List of Atrocities committed by US authorities

Definition: An extremely wicked or cruel act, typically one involving physical violence or injury.

“If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don’t care for human beings.” - Nelson Mandela

Imperialism
- Middle East
- Western hemisphere
- Africa
- Asia
- Europe
Internal Repression
Sources / Starting points

Notes :

Try to convey a sense of moral outrage.
This is a living document, it will be updated as new atrocities pour in.
Feel free to make pull requests (changes), or fork it if you’d like to make your own versions.
Name the specific source and recipient of the atrocity, and provide a source for the claim.
Try to do chronologically from recent to past; it should seem like a running log.

tradução portuguesa

Imperialism

The US empire currently maintains an imperialist network of over 800 military bases in 70 countries. (For comparison, all other countries combined have only 30 bases)
The US has always been in a state of perpetual war; as of 2021, it has been at war 225 / 243 years of its existence.

Middle East

On February 25th, 2021, in his first month in office, Biden bombs Syria, killing at least 22 people. Pentagon press secretary John Kirby called the bombing “proportionate” and “defensive.” 2
On November 27th, 2020, Israel assassinated Iranian nuclear physicist Moshen Fakhrizadeh via a satellite controlled vehicle-mounted machine gun, which then self-detonated after killing him. The attack was likely commited by Israel with US help and foreknowledge.
In 2020, former US drone operator Brandon Bryant revealed the full extent of his work piloting drones in Afghanistan from his workspace near Las Vegas, from 2006-2011. He reached his breaking point with the US military after killing a child in Afghanistan that his superiors told him was “a dog.” He recalls the moment: After firing a Hellfire missile at a building containing his target, he saw a child exit the building just as the missile struck. When he alerted his superiors about the situation after reviewing the tape, he was told “it was a f***ing dog, drop it.” During his time in the Air Force, Mr Bryant estimates he contributed directly to killing 13 people himself and says his squadron fired on 1,626 targets including women and children. Mr Bryant quit the military and began speaking out against the drone program, and calls the US worse than nazis.
On January 2nd, 2020, President Donald Trump ordered the drone assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani 2, in a blatant act of war against Iran. Soleimani was a beloved figure to the Iranian people, his death sending shockwaves among residents, and a 3-day national mourning period was declared. Hillary Mann Leverett, a former White House National Security official, said the killing of Soleimani was a “declaration of war” on Iran, and is “equivalent to the Iranians assassinating the US defence secretary”. The drone attack was part of several targeted US airstrikes, and comes in the wake of turmoil following another series of US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria which killed 25 members of the Iraqi Kataib Hezbollah militia, after which outraged Iraqi protesters surrounded the US embassy in Baghdad. In response, the US blamed “Iranian infiltrators” for the embassy attack, and deployed an additional 750 troops, bolstering the 14k troops currently stationed in ~20 military bases surrounding Iran. Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi militia commander, was also killed in a pre-dawn raid on the same day. That evening, another US airstrike in Iraq killed 6 people.
In September 2019, the US killed at least 30 pine nut farmers, and injured 40 others via a drone attack in the nangarhar province in Afghanistan. Malik Rahat Gul, a tribal elder in Wazir Tangi, said the air raid happened at a time when tired workers, mainly daily wage earners, had gathered near their tent after harvesting pine nuts in a field nearby. “The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them”. This marks the 18th year of war in Afghanistan.
In early 2018, US Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher stabbed a defenseless teenage captive to death in Iraq. According to two SEAL witnesses, Gallagher said over the radio “he’s mine” and walked up to the medic and prisoner, and without saying a word, killed the prisoner by stabbing him repeatedly with his hunting knife. Gallagher and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Jake Portier, then posed for photographs of them standing over the body with some other nearby SEALs. Gallagher then text messaged a friend in California a picture himself holding the dead captive’s head by the hair with the explanation “Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife.” After he was imprisoned, Gallagher’s other crimes came to light: fellow soldiers said they witnessed Gallagher shooting and killing an unarmed old man in a white robe, as well as a young girl walking with other girls. Gallagher boasted that he averaged three kills a day over 80 days, including four women. In video interviews with investigators, multiple SEALs described how he would go on solo “gun runs,” emptying loads of heavy machine gun fire into neighborhoods with no apparent targets. “I think he just wants to kill anybody he can,” Corey Scott, a medic from the platoon, told Navy investigators. After his case went public, it became a conservative rallying cry: A website soliciting donations for his defense raised > $375k, and a prominent veterans’ apparel maker sold “Free Eddie” T-shirts. Spurred on by his family, 40 Republican members of Congress signed a letter in March calling for the Navy to free him, and soon after, US President Trump had him released from prison to house arrest. In July, 2019, he was acquitted of all charges. Gallagher was one of three military personnel accused or convicted of war crimes on whose behalf Trump had intervened to pardon or promote. Trump told a rally audience days after his intervention, “I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state.” Gallagher has now started a chain of companies selling clothing and nutritional supplements.
On April 14, 2018, the US, UK, and France launched 100 more missiles at 3 different targets in Syria, again claiming that the Syrian government used chemical attacks against its own citizens in douma as justification. On 10 April, the Syrian government again invited the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to send a team to investigate the sites of the alleged attacks. Trump, Macron, and May have all issued statements saying that this is not an intervention in the Syrian civil war. 1. In a leaked email in Nov, 2019, an OPCW whistleblower stated that the US fabricated the evidence, and used it justify the air-strike. 2
Starting in June 2017, photos and videos from Syrian civilians in Raqqa showed that the US-backed coalition in Syria was illegally using white phosphorus in civilian areas. White phosphorus can burn human flesh down to the bone, and wounds can reignite up to days later. “No matter how white phosphorus is used, it poses a high risk of horrific and long-lasting harm in crowded cities like Raqqa and Mosul and any other areas with concentrations of civilians,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch. One attack on an internet cafe killed at least 20 civilians, while other deaths are still being confirmed. One of those civilians killed was in the process of sending a report to Humans Rights Watch, when the cafe was struck. The US killed 273 syrian civilians in April, slightly more than the number killed by ISIS. A US attack in July killed another 50 civilians. In August, the US killed another 60+ civilians. On May 17th, 2020, the US firebombed over 200 acres of wheat fields in Syria, leaving many food insecure. 1,2,3
On April 4th, 2017, following the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, Trump ordered an airstrike of 59 tomahawk cruise missiles (worth $70 million) fired at the Shayrat air base in Syria (one that Trump claims is the source of the chemical attack) in the 2017 Shayrat Missile Strike. This is the first attack by the US directly targeting Ba’athist Syrian government forces, who are closely allied with Russia. Russian Prime Minister Dimitry Medvedev said the attack brought the U.S. “within an inch” of clashing with the Russian military, and could’ve sparked a nuclear war. The attack was praised by US politicians on both sides of the aisle, as well >30 countries. Over 700 children have been killed US coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since August 2014. The US conducted another airstrike against Syria on June 7th, 2017.1
On March 21st, 2017, A US airstrike killed at least 30 Syrian civilians in an airstrike on a school in the Raqqa province. The week before, 49 people were killed when US warplanes fired on a target in in the 2017 al-Jinah airstrike, a village in western Aleppo province. US officials said the attack had hit a building where al-Qaeda operatives were meeting, but residents said the warplanes had struck a mosque where hundreds of people had gathered for a weekly religious meeting. 1
On March 17th, 2017, A US airstrike killed ~112 civilians in Mosul, Iraq. In response, US Defense Secretary James Mattis said, “There is no military force in the world that is proven more sensitive to civilian casualties.” 1
On February 15th, 2017, US-backed Saudi planes bombed a funeral in Yemen, killing 5 women and wounding dozens more. In the 2015 - Present Yemeni Civil War, 16,200 people have been killed including 10,000 civilians, 3 million have been displaced and left homeless, and over 200,000 people are facing shortages of food, water and medicine. The US has used drone bombers in Yemen, and has supported Saudi interests in the region, with military contracts providing weapons and planes. The US has weapons contracts with Saudi Arabia valuing over $110 billion. In August 2018, Saudi planes bombed a school bus, killing 50, including 40 children, and wounding another 80.1, 2, 3
In 2010, President Obama directed the CIA to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, despite the fact that he had never been charged with any crime, killing him with a September, 2011 drone strike. Two weeks later, a separate CIA drone strike in Yemen killed his 16-year-old American-born son, Abdulrahman, along with the boy’s 17-year-old cousin and several other innocent Yemenis. In January 2017, Trump ordered a SEAL strike, and reports from Yemen quickly surfaced that 30 people were killed, including 10 women and children. Among the dead: the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar Awlaki, sister of the 16 year old killed by Obama. 1
In 2016, the US under Obama dropped 26,171 bombs in the Middle East and North Africa, up 3000 from the previous year. The countries bombed include Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia. He authorized 10 times more drone strikes than George W Bush. 1
In January 2015, the US killed 13-year-old Mohammed Tuaiman in Yemen with a drone strike. A month earlier, the guardian interviewed him, and he was quoted as saying: ““A lot of the kids in this area wake up from sleeping because of nightmares from them and some now have mental problems. They turned our area into hell and continuous horror, day and night, we even dream of them in our sleep…In their eyes, we don’t deserve to live like people in the rest of the world and we don’t have feelings or emotions or cry or feel pain like all the other humans around the world.” In 2011 an unmanned combat drone killed his father and teenage brother as they were out herding the family’s camels. 1
Since 2013, The US has intervened militarily in the ongoing Syrian Civil War, with airstrikes, naval bombardments, and funding and training Syrian Islamic and secular insurgents fighting to topple the Syrian government. Many have labeled the struggle as a proxy war between US and Russian interests in the Middle East, in a highly unstable region. Between 500-700 civilians have been killed by coalition airstrikes, and over 50,000 ISIL militants and pro-bashad fighters have been killed. 1
From 2011 up to the present day, the US ousted Mummar Gaddafi in Libya, and began conducting an extensive bombing campaign (>110 tomahawk cruise missiles) in the Libyan Civil Wars of 2011 and 2014. This includes 7,700 air strikes, resulting in 30,000 -100,000 deaths. Loyalist towns were bombed to rubble and ethnically cleansed, and the country is in chaos as Western-trained and armed Islamist militias seize territory and oil facilities and vie for power. The Misrata militia, trained and armed by Western special forces, is one of the most violent and powerful in the world.1 The country has since collapsed into a chaos of child soldiers, slavery, and violence between extremist groups, a haunting repetition of what US imperialism has left in its wake in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. An interview with Gaddafi’s former spokesman about the US overthrow of Libya..
US drone operator turned whistleblower Brandon Bryant told stories about his time as a drone operator in Afghanistan from 2006-2011. He estimates that he contributed directly to killing 13 people himself and says his squadron fired on 1,626 targets including women and children. He tells of one instance of killing a child, with his superiors telling him “it was a f** dog, drop it”. “That image on the screen is still in my head. Whenever I think about it, it still hurts me,” Mr Bryant said. “When I pulled the trigger, I knew that it was wrong. When the missile struck I knew in my soul I had become a murderer.” He tells of how his superiors would ridicule, punish, and threaten legal action against anyone who had misgivings about their orders. He believes that the US military is “worse than the nazis.”
In 2010, Chelsea Manning’s leak of the Iraq War Logs revealed US army reports on civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan; 66,081 out of 109,000 recorded deaths were civilians. They show that US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers, and that US troops killed almost 700 civilians for coming too close to checkpoints, including pregnant women and the mentally ill, and countless other atrocities.1
From 2000 up to the present day, the US has been carrying out a campaign of drone strikes and asassinations in the Middle East and Africa, including Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, resulting in thousands of civilian deaths, including women, children, and US citizens. 1 Drone strikes are used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill people the Obama administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without indictment or trial — worthy of execution. Drone strike targets are usually pinpointed through cell phone usage. The Obama asassination complex is detailed in the drone papers.
On 3 October 2015, a United States Air Force AC-130U gunship attacked and killed 42 people and wounded 30 more in the Kunduz Trauma Centre operated by Doctors Without Borders, in northern Afghanistan. The airstrike constitutes a war crime (attacks on hospitals are considered war crimes), and is the first instance of one Nobel peace prize winner (Obama) bombing and killing another (Doctors without borders). CNN and the New York Times deliberately obscured the US’s responsibility for the bombing, with the headline, “US is blamed after bomb hits afghan hospital”. 1,2
On 22 August 2008, A US airstrike killed ~90 civilians, mostly children, in the village of Azizabad, Afghanistan. 1
On July 6 2008, the US bombed a wedding party and killed 47 Afghan civilians in the Haska Meyna Wedding party airstrike. The first bomb hit a group of children who were ahead of the main procession, killing them instantly. A few minutes later, the aircraft returned and dropped a second bomb in the center of the group, killing a large number of women. The bride and two girls survived the second bomb, but were killed by a third bomb while trying to escape from the area. Hajj Khan, one of four elderly men who were escorting the party, stated that his grandson was killed and that there were body parts everywhere. 1
On September 16, 2007, employees of Blackwater (since renamed Academi), a private military company, killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20 more in the Nisour Square massacre, revealing a wide-spread policy to employ and enable private security firms to use deadly force. 1
On July 12, 2007, US AH-64 Apache helicopters bombed and killed ~15 Iraqi civilians, including two reuters journalists, and wounding two children, in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, New Baghdad. The attacks received worldwide coverage following the leaking of 39 minutes of classified gunsight footage, in a video released by wikileaks titled collateral murder. 22-year-old American Army intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley Manning) was arrested for leaking the video, along with a video of another airstrike and around 260,000 diplomatic cables, to WikiLeaks. She was being held in prison under the Espionage act, a law used to jail dissidents, intended to prohibit any interference with military operations, until early 2017. 1 On March 8, 2019, Manning was held in contempt of court by a United States District Court judge for refusing to testify to a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Manning said she was objecting to the “secrecy of the grand jury process”. Except for a brief period of release between May 9 and May 16, she continues to be held in the Alexandria City Jail until she agrees to testify. Julian Assange, the founder of wikileaks, has also been the target of the CIA, who (aided by a spanish security firm) continually spied on him while in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.
On May 9, 2006, U.S. troops executed 3 male Iraqi detainees at the Muthana Chemical Complex, called the Iron Triangle Murders.1
On April 26, 2006 in the Hamdania incident, US troops killed an unarmed civilian, staging a fake firefight to cover it up. Members of the squad shot the stolen AK-47 rifle into the air to make it sound like a firefight was occurring, and after the Iraqi man was dead, the Marines scattered the expended AK-47 brass next to the body, removed the plastic restraints, and placed the rifle next to the body.1
On March 15, 2006, 11 Iraqi civilians were bound and executed by US troops in the Ishaqi incident. 1
On March 12, 2006, US Soldiers gang raped and killed a 14-year-old Iraqi girl named Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, and murdered her parents, and her six year old sister, in the Mahmudiyah rape and killings. 1
Beginning in 2005, the U.S. government secretly encouraged and advised a Pakistani Balochi militant group named Jundullah that is responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran.[85] ABC News learned from tribal sources that money for Jundullah was routed to the group through Iranian exiles. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture,” according to Professor Vali Nasr.[87] U.S. intelligence sources later claimed that the orchestration of Jundallah operations was, in actuality, an Israeli Mossad false flag operation that Israeli agents disguised to make it appear to be the work of American intelligence.[90]
On November 19, 2005, a group of US marines killed 24 unarmed men, women and children in the city of Haditha in Western Iraq. Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich admitted to telling his men to “shoot first and ask questions later”. The eight marines were found not guilty of voluntary manslaughter. 1
In 2004, accounts of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, including torture (whitewashed as enhanced interrogation techniques), rape, sodomy, and homicide of prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to public attention, revealing a systemic policy of torture during the Iraq war, primarily perpetrated by US Military police, and the CIA. Many of the torture techniques used were developed at Guantánamo detention centre, including prolonged isolation; sensory deprivation to induce psychosis, a sleep deprivation program whereby people were moved from cell to cell every few hours so they couldn’t sleep for days, weeks, even months, short-shackling in painful positions; nudity; extreme use of heat and cold; the use of loud music and noise and preying on phobias. Many, such as Manadel al-Jamadi, were tortured to death. 1
On May 20, 2004, A US airstrike killed 42 civilians attending a wedding, in the Mukaradeeb wedding party massacre. 1
On April 14, 2004, Lieutenant Ilario Pantano of the United States Marine Corps, killed two unarmed captives. Lieutenant Pantano claimed that the captives had advanced on him in a threatening manner. All charges were dropped, and he received an honorable discharge. 1
In April, 2004, the US military lied to the family of Pat Tillman, a famous American athlete turned soldier, surrounding his death by friendly fire, and used a fake heroic story about his death as a recruiting poster. The jingoistic media coverage was created by the spin of several top US generals and Bush administration officials, who dictated a memo about how best to handle the embarrassing death of such a high profile soldier. This is chronicled in the documentary, A Tillman Story. 1
Starting with the Iraq war, the US increasingly began contracting private mercenary companies to do military operations. These private companies are authorized by the US to use lethal force. Blackwater, one such company known for its ruthless reputation for killing civilians, has been involved in various scandals, such as in Fallujah, and Nisour square. Its founder, Erik Prince, has close ties to the Trump administration. 1
On December 10, 2002, US military police, aided by the CIA, tortured and killed Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver, at Baghram prison, highlighting a scandal of torture and murder at the prison. Dilawar was chained to the ceiling of his cell, and suspended by his wrists for four days. His arms became dislocated from their sockets, and flapped around limplywhenever guards collected him for interrogation. During his detention, Dilawar’s legs were beaten to a pulp. They would have had to have been amputated because damage was so severe. The murder and US torture complex is chronicled in the 2007 documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. 1
Since 2001, many enemy combatants have been held at the Guantanamo bay detention camp, a prison camp in Cuba in which suspected enemies are jailed indefinitely without trial. Several inmates have been severely tortured, leading much of the world to decry its existence as a human rights abuse. The military acts as interrogators, prosecutors and defense counsel, judges, and when death sentences are imposed, as executioners. All trials are held in private. Trump has vowed to keep the prison open, saying, “[…] I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding… Don’t tell me it doesn’t work—torture works… if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing to us.” At least 108 detainees have died while in US custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo bay, with at least 20 being declared by the Army as murder.1,2
The attacks precipitated the signing into law in 2001 of the Patriot Act, which expanded the powers of the NSA to perform mass surveillance, allowed indefinite detention of immigrants, allowed warrant-less searching of phone and email records without a court order, . Thousands of people were jailed, and questioned under the new power the act granted to law enforcement agencies. Susan Lindauer, a congressional staffer turned activist, imprisoned from 2005-09 for violating the “acting as an agent of a foreign government” provision of the patriot act; the charges were later dropped after it was discovered no evidence ever existed. 1
The September 11th 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, provoked an international military campaign of Middle East imperialism known as The War on Terror. Conflicts include the Nato led involvement in Afghanistan (2001–2014), the Insurgency in Yemen (1992–2015), the Iraq War (2003–2011), the War in North-West Pakistan (2004–present), and the International campaign against ISIL (2014–present). The enemy combatants of the war have mostly been people of the Middle East. Casualty numbers are in the millions, detailed here. 1 In 2021, when confronted about the million Iraqi civilians killed, former president G.W. Bush laughed.
1991, the U.S. bombed the Amiriya civilian air raid shelter in Iraq, which was sheltering a thousand sleeping civilians, massacring 408 Iraqi civilians (261 women and 52 children).
Approximately 250,000[5] of the 697,000 U.S. veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf War are afflicted with an enduring chronic multi-symptom illness called Gulf War Syndrome. From 1995 to 2005, the health of combat veterans worsened in comparison with nondeployed veterans, with the onset of more new chronic diseases, functional impairment, repeated clinic visits and hospitalizations, chronic fatigue syndrome-like illness, posttraumatic stress disorder, and greater persistence of adverse health incidents.[7]. Suggested causes have included depleted uranium, sarin gas, smoke from burning oil wells, vaccinations, combat stress and psychological factors.1
In 1990, The U.S. liberates Kuwait from Iraq in the Gulf War. Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, was formerly backed by the US when his regime invaded Iran in 1980, and before that was hired by the CIA in a botched assassination attempt on the then Iraqi president. During this costly eight-year war, the CIA built up Hussein’s forces with sophisticated arms, intelligence, training and financial backing, cementing Hussein’s power at home, and allowing him to crush the many internal rebellions that erupted from time to time, sometimes with poison gas. 20,000–35,000 Iraqis were killed in the Gulf War, along with 75,000+ wounded. A vindictive U.N. embargo followed that several years later still denied Iraq the technological resources to recover its food production, medical services, and sanitation facilities. As late as 1993, CNN reported that nearly 300,000 Iraqi children were suffering from malnutrition. Deaths exceeded the normal rate by 125,000 yearly, mostly affecting ‘the poor, their infants, children, chronically ill, and elderly’. Iraqi citizens, who previously had enjoyed a decent living standard, were reduced to destitution.1
In 1988, a US navy cruise missile shot down Iran Flight 655, killing its 290 civilian passengers. In 1996 As part of the settlement, the US did not admit legal liability or formally apologize to Iran but agreed to pay on an ex gratia basis $61.8 million. 1,2
In 1980, the US helped Turkish armed forces in the 1980 Turkish coup d’état, including supplying them with American-made Sikorski helicopters. 1
In 1980, the US funded and sold weapons to both sides in the Iran-Iraq War, hoping to destabilize the region and create a puppet regime favorable to US interests. Over 500,000 people died in the conflict. 1
From 1979-89, the CIA begins supplying arms and money ($630 million per year by 1987, and a total of 5-6 Billion USD) to factions fighting against the soviets in their invasion of afghanistan, In what was known as Operation Cyclone. the U.S. government secretly provided weapons and funding for the Mujahadin Islamic guerillas of Afghanistan fighting to overthrow the Afghan government and the Soviet military forces that supported it. Supplies were channeled through the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan.[44][45][46]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change#cite_note-46) Although Operation Cyclone officially ended in 1989 with the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, U.S. government funding for the Mujahadin continued through 1992. Fanatical extremists now possess state-of-the-art weaponry, including [Sheik Abdel Rahman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Abdel-Rahman), and [Osama Bin Laden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden), who were later responsible for the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center bombings in New York. The architect of the war, Zbigniew Brzezinski, an advisor to president carter, admitted in a 1998 interview with the Parisian publication Le Novel Observateur, confirmed that Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the Mujahadin against the soviet-supported Kabul government, before the soviet invasion. [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone), [2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan) In 2010 Hillary Clinton commented on how the house majority democrats, in coalition with then president Reagan, thought that “it was a pretty good idea” to create Al-Qaeda in order to combat the Soviet Union.
Since the 1960s, the US has given immense economic and military aid to Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has taken 100,000 - 200,000 lives. The US has used its UN veto power to block a two-state solution countless times. 1
In 1958, Eisenhower authorized Operation Blue Bat, an invasion of 14,000 US troops in the ongoing civil war in Lebanon. This was the first application of the Eisenhower Doctrine under which the U.S. announced that it would intervene to protect regimes it considered threatened by international communism. The goal of the operation was to bolster the pro-Western Lebanese government of President Camille Chamoun against internal opposition and threats from Syria and Egypt. 1
In 1953, the CIA in Iran overthrows the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in a military coup, after he threatened to nationalize British oil. The CIA replaces him with a dictator, the Shah of Iran, whose secret police, SAVAK, is as brutal as the Gestapo. After the initial coup failed and the Shah and his family fled to Italy, the CIA payed millions of dollars to bribe military officers and pay gangsters to unleash violence in the streets of Tehran. 1
In 1949, the US aided a Syrian coup d’état. The democratically elected government of Shukri al-Quwatli was overthrown by a junta led by the Syrian Army chief of staff at the time, Husni al-Za’im,who became President of Syria on 11 April 1949. The exact nature of US involvement in that coup is still highly controversial. However, it is well documented that the construction of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, which had been held up in the Syrian parliament, was approved by Za’im just over a month after the coup.1

Western hemisphere

TODO add cuba, twitter stuff. Add additional trump sanctions, can’t trade with VZ
In March 2020, the US placed a $15M dollar bounty on the head of the Venezuelan president, Maduro. This is the first time the US has publicly put a bounty on a ruling head of state, accusing Maduro and his government of drug trafficking, and harboring terrorists. The US Drug Enforcement agency itself states that less than 7% of drug movement through south america transits from Venezuela: 93% of cocaine comes from Columbia, a staunch US ally, 4% from Peru, and 3% from Unknown. 2 The US has historically been closely allied with South American drug traffickers, like Honduras’s US-Backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez, Panamanian President Manuel Noriega, The Contras, and many more. The US-appointed “president of Venezuela”, Juan Guaido, is closely connected to the Columbian cartel Los Rastrojos, a vicious cartel responsible for dozens of kidnappings and murders in Tachira VZ.
On Nov 10, 2019, newly re-elected Bolivian President Evo Morales was forced to resign by the Bolivian military as part of a US-backed right-wing coup. Right-wing violence in the wake of Evo’s re-election ( a landslide victory of > 10% the next runner ) included the kidnapping of Evo’s brother and sister, cutting the hair of a leftist mayor, painting her red and parading her down the street, forcing her resignation, burning the town hall, the firebombing of several leftist government members’ houses, and street clashes in Cochabamba, Potosi, and La paz resulting in deaths and injuries. The Radio Education Network of Bolivia (Erbol) has released 16 recordings, 2, which uncover talks between U.S. officials, Bolivian opponents, and former military, outlining the coup strategy. In a three-part plan outlined by U.S. officials, former President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (2002-2003) is mentioned. Lozada had Carlos Mesa (the principal opponent of Morales in the last election) as his vice-president and currently lives in the U.S. U.S. senators Bob Menendez, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio are some of the American officials mentioned in the audios, linked to the Bolivian opposition planning a coup against President Evo Morales. A Wikileaks cable confirmed that the US was using Mesa to undermine Evo for years. The US government (through USAID) spent over $97M dollars to try to topple Morales and fund separatists in his first 7 years in office. World leaders have condemned the coup. The primary reason for the coup: a fight over Bolivia’s lithium, a crucial mineral required for smartphone and electric car batteries. Bolivia is estimated to have over 70% of the world’s lithium reserves, and was on the cusp of completing a deal with China and kicking out several French, US, and South Korea mining firms. Over the next few days, over 68k fake twitter accounts were created supporting the coup, many coming from airforce bases in Virginia. Debunking US propaganda on Bolivia.
In 2017, Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, leaving 3.4 million without electricity and fuel, and causing an estimated $50 Billion in damage. 55% of Puerto Ricans have no potable water, in one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades. In marked contrast to the initial relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, on September 22 the only signs of relief efforts were beleaguered Puerto Rican government employees. The US response has been dismal, leading many to believe that the US prefers a decapitalized Puerto Rico. On September 29, San Juan Mayor Cruz held a press conference to plead for aid and to highlight failures by FEMA, saying, “This is what we got last night. Four pallets of water, three pallets of meals, and 12 pallets of infant food — which, I gave them to the people of Comerío, where people are drinking off a creek. So I am done being polite. I am done being politically correct. I am mad as hell.” Cruz continued. “So I am asking the members of the press, to send a mayday call all over the world. We are dying here… And if it doesn’t stop, and if we don’t get the food and the water into people’s hands, what we are going to see is something close to a genocide.” In response President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter: “Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help.” 1
Following a series of terrorist attacks against Cuba (such as the bombing of Cuban commercial flight 455, that originated from anti-Castro Cuban exile groups in the US, such as Alpha 66, the F4 Commandos, the Cuban American National Foundation, and Brothers to the Rescue), the Cuban government sent spies to infiltrate these insurgent groups operating in Miami. Afterwards, the Cuban government then provided 175 pages of documents to FBI agents investigating Posada Carriles’s (a former CIA operative) role in the 1997 terrorist bombings in Havana, but the FBI failed to use the evidence to follow up on Posada. Instead, they used it to uncover and imprison the Cuban spies, known as the Cuban Five. [18][19]. The Cuban Five said they were spying on Miami’s Cuban exile community, not the US government. They were imprisoned from 1998, until their eventual release via a prisoner swap in 2014. The terrorist bomber Posada Carriles (who admitted to planning 6 bombings of Havana Hotels and Restaurants) lived in Miami and was safeguarded by the US government until his death in 2018. 2
In 2009, a coup in Honduras has led to severe repression and death squad murders of political opponents, union organizers and journalists. At the time of the coup, U.S. officials denied any role in the coup and used semantics to avoid cutting off U.S. military aid as required under U.S. law. But two Wikileaks cables revealed that the U.S. Embassy, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was the main power broker in managing the aftermath of the coup and forming a government that is now repressing and murdering its people, including popular leader Berta Cáceres. The two men who killed Berta Cáceres were trained in the US. A former soldier with the US-trained special forces units of the Honduran military asserted that Caceres’ name was included on a hitlist distributed to them months before her assassination.[66] According to a February 2017 investigation by The Guardian, court papers purport to show that three of the eight people arrested in connection with the assassination are linked to the US-trained elite troops. Two of them, Maj Mariano Díaz and Lt Douglas Giovanny Bustillo, received military training in the US.1,2
In 1996, investigative journalist Gary Webb exposed a CIA-run business of selling cocaine produced in Nicaragua, to help fund the anti-communist Contras in their fight against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. These drugs were mostly sold to black communities in California, and helped spark the Crack epidemic. Several of the US dealers such as such as Ross and Oscar Danilo Blandon, were found to have CIA and DEA ties. Webb’s reports were suppressed in the news media. In 1997, Webb stated: “If we had met five years ago, you wouldn’t have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me … And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job … The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.” In 2004, Webb was found dead in his home, shot in the back of the head twice. His death was ruled a suicide.
In 1990 in Haiti, Competing against 10 comparatively wealthy white candidates, leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide captures 68 percent of the vote. A few months later, the CIA-backed military deposes him in a coup. More military dictators brutalize the country, as thousands of Haitian refugees escape the turmoil in barely seaworthy boats. The CIA “paid key members of the coup regime forces, identified as drug traffickers, for information from the mid-1980s at least until the coup.”1 Coup leaders Cédras and François had received military training in the United States. As popular opinion calls for Aristide’s return, the CIA begins a disinformation campaign painting the courageous priest as mentally unstable.1
In 1989, the U.S. invades Panama with 26k troops to overthrow a dictator of its own making, General Manuel Noriega, with the stated goal of “Defending democracy and human rights in Panama”. Noriega had been on the CIA’s payroll since 1966, collecting at least $100,000 per year from the U.S. Treasury. As he rose to be the de facto ruler of Panama, he became even more valuable to the CIA, reporting on meetings with Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and supporting U.S. covert wars in Central America, and had been transporting drugs with the CIA’s knowledge since 1972. By the late 80s, Noriega’s growing independence and intransigence had angered Washington. The UN human rights commission estimates that around 4,000 people were killed by US troops (The US claims only 250 people). 1 The US military bombed urban neighborhoods, executed hundreds of civilians, and even tested new experimental weapons. The Panama invasion violates both the UN and OAS charter, which prohibits the invasions of a sovereign country or their territorial integrity, as well as the Geneva conventions. All the major US media supported the invasion: the New York Times, Wallstreet Journal, The Washington Post, the LA times, CBS, and NBC. Michael Parenti observes in his observation of media complicity with the invasion: “The media is not favorable to corporate america, they are corporate america.” The UN voted on Dec 29th 1989 overwhelming to condemn the invasion as a “flagrant violation of international law”. No US soldier or general has been tried for these war crimes, despite the UN commission, or the dozens of eyewitness accounts by Panamanians. These atrocities are chronicled in the documentary The Panama Deception.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. supplied military equipment and substantial aid for the Columbian government in their civil war to fight against FARC, known as Plan Columbia. The weapons, ostensibly delivered for use against narcotics traffickers, was being used by the Colombian military to commit abuses in the name of “counter-insurgency.” One estimate is that 67,000 deaths have occurred from the 1960s to recent years due to support by the U.S. of Colombian state terrorism. Another 1994 Amnesty International report, stated that more than 20,000 people were killed for political reasons in Colombia since 1986, mainly by the military and its paramilitary allies.
In 1987, the former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, John Stockwell, testified to Congress and told a grisly tale of US involvement on behalf of business interests in Latin America. He cited covert operations in Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. Over the course of his testimony, he estimated that given the bombings of water supplies and other essential infrastructure, the invasions, the coups, that the United States, on its quest for empire, has been responsible for 6,000,000 deaths. The CIA retaliated by suing him into bankruptcy. 1
From 1982-89, The U.S. government attempted to topple the government of Nicaragua by secretly arming, training and funding the Contras, a terrorist group based in Honduras that was created to sabotage Nicaragua and to destabilize the Nicaraguan government.As part of the training, the CIA distributed a detailed “terror manual” entitled “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla War,” which instructed the Contras, among other things, on how to blow up public buildings, to assassinate judges, to create martyrs, and to blackmail ordinary citizens. In 1986, the Nicaraguan government under the Sandinistas shoots down a C-123 transport plane carrying military supplies to the Contras. The lone survivor, Eugene Hasenfus, turns out to be a CIA employee, as are the two dead pilots, contradicting Reagan’s claims that the US was not aiding the contras. 1
In the 1980s the CIA supported Battalion 316, a torture/assassination squad in Honduras, which kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of its citizens. Battalion 316 used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations , and prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves. Declassified documents and other sources show that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy knew of numerous crimes, including murder and torture, yet continued to support Battalion 316 and collaborate with its leaders. These constitute war crimes.1
In 1981, the CIA assassinated Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos via a plane crash, over the Carter-Torrijos treaty, which would return sovereignty of the Panama canal by 1999, and force a closure of all 26 US bases in Panama by 2000, and for his support of the Sandinistas. The US denies the assassination, but refused to allow evidence to be submitted as it would violate the Classified Information Procedures Act.
In 1981, in an act of biological warfare, the US released a strain of Dengue fever into Cuba, developed at Fort Dietrich. A total of 320k people were infected, 158 people died, including 101 children under the age of 15.
In 1980, In El Salvador, The Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, pleads with President Carter to stop aiding the military government slaughtering his people. Carter refuses. Right-wing leader Roberto D’Aubuisson has Romero shot through the heart while saying Mass. The country soon dissolves into civil war, with the peasants in the hills fighting against the military government. The CIA and U.S. Armed Forces supply the government with overwhelming military and intelligence superiority, as well as over 3000 tons of US made bombs, training death squads to roam the countryside, committing atrocities like that of El Mozote in 1982, where 800 civilians were massacred. By 1992, some 63,000 Salvadorans were killed. Back then Salvador was controlled by a mafia of 13 families who owned 50% of the land and wealth. The 13 families were heavily linked with the United States. CIA provided weapons and military training to the Salvadorean Army, as well as $6B in aid, and US military training in Panama. As soon as the CIA discovered the priests were indoctrinating the masses, they began killing them.
In 1979, The CIA began to destabilize Grenada after Maurice Bishop became president, for his marxist, pro-cuba, anti-racism, and anti-apartheid stances. The previous leader, Eric Gairy, was a British/US puppet who furthered imperialist interests in the region, sacked the treasury, presided over 47% unenemployment, and a 200% cost of living increase. His right wing gang / secret police, the Mongoose gang, ruthlessly tortured Leftists, sending his police to Pinochet’s Argentina to learn torture techniques, and even murdered Maurice’s father. Under Bishop’s leadership, Women were given equal pay and paid maternity leave, and sex discrimination was made illegal. Organisations for education (Center for Popular Education), health care, and youth affairs (National Youth Organization) were also established, as well as free education and health care. A literacy campaign lowered it to less than 5% in 3 years. The campaign against him resulted in his overthrow and the invasion by the U.S. of Grenada on October 25, 1983, with about 277 people dying.
In 1979, the US-backed dictator Anastasios Samoza II falls, beginning the popular Nicaraguan Revolution. Remnants of his Guard will become the Contras, who fight a CIA-backed guerilla war against the left-wing Sandinista government throughout the 1980s, with Reagan authorizing covert support to anti-Sandinista forces. 1
In 1976, several CIA-linked anti-Castro Cuban exiles and members of the Venezuelan secret police DISIP were responsible for a terrorist bomb attack on Cuban flight 455, killing 73 people. CIA venezuelan operative Luis Posada Carriles, one of the bombers, fled and was granted amnesty in the US in 2007. 1
In 1976, The CIA backed an overthrow of Argentinan leader Isabel Martínez de Perón by right wing anti-communist dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. In 1983, two years after the return of a representative democratic government, he was prosecuted in the Trial of the Juntas for large-scale human rights abuses and crimes against humanity that took place under his rule, including kidnappings or forced disappearance, widespread torture and extrajudicial murder of activists, and political opponents as well as their families at secret concentration camps, and harboring nazis. An estimated 13,000 -30,000 political dissidents vanished during this period. Videla was also convicted of the theft of many babies born during the captivity of their mothers at the illegal detention centres and passing them on for illegal adoption by associates of the regime. In his defence, Videla maintains the female guerrilla detainees allowed themselves to fall pregnant in the belief they wouldn’t be tortured or executed. 1
On 11 September 1973, The CIA backed a military coup to remove democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, in favor of right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet. His US-supported regime was characterized by the systematic suppression of political parties and the persecution of dissidents to an extent that was unprecedented in the history of Chile, backed by the neoliberal free-market economic policies of the Chicago Boys. Over-all, the regime left over 3,000 dead or “dissappeared”, tortured thousands of prisoners, and forced 200,000 Chileans into exile. He’s known for the Villa Grimaldi, a torture complex, and his Caravan of Death, a Chilean Army death squad guilty of countless atrocities, including dropping pregnant women and teenagers out of helicopters in the ocean, and executions where prisoners were shot by parts, over extended periods of time. Pinochet’s forces are conservatively estimated to have killed over 11,000 people in his first year in power. 1, 2
In 1971 in Bolivia, after half a decade of CIA-inspired political turmoil, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows the leftist President Juan Jose Torres, eventually being kidnapped and murdered by CIA backed right wing death squads, as part of Operation Condor. In the next two years, dictator Hugo Banzer will have over 2,000 political opponents arrested without trial, then tortured, raped and executed. Banzer wwas trained at the U.S.-operated School of the Americas in Panama and later at Fort Hood, Texas. A few years later the Catholic Church denounced an army massacre of striking tin workers in 1975, Banzer, assisted by information provided by the CIA, was able to target and locate leftist priests and nuns. His anti-clergy strategy, known as the Banzer Plan, was adopted by nine other Latin American dictatorships in 1977.
In 1971, A CIA operative told a reporter he delivered a strain of the African Swine Fever virus from an army base in the Canal Zone to anti-Castro Cubans. An outbreak of the disease then occurred in Cuba, resulting in the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide animal epidemic. It was labeled the “most alarming event” of 1971 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization.1
Starting in the 1970s, a CIA-backed coalition of right wing governments in Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, began Operation Condor, a campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of opponents, with the stated aim of “eliminating Marxist subversion.” Victims included dissidents and leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests and nuns, students and teachers, intellectuals and suspected guerillas. An estimated 30,000 to 80,000 leftists or sympathizers were killed. 1
In 1969, amid a collapsing economy, labor and student strikes in Uruguay, CIA operative Dan Mitrione initiates a campaign of torture and violence against the left-wing student group Tuparamos. Former Uruguayan police officials and CIA operatives stated Mitrione had taught torture techniques to Uruguayan police, including the use of electrical shocks delivered to his victims’ mouths and genitals. It has been alleged that he used homeless people for training purposes, who were executed once they had served their purpose.1
In 1968, a CIA-organized military operation in Bolivia led by cuban exile and CIA agent Félix Rodríguez captures legendary guerilla Che Guevara, defeating the Ñancahuazú Guerrilla. The Bolivian president ordered his immediate execution to prevent worldwide calls for clemency, and the drama of a trial. Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie aka “The Butcher of Lyon”, advised and possibly helped the CIA orchestrate Guevara’s eventual capture.1
In 1965, The US intervened in the Dominican Civil War, providing air support and 1,700 marines. This later transformed into an Organization of American States occupation of the country. 1
In 1964, A CIA-backed military coup in Brazil overthrows the democratically elected government of Joao Goulart. The junta that replaces it will, in the next two decades, become one of the most bloodthirsty in history. General Castelo Branco creates Latin America’s first death squads, or bands of secret police who hunt down communists and political opponents for torture, interrogation and murder. Later it is revealed that the CIA trained the death squads. Thousands were tortured, and hundreds were killed.
In the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously agreed that a full-scale nuclear attack and invasion was the only solution, nearly plunging the world into nuclear war. 1
From 1961 onward, The US School of Americas, a US Department of Defense institute in Fort Benning, Georgia, was assigned the specific goal of teaching “anti-communist counterinsurgency training,” to CIA-supported right wing paramilitaries. It trained more than 19,000 students from 36 countries in the western hemisphere, including several Latin American dictators, and, during the 1980s, included torture in its curriculum. 1
In 1961, in Ecuador, the CIA-backed military forces the democratically elected President José María Velasco Ibarra to resign. Vice President Carlos Arosemana replaces him; the CIA fills the now vacant vice presidency with its own man. 1
In 1961, the CIA assassinated Rafael Trujillo, a murderous dictator responsible for the deaths of more than 50,000 people, who Washington had supported since 1930. Trujillo’s business interests had grown so large (about 60 percent of the economy) that they had begun competing with American business interests. The US later provided troops on the side of the loyalists in the 1965 Dominican civil war, to ensure US interests. 1
After the Failed bay of pigs invasion, the CIA began Operation Mongoose, a series of covert operations to disrupt and destabilize Cuba. The operation included economic warfare, including an embargo against Cuba, “to induce failure of the Communist regime to supply Cuba’s economic needs,” a diplomatic initiative to isolate Cuba, and psychological operations “to turn the peoples’ resentment increasingly against the regime.”[32] The economic warfare prong of the operation also included the infiltration by the CIA of operatives to carry out many acts of sabotage against civilian targets, such as a railway bridge, a molasses storage facilities, an electric power plant, and the sugar harvest, notwithstanding Cuba’s repeated requests to the United States government to cease its terrorist operations.[33][32] In addition, the CIA orchestrated a number of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, head of government of Cuba, including attempts that entailed CIA collaboration with the American mafia. 1
In 1961, the CIA sent 1,500 Cuban exiles to invade Castro’s Cuba in the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. B26 bombers attacked cuban airfields, providing initial air support. The planners had imagined that the invasion would spark a popular uprising against Castro -– which never happened. Several hundred were killed in the action. Castro’s government returned the captured invaders for medical supplies. 1
In 1959, following the US occupation of Haiti, The U.S. military helps “Papa Doc” Duvalier become dictator of Haiti. He creates his own private police force, the Tonton Macoutes, who terrorize the population with machetes. They kill over 100,000 during the Duvalier family reign. The U.S. does not protest their dismal human rights record.
In 1958, The United States supported the Batista dictatorship in Cuba. Batista aligned with the wealthiest landowners who owned the largest sugar plantations, and presided over a stagnating economy that widened the gap between rich and poor Cubans. Eventually most of the sugar industry was in U.S. hands, and foreigners owned 70% of the arable land. As such, Batista’s increasingly corrupt and repressive government then began to systematically profit from the exploitation of Cuba’s commercial interests, by negotiating lucrative relationships with both the American Mafia, who controlled the drug, gambling, and prostitution businesses in Havana, and with large U.S.-based multinational companies who were awarded lucrative contracts. To quell the growing discontent amongst the populace—which was subsequently displayed through frequent student riots and demonstrations—Batista established tighter censorship of the media, while also utilizing his Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities secret police to carry out wide-scale violence, torture and public executions; ultimately killing anywhere from hundreds to 20,000 people. After the Cuban revolution, the CIA launched a long campaign of terrorism against Cuba, training Cuban exiles in Florida, Central America and the Dominican Republic to commit assassinations and sabotage in Cuba. These include the cuban embargo, and over 638 failed assasination attempts on fidel castro. 1
In 1954, the CIA overthrows the democratically elected Guatemalen Jacobo Árbenz in a military coup in operation PBSucess. Arbenz threatened to nationalize the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company, in which CIA Director Allen Dulles also owns stock. Arbenz is replaced with a series of US-backed right-wing dictators whose bloodthirsty policies will kill over 100,000 Guatemalans in the next 40 years, until 1996. The coup has been described as the definitive deathblow to democracy in Guatemala.1
In 1953, A 2011 release of British intelligence files revealed that US and British MI5 forces overthrew the government of Cheddi Jagan, the elected leader of British Guyana. They showed how British spies kept up intense scrutiny on Cheddi Jagan and his wife Janet, who together founded the People’s Progressive party (PPP) to campaign for workers’ rights and independence from British rule for the sugar-producing colony in northern South America. Churchill and the US feared that the Jagans were communists, although MI5 found no foreign ties. Churchill dispatched a warship, HMS Superb, and brought hundreds of troops by air and sea to secure key sites. An outraged Cheddi Jagan appealed by telegram to Britain’s opposition Labour party for help. Leader Clement Attlee replied curtly: “Regret impossible to intervene.”
Between 1946-48, the US government secretly infected hundreds of test subjects in Guatemala with STDs, without their consent, in order to see the effects of various diseases. US academic institutions also participated in the studies.
In 1941, the US used its contacts in the Panama National Guard, which the U.S. had earlier trained, to have the government of Panama overthrown in a bloodless coup. The U.S. had requested that the government of Panama allow it to build over 130 new military installations inside and outside of the Panama Canal Zone, and the government of Panama refused this request at the price suggested by the U.S.
In Smedley Butler’s (A former US general and medal of honor recipient) 1935 pamphlet, War is a Racket, he recounted his experience as being an agent of American Imperialism: “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”1
In 1928, the Columbian army killed ~800-3000 striking workers in Cienaga, Columbia, after the US threatened to invade with U.S. Marine Corps troops if the Colombian government did not act to protect the United Fruit Company’s interests, in the Banana Massacre. The banana plantation workers were demanding written contracts, eight-hour work days, six-day work weeks and the elimination of food coupons. The troops set up their machine guns on the roofs of the low buildings at the corners of the main square, closed off the access streets, and after a five-minute warning opened fire into a dense Sunday crowd of workers and their wives and children who had gathered, after Sunday Mass, to wait for an anticipated address from the governor. 1
From 1916-24, the US occupied the Dominican Republic, with repeated actions in 1903, 1904, and 1914. 1
From 1915–34, Haiti was occupied by the US, which led to the creation of a new Haitian constitution in 1917 that instituted changes that included an end to the prior ban on land ownership by non-Haitians. Including the First and Second Caco Wars.[13] At least 15,000 Haitians were killed. 1
In 1914, the US military invaded Veracruz, Mexico, after US sailors were arrested by the Mexican government for entering off-limits areas, in the Tampico Affair. Over 200 were killed in the invasion.
In 1912, the US military invaded Nicaragua after intermittent landings and naval bombardments in the previous decades. It was occupied by the U.S. almost continuously from 1912 through 1933. With the onset of the Great Depression and Augusto C. Sandino’s Nicaraguan guerrilla troops fighting back against U.S. troops, it became too costly for the U.S. government and a withdrawal was ordered in 1933.
In 1906, 5360 Mexican workers went on strike at the Cananea Copper Company mines in Cananea, Sonora. The company was owned and founded by American businessman William Greene, and received generous subsidies and contracts from then dictator of Mexico Porfirio Diaz. Cananea was a company mining town where the only goods accessible were sold by the company and the prices were hefty relative to the wages earned. Mexican workers earned 3.5 pesos a day while American workers earned 5 pesos a day. The Mexican workers began a strike with the support of the surrounding population while the American workers defended the factory and the management. The American employees hosed high-pressure water and shot the crowd killing three people inciting riots that would later be squashed by Mexican soldiers. Although Diaz would reject American involvement, a trainload of Arizona Rangers had already crossed the border. All conspirators were given 15 years in prison but would be released in the course of the Mexican Revolution.
In 1903 the US backed its puppet state Panama’s secession from Columbia, for Columbia’s refusal to allow the US military presence there. The Panama Canal was under construction by then, and the Panama Canal Zone, under United States sovereignty, was then created, and under control by the US military for 100 years, until 2000.1
From 1895-1917, the Banana Wars refers to the military intervention on behalf of US business interests in Central America and the Caribbean (8 countries in total) after the Spanish American War. In Honduras, for example, the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company dominated the country’s key banana export sector and associated land holdings and railways, and saw insertion of American troops in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924 and 1925. 1
In 1896, the US fought the Spanish-American War largely over economic interests in the Caribbean, primarily Cuba. Historian Eric Foner writes: “Even before the Spanish flag was down in Cuba, U.S. business interests set out to make their influence felt. Merchants, real estate agents, stock speculators, reckless adventurers, and promoters of all kinds of get-rich schemes flocked to Cuba by the thousands. Seven syndicates battled each other for control of the franchises for the Havana Street Railway, which were finally won by Percival Farquhar, representing the Wall Street interests of New York. Thus, simultaneously with the military occupation began . . . commercial occupation.” 1
In 1846, the US sent a small force into Mexico with the aim of bringing about a war, and started the Mexican-American War. The US prevailed, expanding its territory far into Mexico, and killed ~25,000 mexicans in the process, as part of an ideological goal of white supremacy in north america called manifest destiny. The shift in the Mexico-U.S. border left many Mexican citizens separated from their national government. For the indigenous peoples who had never accepted Mexican rule, the change in border meant conflicts with a new outside power.1

Africa

In early 2017, the US began conducting drone strikes in Somalia against Al Shabab militants. An attack on July 16th killed 8 people. 1
In 1998, the US bombed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, killing one employee and wounding 11. It was the largest pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, producing medicine both for human and veterinary use. The US had acted on false evidence of a VX nerve agent from a single soil sample, and later used a false witness to cover for the attack. It was the only pharmaceutical factory in Africa not under US control. 1
In June 1982, with the help of CIA money and arms, Hissene Habre , dubbed Africa’s Pinochet, takes power in Chad. His secret police, use methods of torture including the burning the body of the detainee with incandescent objects, spraying gas into their eyes, ears and nose, forced swallowing of water, and forcing the mouths of detainees around the exhaust pipes of running cars. Habré’s government also periodically engaged in ethnic cleansing against groups such as the Sara, Hadjerai and the Zaghawa, killing and arresting group members en masse when it was perceived that their leaders posed a threat to the regime. Human Rights Watch claimed that Habre was responsible for thousands of killings. In 2001, while living in Senegal, he was almost tried for crimes committed by him in Chad. However, a court there blocked these proceedings. Then human rights people decided to pursue the case in Belgium, because some of Habre’s torture victims lived there. The U.S., in June 2003, told Belgium that it risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters if it allowed such a legal proceeding to happen. So the result was that the law that allowed victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad was repealed. However, two months later a new law was passed which made special provision for the continuation of the case against Habre. In May 2016 he was found guilty of human-rights abuses, including rape, sexual slavery and ordering the killing of 40,000 people, and sentenced to life in prison. 1
In the 1980s, Reagan maintains a close relationship with the Apartheid South african government, called constructive engagement, while secretly funding it in the hopes of creating a bulwark of anti-communism and preventing a marxist party from taking power, as happened in angola. Later on, in the wars against Apartheid in South Africa and Angola, in which cuban and anti-apartheid forces fought the white south african government, the US supplied south africa with nuclear weapons via Israel. 1
In 1975, Henry Kissinger launches a CIA-backed war in Angola, backing the brutal anti-communist leader of UNITAS, Jonas Savimbi, against Agostinho Neto and his Marxist-Leninst MPLA party, creating a civil war lasting for 30 years. The CIA financed a covert invasion via neighboring Zaire and a drive on the Angolan capital by the U.S. ally, South Africa. Congress continues to fund UNITAS, and their south-african apartheid allies until the late 1980s. By the end of the war, more than 500,000 people had died and over one million had been internally displaced. 1
In 1966, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows he widely popular Pan-Africanist and Marxist leader Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, inviting the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to take a lead role in managing the economy. With this reversal, accentuated by the expulsion of immigrants and a new willingness to negotiate with apartheid South Africa, Ghana lost a good deal of its stature in the eyes of African nationalists.1
In 1965, a CIA-backed military coup installs Mobutu Sese Seko, described as the “archetypal African dictator” in Congo. The hated and repressive Mobutu exploits his desperately poor country for billions.1
In 1962, a tip from a CIA spy in South Africa lead to the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, due to his pro-USSR leanings. This began his 27-year-long imprisonment.
In 1961, the CIA assists in the assassination of the democratically elected congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, throwing the country into years of turmoil. Before his assassination the CIA sent one of its scientists, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to the Congo carrying “lethal biological material” intended for use in Lumumba’s assassination. This virus would have been able to produce a fatal disease indigenous to the Congo area of Africa and was transported in a diplomatic pouch. 1
In 1801, and again in 1815, the US aided Sweden in subjugating a series of coastal towns in North Africa, in the Barbary Wars. The stated reason was to crack down on pirates, but the wars destroyed the navies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, and secured European and US shipping routes for goods and slaves in North Africa. US Representatives stated: “When we can appear in the Ports of the various Powers, or on the Coast, of Barbary, with Ships of such force as to convince those nations that We are able to protect our trade, and to compel them if necessary to keep faith with Us, then, and not before, We may probably secure a large share of the Meditn trade, which would largely and speedily compensate the U. S. for the Cost of a maritime force amply sufficient to keep all those Pirates in Awe, and also make it their interest to keep faith.” Thomas Jefferson echoed and carried out the war, saying that war was essential to securing markets along the Barbary Coast.

Asia

Between 1996-2006, The US has given money and weapons to royalist forces against the nepalese communists in the Nepalese civil war. ~18,000 people have died in the conflict. In 2002, after another civil war erupted, President George W. Bush pushed a bill through Congress authorizing $20 million in military aid to the Nepalese government.1
In 1996, after receiving incredibly low approval ratings, the US helped elect Boris Yeltsin, an incompetent pro-capitalist independent, by giving him a $10 Billion dollar loan to finance a winning election. Rather than creating new enterprises, Yeltsin’s democratization led to international monopolies hijacking the former Soviet markets, arbitraging the huge difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities and the prices prevailing on the world market. Much of the Yeltsin era was marked by widespread corruption, and as a result of persistent low oil and commodity prices during the 1990s, Russia suffered inflation, economic collapse and enormous political and social problems that affected Russia and the other former states of the USSR. Under Yeltsin, Between 1990 and 1994, life expectancy for Russian men and women fell from 64 and 74 years respectively to 58 and 71 years. The surge in mortality was “beyond the peacetime experience of industrialised countries”. While it was boom time for the new oligarchs, poverty and unemployment surged; prices were hiked dramatically; communities were devastated by deindustrialisation; and social protections were stripped away.1,2
In the 1970s-80s, wikileaks cables revealed that the US covertly supported the Khmer Rouge in their fight against the Vietnamese communists. Annual support included an end total of ~$215M USD, food aid to 20-40k Khmer Rouge fighters, CIA advisors in several camps, and ammunition.
In December 1975, The US supplied the weaponry for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. This incursion was launched the day after U.S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had left Indonesia where they had given President Suharto permission to use American arms, which under U.S. law, could not be used for aggression. Daniel Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the UN. said that the U.S. wanted “things to turn out as they did.” The result was an estimated 200,000 dead out of a population of 700,000. Sixteen years later, on November 12, 1991, two hundred and seventeen East Timorese protesters in Dili, many of them children, marching from a memorial service, were gunned down by Indonesian Kopassus shock troops who were headed by U.S.- trained commanders Prabowo Subianto (son in law of General Suharto) and Kiki Syahnakri. Trucks were seen dumping bodies into the sea.
In 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis, the CIA helped topple the democratically elected, left-leaning government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, by telling Governor-General, John Kerr, a longtime CIA collaborator, to dissolve the Whitlam government.
In 2018 after the release of a suppressed ISC (International Scientific Commission) report, and the release of declassified CIA communications daily reports in 2020, it was revealed that the US used germ warfare in the Korean war, 2. Many of these attacks involved the dropping of insects or small mammals infected with viruses such as anthrax, plague, cholera, and encephalitis. After discovering evidence of germ warfare, China invited the ISC headed by famed British scientist Joseph Needham, to investigate, but the report was suppressed for over 70 years.
Between 1963 and 1973, The US dropped ~388,000 tons of napalm bombs in vietnam, compared to 32,357 tons used over three years in the Korean War, and 16,500 tons dropped on Japan in 1945. US also sprayed over 5 million acres with herbicide, in Operation Ranch Hand, in a 10 year campaign to deprive the vietnamese of food and vegetation cover. 1,2
In 1971 in Pakistan, an authoritarian state supported by the U.S., brutally invaded East Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971. The war ended after India, whose economy was staggering after admitting about 10 million refugees, invaded East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and defeated the West Pakistani forces. The US gave W. pakistan 411 million provided to establish its armed forces which spent 80% of its budget on its military. 15 million in arms flowed into W. Pakistan during the war. Between 300,000 to 3 million civilians were killed, with 8-10 million refugees fleeing to India. 1
In 1970, In Cambodia, The CIA overthrows Prince Sihanouk, who is highly popular among Cambodians for keeping them out of the Vietnam War. He is replaced by CIA puppet Lon Nol, whose forces suppressed the large-scale popular demonstrations in favour of Sihanouk, resulting in several hundred deaths.1 This unpopular move strengthens once minor opposition parties like the Khmer Rouge (another CIA supported group), who achieve power in 1975 and massacres ~2.5 million people. 1 The Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, carried out the Cambodian Genocide, which killed 1.5-2M people from 1975-1979.
In 1969, The US initiated a secret carpet bombing campaign in eastern Cambodia, called, Operation Menu, and Operation Freedom Deal in 1970. An estimated 40,000 - 150,000 civilians were killed. Nixon lied about this campaign, but was later exposed, and one of the things that lead to his impeachment. 1
US dropped large amounts of Agent Orange, an herbicide developed by monsanto and dow chemical for the department of defense, in vietnam. Its use, in particular the contaminant dioxin, causes multiple health problems, including cleft palate, mental disabilities, hernias, still births, poisoned breast milk, and extra fingers and toes, as well as destroying local species of plants and animals. The Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that up to 1 million people are disabled or have health problems due to Agent Orange.1, 2
US Troops killed between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians, including women, children, and infants, in South Vietnam on March, 1968, in the My Lai Massacre. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated. Soldiers set fire to huts, waiting for civilians to come out so they could shoot them. For 30 years, the three US servicemen who tried to halt the massacre and rescue the hiding civilians were shunned and denounced as traitors, even by congressmen. 1
In 1967, the CIA helped South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in villages, in the Phoenix Program. By 1972, Phoenix operatives had executed between 26,000 and 41,000 suspected NLF operatives, informants and supporters.1
In 1965, The CIA overthrew the democratically elected Indonesian leader Sukarno with a military coup. The CIA had been trying to eliminate Sukarno since 1957, using everything from attempted assassination to sexual intrigue, for nothing more than his declaring neutrality in the Cold War. His successor, General Suharto, aided by the CIA, massacred between 500,000 to 1 million civilians accused of being communist, in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. The US continued to support Suharto throughout the 70s, supplying weapons and planes.
From the 1960s onward, the US supported Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The US provided hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, which was crucial in buttressing Marcos’s rule over the years. The estimated number of persons that were executed and disappeared under President Fernando Marcos was over 100,000. After fleeing to hawaii, marco was suceeded by the widow of an opponent he assasinated, Corazon aquino. 1
Starting in 1957, in the wake of the US-backed First Indochina War, The CIA carries out approximately one coup per year trying to nullify Laos’ democratic elections, specifically targeting the Pathet Lao, a leftist group with enough popular support to be a member of any coalition government, and perpetuating the 20 year Laotian civil war. In the late 50s, the CIA even creates an “Armee Clandestine” of Asian mercenaries to attack the Pathet Lao. After the CIA’s army suffers numerous defeats, the U.S. drops more bombs on Laos than all the U.S. bombs dropped in World War II. A quarter of all Laotians will eventually become refugees, many living in caves. This was later called a “secret war,” since it occurred at the same time as the Vietnam War, but got little press. Hundreds of thousands were killed.1
In 1955, the CIA provided explosives, and aided KMT agents in an assassination attempt against the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai. KMT agents placed a time-bomb on the Air India aircraft, Kashmir Princess, which Zhou was supposed to take on his way to the Bandung Conference, an anti-imperialist meeting of Asian and African states, but he changed his travel plans at the last minute. Henry Kissinger denied US involvement, even though remains of a US detonator were found. 16 people were killed. 1
From 1955-1975, the US supported French colonialist interests in Vietnam, set up a puppet regime in Saigon to serve US interests, and later took part as a belligerent against North Vietnam in the Vietnam War. U.S. involvement escalated further following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was later found to be staged by Lyndon Johnson. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities (see Vietnam War casualties). Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from 966,000 source to 3.8 million.source Some 240,000–300,000 Cambodians,source 2 3 20,000–62,000 Laotians,4 and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict, with a further 1,626 missing in action. Unexploded bomb continue to kill civilians for years afterward. 1
In the summer of 1950 in South Korea, anticommunists aided by the US executed at least 100,000 people suspected of supporting communism, in the Bodo League Massacre. For four decades the South Korean government concealed this massacre. Survivors were forbidden by the government from revealing it, under suspicion of being communist sympathizers. Public revelation carried with it the threat of torture and death. During the 1990s and onwards, several corpses were excavated from mass graves, resulting in public awareness of the massacre. 1
In 1984, documents were released showing that Eisenhower authorized the use of atomic weapons on North Korea, should the communists renew the war in 1953. The 2,000 pages released show the high level of planning and the detail of discussion on possible use of these weapons, and Mr. Eisenhower’s interest in overcoming reluctance to use them.
In the beginning of the Korean war, US Troops killed ~300 South Korean civilians in the No Gun Ri massacre, revealing a theater-wide policy of firing on approaching refugee groups. Trapped refugees began piling up bodies as barricades and tried to dig into the ground to hide. Some managed to escape the first night, while U.S. troops turned searchlights on the tunnels and continued firing, said Chung Koo-ho, whose mother died shielding him and his sister. No apology has yet been issued. 1
The US intervened in the 1950-53 Korean Civil War, on the side of the south Koreans, in a proxy war between the US and china for supremacy in East Asia. South Korea reported some 373,599 civilian and 137,899 military deaths, the US with 34,000 killed, and China with 114,000 killed.[16] Overall, the U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of bombs—including 32,557 tons of napalm—on Korea, more than they did during the whole Pacific campaign of World War II.[305][306] The US killed an estimated 1/3rd of the north Korean people during the war. The Joint Chiefs of staff issued orders for the retaliatory bombing of the People’s republic of China, should south Korea be attacked. Deadly clashes have continued up to the present day. 1
From 1948-1949, the Jeju uprising was an insurgency taking place in the Korean province of Jeju island, followed by severe anticommunist suppression of the South Korean Labor Party in which 14-30,000 people were killed, or ~10% of the island’s population. Though atrocities were committed by both sides, the methods used by the South Korean government to suppress the rebels were especially cruel. On one occasion, American soldiers discovered the bodies of 97 people including children, killed by government forces. On another, American soldiers caught government police forces carrying out an execution of 76 villagers, including women and children. The US later entered the Korean civil war on the side of the South Koreans. 1
In 1949 during the resumed Chinese Civil War, the US supported the corrupt Kuomintang dictatorship of Chiang Kaishek to fight against the Chinese Communists, who had won the support of the vast majority of peasant-farmers and helped defeat the Japanese invasion. The US strongly supported the Kuomintang forces. Over 50,000 US Marines were sent to guard strategic sites, and 100,000 US troops were sent to Shandong. The US equipped and trained over 500,000 KMT troops, and transported KMT forces to occupy newly liberated zones as well as to contain Communist-controlled areas.[51] American aid included substantial amounts of both new and surplus military supplies; additionally, loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars were made to the KMT.[59] Within less than two years after the Sino-Japanese War, the KMT had received $4.43 billion from the US—most of which was military aid.[51]1
The U.S. installed Syngman Rhee,a conservative Korean exile, as President of South Korea in 1948. Rhee became a dictator on an anti-communist crusade, arresting and torturing suspected communists, brutally putting down rebellions, killing 100,000 people and vowing to take over North Korea. Rhee precipitated the outbreak of the Korean War and for the allied decision to invade North Korea once South Korea had been recaptured. He was finally forced to resign by mass student protests in 1960.1
Between 1946 and 1958, the US tested 23 nuclear devices at Bikini Atoll, using the native islanders and their land as guinea pigs for the effects of nuclear fallout. Significant fallout caused widespread radiological contamination in the area, and killed many islanders. A survivor stated, “What the Americans did was no accident. They came here and destroyed our land. They came to test the effects of a nuclear bomb on us. It was no accident.” Many of the islanders exposed were brought to the US Argonne National laboratory, to study the effects. Afterwards the islands proved unsuitable to sustaining life, resulting in starvation and requiring the residents to receive ongoing aid. Virtually all of the inhabitants showed acute symptoms of radiation syndrome, many developing thyroid cancers, Leukimia, miscarriages, stillborn and “jellyfish babies” (highly deformed) along with symptoms like hair falling out, and diahrrea. A handful were brought to the US for medical research and later returned, while others were evacuated to neighboring Islands. The US under LBJ prematurely returned the majority returned 3 years later, to further test how human beings absorb radiation from their food and environment. The islanders pleaded with the US to move them away from the islands, as it became clear that their children were developing deformities and radiation sickness. Radion levels were still unacceptable. The United States later paid the islanders and their descendants 25 million in compensation for damage caused by the nuclear testing program. A 2016 investigation found radiation levels on Bikini Atoll as high as 639 mrem yr−1, well above the established safety standard threshold for habitation of 100 mrem yr−1. Similar tests occurred elsewhere in the Marshall Islands during this time period. Due to the destruction of natural wealth, Kwajalein Atoll’s military installation and dislocation, the majority of natives currently live in extreme poverty, making less than 1$ a day. Those that have jobs, mostly work at the US military installation and resorts. Much of this is detailed in the documentary, The Coming War on China (2016). 1,2
After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Douglas MacArthur pardoned Unit 731, a Japanese biological experimentation center which performed human testing of biological agents against Chinese citizens. While a series of war tribunals and trials was organized, many of the high-ranking officials and doctors who devised and respectively performed the experiments were pardoned and never brought to justice. As many as 12,000 people, most of them Chinese, died in Unit 731 alone and many more died in other facilities, such as Unit 100 and in field experiments throughout Manchuria. One of the experimenters who killed many, microbiologist Shiro Ishii, later traveled to the US to advise on its bioweapons programs. In the final days of the Pacific War and in the face of imminent defeat, Japanese troops blew up the headquarters of Unit 731 in order to destroy evidence of the research done there. As part of the cover-up, Ishii ordered 150 remaining subjects killed.1,2
In 1945 during the month-long Battle of Manila, the US in deciding whether to attack Manila (then under Japanese occupation) with ground troops, decided instead to use indiscriminate carpet-bombing, howitzers, and naval bombardment, killing an estimated 100,000 people. The casualty figures show the US’s regard for filipino civilian life: 1,010 Americans, 16,665 Japanese and 100,000 to 240,000 civilians were killed. Manila became, alongside Berlin, and Warsaw, one of the most devastated cities of WW2.
US Troops committed a number of rapes during the battle of Okinawa, and the subsequent occupation of Japan. There were 1,336 reported rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa prefecture alone.1 American Occupation authorities imposed wide-ranging censorship on the Japanese media, including bans on covering many sensitive social issues and serious crimes such as rape committed by members of the Occupation forces.2
From 1942 to 1945, the US military carried out a fire-bombing campaign of Japanese cities, killing between 200,000 and 900,000 civilians. One nighttime fire-bombing of Tokyo took 80,000 lives. During early August 1945, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing ~130,000 civilians, and causing radiation damage which included birth defects and a variety of genetic diseases for decades to come. The justification for the civilian bombings has largely been debunked, as the entrance of Russia into the war had already started the surrender negotiations earlier in 1945. The US was aware of this, since it had broken the Japanese code and had been intercepting messages during for most of the year. The US ended up accepting a conditional surrender from Hirohito, against which was one of the stated aims of the civilian bombings. The dropping of the atomic bomb is therefore seen as a demonstration of US military supremacy, and the first major operation of the Cold War with Russia. 1,2
In 1918, the US took part in the allied intervention in the Russian civil war, sending 11,000 troops to the in the Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions to support the anti-bolshevik, monarchist, and largely anti-semitic White Forces. 1
In 1900 in China, the US was part of an Eight-Nation Alliance that brought 20,000 armed troops to China, to defeat the Imperial Chinese Army, in the the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-imperialist uprising. 1
In 1899, after a popular revolution in the Philippines to oust the Spanish imperialists, the US invaded and began the Phillipine-American war. The US military committed countless atrocities, leaving 200,000 Filipinos dead. Jacob H Smith killed between 2,500 to 50,000 civilians, His orders included, “kill everyone over the age of ten” and make the island “a howling wilderness.”1,2
Throughout the 1800s, US settlers engaged in a genocide of native Hawaiians. The native population decreased from ~ 400k in 1789, to 40k by 1900, due to colonization and disease. In 1883, the US engineered the overthrow of Hawaii’s native monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani, by landing two companies of US marines in Honolulu. Due to the Queen’s desire “to avoid any collision of armed forces, and perhaps the loss of life” for her subjects and after some deliberation, at the urging of advisers and friends, the Queen ordered her forces to surrender. Hawaii was initially reconstituted as an independent republic, but the ultimate goal of the US was the annexation of the islands to the United States, which was finally accomplished in 1898. After this, the Hawaiian language was banned, English replaced it as the official language in all institutions and schools. The US finally apologized in 1993, but no land has been returned. 1

Europe

In late 2019, CIA agent Anne Sacoolas hit and killed a British teenage pedestrian named Harry Dunn with her car, while she was driving on the wrong side of the road, near the RAF Croughton base in the UK where she and her husband (both CIA agents) worked. After the Foreign and Commonwealth office rejected Anne Sacoolas request for diplomatic immunity, Anne fled the UK on a US Air Force plane. Both the US and UK governments lied to the Dunn family, saying that she was a US diplomat, and hid the fact that she had fled for months. In October, the Dunn family visited the White House and met with Donald Trump. According to Seiger, Trump tried to buy off the couple, promising them that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was “standing by ready to write a check.” Trump reportedly blindsided the Dunns, telling them that Sacoolas was in the other room waiting to meet with them. The couple refused the offer, demanding her extradition. Sacoolas’s lawyers have stated, “Anne will not return voluntarily to the United Kingdom to face a potential jail sentence for what was a terrible but unintentional accident.” As of February 2020, the extradition request is at an impasse, while at the same time the UK is complying with Julian Assange’s extradition to the US. RAF Croughton base houses agents from the NSA and CIA, and is famous for being exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for forwarding information from German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone to the CIA. On march 2021, the US admitted that sacoolas was a CIA agent.
In 2003, the CIA kidnapped Italian milanese Imam Abu Omar, took him to Egypt, then tortured, including rape, genital electro-shock, and resulted in him becoming deaf in one ear, in the Imam Rapito Affair. On 23 December 2005, a judge issued a European arrest warrant against 22 CIA agents, but the US hasn’t responded.
In 2002, GW Bush signed into law the “Hague invasion act”, IE the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which gives the US: “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court”.
In 2001, due to the passing of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, the US was forced to disclose the full extent of its collaboration and protection of nazi war criminals.
From March to June of 1999, After Serbs refused to acquiesce in the break-up of their republic, the US and NATO began bombing Yugoslavia killing ~500 civilians, leaving thousands homeless, destroying bridges, industrial plants, public buildings, private businesses, as well as barracks and military installations. 1, 2
In February, 1998, A US marine core plane flying wrecklessly below regulations, cut a cable supporting aerial cable cars at a ski resort near Cavalese, Italy, killing 20 people, in the Cavalese Cable Car Disaster / Massacre of Cermis. The pilots destroyed the plane’s tape, and were found not guilty. Italian prosecutors were outraged that the US refused to forgoe the NATO treaty that gives all jurisduction to US military courts. By February 1999, the victims’ families had received USD $65,000 per victim as immediate help by the Italian government, which was reimbursed by the U.S. government. In May 1999, the U.S. Congress rejected a bill that would have set up a $40 million compensation fund for the victims. In December 1999, the Italian legislature approved a monetary compensation plan for the families ($1.9 million per victim). NATO treaties obligated the U.S. government to pay 75% of this compensation, which it did.
In 1995, the US conducted a campaign of airstrikes called Operation Deliberate Force, as part of an intervention in the Bosnian civil war. 1
From the 1950s-90s, the CIA and NATO ran a series of clandestine networks, headquartered in Rome, Italy called Operation Gladio. Its purpose was supplying aid (primarily money and weaponry) to right wing paramilitaries to attack left-wing movements, and carry out assassinations and bombings, as well as funnel money to centrist political parties. It had operations in Belgium, Finland, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Turkey, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Austria. In Italy, the group had 600+ members, and carried out car bombings during Italy’s years of lead. In Germany, it included former Nazi SS members—Staff Sgt. Heinrich Hoffman, Lt. Col. Hans Rues, and Lt. Col. Walter Kopp. CIA weapons caches are still being discovered in all the countries above.
Throughout the 1980-90s, the US, with the aid of the IMF and NATO, actively destabilized and aided in the breakup of Yugoslavia, with the goal of weakening and destroying the last surviving socialist bloc in Europe. These include stirring up ethnic tensions between the member countries, economic warfare, and military intervention. The Reagan administration in a 1982 secret memo, advocated “expanded efforts to promote a ‘quiet revolution’ to overthrow Communist governments and parties,” while reintegrating the countries of Eastern Europe into a market-oriented economy. In November 1990, the Bush administration pressured Congress into passing the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, which provided that any part of Yugoslavia failing to declare independence within six months would lose U.S. financial support, demanded separate elections in each of the six Yugoslav republics, and mandated U.S. State Department approval of both election procedures and results as a condition for any future aid. In 1991, Yugoslav Army chief Veljko Kadijević stated: “An insidious plan has been drawn up to destroy Yugoslavia. Stage one is civil war. Stage two is foreign intervention. Then puppet regimes will be set up throughout Yugoslavia.” 1, 2, 3
In 1967 in Greece, the CIA installed Georgios Papadopoulos in a military coup, a CIA agent and former nazi collaborator, as the military ruler of Greece. He’s seen today as an relic of authoritarianism , xenophobia, and anti-communism. 1 Phillips Talbot, the US ambassador in Athens, disapproved of the military coup which established the “Regime of the Colonels” (1967–1974), complaining that it represented “a rape of democracy”—to which Jack Maury, the CIA chief of station in Athens, answered, “How can you rape a whore?
From the 1940s - 60s, the CIA provided an average of $5 million annually in covert aid towards financially supporting centrist Italian governments and using the awarding of contracts to weaken the Italian Communist Party’s hold on labor unions. It was also involved in bombings and assassinations as a part of Operation Gladio.
In 1956, Radio Free Europe (a CIA funded propaganda outlet) broadcasts Khruschev’s Secret Speech, which played a role in the Hungarian revolution, and also hinted that American aid will help the Hungarians fight. The US fails to provide any military aid to Hungary in their ensuing conflict with the Soviet Union. 1
From 1948 onwards, the CIA under Allen Dulles developed a program of media manipulation called Project Mockingbird, having major influence over the media, including >25 newspapers. The usual method was placing reports developed from intelligence provided by the CIA to cooperating or unwitting reporters, or employing media directly as American assets.1
In 1948, the CIA corrupts the elections in Italy, where Italian communists threaten to win the elections. The CIA buys votes, broadcasts propaganda, threatens and beats up opposition leaders, and infiltrates and disrupts their organizations. The communists are defeated.1,2
From 1948 onward, the CIA implements Operation Bloodstone, similar to Operation Paperclip, where the CIA actively sought out nazis and collaborators living in Soviet controlled territories, to work as spies in the USSR, US, Canada, and Latin America. Many of those who were hired as part of Bloodstone were high-ranking Nazi intelligence agents who had committed war crimes.
In 1947, in Greek civil war and ensuing right wing military junta of 1967-74, Truman and the CIA provided money, 74,000 tons of military equipment, and advisors to support anti-communist Greek dictators with deplorable human rights records. Support for right-wing dictatorships in Greece and Turkey were funded and sold under the Truman Doctrine, an anti-soviet foreign policy platform, despite the fact that it was Yugoslavia who provided support to the Greek labor movement rebels, and not the Soviet Union.1
In the post-war period, while the USSR carried out de-nazification in East Germany, in West Germany many Nazis were kept in power. One study revealed that more than half of the leadership of the West German Justice Ministry were former members of the Nazi party, including dozens of former paramilitary SA members. Several former Nazi Generals, including Adolf Heusinger, and Hans Speidel, went on to become generals in West Germany, and then NATO.
During the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, eight unarmed Italian civilians, including an eleven year old girl, were killed by U.S. troops. 1
US soldiers killed 73 unarmed Italian and German prisoners of war in Santo Pietro, Italy on July 1943. The survivors were then shot at close range, directly through the heart. 1
The Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps) were a group of 19 US prison camps built in the Allied-occupied part of Germany to hold captured German soldiers at the close of the Second World War, holding between one and almost two million surrendered Wehrmacht personnel. Prisoners held in the camps were designated Disarmed Enemy Forces and not POWs, to avoid international treaty regulations. Throughout the summer of 1945, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was prevented from visiting prisoners in any of the Allies’ Rheinwiesenlager. Visits were only started in the autumn of 1945, at a time when most camps had closed or were closing. During their visits, the delegates observed that German prisoners of war were often detained in appalling conditions. They drew the attention of the authorities to this fact, and gradually succeeded in getting some improvements made.”[7] Between 3,000 to 10,000 died from starvation, dehydration and exposure to the weather elements because no structures were built inside the prison compounds. 1
A study by Robert J. Lilly estimates that a total of 14,000 civilian women in England, France and Germany were raped by American GIs during World War II.1. It is estimated that there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war and one historian has claimed that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common.2
In 1952, the CIA recruited nazi scientist Emil Augsburg, who was involved in an SS think for planning the final solution, and protected him from war crimes accusations.
In July, 1945, the predecessor to the CIA, the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), under the name Operation Paperclip, rescued and recruited 1,500 Nazi scientists, engineers, and spies. These included Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s master spy who had built up an intelligence network in the Soviet Union, SS intelligence officers Alfred Six and Emil Augsburg (who massacred Jews in the Holocaust), Klaus Barbie (the “Butcher of Lyon”, who was used by the US to further anti-communist efforts in europe), Otto von Bolschwing (the Holocaust mastermind who worked with Eichmann) and SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny (a personal friend of Hitler’s). The policy of collaboration with nazi spies was deemed necessary to counter the threat from the USSR. 1 .
In February 1945, 527 airplanes of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city of Dresden, Germany, killing ~25,000 civilians.1
In the summer of 1942, the US turned away a series of ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Most notoriously, in June 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis and its 937 passengers, almost all Jewish, were turned away from the port of Miami, forcing the ship to return to Europe; more than a quarter died in the Holocaust. 1
The US maintained a policy of neutrality during the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, discounting the rise of anti-semitism and European fascism. It was not Hitler’s attacks on the Jews that brought the United States into World War II, any more than the enslavement of 4 million blacks brought Civil War in 1861. Italy’s attack on Ethiopia, Hitler’s invasion of Austria, his takeover of Czechoslovakia, his attack on Poland-none of those events caused the United States to enter the war, although Roosevelt did begin to give important aid to England. What brought the United States fully into the war was the Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.1
In the 1936-39 Spanish civil war, the Roosevelt administration sponsored a neutrality act that had the effect of shutting off help to the Spanish government while Hitler and Mussolini gave critical aid to Franco, aiding yet another fascist victory in Europe. American President Richard Nixon later toasted Franco’s “firmness and fairness”,[41] and, after Franco’s death, he stated: “General Franco was a loyal friend and ally of the United States.[42]”.

Internal Repression

Native Americans

In 2016, the US army corp of engineers approved a Energy Transfer Partners’ proposal to build an oil pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, sparking the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, evoking a brutal response from North Dakota police aided by the National Guard, private security firms, and other law enforcement agencies from surrounding states. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe believes that the pipeline would put the Missouri River, the water source for the reservation, at risk, pointing out two recent spills, a 2010 pipeline spill into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, which cost over billion to clean up with significant contamination remaining, and a 2015 Bakken crude oil spill into the Yellowstone River in Montana. Police repression has included dogs attacking protesters, spraying water cannons on protesters in sub-freezing temperatures, >700 arrests of Native Americans and ~200 injuries, a highly militarized police force using armored personnel carriers, concussion grenades, mace, Tasers, batons, rubber bullets, and tear gas. In November 2017, the keystone XL pipeline burst, spilling 210,000 gallons of oil in Amherst, South Dakota. 1, 2
In 1975, FBI agents attacked AIM activists on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in the ‘Pine Ridge Shootout’.[37] Two FBI agents, and an AIM activist were killed. In two separate trials, the U.S. prosecuted participants in the firefight for the deaths of the agents. AIM members Robert Robideau and Dino Butler were acquitted after asserting that they had acted in self–defense. Leonard Peltier was extradited from Canada and tried separately because of the delay. He was convicted on two counts of first–degree murder for the deaths of the FBI agents[38] and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life in prison, after a trial which is still contentious. He remains in prison.
In 1973, 200 Oglala Lakota and AIM activists occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, called the Wounded knee incident. They were protesting the reservation’s corrupt US-backed tribal chairman, Dick Wilson, who controlled a private militia, called Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs), funded by the government. FBI, US marshals, and other law enforcement cordoned off the area and attacked the activists with armored vehicles, automatic rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and gas shells, resulting in two killed and 13 wounded. Ray Robinson, a civil rights activist who joined the protesters, disappeared during the events and is believed to have been murdered. As food supplies became short, three planes dropped 1,200 pounds of food, but as people scrambled to gather it up, a government helicopter appeared overhead and fired down on them while groundfire came from all sides. After the siege ended in a truce, 120 occupiers were arrested. Wilson stayed in office and in 1974 was re-elected amid charges of intimidation, voter fraud, and other abuses. The rate of violence climbed on the reservation as conflict opened between political factions in the following three years; residents accused Wilson’s private militia of much of it. 1
In Nov. 1969, a group of 89 Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island for 15 months, to gauge the US’s commitment to the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), which stated that all abandoned federal land must be returned to native people. Eventually the government cut off all electrical power and all telephone service to the island. In June, a fire of disputed origin destroyed numerous buildings on the island.[7] Left without power, fresh water, and in the face of diminishing public support and sympathy, the number of occupiers began to dwindle. On June 11, 1971, a large force of government officers removed the remaining 15 people from the island.1
From its creation in 1968, The American Indian Movement (AIM) has been a target of repression from law enforcement agencies, and surveillance as one of the FBI’s COINTELPRO targets. This includes the wounded knee incident and the pine ridge shootout. 1
In 1942 the federal government took privately held Pine Ridge Indian Reservation land owned by tribal members in order to establish the Badlands Bombing Range of 341,725 acres, evicting 125 families. Among the families evicted was that of Pat Cuny, an Oglala Sioux. He fought in World War II in the Battle of the Bulge after surviving torpedoing of his transport in the English Channel.[24] Dewey Beard, a Miniconjou Sioux survivor of the Wounded Knee Massacre, who supported himself by raising horses on his 908-acre allotment received in 1907 was also evicted. The small federal payments were insufficient to enable such persons to buy new properties. In 1955 the 97-year-old Beard testified of earlier mistreatment at Congressional hearings about this project.[25] He said, for “fifty years I have been kicked around. Today there is a hard winter coming. …I might starve to death.” 1
In 1890, US soldiers killed 150-300 people (including 65 women and 24 children) at Wounded Knee (19-26 people, including two women and eleven children.) on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the U.S. state of South Dakota. Twenty-five soldiers also died, and 39 were wounded (6 of the wounded later died).[7] At least twenty soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor. The event was driven by local racism towards the practice of Ghost Dancing, which whites found distasteful, and the Native Americans arming up in response to repeated broken treaties, stolen land, and their bison-herds being hunted to near extinction by the whites.1
In 1887, the Dawes Act, and Curtis Act, resulted in the loss of 90 million acres of native-alloted land, and the abolition of many native governments. During the ensuing decades, the Five Civilized Tribes lost 90 million acres of former communal lands, which were sold to non-Natives. In addition, many individuals, unfamiliar with land ownership, became the target of speculators and criminals, were stuck with allotments that were too small for profitable farming, and lost their household lands. Tribe members also suffered from the breakdown of the social structure of the tribes. 1
Starting in the 1870s, The US army, aided by settlers and private hunters, began a widespread policy of slaughtering bufallo and bison, in order to destroy many tribe’s primary food source, and to starve Native Americans into submission. By 1900, they succeeded; the bufallo population dropped from more than 30 million, to a few hundred. The country’s highest generals, politicians, and presidents including Ulysses S. Grant, saw the destruction of buffalo as solution to the country’s “Indian Problem.” By destroying the food supply of the plains natives, they could more easily move them onto reservations.1
Starting in 1830-50, The Trail of Tears was a series of forced removals of Native American nations, including Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Cherokee people and the African freedmen and slaves who lived among them, from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to an area west of the Mississippi River that had been designated as Native Territory. The forced relocations were carried out by various government authorities following the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. “Marshaled by guards, hustled by agents, harried by contractors,they were being herded on the way to an unknown and unwelcome destination like a flock of sick sheep.” They went on ox wagons, on horses, on foot, then to be ferried across the MississippiRiver. The army was supposed to organize their trek, but it turned over its job to private contractors who charged the government as much as possible, gave the Indians as little as possible. The Cherokee removal in 1838 (the last forced removal east of the Mississippi) was brought on by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia in 1828, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush.[6] Approximately 2,000-6,000 of the 16,543 relocated Cherokee perished along the way.[7][8][9][10][11]1
In 1848, the California Genocide is a term used to describe the drastic decrease in Native American population in California. The population decreased from ~300,000 in 1769, to 16,000 in 1900. 1
The Second Seminole War, also known as the Florida War, was a conflict from 1835 to 1842 in Florida between various groups of Native Americans collectively known as Seminoles and the United States, part of a series of conflicts called the Seminole Wars. The Second Seminole War, often referred to as the Seminole War, is regarded as “the longest and most costly of the Indian conflicts of the United States.” ~3000 seminoles were killed, and 4000 were deported to Indian territory elsewhere. 1
In 1832, the Black Hawk War, was a brief 1832 conflict between the United States and Native Americans led by Black Hawk, a Sauk leader, in Illinois. The war gave impetus to the US policy of Indian removal, in which Native American tribes were pressured to sell their lands and move west of the Mississippi River and stay there. Over 500 Native Americans were killed in the conflict.1
In 1832, the Chickasaw Indians were forced by the US to sell their country in 1832 and move to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) during the era of Indian Removal in the 1830s.
In 1813, the Creek War, was a war between the US, lead by the then notorious indian-hunter Andrew Jackson, and the Creek nation, residing primarily in Alabama. Over 1,500 creeks were killed. The war effectively ended with the Treaty of Fort Jackson, where General Andrew Jackson insisted that the Creek confederacy cede more than 21 million acres of land from southern Georgia and central Alabama. These lands were taken from allied Creek as well as Red Sticks. In 1814, Andrew Jackson became famous for his role in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, where his side killed more than 800 Creeks. Under Jackson, and the man he chose to succeed him, Martin Van Buren, 70,000 Indians east of the Mississippi were forced westward.
The Red Sticks, a faction of Muscogee Creek people in the American Southeast, led a resistance movement against European-American encroachment and assimilation; tensions culminated in the outbreak of the Creek War in 1813.
From 1785-96, the Northwest Indian War was a war between the US and a confederation of numerous Native American tribes, with support from the British, for control of the Northwest Territory. President George Washington directed the United States Army to enforce U.S. sovereignty over the territory. Over 1,000 Native Americans were killed in the bloody conflict.
In the 1800s, Indian removal was a policy of the United States government whereby Native Americans were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River, thereafter known as Indian Territory. That policy has been characterized by some scholars as part of a long-term genocide of Native Americans. 1
The Texan-Indian Wars were a series of 19th-century conflicts between settlers in Texas and the Southern Plains Indians. Its hard to approximate the number of deaths from the conflicts, but the Indian population in Texas decreased from 20,000 to 8,000 by 1875. 1
The Indian Wars is a name given to the collection of over 40 conflicts and wars between Native Americans and US settlers. The US census bureau reports that they have cost the lives of about 19,000 white men, women and children, including those killed in individual combats, and the lives of about 30,000 Indians. The actual number of killed and wounded Indians must be very much higher than the number given… Fifty percent additional would be a safe estimate..1
From 1500-1900s, European and later US colonists and authorities displaced and committed genocide on the Native American Population. Ward Churchill characterizes the reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 as a “vast genocide.. the most sustained on record. Some of the atrocities will be listed above. 1, 2

Black people

The origins of US police lie in the slave-catching patrols of the 1700s.
The Obama era was one of the greatest decreases in working class and black wealth in history: home equity decreased by ~$17k between 2007 and 2016. His housing policies led to millions losing their homes. While Wall street banks recieved $29 Trillion in bailouts, $75 Billion in relief was set aside for housing foreclosures and mortgage assistance. Instead of being paid to families, this was paid to mortgage servicers, and the services found ways to pocket the money and continue foreclosures: by the end of the program, less than 20% of the funds were used, and most had dropped out of the program due to foreclosures. The Obama administration refused to prosecute the fraud, or any of those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.
On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pinned George Floyd with his knee on Floyd’s neck for over 7 minutes, killing him in a manner reminiscient of Eric Garner. Bystander Darnella Frazier filmed the encounter. During that time, Floyd moaned, sobbed, “Oh Mama, oh Mama,” begged, “Please, please, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe” at least 11 times. Other distressed witnesses joined in with “Bro, you’ve got him down, at least let him breathe, man,” and, “He’s not even resisting arrest … he’s human, bro.” One of the cops responds, “This is why you don’t do drugs, kids.” After about four minutes, Floyd lost consciousness. Though a witness charged, “You just really killed that man, bro,” Chavin kept his knee on Floyd’s unmoving neck for another four minutes. Afterwards, protests erupted in dozens of US cities, with over 50 cases of police brutality. Many police posed for US Media-friendly photo ops with protesters, then immediately tear gassed, shot pepper balls, and cleared them from the area. Over 11k people have been arrested, and several killed, including a 13 year old. A massive, documented list of all the cases of police brutality in the wake of these protests, in every US state.
On May 11th, 2020, 27 year old EMT Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend were at their apartment in Louisville Kentucky, when police, doing a no-knock-no-announce raid, stormed in and blindly fired more than 20 shots, killing her. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, returned fire, thinking they were intruders. The police were searching for two drug suspects who were already in police custody, who lived more than 10 miles away from Taylor’s house. Kenneth Walker was charged with first degree assault and attempted murder, while the cops were placed on paid leave. Walker’s case was brough to a grand jury, but after protests erupted, he was released by the judge, and the district attorney moved to dismiss all charges against him. As of Septemeber 2020, the only charge brought, was against one officer, none of whose bullets killed Breonna Taylor, but for “wanton endangerment”, since he fired shots into the walls of other apartments. The other officers who murdered Breonna Taylor went free, and the nation erupted in protests.
On February 23rd, 2020, 3 men in a pickup truck shouting racist slurs, shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery, while he was jogging, in Brunswick Georgia. Consecutively, 2 different Brunswick District Attorneys, and other officials connected with the killers advised officers to make no arrests. After a local attorney for a passerby who caught the event on camera, released the video to a local radio station, it then went viral on youtube and twitter, forcing a response by Georgia governor Brian Kemp. While the killers were ultimately convicted, they were not arrested until 74 days after the killing.
During the 2020 coravirus pandemic, it was found that a law that empowered police to arrest those for not social distancing, lead to 80% of those arrested being black and latino.
On October 12th, 2019, yet another police officer went into a home, and shot and killed the inhabitant, 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson, in Fort Worth, TX. It began with a neighbor who called 911, after seeing a house with the door open - “When I made that non-emergency call, I didn’t say it was a burglary. I didn’t say it was people fighting. I didn’t say anything to make them have a gun. All they needed to do is ring the doorbell,” neighbor James Smith said. The officer has been placed on paid leave.
On Augist 24th, 2019, Minneapolis police arrested black teen Elijah McClain, beat him, held him down, and injected him with ketamine, killing him. Ketamine injections (forced drugging) are a widespread practice used by police to subdue suspects.
On June 12th, 2019, US marshalls shot and killed 20 year old Brandon Webber, as he was getting into his vehicle outside his home. The police have alternately claimed that he rammed them with his car, and that he was carrying a weapon, but aren’t releasing details or dashcams. The killing provoked a strong protest from the community, police used tear gas to disperse the crowd, and arrested three people. 36 cops were injured from flying rocks and bricks thrown by protestors. Mayor Strickland stated: “Let me be clear, the aggression shown towards our officers and deputies (Wednesday night) was unwarranted.” Memphis police have a history of killings of young black men, including Darrius Stewart, an unarmed 19 year old shot and killed in 2015.
In March, 2019, an Oklahoma City cop shot 14-year-old Lorenzo Clerkley Jr. twice through a crack in a wooden fence, only giving him a 0.6 second warning, while him and his friends were playing with BB guns in their backyard. The horrific scene showed that the cop knew they were BB guns before shooting. It also shows Lorenzo telling him he was shot in the right side, then the cop rolling him on that side, as well as being dragged over broken glass. The family does not have health insurance and can’t afford the medical bills, including a $1,300 ambulance ride. Oklahoma County District Attorney determined the shooting was justified, and the Officer is currently on paid leave. A review of all of the department’s police shootings between 2004 and 2013 found that none of the 78 police shootings investigated by the homicide unit ever resulted in criminal charges, firing, demotion, or unpaid time off.
On September 27th, 2018, a Dallas TX police officer getting off work entered the apartment of 26 year old Botham Jean (thinking it was her own), and shot and killed him. The officer, Amber Guyger, at first was placed on administrative leave, and eventually was charged with manslaughter. Jeans family accused the Dallas Police Department of using Jean’s marijuana use in news articles as a justification for his murder. The trial for Amber Guyger concluded in October, 2019, finding Amber Guyger guilty, but only receiving a 10 year sentence. The judge hugged her after the verdict. One of the witnesses of the murder, Jean’s next door neighbor Joshua Brown, is suspiciously murdered a few days after the trial. He was expected to testify against police in a different case, a second time. 1,2,3
On June 20th 2018, a Pittsburgh PA cop shot 17-year old Antwon Rose in the back while he was running away and killed him. Luckily a cell phone video caught the incident, showing officers handcuffing his corpse. “He was just a really lovely, gentle kid,” Gisele Fetterman told the newspaper at a World Refugee Day event in Market Square on Wednesday. “His mom is amazing. All the kids loved him. Just a fine person. Bubbly. Funny. Goofy. Just really special.”1
On July 19th, 2017, Cincinatti OH prosecutors decided not to pursue a third murder trial for police officer Ray Tensing, who shot Samuel DuBose in the head on July 19th 2015, killing him, after pulling him over for a missing front license plate. The prosecutor told the mother, “since there are more racists in Hamilton county than not, its pointless to pursue another trial because you won’t get a conviction.” Tensing was wearing a confederate battle flag T-shirt when he murdered DuBose. 1
On June 18th, 2017, Seattle police murdered a 30 year old pregnant woman suffering from mental health issues, Charleena Lyles, while her 3 of her 4 children slept in the next room. No charges have been brought against the police officers. 1
On Feb 12, 2017, Jerimy Mathis, a white North Carolina state trooper shot 31-year-old Willard Scott twice in the back, killing him, as he was running away from the trooper after a traffic stop. Mathis was placed on paid leave, and no charges have been filed.1
On July 18th, 2016, Police shot Alfred Kinsey, a mental health therapist who was unarmed, while he was helping an autistic patient in a park. Kinsey was lying on the ground with his hands in the air and trying to negotiate between officers and his patient when he was shot. Both Kinsey and his patient were unarmed. Following the shooting, Kinsey stated he was handcuffed and left bleeding on the ground for 20 minutes with police giving him no medical aid. Authorities stated that they were investigating the incident, which received significant media attention following the appearance of cellphone video footage. The officer who shot Kinsey was arrested in 2017 and charged with attempted manslaughter and negligence. However, he remains employed and has not been fired. 1,2
On July 6th, 2016, Philando Castile was shot and killed by Jeronimo Yanez, a St. Anthony, Minnesota police officer. Castile’s girlfriend live-streamed the murder, showing Yanez pointing the gun at both her and her daughter. After Yanez was acquitted of all charges on June 16, 2017 by a jury, a video of the murder was leaked, showing Philando openly disclosing that he had a firearm on him, only to then be shot point-blank 5 times. According to author and former FBI agent Larry Brubaker, who has written two books on officer-involved shootings, “this is the first time an officer has been charged for a fatal shooting in Minnesota in more than 200 cases that spanned over three decades”. 1
On November 5th, 2015, Two police officers shot and killed 24-year old Jamar Clark. The cops were placed on paid leave. Protests over the shooting lead to another act of terrorism where 4 white men shot 5 Black lives matter protestors. 1
In May, 2010, Kalief Browder, a 16 year old black teen, was arrested while walking home in the Bronx, on suspicion of robbery. He was held for 3 years on Riker Island, a New York jail notorious for its horrible treatment of inmates, without trial or conviction, refusing to accept the state’s plea deal and staunchly defending his innocence, until the case was finally dismissed. Kalief was held for 2 of his 3 years in solitary confinement, and his deteriorating mental health lead him to attempt suicide multiple times. After his release, Kalief Browder committed suicide by hanging himself, in June, 2015. 1, 2
On May 16, 2010, Police officer Joseph Weekley killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones with a headshot, a 7 year old black girl, as she slept on a sofa inside her home on the east side of Detroit. On January 28, 2015, a prosecutor cleared Weekley of the last remaining charge against him, ensuring there would not be a third trial.1, 2
On April 12, 2015, Freddie Carlos Gray, Jr., a 25-year-old Black man, was arrested by the Baltimore Police Department for possessing what the police alleged was an illegal switchblade under Baltimore law. While being transported in a police van, several cops held him down, putting pressure on his spinal cord, after which he fell into a coma and died on April 19, 2015. This sparked a series of protests in Baltimore; riot police responded violently, and called in the national guard to aid against the “thugs”, as they were labeled by Obama in a press conference. After the protests were put down, the police officers were given separate trials, and all of them were found innocent. 1
On March 30, 2015, After being pulled over for rolling through a stop sign, Floyd Dent was beaten by officer William Melendez, who had a history of civil complaints for brutality. Melendez punched him 15 times in the temple, put him in a chokehold, until another officer arrived and tased him. Melendez repeatedly threatened to kill Dent, and plant drugs on him. 1
The shooting of Walter Scott occurred on April 4, 2015, in North Charleston, South Carolina, following a daytime traffic stop for a non-functioning brake light. Scott, an unarmed black man, was murdered by Michael Slager, a white North Charleston police officer. Slager was only charged with murder after an eyewitness video surfaced which showed him shooting Scott from behind while Scott was fleeing, and which contradicted his police report. Without the video, the shooting would’ve likely been deemed justified, as nearly all murders by police result in no charges. 1
On November 22, 2014, in Cleveland, Ohio, two police officers killed 12 year old Tamir Rice, after receiving a call that he had a weapon. It turned out to be a toy. 1
On November 14, 2014,Albuquerque New Mexico police officer Keith Sandy killed a mentally ill homeless man, Boyd. Sandy told another officer: “For this fucking lunatic? I’m going to shoot him in the penis with a shotgun here in a second.”, then killed Boyd 2 hours later. Sandy chose voluntary retirement (in order to avoid an internal investigation) and a pension, getting 70% of his pay for the rest of his life. 1
On October 20th, 2014, 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was shot and killed by police in Chicago. The police at first claimed he was behaving erratically with a knife, and shot him 16 times. The initial police portrayals of the incident, consisting of about 400 pages of typed and handwritten reports, prompted police supervisors to rule the case a justifiable homicide and within the bounds of the department’s use of force guidelines. Dashcam footage released a year later (after the police denied 15 previous requests) showed that he was walking away from police when shot. There was also a security camera at a nearby Burger King restaurant that may have captured the shooting, but during the time of the shooting there is a gap of 86 minutes in the recording. The officer was found guilty of second degree murder, and a $5M settlement was awarded to his family, however a USDOJ report released in January of 2017, described police as having a culture of “excessive violence,” especially against minority suspects. Three Chicago police officers tried for allegedly attempting to cover up events related to the shooting were found not guilty by the Cook County Circuit Court on January 17, 2019.
The shooting of Michael Brown occurred on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a northern suburb of St. Louis. Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, 28, a white Ferguson police officer, after robbing a convenience store. Protests in Ferguson erupted after the murderer was found innocent, evoking a militarized crackdown on black protestors by the predominantly white police force. After his mother and some supporters put have been few industries which have been immune.[1]. A long flowers and candles on the spot where he was killed, police ran over the spot with their vehicles.This systemic pattern of murder of unarmed black civilians spawned the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. 1 At least 6 of the most visual Ferguson protestors have been killed or “suicided” under suspicious circumstances in the years since.2 Other harrassments include bullets being shot into protestors cars, snakes being placed in cars, and cars being run off the road. The Ferguson community suspects a vigilante murderer, or white supremacists, working with the police. Missouri has over 5,000 militia groups active in the state. Due to the protestors opposition to police, their murders remain unsolved.
The shooting of John Crawford III occurred on August 5, 2014. Crawford was a 22-year-old African-American man shot to death by Beavercreek police officer Sean Williams, in a Walmart store in Beavercreek, Ohio, near Dayton, while holding a toy BB gun.1
On August 5th, 2014, Tulsa Oklahoma police officer Shannon Kepler shot and killed his daughter’s 19 year old black boyfriend, Jeremy Lake, after Lake tried to shake his hand. After the killing, he fled the scene, and neither called for medical help, nor stayed to talk with police. As of July 2017, there have been 3 deadlocked trials. 1
On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner died in Staten Island, New York City, after a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer put him in what has been described as a chokehold for about 15 to 19 seconds while arresting him. A grand jury found the officer Pantaleo innocent, sparking a series of nation-wide demonstrations against police brutality of blacks.1
On April 30, 2014, a police officer, Christopher Manney, shot and killed Dontre Hamilton, a black man with a history or mental illness, at Red Arrow Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After the shooting, Manney applied for duty disability, saying the shooting and its aftermath caused him to experience severe post-traumatic stress disorder, after being fired. No charges were brought against him.1
On March 3rd, 2014, Police claimed 22 year old Victor White shot himself while handcuffed (behind his back) in the back of a Louisiana state police car. A later autopsy revealed that he was shot in the front by a right-handed person (he was left-handed). Yet, the Iberia Parish coroner continued to declare the death a suicide. 1
In September 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Police shot and killed 2 black civilians and wounded 4 others in the Danziger Bridge Shootings. New Orleans police fabricated a cover-up story for their crime, falsely reporting that seven police officers responded to a police dispatch reporting an officer down, and that at least four suspects were firing weapons at the officers upon their arrival.[2] Although 5 police officers were initially convicted by a federal jury in New Orleans, this decision was overturned. In 2016, the five officers plead guilty and received reduced sentences from 3-12 years. 1
In 2004, during a protest at the republican national convention, over 1,800 people were arrested. They were held at Hudson Pier Depot at Pier 57 on the Hudson River, a three-story, block-long pier that has been converted into a temporary prison, described as overcrowded, dirty, and contaminated with oil and asbestos. People reported having suffered from smell, bad ventilation, and even chemical burns and rashes. In 2014, the city was forced to pay $6.4 million to 430 individual plaintiffs. $6.6 million was paid to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by 1,200 additional people. 1,2
In 1991 in Los Angeles, Latasha Harlins was a 15-year-old black teen who was shot in the head by Soon Ja Du, a 51-year-old female store owner from South Korea, who was tried and convicted of voluntary manslaughter in Harlins’ death. Harlins’ death came 13 days after the videotaped beating of Rodney King. Du was fined $500 and sentenced to five years of probation and 400 hours of community service but no prison time for her crime. Some cited the shooting as one of the causes of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.1
In 1991, Los Angeles police beat up Rodney King, a black taxi-driver, and his two passengers, after he refused to pull over. The brutal beating, in which he was gagged, tazed, kicked, and beaten with batons by around 6 cops, with ~15 more idly watching, was caught on video, and the media frenzy and black community reaction surrounding his beating lead to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. 1
On May 13, 1985, the police again attempted to evict MOVE, and bombed an entire city block, killing 11 people (including 5 children, Delisha, Thee, Netta, Frank, Raymond, Vincent, Conrad, Rhonda, Lil Phil, Thomaso, & Theresa Africa), and leaving 250 homeless. Police initially lobbed tear gas canisters at the building, and a gunfight with semi-automatic and automatic firearms ensued. Commissioner Sambor then ordered a bombing from a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter, and Philadelphia Police Department Lt. Frank Powell proceeded to drop two one-pound bombs made of C4 explosive (which the police referred to as “entry devices”) made of FBI-supplied water gel explosive, a dynamite substitute, targeting a fortified, bunker-like cubicle on the roof of the house. The resulting explosions ignited a fire from fuel for a gasoline-powered generator in rooftop bunker that eventually destroyed approximately 65 nearby houses. The firefighters, who had earlier deluge-hosed the MOVE members in a failed attempt to evict them from the building, stood by as the fire caused by the bomb engulfed the first house and spread to others, having been given orders to let the fire burn. Despite the earlier drenching of the building by firefighters, officials said that they feared that MOVE would shoot at the firefighters. Eleven people (John Africa, five other adults and five children aged 7 to 13) died in the resulting fire. Ramona Africa, one of the two survivors, stated that police fired at those trying to escape. No one from the city government was charged criminally. Many MOVE members are still in prison, fighting for their release. 1
In 1982, an all‐white jury in Philadelphia sentenced Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal to death for supposedly murdering a police officer. Tellingly, one of the judges referred to Abu‐Jamal with a racial slur. 2
In 1979, a communist-led march to oust the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party lead to the Greensboro Massacre, where local police helped the KKK stop the march and kill 5 protesters. Edward Dawson, a Klansman-turned FBI informant as part of the agency’s COINTELPRO program and was among the founders of the North Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan when the North Carolina chapter of the United Klans of America split. By 1979 he was working as an informant for the Greensboro Police Department. He was given a copy of the march route from the police and informed them of the potential for violence. Absent the police, the attackers escaped with relative ease. All of the killers were acquitted in state and national trials. The city lost a civil lawsuit in 1980, being one of the few times in US history when “a jury held local police liable for cooperating with the KKK in a wrongful death.” The Greensboro city council finally apologized for the incident in 2017. 1
In 1979, Los Angeles police shot and killed Eulia Love over a disputed gas bill. LA police had a notorious reputation for using violence in black, brown, and gay communities. The police chief in a press conference later corrected the amount of the bill, after a reporter quoted an incorrect amount for the bill. 1>
In 1978, the police were involved in shootout with MOVE, a black power commune in Philadelphia, after attempting to evict them. The 9 surviving members (called the MOVE 9, including Charles Sims Africa) were given 100 year long sentences, 7 of which are still currently in prison.
Between 1932 and 1972, the US public health service secretly infected ~200 black men with syphilis, under the guise of receiving free health care, in the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. None of the men infected were ever told they had the disease (told instead they had “bad blood”), and none were treated with penicillin even after the antibiotic became proven for the treatment of syphilis in 1947. By the end of the study in 1972, only 74 of the test subjects were alive. Of the original 399 men, 28 had died of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis. 1
Between the 1950s and the 1970s, predatory contracts called “home sale contracts” were given to 75% of the 60k homes purchased by black Chicaogans. These “home sale contracts” allowed the seller to hold the property until the buyer paid off the entire mortgage. This meant that no equity was accrued by the buyer and the owners could kick the buyers out if a single monthly payment was missed. Black contract buyers in Chicago payed an average of $71k more than they would have through a conventional non-predatory mortgage. In total, between $3.2B and $4B were expropriated from Chicago’s black community.
In 1969, the FBI in collaboration with chicago police, murdered an influential black panther organizer, Fred Hampton, when he was 21 years old. An FBI informant drugged him in the evening, then agents broke into the apartment, killing another, and firing into the room where Hampton and his pregnant girlfriend slept. The FBI targeted him as being a potential “Black Messiah”, as Hampton was organizing poor blacks, whites, Latinos, and Native Americans in Chicago with the Rainbow Coalition, to fight the repressive police brutality under mayor Daley. After a break-in at an FBI office in Pennsylvania, the existence of COINTELPRO, an illegal counter-intelligence program, was brought to light. One of the documents that was released after the break-in was a floor plan of Hampton’s apartment. Another document outlined a deal the FBI brokered with the deputy attorney general to conceal the FBI’s role in the assassination of Hampton and the existence of COINTELPRO. 1
Starting in 1967, The Black Panther Party, a revolutionary black socialist group, became the target of FBI’s COINTELPRO. Hoover deemed the Panther’s free breakfast program (which served food for 10,000 children daily at its height), and its free medical care programs, as a dangerous threat to the US. Local police forces, aided by the FBI, were involved with multiple break-ins of panther headquarters, shoot-outs, the arrests, imprisonment, or murder of nearly every high-ranking member, and achieved its systematic destruction by 1980. A faithful account of its history is in founder Huey P. Newton’s autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, and the history Black against Empire. 1
In 1967, a nationwide series of riots broke out in the black ghettos of the US, involving young blacks revolting against the white-supremacist power structure. In the 1967 Detroit Riot, Lyndon Johnson brought in the Michigan National guard to put down the revolt. The result was 43 dead, 1,189 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed. 1
From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the FBI to ‘neutralize’ him as an effective civil rights leader. This included wiretapping his phones, blackmail letters threatening to expose his extramarital affairs, a letter encouraging him to commit suicide, as well as watching King during his assassination, leading many to believe the FBI were either complicit, or accomplices. The FBI are similarly accused of being complicit or accomplices to the nation of Islam’s murder of Malcolm X. 1 In February 2021, a deathbed confession from an NYPD agent revealed that the NYPD and FBI aided in the killing of Malcolm X, by arresting Malcolm X’s bodyguards days before his assassination.
In such cities as Birmingham, Alabama, police ruthlessly enforced segregation, and white supremacist terrorism. In 1963, the police assisted the KKK in bombing the black leaders of the Birmingham Campaign for desegregation, leading to the Birmingham Riot of 1963, as well as the 16th st. Baptist Church Bombing, where 4 black girls were killed. The US government sent in troops to quell the revolting black populace. In the 1963 Children’s Crusade, police mass arrested black children who had walked out of school protesting segregation, using fire hoses and attack dogs against them. Over 1,000 people were arrested throughout the campaign.
In 1927, the US had Marcus Garvey, a black organizer, deported under false pretenses of mail fraud. Garvey was unique in advancing a Pan-African philosophy to inspire a global mass movement and economic empowerment focusing on Africa known as Garveyism.[3] Promoted by the UNIA as a movement of African Redemption, Garveyism would eventually inspire others, ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Rastafari movement (some sects of which proclaim Garvey as a prophet.)[4]1
In 1921, a white mob started the Tulsa race riot, attacking black residents in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in what is considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in US History. Thousands of whites rampaged through the black community for two days, killing men and women, burning and looting stores and homes, and using private planes to drop burning balls of turpentine on rooftops. ~300 blacks were killed, and ~10,000 blacks were left homeless. More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals and more than 6,000 black residents were arrested and detained. In 2001 it was revealed that the police and national guard assisted the whites. 1
In the years between 1889 and 1903, on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs – hanged, burned, mutilated.
In 1887, white paramilitaries attacked and killed between 35-300 black Knights of Labor sugar workers on strike for better conditions, in the Thibodaux Massacre. Victims reportedly included elders, women and children. All those killed were African American.[3]1
In the 1860s-70s, the Ku Klux Klan, aided by police, organized raids,lynchings, beatings, burnings, throughout the south. For Kentucky alone, between 1867 and 1871, the National Archives lists 116 acts of violence. A sample:
- Sam Davis hung by a mob in Harrodsburg, May 28, 1868.
- Wm. Pierce hung by a mob in Christian July 12, 1868.
- Geo. Roger hung by a mob in Bradsfordville Martin County July 11, 1868. …
- Silas Woodford age sixty badly beaten by disguised mob. . ..
- Negro killed by Ku Klux Klan in Hay county January 14, 1871.
After the Civil war, black voting in the period after 1869 resulted in 2 black senators and 20 black congressmen. This list would dwindle rapidly after 1876, due to the reactionary policies of Johnson-era reconstruction, and the empowering of the KKK in the south. By 1901, there were no blacks in congress, and the number still hasn’t returned to its 1869 levels.
The Memphis Riots of 1866 occurred after a shooting altercation between white policemen and black soldiers recently mustered out of the Union Army. Mobs of white civilians and policemen rampaged through black neighborhoods and the houses of freedmen, attacking and killing black men, women and children. 46 blacks and 2 whites were killed, 75 blacks injured, over 100 black persons robbed, 5 black women raped, and 91 homes, 4 churches and 8 schools burned in the black community.[2]Modern estimates place property losses at over $100,000, suffered mostly by blacks. Police and firefighters made up one third of the mob (24% and 10%, respectively, of the total group); they were joined by small business owners (28%), clerks (10%), artisans (10%), and city officials (4.5%). Many blacks fled the city permanently; by 1870, their population had fallen by one quarter compared to 1865.1
In 1865-66, the Black Codes were laws passed by Southern states after the Civil War. These laws had the intent and the effect of restricting African Americans’ freedom, and of compelling them to work in a labor economy based on low wages or debt. Black Codes were part of a larger pattern of Southern whites trying to suppress the new freedom of emancipated African American slaves, the freedmen.
In 1865, the 13th Amendment, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. This would become an important loophole, as white supremacists, land-owners, and business-owners in the south would enact legislation and find ways to imprison blacks for petty crimes, and thus be able to use free prison labor for their businesses. This continues up to the present day, in such policies as the disparity of sentencing between prescription “white” drugs, and drugs typically used in poorer black communities.
In 1859, white abolitionist John Brown attempted to begin an armed slave revolt, rallying nearby black and white abolitionists, and raided an arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He intended to use the rifles and pikes he captured at the arsenal, in addition to those he brought along, to arm rebellious slaves with the aim of striking terror in the slaveholders in Virginia. He planned to send agents to nearby plantations, rallying the slaves. They would free more slaves, obtain food, horses and hostages, and destroy slaveholders’ morale. Brown planned to follow the Appalachian Mountains south into Tennessee and even Alabama, the heart of the South, making forays into the plains on either side.[9] Due primarily to intelligence leaks, the raid failed; 10 were killed and 6, including Brown, were captured (lead by future confederate general Robert E. Lee), then executed by hanging. Before his execution, John Brown addressed the court: ‘‘I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done. […] Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.” 1
The Fugitive Slave act of 1850 was a law that required all escaped slaves, upon capture, to be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate in this law.Abolitionists nicknamed it the “Bloodhound Law” for the dogs that were used to track down runaway slaves.[1] 1
In 1831, Nat Turner lead a Slave Rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. Rebel slaves killed from 55 to 65 white slave-owners, the highest number of any slave uprising in the Southern United States. There was widespread fear in the aftermath of the rebellion, and white militias organized in retaliation against the slaves. The state executed 56 slaves accused of being part of the rebellion. In the frenzy, many non-participant slaves were punished. At least 100 African Americans, and possibly up to 200, were murdered by militias and mobs in the area. Blacks suspected of participating in the rebellion were beheaded by the militia. “Their severed heads were mounted on poles at crossroads as a grisly form of intimidation.” Across the South, state legislatures passed new laws prohibiting education of slaves and free black people,[3] restricting rights of assembly and other civil rights for free black people, and requiring white ministers to be present at all worship services.1
In 1822, Denmark Vesey a former slave who had purchased his freedom, began organizing his parish for a slave rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina. Vesey and his followers were said to be planning to kill slaveholders in Charleston, liberate the slaves, and sail to the black republic of Haiti for refuge, but were arrested beforehand. Vesey and five slaves were among the first group of men rapidly judged guilty by the secret proceedings of a city-appointed Court and condemned to death; they were executed by hanging on July 2, 1822. In later proceedings, some 30 additional followers were executed. 1
The 1811 German Coast Uprising was a revolt of black slaves in parts of the Territory of Orleans. Between 64 and 125 enslaved men marched from sugar plantations near present-day LaPlace on the German Coast toward the city of New Orleans. During their two-day, twenty-mile march, the men burned five plantation houses (three completely), several sugarhouses, and crops. White men led by officials of the territory formed militia companies to hunt down and kill the insurgents. Over the next two weeks, white planters and officials interrogated, tried and executed an additional 44 insurgents who had been captured. Executions were by hanging or decapitation. Whites displayed the bodies as a warning to intimidate slaves. The heads of some were put on pikes and displayed at plantations. The alleged leader, Charles Deslondes, had his hands chopped off, was then shot in one thigh & then the other, until they were both broken – then shot in the Body and before he had expired was put into a bundle of straw and roasted. 1
In the summer of 1800, Gabriel Prosser planned a large slave rebellion in Richmond, Virginia. Information regarding the revolt was leaked prior to its execution, and he and twenty-five followers were taken captive and hanged in punishment. In reaction, Virginia and other state legislatures passed restrictions on free blacks, as well as prohibiting the education, assembly, and hiring out of slaves, to restrict their chances to learn and to plan similar rebellions. 1
In 1787, the Three-Fifths Compromise, was a compromise between southern and northern states for how slaves should be counted for representation and taxation purposes, and determining how many seats a state would have in the house of representatives. Black slaves were counted as 3/5ths of a white person. 1
In the 18th and 19th centuries, US plantation owners benefitted from African Slavery, which eventually became the dominant mode of production in the south. Words cannot do justice to the inhumanity of slavery as practiced by the US, but specific examples above will attempt to highlight its brutality. The total slave population in the South eventually reached 4 million before liberation. 1

Latinos

On June 14th, 2019, an off-duty cop, Salvador Sanchez, in Corona, CA, shot and killed a mentally ill man, Kenneth French,, as well as shooting his family 8 times, while his family was with shopping for fathers day at a Costco. “I begged and told him not to shoot,” his father Russell French said. “I said we have no guns and my son is sick. He still shot.” Sanchez then fired at least eight rounds, striking all three family members. A man inside Costco stood and prayed over Russell French as he lied on the ground bleeding, he said. Kenneth French was shot twice in his back, Galipo said. There were also two gunshot wounds in his armpit and shoulder area. After the shooting, Corona Police said Sanchez was assaulted “without provocation” before Sanchez opened fire. He was placed on administrative leave days after the shooting, into which the LAPD is conducting an internal investigation.
On Feb 7th, 2019, a US border patrol officer shot and killed 21 for old Mendivil Perez, an American citizen, in Nogales, AZ. More than six months later, CBP won’t name the officer who fired his gun, or explain why he fired, or acknowledge the killing.
In early June, 2019, several reports of abuse surfaced about the US’s migrant prison camps, run by US customs and Border Patrol. One such facility, named “The Dog Pound”, by border patrol agents, had no running water, no tarp or safety from the elements. A group of prisoners were held in a single cell for 30 days without shower or clothes changes, in 100 degree temperatures. There is severe overcrowding in the El Paso camp, with as many as 76 migrants packed into a tiny cell designed for a maximum of 12 people. A number of children have died while being held, including one baby born in an overcrowded cell. The mother was never taken to a hospital. 4 toddlers in a Texas facility were so ill and neglected, that a lawyer intervened to force the government to hospitalize them. Children are often taken from mothers, due to the horrible conditions in the camps. In several Rio Grande Valley facilities, migrants were not provided soap, toothbrushes, and were sleep-deprived. Health and Human Service says it is past capacity with over 13,000 kids in its care at the moment. A mole exposed a Facebook group containing 9500 border patrol agents, with incredibly racist and sexist rhetoric, including threats against US rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was planning a visit to the camps.
On January 29th, 2019, Tempe Arizona police shot and killed a 14 year old, Antonio Arce. He was shot in the back between his shoulder blades while running away. Police at first delayed, then released a small section of the bodycam footage, intentionally cut right before seeing the body, 3 days after the shooting. After backlash over the shortened video, they held a private showing to select reporters, barring any cameras or recording devices, seemingly showing Arce with the orange-tipped airsoft gun found near his body. They’ve refused to release that video to the public, leading many to believe it to be doctored, with police planting an airsoft gun on him after the killing as a justification. The original video has no such airsoft gun. The officer who murdered him is currently on administrative leave.
On Nov 25, 2018, US customs and border agents fired tear gas at hundreds of Central American migrants on the US border. “We ran, but when you run, the gas asphyxiates you more,” Honduran migrant Ana Zuniga, 23, told the Associated Press while cradling daughter Valery, 3, in her arms. The use of tear gas is banned in warfare, while its use for riot control is internationally accepted. Protesters and amnesty seekers would have more rights and protections if they simply declared war on the US government.
In May 2018, at a California press conference regarding Sanctuary cities, Trump, referring to Mexican immigrants stated: “These aren’t people. These are animals”.
Starting in April 2018, the Trump administration began a policy of separating families who attempt to cross the border. Separated children have been housed in a number of newly constructed tent facilities, such as one in Tornillo, TX. Another facility in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the same military prison that held Japanese and Apache civilians, will hold south american migrants. Andrea Pitzer, the author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps” writes, “While writing a book on camp history, I defined concentration camps as the mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of race, religion, national origin, citizenship, or political party, rather than anything a given individual has done. By this definition, the new child camp established in Tornillo, Texas, is a concentration camp.” Recently it has been found that the Trump administration has been drugging children without consent. Children as young as 14 were abused at a Stanton VA ICE facility. “Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me,” said a Honduran immigrant who was sent to the facility when he was 15 years old. “Strapped me down all the way, from your feet all the way to your chest, you couldn’t really move. … They have total control over you. They also put a bag over your head. It has little holes; you can see through it. But you feel suffocated with the bag on.” 1,2,3
Throughout 2018, I.C.E. started another wave of deportations, breaking up hundreds of families, and mandated the legal separation incoming parents from their children (presumably to deter future asylum-seekers). ICE arrested 114 people in Sandusky OH. Trump and Jeff Sessions have ramped up a trend of forcible deportations started by Clinton and Obama. Between 2016 and 2017, apprehensions of undocumented immigrants jumped by a third. In 2017, President Trump deported more than double the number of noncriminals than Obama had the previous year. Those deported include a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy in San Antonio; a grandmother described as the “backbone” of a Navy veteran’s family; a father of two in Detroit who had lived in the U.S. since he was 10 years old. A major consequence of this new policy has been an explosion of fear among immigrant communities “When everyone’s a target, no one is safe,” says Luis Zayas, dean of the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin. He cites instances of ICE agents arresting people who had just filed paperwork for a green card, left church or dropped off their kids at school. “The arrests feel arbitrary, and that’s different,” he says. “The fear is worse now than I’ve ever seen it.” 1, 2,3
In July 2017, police shot Ismael Lopez, a Mississippi car mechanic, in the back of the head at his own home, killing him. While the police say that he was holding a weapon, his guns were nowhere near his dead body, and police also killed his dog, and bullet holes were found from police shooting through the front door. No officer has been charged.1
The United States Department of Homeland Security rescinded DACA, or Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, a program which protects ~ 800,000 minors from being deported, on June 16, 2017, while continuing to review the existence of the DACA program as a whole. The DACA policy was rescinded by the Trump administration on September 5, 2017, but full implementation of the rescission was delayed six months to give Congress time to decide how to deal with the population that was previously eligible under the policy. 1
Beginning in May 2017, ICE began another wave of deportation targeting Mexicans. Hugo Mejia and a coworker, Rodrigo Nuñez, were imprisoned by ICE officials, despite living in the US for 17 years, and having clean records.1
Beginning in 1994, sheriff Joe Arpaio opened up a “tent city”, outside of phoenix, a facility which he called, his own “personal concentration camp”, used to house prisoners, in terrible conditions. In 2011, inmates complained that fans near their beds were not working, and that their shoes were melting from the heat.[45] During the summer of 2003, when outside temperatures exceeded 110 °F (43 °C), Arpaio said to complaining inmates, “It’s 120 degrees in Iraq and the soldiers are living in tents and they didn’t commit any crimes, so shut your mouths!”. Arpaio reinstuted chain gangs (for female prisoners as well), forcing people to work 7 hours a day, 7 days a week. Arpaio also entrapped 18-year-old James Saville into an assassination attempt against himself. Saville’s attorneys eventually discovered that MCSO detectives had bought the bomb parts themselves, then convinced Saville to build it even though he was not predisposed to commit such a crime. On July 9, 2003, a Maricopa County Superior Court jury acquitted Saville, finding that the bomb plot was an elaborate publicity stunt to boost Arpaio’s reelection bid. On April 4th, 2017, newly elected Phoenix sheriff Paul Penzone finally closed it down due to public pressure, after 23 years of operation. Trump pardoned sherriff Arpaio in August 2017, after holding a rally in Phoenix AZ in which police tear-gassed protesters. 1
On March 25th-27th, 2017, ICE agents arrested 84 immigrants in Oregon and Washington. Many arrested had no criminal background. Oregon Governor Katie Brown complied with ICE, but received vitriolic responses when she tweeted in support of immigrant families. 1
On March 27th, 2017, ICE agents in Chicago broke into the home of Felix Torres, and shot him while he and his family slept in their home. After speaking with Torres’ daughter, the People’s Response Team added that “no members of the family are undocumented, and the family has lived in the home for at least 30 years.”Carmen Torres said, “They didn’t say anything. They just came in and pointed pistols in our faces and dragged us out,” DNA Info reported. “It’s a lie when they say he was holding a gun. He doesn’t even own a gun,” she said. “They shot my dad. They shot him, and I don’t know why.” He is in critical condition. 1
In early 2017, ICE began a campaign of arrests and deportation of undocumented immigrants. 700 People have been arrested so far. 1
In the present day, ICE (U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement), the police tasked with immigration enforcement, operates over 500 prison camps, holding over 34,000 undocumented people deemed “aliens”, 20,000 of which have no criminal convictions, in the US system of immigration detention. The camps include forced labor (often with contracts from private companies), poor conditions, lack of rights (since the undocumented aren’t considered citizens), and forced deportations, often splitting up families. Detainees are often held for a year without trial, with antiquated court procedures pushing back court dates for months, encouraging many to accept immediate deportation in the hopes of being able to return faster than the court can reach a decision, but forfeiting legal status, in a cruel system of coercion. After the creation of DHS and ICE, the budget for immigration enforcement doubled from $6.2 billion in 2002 to $12.5 billion in 2006 under Obama. 1, 2,3
In 1996, in response to increased immigration from countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala ravaged by US imperialism and authoritarian dictatorships, the US passed the Anti-Terrorism and effective Death Penalty Act, allowing deportation of any immigrant ever convicted of a crime, no matter how long ago or how serious. Lawful permanent residents who had married Americans and now had children were not exempt. The New York Times reported in July that “hundreds of long-term legal residents have been arrested since the law passed.” 1
By 1984, during the Reagan-era of social services and welfare cutbacks, 42% of all Latino children and one-fourth of the families lived below the poverty line.
In 1983, a mostly latino workforce lead the 3-year long Arizona Copper Mine Strike of 1983, in which the police, national guard, and Arizona governor assisted in one of the largest strikebreaking incidents of the 1980s, ending with the Phelps Dodge Corporation replacing most of the workers and decertifying the unions. Miners were subject to undercover surveillance by the Arizona Criminal Intelligence Systems Agency, to identify strikers engaged in violence, with the governor sending 325 National Guard soldiers to Morenci, and increasing the number of state policemen there to 425. Meanwhile, the local government passed injunctions limiting both picketing and demonstrations at the mine. The Arizona copper mine strike would later become a symbol of defeat for American unions. 1
From 1929 - 1954, the US implemented Mexican Repatriation, and Operation Wetback, a US law enforcement initiative under Eisenhower to curb Mexican immigration, in which over 1 Million Mexicans were arrested. After implementation, Operation Wetback gave rise to arrests and deportations by the U.S. Border Patrol that were civil rights violations, which resulted in several hundred United States citizens being illegally deported without being given a chance to prove their citizenship. From 1929 - 1939, ~400k-2 Million people were deported, 40-60% of them lawful citizens, and many of them children. About 1.1 Million people were deported in 1954 alone. A total of 750 immigration and border patrol officers and investigators; 300 jeeps, cars and buses; and seven airplanes were allocated for the operation.[28] Teams were focused on quick processing, as planes were able to coordinate with ground efforts and quickly deport people into Mexico.[29] While the operation included the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, its main targets were border areas in Texas and California.[29] Overall, there were 1,078,168 apprehensions made in the first year of Operation Wetback, with 170,000 being rounded up from May to July 1954. In addition, many illegal immigrants fled to Mexico fearing arrest; over half a million from Texas alone. 1 2
In 1951, the Los Angeles Police Department severely beat up 5 latino and 2 white men, in an event called Bloody Christmas, leaving them with broken bones and ruptured organs, and covered it up. After pressure from the Mexican-American community, the LAPD opened up an internal inquiry, resulting in eight police officers being indicted for the assaults, 54 being transferred, and 39 suspended.1

Asians

Between 1956-65, the Chinese Confession Program sought confessions of illegal entry from US citizens and residents of Chinese origin, with the (misleading) offer of legalization of status in exchange. The program resulted in 13,895 confessions,[1][4] with about 10,000 in the San Francisco region (where the bulk of the illegally entering Chinese population was concentrated.[2] This was far less than the number of people suspected of having entered illegally, and the less than complete usage of the program was attributed to lack of trust in the United States immigration enforcement agencies among the Chinese population, the lack of clear benefits from confessing, and the risk of deportation faced by the confessor as well as his or her (blood and paper) family.[2] Since confessions by neighbors could implicate a person and cause him or her to be deported, the program created fear and distrust in many Chinese-American communities. Anybody who had illegally entered and came in contact with the FBI before he or she had confessed was subject to immediate deportation.[1] The confessions had a significant impact on the Chinese-American community: as a result of the confessions, 22,083 people were exposed and 11,294 paper son slots were closed.[1][5] For comparison, the 1950 Census listed 117,629 Chinese in America (excluding Hawaii).[1] 1
From 1942-46, FDR imprisoned ~120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps after the attack on pearl harbor. The conditions of the camps were notoriously horrible, and most were forced to make “loyalty oaths”, or risk deportation and separation from their families. It was later admitted that government actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership”. Most lost their homes and jobs, as whites took over vacated homes. 1
The repression faced by Chinese Americans in the 19th and 20th century are found in the articles, History of Chinese Americans, and Anti-Chinese Sentiment in the US.
The Immigration Act of 1917 imposed literacy tests on immigrants, and created new categories of inadmissible persons and barred immigration from the Asia-Pacific Zone.1
The Scott Act of 1888 was a law that prohibited Chinese laborers abroad or who planned future travels from returning. It left an estimated 20,000-30,000 Chinese outside the United States at the time stranded. 1
In 1882, the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, illegalizing Chinese immigration, in a long chain of anti-chinese legislation. It was repealed in 1943. 1
The San Francisco Riot of 1877 was a two-day pogrom waged against Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, California by the city’s majority white population from the evening of July 23 through the night of July 24, 1877. The ethnic violence which swept Chinatown resulted in four deaths and the destruction of more than $100,000 worth of property belonging to the city’s Chinese immigrant population.1
The Page Act of 1875 prohibited entry of immigrants considered undesirable, classifying that as any individual from Asia who was coming to America to be a forced laborer, any Asian woman who would engage in prostitution, and all people considered to be convicts in their own country. It was introduced to “end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women”.[2] The Page Act was supposed to strengthen the ban against “coolie” laborers, by imposing a fine of up to $2,000 and maximum jail sentence of one year upon anyone who tried to bring a person from China, Japan,or any Asian country to the United States “without their free and voluntary consent, for the purpose of holding them to a term of service”.[3] However, these provisions, as well as those regarding convicts “had little effect at the time”.[4] On the other hand, the ban on female Asian immigrants was heavily enforced and proved to be a barrier for all Asian women trying to immigrate, especially Chinese.1
The Chinese Massacre of 1871 was a racially motivated riot which occurred on October 24, 1871 in Los Angeles, California, when a mob of around 500 white men entered Chinatown to attack, rob, and murder Chinese residents of the city.[1][2] An estimated 17 to 20 Chinese immigrants were systematically tortured and then hanged by the mob, making the event the largest mass lynching in American history.[1][2][3]1
The Pigtail Ordinance was a racist law passed in 1873 intended to force prisoners in San Francisco, California to have their hair cut within an inch of the scalp. It affected Han Chinese prisoners in particular, as it meant they would have their queue, a waist-long, braided pigtail, cut off. 1
The Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 was passed by the California legislature in an attempt to appease rising anger among white laborers about salary competition created by the influx of Chinese immigrants at the height of the California gold rush.The act sought to protect white laborers by imposing a monthly tax on Chinese immigrants seeking to do business in the state of California. 1

LGBTQ People

From ~1980-1996, its estimated that around 600k people have died, and 1.2M are living with HIV as a result of the US’s mismanagement of the AIDS epidemic. It disproportionately affects gay and bisexual men, black ppl, and latinos. 1
In 1969, LGBT activists began the Stonewall riots in response to a police raid in Greenwich Village, which highlighted a pattern of discrimination against gay people in the legal system. The Stonewall Inn It catered to an assortment of patrons and was known to be popular among the poorest and most marginalized people in the gay community: drag queens, transgender people, effeminate young men, butch lesbians, male prostitutes, and homeless youth. Police raids on gay bars were routine in the 1960s. The riot began an extended confrontation with the New York City police, and within weeks, Village residents quickly organized into activist groups to concentrate efforts on establishing places for gays and lesbians to be open about their sexual orientation without fear of being arrested. 1
In the 2nd Red and Lavendar Scare of 1947-56, Joseph McCarthy framed homosexuality as a dangerous, contagious social disease that posed a potential threat to state security.[59] Hundreds of suspected homosexuals were imprisoned or fired.1

Women

US police officers routinely commit sexual assault and rapes: most go unreported, but over 1200 incidents, including over 400 rapes were committed over a 9 year period from 2005-2013.
In the period following WWII, the US capitalist-controlled media, advertising, and consumer products industries propagandized and glorified the ideal of the housewife-consumer, in order to sell products, make labor space for returning soldiers, take advantage of women’s unpaid labor in the home, and to help build a new workforce and potential army to combat the soviet union. This sparked an era of regression with respect to the feminist victories of the previous 50 years, and caused psychological damage and demoralization to an uncountable number of women. Women who remained in the labor force were primarily only allowed in subordinate positions such as secretaries, cleaning women, elementary school teachers, saleswomen, waitresses, and nurses. This is chronicled in the Feminine Mystique.
In September 2020, it was revealed that ICE had performed mass hysterectomies on immigrant women in several detention centers, reminiscent of the long-standing US policy of sterilization of black and brown women. 2
From the 1880s onward, many US states (27 + Puerto Rico in 1956) operated a system of forced sterilization of women, rooted in white supremacy. The principle targets were the mentally ill, Native Americans, and blacks. For example, in Sunflower County Mississippi, 60% of black women living there were sterilized without their permission. An estimated 3,406 Indian women were sterilized.[63] California eugenicists in 1933 began sending their literature overseas to german scientists and medical workers, sparking the beginnings of Nazi Eugenics. In the end, over 65,000 individuals were sterilized in 33 states, in all likelihood without the perspectives of ethnic minorities. The US enacted a system of forced sterilization in Puerto Rico since its takeover by the US in 1989: a 1965 survey of of Puerto Rican residents found that about one-third of all Puerto Rican mothers, ages 20-49, were sterilized. 148 female prisoners in two California institutions were sterilized between 2006 and 2010 in a supposedly voluntary program, but it was determined that the prisoners did not give consent to the procedures. In Madrigal vs. Quilligan, many unsuspecting women were coerced to sign paperwork to perform sterilization, while others were told that the process could be reversed. None of the women were fluent in English. 10 latina women were sterilized, and the doctor was found innocent. 1,2,3
US elites in the 18th and 19th centuries pushed a narrative of domestic purity, or the cult of true womanhood, for women as a way of pacifying her with a doctrine of “separate but equal”-giving her work equally as important as the man’s, but separate and different. Inside that “equality” there was the fact that the woman did not choose her mate, and once her marriage took place, her life was determined. One girl wrote in 1791: “The die is about to be cast which will probably determine the future happiness or misery of my life…. I have always anticipated the event with a degree of solemnity almost equal to that which will terminate my present existence.” Marriage enchained, and children doubled the chains. One woman, writing in 1813: “The idea of soon giving birth to my third child and the consequent duties I shall he called to discharge distresses me so I feel as if I should sink.”
In 2019, it was discovered that US Border patrol had been protecting rapes and abuse of its own members since the 1990s. In one instance, a trainee was forced to give oral sex to 5 officers, and then raped while she was unconcious. At least 35 instances of rape by officers was found.
In May, 2019, Alabama lawmakers banned abortion in the state, providing no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. Those caught performing abortions will face up to 99 years in prison. The bill is part of a larger effort to overturn Roe vs Wade, a long-standing supreme court decision affirming a woman’s right to choose. Alabaman women seeking abortions are now forced to travel across state lines, and hide everything about the procedure from friends and family, in order to avoid legal repercussions from their home state. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal suit against the state.
On November 25, 2017, Yang Song died after falling from a 4th floor balcony during a targeted police raid. Her personal messages revealed that in 2016, she was raped at gunpoint by an undercover police officer, and was subsequently harrassed, threatened with deportation, and then likely murdered by the NYPD.
In the 1830s, The Lowell Mill Girls were female workers who came to work in industrial factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, during the Industrial Revolution, and who despite living in cramped boarding houses and working from 5am-7pm every day, developed a culture of defiance against the factory owners, and created reform associations, and began strikes in 1834 and 1836. 1

Workers and the Poor

1 out of every 7 US citizens needs to visit food banks to survive, despite having enough food to feed 10 billion people. Half of all food produced is thrown away by retailers. Food waste in 2018 enough to feed world’s hungry 4 times over. An analysis by the Brookings Institution conducted the summer of 2021 found that, 27.5% of households with children were food insecure — meaning some 13.9 million children lived in a household characterized by child food insecurity. A separate analysis by researchers at Northwestern found insecurity has more than tripled among households with children to 29.5% in late 2020.
US federal and state governments have epically mismanaged and failed to mobilize a response to a global pandemic caused by the Covid 19 virus. Many state governments repeat an endless cycle of refusing to mandate protective measures such as masks and stay-at-home orders, refusing to close super-spreader locations like restaurants, churches, and gyms, then seeing rising death counts, hospital crowding, and a shortage of ventilators. Despite the high death count, many mainstream US news sources continue to call the virus a hoax, and alternatively the “Chinese virus”, shifting blame for its mismanagement to the US’s new primary enemy. Before many countries developed vaccines, Trump attempted a backroom deal to buy a German company working on a vaccine, prompting angry reactions from German politicians. The US, along with other OECD nations, voted in Feb 2021 to block a push by developing nations to waive vaccine patent rights 2, in an effort to stop developing nations from producing current vaccines, and protect US pharma’s intellectual property. As of April 2021, there have been 540k civilian deaths within its borders ( the worst death / capita rates globally of any nation), and an uncountable more outside.
An analysis of 2016 data showed that 8 men control as much wealth as half of the world’s population. Those 8 men are Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Amancio Ortega, Larry Ellison and Michael Bloomberg, and are collectively worth $426 billion. 1
US authorities have a long history of murdering striking workers fighting for better conditions, dating back to the 1800s, up to the present day. According to a study in 1969, the United States has had the bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world, and there have been few industries which have been immune.1 A long list of these deaths and disputes can be found here, and this article on the Labor History of the US.
US conservatives and authorities have systematically dismantled labor unions over the past few decades, and by 2011 fewer than 7% of employees in the private sector belong to unions. The number of major work stoppages fell by 97% from 381 in 1970 to 187 in 1980 to only 11 in 2010.129, 130 The accumulating weaknesses were exposed when President Ronald Reagan—a former union president—broke the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike in 1981, dealing a major blow to unions.131 Union membership among workers in private industry shrank dramatically, though after 1970 there was growth in employees unions of federal, state and local governments.132,133 The intellectual mood in the 1970s and 1980s favored deregulation and free competition.134 Numerous industries were deregulated, including airlines, trucking, railroads and telephones, over the objections of the unions involved.135 Republicans, using conservative think tanks as idea farms, began to push through legislative blueprints to curb the power of public employee unions as well as eliminate business regulations.128,136 Union weakness in the Southern United States undermined unionization and social reform throughout the nation, and such weakness is largely responsible for the anaemic U.S. welfare state.137,1
In addition to artificial housing crises, the US has high numbers of homeless, despite the fact that there are, ~6 houses for every homeless person. Instead of human planning and intelligent distribution of resources, the US ruling class upholds the market as the “the most efficient way of allocating resources”.
Rising Housing prices from real estate speculation have skyrocketed to the point that an epidemic of hidden homeless has arisen: families who live in their cars, or on the street, but who still work. In most US cities, such as LA, it’s illegal to sleep in your car overnight. 1/3rd of all renters pay half their income towards landlords. Even in mid-size cities like Boise Idaho are experiencing a surge of homelessness as of 2019.
Although the US economy produces more than enough food to feed those in poverty, UNICEF, RESULTS, and Bread for the World estimate that 15 million people die each year from preventable poverty, of whom 11 million are children under the age of five. In addition, The US has a comparatively terrible social support system to fight poverty and prevent deaths: “approximately 245,000 deaths in the United States in the year 2000 were attributable to low levels of education, 176,000 to racial segregation, 162,000 to low social support, 133,000 to individual-level poverty, 119,000 to income inequality, and 39,000 to area-level poverty” (sources). That is 2 million people every 10 years in the US alone.1
In the modern day, 20,000 to 40,000 people die every year because of lack of universal health care or health insurance. On average, that’s 300,000 over the last decade. 1
FBI, and local police routinely ally with racists to target left wing activists. One conference on “radical left wings gangs in america”, fittingly enough is held yearly in Quebec City, home of far right groups like La Muete, whose members include knife attacks, and the Quebec city mosque shooting where a gunman killed 6 people during prayer. Federal agents performed a key role in getting Nazi and Klan formations to collaborate with police, and each other.
An outline of some of the US’s worst human rights offenses.
On December 5th, 2019, police opened fire on a busy highway in Miramar Florida, while in pursuit of 2 jewel thieves who stole $3k of jewelry, killing the kidnapped UPS driver, the two thieves, and an innocent 70-year-old bystander in traffic. The graphic video shows complete negligence for the hostage, and surrounding drivers, all to recover some stolen jewelry. On a GoFundMe page that had raised more than $100,000 by Friday evening, Roy Ordonez wrote that his brother, the UPS driver, had been gunned “down like a criminal by the Florida police.” He asked people to share the fundraising page to “make people aware of trigger-happy police officers.” “They could have killed many more people, could have been one of your loved ones,” Roy Ordonez wrote. “Please don’t let my brother’s death be for nothing. Police need to be held accountable.”
In February 2019, an 11 year old was arrested by police after refusing to say the pledge of allegiance. The teacher then asked “Why if it was so bad here he did not go to another place to live,” “They brought me here,” the boy replied. Polk County Public Schools spokesman Kyle Kennedy insisted the 11-year-old “was arrested after becoming disruptive and refusing to follow repeated instructions by school staff and law enforcement.” The sixth grader was then taken to a juvenile detention center, charged with disrupting a school function and resisting arrest without violence.
In 2020, the state of Michigan implemented a policy of locking up children for non-criminal offenses. This follows the trend of increasing police-presence within US schools, which have massively increased the number of students arrested for non-violent offenses.
In 2019, a Phoenix Arizona resident, Jim Stauffer, learned that the body of his deceased mother, Doris, who died in 2014, was one of many bodies sold to the US army used for “blast testing”. He had checked “no” on the paperwork for medical tests involving explosions. “She was then supposedly strapped in a chair on some sort of apparatus, and a detonation took place underneath her to basically kind of get an idea of what the human body goes through when a vehicle is hit by an IED.” Stauffer is one of many plaintiffs named in the suit against Biologic Resource Center and its owner Stephen Gore. Gore pleaded guilty to running an illegal enterprise in 2015, but was sentenced to serve probation.
In January 2018 in Camden New Jersey, a 33 year old police Detective Rafael Martinez Jr raped and impregnated a 15-year old girl.. He negotiated a plea deal in which he only serves 5 months of probation, with no prison time. 1
On December 28th, 2017, Police in Wichita Kansas murdered an innocent man, 28-year-old Andrew Finch who was the recipient of “swatting” (where someone falsely reports an emergency to draw police to an address). The bodycam footage shows that the killing was entirely unjustified. The “swatter”, Tyler Rai Bariss, has a long history of such pranks, 1,2
On December 24th, 2017, Police officers shot and killed an unarmed suspected car thief, Amanda lee jones, and a 6 year old boy, Kameron Prescott, in Bexar County Texas. Kameron Prescott is the youngest and 957th person killed by US police in 2017. Bexar County Sheriff Salazar is quoted as saying, “Right now, what I’m dealing with is a tragic accident that led to the death of this young man.” Young man was used instead of 6 year old boy.1,2
On August 15th, 2017, Police arrested 7 anti-racist activists for toppling a confederate statue in Durham, North Carolina. From New York to California, demonstrations have been organized since the death of Heather Heyer, who was protesting a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Many demonstrators connected with each other through public Facebook events. 1
On July 19th, 2017, Police arrested 155 demonstrators on capitol hill, for protesting a republican-lead health care dismantling initiative by Mitch McConnell, by occupying republican offices. Authorities said demonstrators were warned “to cease and desist with their unlawful demonstration activities” before police made arrests. Police arrested 80 people for the same charge on July 10th. 1
In January 2017, LA county sherriff Neil Kimball, assigned to investigate a sexual assault against a 14 year old girl, tied up and raped the victim, then attempted to intimidate the witness and the family from coming forward, even threatening them at some point during the horrific ordeal. He faces a maximum of only 3 years in prison, and will likely serve less.
In January, 2016, Philip “Mitch” Brailsford, a police officer in Mesa Arizona, killed Daniel Shaver, after someone called in a report of him holding a gun (which turned out to be a pellet gun), out of a hotel window. Brailsford was charged for second-degree murder, and acquitted by a jury a year later. After his acquittal, the court released the graphic bodycam footage showing Daniel Shaver crawling on his hands and knees and begging for his life before he was brutally murdered. After giving contradictory commands, such as telling Daniel to cross his legs, put his face down in the carpet, put his hands behind his head, and crawl towards them, the officer said, “I’m not here to be tactical and diplomatic with you. You listen. You obey… If you move, we’re going to consider that a threat and we are going to deal with it and you may not survive it”.1, 2
In March 2015, former US Marshal and DEA agent Matthew Fogg reported in an interview that DEA agents were instructed not to enforce drug laws in richer, white areas. His superior state, “You know, if we go out there and start messing with those folks, they know judges, they know lawyers, they know politicians. You start locking their kids up, somebody’s going to jerk our chain.” He said they’re going to call us on it, and before you know it, they’re going to shut us down, and there goes your overtime. 1
In 2014 in Flint, Michigan, the city exposed over 100,000 residents to high levels of lead in the drinking water due to insufficient water treatment in the Flint Water Crisis. A federal state of emergency was declared in January 2016 and Flint residents were instructed to use only bottled or filtered water for drinking, cooking, cleaning, and bathing. At least six have died from Legionnaires disease from the poisoning. As of 2017, the crisis is ongoing. Residents are instructed to continue to use bottled or filtered water until all the lead pipes have been replaced, which is expected to be completed no sooner than 2020. 1
Since January, 2013, over 21 US cities have enacted legislation to restrict giving food to the homeless, such as requiring expensive permits to discourage food donations in public spaces, or direct police intervention. In Tampa FL, on January 9th, 2017, police arrested 7 volunteers of Food Not Bombs and 1 homeless person to prevent them from distributing food. 1
From 1980s to the present day, Justice for Janitors Campaigns (a group fighting against the low wages and minimal health-care coverage given to janitors worldwide) in the US have been the target of police arrests and crackdowns. On November 20, 2006, a few days after dozens of strikers and their supporters were arrested by Houston police while engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. 1
In 1996, Congress signed into law the deceptively titled Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which capitalized on a demonization of the poor as being lazy (in reality there was a lack of jobs, and low-wage work proved unable to sustain most families), in order to dismantle welfare benefits. Its aim was to force poor families receiving federal cash benefits (many of them single mothers with children) to go to work, by cutting off their benefits after two years, limiting lifetime benefits to five years, and allowing people without children to get food stamps for only three months in any three-year period. 1
In 1988, Police charged a tent city/homeless center in Tompkins square, arresting and clubbing protesters, injuring 35 people and arresting 9 more. “It’s time to bring a little law and order back to the park and restore it to the legitimate members of the community,” said Captain McNamara. “We don’t want to get into a situation where we under-police something like this and it turns into a fiasco.” Protesters held up signs saying “Gentrification is Class War”. 1
In 1988, a founder of Food Not Bombs, Keith McHenry, was one of nine volunteers arrested for sharing food and literature at Golden Gate Park on August 15, 1988.[1] In the following years, Keith was arrested over 100 times for serving free food in city parks and spent over 500 nights in jail. He faced 25 years to life in prison under the California Three Strikes Law but in 1995, Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission brought about his release.[2] 1
In 1985-86, Hormel workers went on strike in Austin Minnesota, due to a cutwage from $10.69 to $6.50 and significantly reduced benefits. After six months, a significant number of strikebreakers crossed the picket line, provoking riots in Austin. On January 21, 1986, the Governor of Minnesota, Rudy Perpich, called in the National Guard to protect the strikebreakers. The strike ended in June 1986, after lasting 10 months. Over 700 of the workers did not return to their jobs, refusing to cross the picket line. In solidarity with those workers, the boycott of Hormel products continued for some time. Ultimately, however, the company did succeed in hiring new workers at significantly lower wages. 1
In 1983, a mostly latino workforce lead the 3-year long Arizona Copper Mine Strike of 1983, in which the police, national guard, and Arizona governor assisted in one of the largest strikebreaking incidents of the 1980s, ending with the Phelps Dodge Corporation replacing most of the workers and decertifying the unions. Miners were subject to undercover surveillance by the Arizona Criminal Intelligence Systems Agency, to identify strikers engaged in violence, with the governor sending 325 National Guard soldiers to Morenci, and increasing the number of state policemen there to 425. Meanwhile, the local government passed injunctions limiting both picketing and demonstrations at the mine. The Arizona copper mine strike would later become a symbol of defeat for American unions. 1
In 1981, the union PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization), went on strike for better working conditions, pay, and a shorter work week. The union was decertified, declared illegal, and the strike broken by the Reagan Administration. It is considered one of the last death throes of the US labor movement. 1
In May, 1970, the Ohio national guard shot and killed 4 college students, and wounded 9 others in the Kent State Shootings. Some of the students who were shot had been protesting the Cambodian Bombing Campaign, which President Richard Nixon announced during a television address on April 30. Other students who were shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance. There was a significant national response to the shootings: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed throughout the US due to a student strike of 4 million students, and the event further affected public opinion, at an already socially contentious time, over the role of the United States in the Vietnam War. 1
In 1969, after Berkeley student’s reclaimed people’s park, in order to clean it up, then Governor Ronald Reagan sent in police, and the national guard, calling the students, “communist sympathizers”, and a bloody conflict ensued. One student was killed, and 100 more were wounded. 2
From 1947-56, beginning with a 1947 Truman Executive order that required all federal civil services employees to be screen for “loyalty”, a second Red Scare took place with senator Joseph McCarthy at its head, accusing large numbers of people of being communist infiltrators and homosexuals, resulting in hundreds of imprisonments and some 10,000-12,000 people accused losing their jobs. The primary targets of such suspicions were government employees, those in the entertainment industry, educators and union activists, who McCarthy publicly targeted through the anti-communist House of Un-American Activies Committee (HUAC) hearings or public statements. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs.[54] In many cases simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired.[55] In the context of the Cold War, McCarthy framed homosexuality as a dangerous, contagious social disease that posed a potential threat to state security.[59] 1
In 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act remains an anti-worker law intended to dismantle and break up labor unions (around 1/4 workers were in unions at that time). It was passed by capitalists as a response to the post-WW2 strike wave of 1945-46, as more than 5 million workers went on strike during the labor upsurge of returning soldiers. The Taft–Hartley Act prohibited jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. It also required union officers to sign non-communist affidavits with the government. Union shops were heavily restricted, and states were allowed to pass right-to-work laws that ban agency fees. Furthermore, the executive branch of the federal government could obtain legal strikebreaking injunctions if an impending or current strike imperiled the national health or safety. The amendments required unions and employers to give 80 days’ notice to each other and to certain state and federal mediation bodies before they may undertake strikes or other forms of economic action in pursuit of a new collective bargaining agreement. Anyone opposed to the act was labeled a communist, in the rising red scare initiated by McCarthy. 1
In 1934, in the midst of the worsening conditions of the great depression, 400,000 textile workers from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the U.S. Southern states, went on strike for 22 days. Deputies and armed strikebreakers in South Carolina fired on pickets, killing seven, wounding twenty others. State authorities aided by the national guard suppressed the strikes, killing and arresting dozens of picketers and strikers across the nation. Governor Blackwood of South Carolina called out the National Guard with orders to shoot to kill any picketers who tried to enter the mills. Other governors soon followed suit. Nate Shaw, a black alabama sharecropper on strike, was shot and arrested in late 1932, and served twelve years in an Alabama prison.1
In 1934, sailors in San Francisco began a general strike known as the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike. Police attempted to break up the strike by shooting tear gas into the crowd, and charging the protesters on horseback. Police then fired shotguns and revolvers into the crowd, killing 6 workers, in an event known as “Bloody Thursday”. A state of emergency was declared, and the governor sent in the california national guard and federal army soldiers with machine gun mounted trucks to assist vigilante strike-breakers. Over 150 workers were arrested. 1
In 1932, A Bonus Army consisting of 43,000 poor WWI veterans and their supporters gathered in Washington, D.C. in to demand cash-payment redemption of their service certificates. Four troops of cavalry, four companies of infantry, a machine gun squadron, and six tanks assembled near the White House. General Douglas MacArthur was in charge of the operation, Major Dwight Eisenhower his aide. George S. Patton was one of the officers. MacArthur led his troops down Pennsylvania Avenue, used tear gas to clear veterans out of the old buildings, and set the buildings on fire. Then the army moved across the bridge to Anacostia. Thousands of veterans,wives, children, began to run as the tear gas spread. The soldiers set fire to some of the huts, and soon the whole encampment was ablaze. When it was all over, two veterans had been shot to death,an eleven-week-old baby had died, an eight-year-old boy was partially blinded by gas, two police had fractured skulls, and a thousand veterans were injured by gas. 1
In the 1930s, the Harlan County War, was a series of coal mining-related skirmishes, executions, bombings, and strikes that took place in Harlan County, Kentucky. The incidents involved coal miners and union organizers on one side, organizing their workplaces and fighting for better wages and working conditions, and coal firms and law enforcement officials on the other. 1
The Wall Street Crash of 1929, caused by a capitalist speculative bubble throughout 1920s, hit working families the hardest, and along with the Dust Bowl, resulted in the Great Depression, which had devastating social and economic effects on working people everywhere. Unemployment skyrocketed to 25%, poverty and hunger increased, and many families were displaced and forced to leave their homes in search of work elsewhere. The worsening material conditions gave rise to a large movement of industrial unionism (mainly the AFL-CIO), and many large strikes in which workers fought to regain their livelihood. This growing revolutionary movement scared American capitalists into making concessions, and was only pacified by the promises of FDR’s social-democratic New Deal, which had the effect of preserving American Capitalism, and dismantling the growing labor movement. 1
In the late 1920s, during prohibition, the US treasury department, under orders from Calvin Coolidge’s government, intentionally poisoned alcohol supplies leading to the deaths of at least 700 people, with thousands more suffering from alcohol poisoning from methyl alcohol. Public health officials responded with shock. “The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol,” said New York City medical examiner Charles Norris, “[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible.” Most of those sickened and dying were those “who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff.” The program was finally ended in 1933. 1
In 1922, the Great Railroad Strike of 1922 was a 400,000 person-strong nationwide strike of railroad workers, with police and armed company guards killing 10 workers or their family members. Troops bolstered armed company guards in their work protecting railroad property and aiding in the defense and transportation of strikebreakers, thereby working to undermine the strike effort.[12] 1
In 1921, The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest labor uprising in US history and one of the largest, best-organized, and most well-armed uprisings since the American Civil War, resulting in the US army killing 50-100 strikers, and arresting ~1000 more. Private police planes even dropped mustard gas bombs on the strikers. In Logan County, West Virginia, some 10,000 armed coal miners confronted 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers, called the Logan Defenders,[2] who were backed by coal mine operators during an attempt by the miners to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields. The battle ended after approximately one million rounds were fired,[3] and the United States Army intervened by presidential order.
In 1920, the Battle of Matewan was a shootout between coal miners and the Baldwin-Felts detective agency, after they attempted to evict striking miners from company houses. Shooting of undetermined origins resulted in the deaths of two coal miners, seven agents, and the mayor, with Sheriff Sid Hatfield siding with the miners to defend them. Afterward, when the charges against Hatfield and 22 others for the murder of Albert Felts were dismissed, Baldwin-Felts detectives assassinated Hatfield and his deputy Ed Chambers on August 1, 1921, on the steps of the McDowell County courthouse in Welch, West Virginia. None of the Baldwin-Felts detectives was ever convicted of Hatfield’s assassination: they claimed they had acted “in self-defense”. 1
In 1919, An IWW general strike took place in Seattle, Washington, in which dissatisfied workers in several unions began a strike to gain higher wages after two years of World War I wage controls. The strike was put down by the City’s mayor, who called in federal troops and nearby police. 39 labor leaders labeled as ‘Bolsheviki’ were arrested, with Seattle’s mayor Ole Hanson taking credit for ending the strike. He resigned a few months later and toured the country giving lectures on the dangers of “domestic bolshevism”, earning $38,000 in seven months, five times his annual salary as mayor. After WWI, the IWW was largely dismantled. 1
In 1919, A massacre in Centralia Washington occurred when the city-supported American legion attacked IWW labor organizers, killing 6 people. Frank Everett, one of the wobbly organizers, escaped, was dragged back to town behind an automobile, suspended him from a telegraph pole, then locked him in jail. That night, his jailhouse door was broken down, he was dragged out,put on the floor of a car, his genitals were cut off, and then he was taken to a bridge, lynched, and his body riddled with bullets. Seven wobblies were imprisoned and sentenced to 25-40 years by city officials. The primary reason for this was that the growing anti-war labor movement was seen as a threat to capitalists in Centralia. 1
In 1914, Woodrow Wilson instituted the first modern draft (fighting without pay), since only 73,000 people volunteered (indicating low support for the war), and plunged American workers into WWI, widely regarded as an imperialist war between European capitalist powers over boundaries, colonies, and spheres of influence in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, in which millions were killed and wounded. Around 900 anti-war socialists such as Eugene Debs were arrested and imprisoned under the Espionage Act for “obstructing the recruiting or enlistment service.”1
In 1914, The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, fighting for an 8-hour work day, better pay, and union recognition, as part of the larger Colorado Coalfield War. The national and camp guards killed 19-26 people, including two women and eleven children. To finish clearing out the camp, the Guard moved down from the hills with torches, set fire to the tents, and the families fled into the hills. In retaliation for Ludlow, the miners armed themselves and attacked dozens of mines over the next ten days, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 40-mile front from Trinidad to Walsenburg.[2] The entire strike would cost between 69 and 199 lives. Congress responded to public outcry by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the incident.[5] Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day. Historian Howard Zinn described the Ludlow Massacre as “the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history”. 1
In 1912, the Paint Creek Mine War was a violent series of confrontations between striking coal miners in West Virginia, and police. The confrontation directly caused perhaps fifty violent deaths, as well as many more deaths indirectly caused by starvation and malnutrition among the striking miners. In the number of casualties it counts among the worst conflicts in American labor union history. The strike was a prelude to subsequent labor-related West Virginia conflicts in the following years, the Battle of Matewan and the Battle of Blair Mountain. 1
In 1912, immigrant workers began a Textile Strike in Lawrence Massachusetts, lead by the IWW, prompted by a two-hour pay-cut. The strike united workers from more than 40 different nationalities.[2] Carried on throughout a brutally cold winter, the strike lasted more than two months, defying the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) that immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could not be organized. Lawrence police killed 2 people, beat a pregnant woman to miscarriage, and arrested >250. Congressional hearings followed, resulting in exposure of shocking conditions in the Lawrence mills and calls for investigation of the “wool trust.” Mill owners soon decided to settle the strike, giving workers in Lawrence and throughout New England raises of up to 20 percent. Within a year, however, the IWW had largely collapsed in Lawrence.1
In the year 1904, 27,000 workers were killed on the job due to industrial accidents from poor have been few industries which have been immune.[1]. A long working conditions, in manufacturing, transport, and agriculture. In one year, 50,000 accidents took place in New York factories alone. Hat and cap makers were getting respiratory diseases, quarrymen were inhaling deadly chemicals, lithographic printers were getting arsenic poisoning. According to a report of the Commission on Industrial Relations, in 1914, 35,000 workers were killed in industrial accidents and 700,000 injured.1
The Coal Strike of 1902 was a strike by 150,000 miners of the United Mine Workers of America in the anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. Miners struck for higher wages, shorter workdays and the recognition of their union. Although it was resolved with a modest pay increase (but a refusal to recognize the UMWA union), police killed several strikers. An immigrant striker named Anthony Giuseppe was found fatally shot near a Lehigh Valley Coal Company colliery in Old Forge; it was thought the Coal and Iron Police guarding the site shot blindly through a fence.[18] Contemporary reporting describes three other deaths and widespread shooting injuries among strikers and Shenandoah police. [20] On October 9, a striker named William Durham was shot and killed in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, near Shenandoah. He’d been loitering near the half-dynamited house of a non-union worker and disobeyed an order to halt.[21] 1
In 1894, the Pullman Strike was one of the bloodiest battles between police and workers in US history. The conflict began in Pullman, Chicago, when nearly 4,000 factory employees of the Pullman Company began a wildcat strike in response to recent reductions in wages, despite not reducing the rents or cost of goods in the company town. Debs and the ARU called a massive boycott against all trains that carried a Pullman car. It affected most rail lines west of Detroit and at its peak involved some 250,000 workers in 27 states. Thirty people were killed by the police. The federal government obtained an injunction against the union, Debs, and other boycott leaders, ordering them to stop interfering with trains that carried mail cars. After the strikers refused, President Grover Cleveland ordered in the Army to stop the strikers from obstructing the trains. Violence broke out in many cities, and the strike collapsed. Defended by a team including Clarence Darrow, Debs was convicted of violating a court order and sentenced to prison; the ARU then dissolved.1
During the late 19th century, the Pinkertons were a private security firm hired by the wealthy to infiltrate unions, supply guards, keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, and recruit goon squads to intimidate workers. The Pinkertons were also used as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia as well as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. After bad publicity, and the rise of organized labor by the 1930s, police forces and the national guard were required to suppress the labor movement. 1
In 1892, the Homestead Strike was an industrial lockout and strike between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania steel workers, and the Carnegie steel company, who hired armed Pinkertons to act as strike-breakers. It culminated in a battle between strikers and private security agents on July 6, 1892.[3] The battle was one of the most serious disputes in U.S. labor history, third behind the Ludlow Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain. After the thousands of rioters forced the encircled pinkertons to surrender, the US sent in national guard troops to suppress the strike, killing ~9 and arresting hundreds. 1
The Coal Wars were a series of armed labor conflicts in the US between striking workers, and the police and paid private security firms, between 1890 and 1930. Although they occurred mainly in the East, particularly in Appalachia, there was a significant amount of violence in Colorado after the turn of the century. Coal capitalists paid private detectives as well as public law enforcement agents to ensure that union organizers were kept out of the region, using intimidation, harassment, espionage, and murder. Mining families lived under the terror of Baldwin-Felts detective agents who were professional strikebreakers under the hire of coal operators. During that dispute, agents drove a heavily armored train through a tent colony at night, opening fire on women, men, and children with a machine gun. 1
In 1886, Chicago police killed several workers, and arrested many more striking in support of an 8-hour work day. The next day, they then attempted to break up the strike, upon which an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at police, killing several, in the Haymarket Affair. Four anarchists were tried and hanged without evidence, and their executions aroused a funeral march of 25,000 in Chicago. 1
The Great Railroad strike of 1877 was a nationwide strike in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Illinois, and Missouri, after the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O) cut wages for the third time in a year. The strike finally ended some 45 days later after it was put down by local and state militias, and federal troops, who murdered around ~100 workers or family members, and arrested ~1000 people. A newspaper recounting the situation in Chicago reports: “The sound of clubs falling on skulls was sickening for the first minute, until one grew accustomed to it. A rioter dropped at every whack, it seemed, for the ground was covered with them.” The railroads made some concessions, withdrew some wage cuts, but also strengthened their “Coal and Iron Police.” 1
In 1874, Police charged and broke up a labor demonstration of unemployed workers in Tompkins Square, New York. One newspaper reported: Police clubs rose and fell. Women and children ran screaming in all directions. Many of them were trampled underfoot in the stampede for the gates. In the street bystanders were ridden down and mercilessly clubbed by mounted officers. 1
In 1841, Dorrs’s Rebellion was an armed insurrection against Rhode Island elites in order to give universal suffrage to factory workers and immigrants, previously only granted to those who owned land and had at least $134. Dorr had originally supported granting voting rights to blacks, but he changed his position in 1840 because of pressure from white immigrants, who wanted to gain the vote first. The “Dorrites” led an unsuccessful attack against the arsenal in Providence, Rhode Island on May 19, 1842. Dorr eventually disbanded his forces, realizing that he would be defeated in battle by the approaching militia, and fled the state. Governor King issued a warrant for Dorr’s arrest with a reward of $5,000.1
Throughout the late 1800s, robber barons and wealthy industrialists like J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Jay Gould, and the Mellon Family, presided over the Gilded Age, a period of massive wealth and resource accumulation into a small number of hands. The wealthy capitalists pushed state and federal legislation to serve their interests, and succeeded in enlisting the police to serve their interests, including pushing farmers and Native Americans off their land. Henry George and others criticized the immense accumulation of property, pointing out that the lowest classes did not share in the gains of luxury and comfort.
In the 1830s, after the accumulation of farmland by a few wealthy families, thousands of farmers forced to rent their land formed Anti-Rent associations to prevent evictions, culminating in the Anti-Rent War, a guerilla war between bands of sheriffs and farmers. The wealthy used sheriffs and deputies to evict thousands of returning civil war veterans unable to pay rent. The farmers had fought, been crushed by the law, their struggle diverted into voting, and the system stabilized by enlarging the class of small landowners, leaving the basic structure of rich and poor intact. It was a common sequence in American history.
From 1786-87, Shays’ Rebellion was an armed uprising in Massachusetts over dissatisfaction from returning veterans. The rural farming population was generally unable to meet the demands being made of them by merchants or the civil authorities, and individuals began to lose their land and other possessions when they were unable to fulfill their debt and tax obligations. This led to strong resentments against tax collectors and the courts, where creditors obtained and enforced judgments against debtors, and where tax collectors obtained judgments authorizing property seizures. It,and similar conflicts and unrest were pacified by the passing of the 1789 Bill of Rights. 1
In 1787, James Madison in the Federalist Paper #10, outlined the primary role of the US constitution, arguing that representative government was needed to maintain peace in a society ridden by factional disputes. These disputes came from “the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.” The problem, he said, was how to control the factional struggles that came from inequalities in wealth. Minority factions could be controlled, he said, by the principle that decisions would be by vote of the majority. So the real problem, according to Madison, was a majority faction, and here the solution was offered by the Constitution, to have “an extensive republic,” that is, a large nation ranging over thirteen states, for then “it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength,and to act in unison with each other…. The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States.” Madison’s argument can be seen as a sensible argument for having a government which can maintain peace and avoid continuous disorder. But is it the aim of government simply to maintain order, as a referee, between two equally matched fighters? Or is it that government has some special interest in maintaining a certain kind of order, a certain distribution of power and wealth, a distribution in which government officials are not neutral referees but participants? In that case, the disorder they might worry about is the disorder of popular rebellion against those monopolizing the society’s wealth. This interpretation makes sense when one looks at the economic interests, the social backgrounds, of the makers of the Constitution. Charles Beard warned us that governments-including the government of the United States-are not neutral, that they represent the dominant economic interests, and that their constitutions are intended to serve these interests.
The 1787 US Constitution is falsely portrayed as a document representing an ideal of social and political equality, despite every framer being a rich white propertied man. Historian Charles Beard found that a majority of the framers were lawyers by profession, that most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing, or shipping, that half of them had money loaned out at interest, and that forty of the fifty-five held government bonds, according to the records of the Treasury Department. Thus, Beard found that most of the makers of the Constitution had some direct economic interest in establishing a strong federal government: the manufacturers needed protective tariffs; the money lenders wanted to stop the use of paper money to pay off debts; the land speculators wanted protection as they invaded Indian lands; slave-owners needed federal security against slave revolts and runaways; bondholders wanted a government able to raise money by nationwide taxation, to pay off those bonds. Four groups, Beard noted, were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants, women, men without property. And so the Constitution did not reflect the interests of those groups. He later wrote: “Inasmuch as the primary object of a government, beyond the mere repression of physical violence, is the making of the rules which determine the property relations of members of society, the dominant classes whose rights are thus to be determined must perforce obtain from the government such rules as are consonant with the larger interests necessary to the continuance of their economic processes, or they must themselves control the organs of government.”
The American Revolution is falsely portrayed as being a social revolution. Carl Degler says (Out of Our Past): “No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class.” George Washington was the richest man in America. John Hancock was a prosperous Boston merchant. Benjamin Franklin was a wealthy printer. Edmund Morgan sums up the class nature of the Revolution this way: “The fact that the lower ranks were involved in the contest should not obscure the fact that the contest itself was generally a struggle for office and power between members of an upper class: the new against the established.” Looking at the situation after the Revolution, Richard Morris comments: “Everywhere one finds inequality.” He finds “the people” of “We the people of the United States” (a phrase coined by the very rich governor Morris) did not mean Indians or blacks or women or white servants. In fact, there were more indentured servants than ever, and the Revolution “did nothing to end and little to ameliorate white bondage.”

Children

In 2021, it was revealed that the Boston PD covered up that it’s union leader was a child molester for over 20 years.

Prisoners

The US currently operates a system of slave labor camps, including at least 54 prison farms involved in agricultural slave labor. Outside of agricultural slavery, Federal Prison Industries operates a multi-billion dollar industry with ~ 52 prison factories , where prisoners produce furniture, clothing, circuit boards, products for the military, computer aided design services, call center support for private companies. 1, 2, 3
Ramping up since the 1980s, the term prison–industrial complex is used to attribute the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies. Such groups include corporations that contract prison labor, construction companies, surveillance technology vendors, companies that operate prison food services and medical facilities, private probation companies, lawyers, and lobby groups that represent them. Activist groups such as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) have argued that the prison-industrial complex is perpetuating a flawed belief that imprisonment is an effective solution to social problems such as homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy. 1
The War On Drugs, a policy of arrest and imprisonment targeting minorities, first initiated by Nixon, has over the years created a monstrous system of mass incarceration, resulting in the imprisonment of 1.5 million people each year, with the US having the most prisoners per capita of any nation. One in five black Americans will spend time behind bars due to drug laws. The war has created a permanent underclass of impoverished people who have few educational or job opportunities as a result of being punished for drug offenses, in a vicious cycle of oppression. 1, 2
In the present day, ICE (U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement), the police tasked with immigration enforcement, operates over 200 prison camps, housing over 31,000 undocumented people deemed “aliens”, 20,000 of which have no criminal convictions, in the US system of immigration detention. The camps include forced labor (often with contracts from private companies), poor conditions, lack of rights (since the undocumented aren’t considered citizens), and forced deportations, often splitting up families. Detainees are often held for a year without trial, with antiquated court procedures pushing back court dates for months, encouraging many to accept immediate deportation in the hopes of being able to return faster than the court can reach a decision, but forfeiting legal status, in a cruel system of coercion. 1, 2
Over 90% of criminal trials in the US are settled not by a judge or jury, but with plea bargaining, a system where the defendant agrees to plead guilty in return for a concession from the prosecutor. It has been statistically shown to benefit prosecutors, who “throw the book” at defendants by presenting a slew of charges, manipulating their fear, who in turn accept a lesser charge, regardless of their innocence, in order to avoid a worst outcome. The number of potentially innocent prisoners coerced into accepting a guilty plea is impossible to calculate. Plea bargaining can present a dilemma to defense attorneys, in that they must choose between vigorously seeking a good deal for their present client, or maintaining a good relationship with the prosecutor for the sake of helping future clients. Plea bargaining is forbidden in most European countries. John Langbein has equated plea bargaining to medieval torture: “There is, of course, a difference between having your limbs crushed if you refuse to confess, or suffering some extra years of imprisonment if you refuse to confess, but the difference is of degree, not kind. Plea bargaining, like torture, is coercive. Like the medieval Europeans, the Americans are now operating a procedural system that engages in condemnation without adjudication.” 1
A grand jury is a special legal proceeding in which a prosecutor may hold a trial before the real one, where ~20 jurors listen to evidence and decide whether criminal charges should be brought. Grand juries are rarely made up of a jury of the defendant’s peers, and defendants do not have the right to an attorney, making them essentially show-trials for the prosecution, who often find ways of using grand jury testimony to intimidate the accused, such as leaking stories about grand jury testimony to the media to defame the accused. In the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, all of whom were unarmed and killed by police in 2014, grand juries decided in all 3 cases not to pursue criminal trials against the officers. The US and Liberia are the only countries where grand juries are still legal. 1
The US system of bail (the practice of releasing suspects before their hearing for money paid to the court) has been criticized as monetizing justice, favoring rich, white collar suspects, over poorer people unable to pay for their release. 1

On Jan 26th, In Mississippi state penitentiary, an inmate was found hanging in his cell, in a string of deaths in the prison. This is the 12th death within a single month.
A photo surfaced of a November 2019 training class for prison guards in west virginia, showing 34 trainees doing a nazi salute. Only 3 people have been fired. A large number of prison workers, and populations in prison-towns, are white supremacists.
A black-site interrogation warehouse in Chicago called Homan Square, is notorious for sexual abuse, torture, and dissappearances of its prisoners. The main interrogator, Richard Zuley, applied torture techniques he learned at Guantanamo bay at Homan Square1, 2, 3
On Oct 25th, 2014, a mentally ill inmate, Michael Anthony Kerr, at the Alexander Correctional Institution in Taylorsville, NC, died of thirst after being denied water during a 35-day solitary confinement. Prison officials have said since Kerr’s death six months ago that they would investigate the events that led to his death, but no report has been issued and officials have not said when one would be. 1
On May 23rd, 2014, a mentally ill inmate at a Dade county correctional facility near Miami FL was tortured to death by prison guards. Darren Rainey was serving a two year sentence for cocaine possession when he was forced into a locked shower by prison guards as punishment for defecating in his cell, says one inmate. Once Rainey was inside the shower, guards blasted him with scalding hot water as he begged for his life. Investigators determined that there is not enough evidence to charge the guards. 1
The Crime bill of 1994, signed into law by Bill Clinton, increased the size of the US prison industry, and dealt with the problem of crime by emphasizing punishment, not prevention. It extended the death penalty to a whole range of criminal offenses, and provided $30 billion for the building of new prisons, to crack down on “super predators”, a term used by Hillary Clinton to refer to remorseless juvenile criminals. 1
In the 1978 case Houchins v. KQED, Inc. the supreme court ruled that the news media do not have guaranteed rights of access to jails and prisons. It ruled also that prison authorities could forbid inmates to speak to one another, assemble, or spread literature about the formation of a prisoners’ union.1
In September, 1971, prison guards killed George Jackson, a black Marxist and member of the Black Panthers in San Quentin prison (who had served 10 years of an indeterminate prison sentence for a $70 robbery), after he attempted to free himself and other inmates. Outrage over this, terrible prison conditions, and mistreatment by white prison guards, caused the Attica Prison Riot, in which 33 inmates and 10 prison guards were killed, and sparked dozens of prison riots across the country. In Attica, 100 percent of the guards were white, prisoners spent fourteen to sixteen hours a day in their cells, their mail was read, their reading material restricted, their visits from families conducted through a mesh screen, their medical care disgraceful, 75% were there as a result of plea bargaining, and their parole system inequitable.
Many companies in the 1800s were guilty of using prison laborers, such as the Tennesee Coal Iron and Railroad company. In 1891, the prison workers struck, overpowered the guards, and other neighboring unions came to their aid.

Religious minorities

From February to April of 1994, ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) and FBI forces besieged a religious compound in Waco, Texas, after a botched raid and arrest attempt of the leader of the branch davidians, David Koresh, for sexual abuse and weapons charges. After a failed negotiation, tanks were used to rip apart the building, while highly flammable tear gas was shot into the building. 76 people, including pregnant women and children, were burned alive in the firestorm. The event is chronicled in the documentary, Waco: Rules of Engagement.1

Pervasive

In 2020, it was revealed that the Swiss company, Crypto AG, which provided secure communications services to ~120 governments throughout the 20th century, was secretly ran by the CIA and West German Intelligence. The CIA and later NSA were able to read encrypted communications for many countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Italy, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Jordan and South Korea.
In August 2019, while awaiting an impending trial, infamous predator and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, was found “suicided” in his cell, after being placed on suicide watch. Epstein was a close associate of two US presidents (Clinton and Trump), British Royalty (Prince Andrew), and many global celebrities. Authorities claim he killed himself after guards were absent from the area. His death ensures that no further investigation will ensue, uncovering underage prostitution rackets used by the world’s rich and powerful.
Police repression against minorities and the poor have been increasing in the last few years, leading to the establishing of several online databases, such as this one by the washington post documenting shooting-deaths by police, and killedbypolice.net. US police shot and killed 952 people in 2017, 963 people in 2016, and 991 in 2015.
The Paradise papers, first made public on November 5th, 2017, are a leak of 1.4 TB of electronic documents relating to offshore investments, detailing the secrets of the world’s elites hidden wealth. The leaks implicated hundreds of the wealthiest people and companies on the planet in financial schemes. According to the papers, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Disney, Uber, Nike, Walmart, Allianz, Siemens, McDonald’s, and Yahoo! are among the corporations that own offshore companies, as well as Allergan, the manufacturer of Botox. Some people implicated in tax avoidance schemes are Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth II, President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, Rex Tillerson, Paul Allen (Microsoft), Bono, Carl Icahn, Sheldon Adelson, George Soros, and 3 former canadian prime ministers.1, 2
On July 23rd, 2017, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against Washington DC police, after police sexually abused protestors arrested during Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, when hundreds were arrested. A complaint by four plaintiffs charges officers stripped them, grabbed their genitalia and inserted fingers into their anuses while other officers laughed. One of the plaintiffs, photojournalist Shay Horse, said, “I felt like they were using molestation and rape as punishment. They used those tactics to inflict pain and misery on people who are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.” In a statement, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department promised an investigation but defended its officers’ actions, saying all arrests on January 20 were proper. In December, 2017, all the charges against the J20 protesters were dropped. 1
In June 2017, the FBI arrested Reality Winner, an NSA contractor, shortly after The Intercept published an article describing Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, based on classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents leaked to them anonymously. She is currently in jail for “willful retention and transmission of national defense information”, and was denied bail. 1
In 2017, Wikileaks published a series of CIA leaks titled Vault 7. The files, dated from 2013–2016, include details on software capabilities of the agency, such as the ability to compromise smart televisions smartphones, including Apple’s iPhone and phones running Google’s Android operating system, as well as operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. By adding malware to the Android operating system, the agency can gain access to secure communications made on a device. A program called “Weeping Angel”, is claimed to be able to use Samsung smart televisions as covert listening devices, allowing an infected smart television to be used “as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the internet to a covert C.I.A. server” even if it appears to be off. 1
Despite claims from US political figures that they “support the troops”, there is a 100+ year long history of experimentation on US troops —from nuclear tests to psychotropic drugs—as well as knowingly exposing them to deadly poisons, from sarin gas to Agent Orange. Most damning is that the hundreds of thousands of veterans seeking help from the government for the side-effects are always met with lies and denial. 1
In 2013, Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor, leaked secret NSA documents exposing a world-wide network of surveillance lead by the US, in the Global surveillance disclosures. Some NSA programs revealed were PRISM (which collects the e-mail, voice, text and video chats of foreigners and an unknown number of Americans from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple and other tech giants), UPSTREAM, in which the NSA made deals with fiberoptic undersea cable companies to spy on emails, web pages, and phone calls across continents, GENIE, in which smartphone manufacturers of iphone and android bundled spying programs, and XKeyScore, which allowed NSA agents to help build a “fingerprint” of a target by watching their emails, traffic to and from website, and track associations. The Washington Post revealed that the NSA has been tracking the locations of mobile phones from all over the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. In the process of doing so, the NSA collects more than five billion records of phone locations on a daily basis. This enables NSA analysts to map cellphone owners’ relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phoneusers who cross their paths. Australia (ASD), Britain (GCHQ), Canada (CSEC), Denmark (PET), France (DGSE), Germany (BND), Italy (AISE), the Netherlands (AIVD), Norway (NIS), Spain (CNI), Switzerland (NDB), Singapore (SID) as well as Israel (ISNU), were found to be spying on their own citizens, and sharing that data with countries and businesses 1
Since 2012, the US military has a state-run and funded astroturfing campaign to manipulate public opinion online, and spread pro-US propaganda through government funded sockpuppets, called Operation Earnest Voice.
The 2010 US diplomatic cables leak by Chelsea Manning revealed a pervasive policy of using US ambassadors as spies, supporting dictatorships, spying on the UN, strong-arming for US companies abroad, and disrupting nuclear disarmament talks. The scope of these leaks touches every country the US has a relationship with, and they are better detailed here. 1, 2
In 2010, Chelsea Manning was imprisoned under the espionage act for a series of leaks which embarrassed the US government, including the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike, Afghan War documents, Iraq War documents leak, US diplomatic cables leak, and the Guantanamo Bay files leak. The leak was, in Manning’s Words: “possibly one of the most significant documents of our time, removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare”. 1
Between 1850 and 2011, according to the World Resources Institute, the United States was the source of 27 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions causing global warming; the European Union, 25 percent; China, 11 percent; Russia, 8 percent; and Japan, 4 percent. These emissions have led to the emergence of large-scale environmental hazards to human health, such as extreme weather, ozone depletion, increased danger of wildland fires, loss of biodiversity, stresses to food-producing systems and the global spread of infectious diseases. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 160,000 deaths, since 1950, are directly attributable to climate change. Many believe this to be a conservative estimate. To date, much less research has been conducted on the impacts of climate change on health, food supply, economic growth, migration, security, societal change, and public goods, such as drinking water, than on the geophysical changes related to global warming.1,2
The Espionage Act, a federal law that allows imprisonment of anyone who interferes with military operations or recruitment, was used to imprison socialists and dissidents for speaking out against WWI, and involuntary conscription, as well as modern activists speaking out against the US police state. In 1919, Eugene V. Debs, a popular socialist candidate for president was imprisoned for his anti-war speeches. Among those charged with offences under the Act are German-American socialist congressman and newspaper editor Victor L. Berger, labor leader and four time Socialist Party of America candidate, Eugene V. Debs, anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, former Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society president Joseph Franklin Rutherford, communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Cablegate whistleblower Chelsea Manning, and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In 2004, during a protest at the republican national convention, over 1,800 people were arrested. They were held at Hudson Pier Depot at Pier 57 on the Hudson River, a three-story, block-long pier that has been converted into a temporary prison, described as overcrowded, dirty, and contaminated with oil and asbestos. People reported having suffered from smell, bad ventilation, and even chemical burns and rashes. In 2014, the city was forced to pay $6.4 million to 430 individual plaintiffs. $6.6 million was paid to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by 1,200 additional people. 1,2
In 1987, FBI agent Jack Ryan was arrested for refusing to investigate non-violent activists. He lost his job in September 1987 ten months short of retirement. He was thus ineligible for a full pension and had to live in a homeless shelter. In a report by the LA Times, he stated his belief that the Bureau could reinstate him to a position which would not conflict with his personal beliefs that U.S. involvement in Central America is “violent, illegal and immoral.”1
In 1976, the US tested Agent White, a powerful pesticide developed by Dow Chemical, in Cherokee county, North Carolina. Within 3 years, the rate of cancer deaths leapt to 60% above the national average.
In 1968, the CIA implemented Operation CHAOS, a spying program targeting Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, Women Strike for Peace, and Ramparts Magazine, in an effort to tie vietnam anti-war protests to foreign intervention. CIA agents went undercover as student radicals to spy on and disrupt campus organizations protesting the Vietnam War. In total, Operation CHAOS contained files on 7,200 Americans, and a computer index totaling 300,000 civilians and approximately 1,000 groups, with no foreign interventionism found. The operation was halted after the watergate break-in, and exposed a few years later. 1
In January 1961, the US air force accidentally dropped two nuclear bombs on North Carolina, each of them 250x the strength of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima, and one of them came very close to detonating. This was covered up for nearly 50 years. In 2013, the US finally admitted the coverup and released the classified documents. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stated: “By the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted.” The estimated death tolls would have been 28,000 dead with 26,000 people injured.
In the 1960s, the CIA implemented an operation called Acoustic Kitty, to spy on the soviet union. Veterinary surgeons implanted a microphone in cat’s ear canals, a small radio transmitter at the base of its skull and a thin wire into its fur.
Beginning in August, 1956, COINTELPRO (a portmanteau derived from COunter INTELligence PROgram) was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting domestic political organizations. COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed subversive, including anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists of the Civil Rights Movement or Black Power movement (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party), feminist organizations, anti-colonial movements (such as Puerto Rican independence groups like the Young Lords), and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, neutralize or otherwise eliminate” the activities of these movements and especially their leaders.
In 1953, the CIA begins Project MKUltra, a human testing program. Experiments on humans were intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations and torture, in order to weaken the individual to force confessions through mind control. MKUltra used numerous methodologies to manipulate people’s mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as other forms of psychological torture. The scope was broad, with research undertaken at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, as well as hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. Many subjects died under testing, or committed suicide. Others such as Frank Olson were murdered for threatening to expose the program. 1
In 1950, the US Navy secretly infected over 800,000 residents of the San Fransisco Bay Area with Serratia marcescens, a human pathogen known to cause urinary and respiratory infections, during Operation Sea-Spray, in one of the largest human experiments in history. The residents of the area were not informed, making the event a serious violation of the Nuremberg Code on medical ethics. In the following month, 11 residents checked in at a local hospital with a rare urinary tract infection (one patient, Edward J. Nevin died as a result), and the area saw a spike in pneumonia cases. The military tested biological agents on US citizens in at least six other similar tests causing a variety of symptoms such as whooping cough throughout the 50s and 60s in Florida, the Midwest, New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. 1
From 1945-70s, Scientists working under the Manhattan Project and the US atomic energy commission injected hundreds of US citizens with plutonium, including children and pregnant women. In Nashville, pregnant women were given radioactive mixtures. In Cincinnati, some 200 patients were irradiated over a period of 15 years. In Chicago, 102 people received injections of strontium and caesium solutions. In Massachusetts, 57 developmentally disabled children were fed oatmeal laced with radioactive tracers in an experiment sponsored by MIT and the Quaker Oats Company. In none of these cases were the subjects informed about the nature of the procedures, and thus could not have provided informed consent. During atomic testing, US soldiers and families who lived downwind from the blast were deliberately exposed to nuclear bomb blasts and radiation. 1>
Prior to WWII, under the banner of “Fitter Families for the future”, many US states practiced eugenics, in the form of forced sterilizations, euthanasia, and better baby contests. After the eugenics movement was well established in the United States, it spread to Germany. California eugenicists began producing literature promoting eugenics and sterilization and sending it overseas to German scientists and medical professionals. By 1933, California had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than all other U.S. states combined. The forced sterilization program engineered by the Nazis was partly inspired by California’s. The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs, including the one that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.1
In 1933, The Business Plot was a political conspiracy in the United States. Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans’ organization with Butler as its leader and use it in a coup d’état to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1934, Butler testified before the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the “McCormack-Dickstein Committee”) on these claims. No one was prosecuted.1
The Immigration Act of 1924 was a United States federal law that limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States as of the 1890 census, down from the 3% cap set by the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which used the Census of 1910. The law was primarily aimed at further restricting immigration of Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans, especially Italians and Eastern European Jews. In addition, it severely restricted the immigration of Africans and outright banned the immigration of Arabs and Asians. According to the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian the purpose of the act was “to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity”. The new quotas for immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe were so restrictive that in 1924 there were more Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Portuguese, Romanians, Spaniards, Jews, Chinese, and Japanese that left the United States than those who arrived as immigrants.1
The Alien and Sedition Acts, signed into law in 1798, originally made it harder for an immigrant to become a citizen, but was later used during WWII by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to imprison Japanese, German, and Italian aliens during World War II, with continued use after the war by Truman to imprison and deport people. 1
The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalization to immigrants who were “free white persons of good character.” It thus excluded American Indians, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks, and later Asians. 1

essays

List of Atrocities committed by US authorities

Contents

Imperialism

Middle East

Western hemisphere

Africa

Asia

Europe

Internal Repression

Native Americans

Black people

Latinos

Asians

LGBTQ People

Women

Workers and the Poor

An outline of some of the US’s worst human rights offenses.

Children

Prisoners

Religious minorities

Pervasive

Sources / Starting points