese today more than the Americans.
Whose voice should we listen to? Rory Kennedy with her slick and costly archive-footage based mockumentary of history, or Tiana who is struggling to bring Vietnamese voices and a deliberately buried history to life?
Why are these Vietnam films always—“AAU—all About Us?”
Berlin – The second largest German financial institution, Commerzbank AG, was fined by the US government for a billion dollars for conducting business with Cuba.
The Financial Times said this Tuesday that the German company is headquartered in Frankfurt and is the second largest in the country after the Deutsche Bank, which is listed as the fifth most powerful bank in the world.
Commerzbank AG is obliged to disburse a penalty of one billion dollars, according to US provisions establishing penalties for bank agents having made transactions linked to Cuba through US branches.
According to the Financial Times, the German institution agreed last September to pay 650 million dollars after being accused of conducting financial transactions with Cuba, Iran, Sudan and other countries sanctioned by the United States.
The report adds that Washington launched a full-scale investigation against European banks, potential violators of the sanctions regime.
Some of the European banks investigated by the United States are the German Deutsche Bank, the French Crédit Agricole and Société Générale of France, and the Italian UniCredit SpA.
The New York Times published on July 9 that the Treasury Department fined Commerzbank more than 500 million dollars for making transfers through its subsidiaries toward Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Myanmar, Iran and Sudan.
Havana constantly denounces United States’ extraterritorial sanctions against it, with economic entities from almost all over the world joining the Cuban protest.
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