Human Rights Violations by USA throughout its history.

 Always the Aggressor

In recent times, a UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) report has harshly criticized the United States, citing a laundry list of human rights violations both on American soil and in countries around the world. The report detailed rampant violations by the US government of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The U.S. stands accused of enforced disappearances, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that had been committed in the context of the CIA secret rendition, interrogation and detention programs.

 U.S. policies have created a worldwide system of illegal prison camps, where the U.S. and foreign personnel carry out torture against supposed terrorists and other enemies of the American state. There is clear evidence that the U.S. is still continuing to hold detainees without a legal trial in its prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that at least 45 prisoners are being held on an indefinite basis without charges or trial.

 The United States of America is described as a ‘flawed democracy’ and is ranked as the 25^th most democratic country in the world as of 2020. The United States performs worse than average for Quality of Life, Safety from the State, and Empowerment rights.

 Much of the criticism is directed at the existence of systemic racism, weaker labor protections than most western countries, imprisonment of debtors, criminalization of homelessness and poverty, invasion of its citizens' privacy through mass surveillance programs, police brutality, police impunity and corruption, incarceration of citizens for profit, mistreatment of prisoners, the highest number of juveniles in the prison system of any country, some of the longest prison sentences in the world, continued use of the death penalty despite its abolition in nearly all other western countries, abuse of both legal and illegal immigrants  (including children), the facilitation of state terrorism, a health care system favoring profit via privatization over the well-being of citizens, the lack of a universal health care program unlike most other developed countries, one of the most expensive and worst-performing health care systems of any developed country, continued support for foreign dictators (even when genocide has been committed), forced disappearances, extraordinary renditions, extrajudicial detentions, the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and black sites, and extrajudicial targeted killings (e.g. the Disposition Matrix).

The Disposition Matrix, informally known as a kill list, is a database of information for tracking, capturing, "rendering", or killing suspected enemies of the United States. Developed by the Obama administration beginning in 2010, it goes beyond existing kill lists and is intended to become a permanent fixture of U.S. policy. The process determining criteria for killing is not public and was heavily shaped by National Counter-terrorism Director and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John O. Brennan.

Though White House, National Counter-terrorism Center (NCTC), and CIA spokespeople have declined to comment on the database, officials have stated privately that kill lists will expand "for at least another decade", if not indefinitely. One official stated "it's a necessary part of what we do”. Paul R. Pillar, the former deputy director of the CIA's counter-terrorism center, has stated, "We are looking at something that is potentially indefinite".

In 1776, the American Declaration of Independence announced that the Thirteen Colonies of settlers in what is today the North-Eastern USA, regarded themselves as independent states, and no longer a part of the British Empire. The Declaration stated "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". The United States Constitution, adopted in 1787 through ratification at a national convention and conventions in the colonies, created a republic that guaranteed several rights and civil liberties. However, it did not extend voting rights in the United States beyond white male property owners (about 6% of the population at that time). The original Constitution sanctioned slavery and through the “Three-Fifths Compromise”, where it counted slaves (who were not defined by race) as three-fifths of a Person for purposes of distribution of taxes and representation in the House of Representatives (although the slaves themselves were discriminated against in voting for such representatives).

Post the American Civil War [1861-1865], where over 620,000 men were killed in the first mass effort towards genuine civil rights for all inhabitants, the U.S. Constitution was amended to prohibit slavery and to prohibit states' denying rights granted in the Constitution. Among these amendments was the 14th Amendment, which included an Equal Protection Clause which seemed to clarify that courts and states were prohibited in narrowing the meaning of "Persons". After the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted, Susan B. Anthony (champion of temperance, abolition, the rights of labor, and equal pay for equal work), encouraged by the equal protection language, voted in the 1872 elections in New York state. She was prosecuted for this, however, and ran into an all-male court ruling that women were not "Persons".

On paper at least, the U.S. Constitutional amendments have been enacted as the needs of their society evolved. The 9^th Amendment and 14^th Amendment recognized that not all human rights were enumerated in the original United States Constitution. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 are examples of human rights that were enumerated by Congress well after the Constitution's writing.

Racial discrimination and Human Rights abuses started in what was to become the United States of America, from the time of the “Pilgrims”. This was a group of about 100 people many of them seeking religious freedom in the “New World” (as the North American continent was referred to then), who set sail from England on the Mayflower in September 1620. That November, the ship landed on the shores of Cape Cod, in present-day Massachusetts, and in late December the group landed at Plymouth Harbor, where they would form the first permanent settlement of Europeans in New England. These original settlers of Plymouth Colony are known as the Pilgrim Fathers, or simply as the Pilgrims.

Many early 17^th century European settlers died, in the first few years of colonization, due to starvation and disease. Turkey, pumpkin and Indian corn are three traditional foods of Thanksgiving were actually introduced to the Pilgrims by the Algonquians (the North American native tribes). Initially, some of these foods were foreign to the struggling European colonists. However, over the course of several years, the colonists learned how to survive in their new environment with the help of their Native American neighbors. The first Thanksgiving was a three-day harvest festival, with ninety-one “savages” in attendance. The Pilgrims viewed their Native American neighbors as “savages” due the hierarchy of a Eurocentric philosophy placing the white man as superior and other races, such as, Black, Asian and Native American as inferior.

Over half of the passengers aboard the Mayflower, were Puritan (English Protestant Christians), those who believed the Catholic Church could not be redeemed and true believers should separate themselves from it. The Puritan worldview consisted of two parties: God’s party being white; Satan’s party being dark, heathen and doomed.  The New World was a spiritual battleground, with war being the primary vehicle of God’s deliverance and justice, in the Puritan mind.

The Pequot War, fought in 1636–37 by the Pequot people (members of the group of North American native tribes) against a coalition of English settlers from the Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and Saybrook colonies, eliminated the Pequot as an impediment to English colonization of southern New England. It was an especially brutal war and the first sustained conflict between Native Americans and Europeans in the North – Eastern part of what was to become later as USA. The Pequot War was considered by the Puritans as a war of misunderstandings and natural law, in which the Puritans were righteous and justified, while the Pequot were heathens, soldiers of Satan, and inhuman. The defeat of the Pequot in this relatively short, small-scale conflict served to justify the killing of Native Americans by creating an image of untrustworthy savages that were plotting to destroy those doing God’s work in the New World. This has become the bedrock of American cultural and political strategy from those days to the present.

After the defeat of the Pequot, it was the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags, once friends of the English in the early 17^th century, which both discovered, before the end of that century, that the Puritan conception of God’s providential plan for New England left no room to assert Native American autonomy. Such assertions were an offense to the Puritan sense of mission. As the population ratio between the English and the Native Americans in New England shifted in favor of the English, the Puritans authorities became increasingly overbearing in their dealings with their Native American counterparts. The Puritan's policy for the original natives, from its inception, was driven by the conviction that if Puritans remained faithful to their covenant with God, they were destined to replace the natives' as masters of New England.

This intolerance towards other cultures reflected the essential elements of the Puritan worldview as a struggle between heathen savagery and Christian civilization. Puritan ideology was founded on three premises, which later translated into vital elements of the political strategy of the American West. The first was the image of the Native American as primitive, dark and of evil intent. The second was the portrayal of the Puritan as an agent of God and of progress, redeeming the land through righteous violence. And finally, the justification of the expropriation of local tribal resources and the extinction of Native American sovereignty as security measures necessitated by their presumed savagery.

By the 19^th century, this political ideology began to reflect itself within United States governmental policy, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Around 1828, the native Cherokee tribes were forcibly expelled from their ancestral homeland and relocated to the Oklahoma territory, by the sovereign state of Georgia which was attempting to abolish the Cherokee Nation and incorporate the Cherokee land under its own laws. The Cherokee tried to prevent this and maintain their sovereign “nation” by adopting a constitution, based on that of the United States, to govern their own land under laws and elected officials. Andrew Jackson became president in 1829 and one of his first priorities was to resolve this issue.

Jackson, being a slave owner and a legendary fighter against indigenous natives of the Western frontier, sided with Georgia, supporting states’ rights to supersede treaty rights. The issue was brought before the Supreme Court twice, once in 1831 in Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia and again in 1832 in Worchester vs. Georgia. Chief Justice John Marshall described the Cherokees as “a domestic, dependent nation” and he proclaimed the unconstitutionality of Georgia’s laws, asserting that federal authority overruled states’ rights regarding Indian treaties. However, Jackson had already persuaded Congress to pass the Indian Removal Act in 1830 that made it virtually impossible for any indigenous tribe to escape ceding its land and moving to “Indian territory”, west of the Mississippi River. It is worth noting that, in modern times, these acts would be violations of U.N. Charter, Article 1.2 which asserts, “To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace”.

Throughout American history, the treatment of indigenous Native Americans has violated numerous articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These violations resulted in the loss of numerous Native American homelands, the Cherokee being only one example, and the genocide of numerous other smaller tribes since the beginning of European colonization. This is largely due to Eurocentric ideals, like the natural law of the Puritan worldview, which elevates the status of European peoples over that of indigenous, Native American people through a biased worldview. This mindset is so pervasive and powerful that it still prevails today, evidenced by modern films and television that paint Native American tribes as savage, ignorant and of ill intent toward the “white man”, and the policies of the current United States government. These governmental policies have resulted in the alienation and marginalization of Native American peoples throughout American history. A likely total of 100,000-500,000 Native Americans in the U.S. have died since 1776. The high end would be around a million.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work as indentured servants and labor in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton. Many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans. Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to America during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women. The slave owners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement was restricted. Many white masters raped enslaved black women and children, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their masters.

“Lynching’s were a method of social and racial control intended to terrorize black Americans into submission, and into an inferior racial caste position that was widely practiced in the U.S. south from roughly 1877 through 1950.” Because lynching’s were typically executions outside the scope of official court proceedings and without any formal tracking system, most historians and scholars have little doubt that the true number of lynching’s in that country have been dramatically under-reported. Nonetheless, most of the more than 4,400 documented victims of racial terror lynching who were killed between 1877 and 1950 were killed in the 12 Southern states, with Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana among the deadliest. Several hundred additional victims were lynched in other regions, with the highest numbers in Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, and West Virginia. However, it is significant to note that there are countless other victims who were undocumented and remain unknown.

On September 22, 1862; the then President Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State…in rebellion,…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Previously enslaved men and women received the rights of citizenship and the “equal protection” of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment and the right to vote in the 15th Amendment, but these provisions of Constitution were often ignored or violated, and it was difficult for Black citizens to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping.

The anti-literacy laws after 1832 contributed greatly to the problem of widespread illiteracy facing the freed men and other African Americans after Emancipation and the Civil War, 35 years later. The problem of illiteracy and need for education was seen as one of the greatest challenges confronting these people as they sought to join the free enterprise system and support themselves. Consequently, many black and white religious organizations and wealthy philanthropists were inspired to create and fund educational efforts specifically for the betterment of Black Americans. Blacks held teaching as a high calling, with education the first priority for children and adults. Some of the schools took years to reach a high standard, but they managed to get thousands of teachers started, and "in a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South" and "wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of black people in the land".

Regardless of the formation of an educated black American section in society; the ever existing “Puritan white supremacy” mindset led to the segregation policies in the U.S. federal government in early 20th century that has harmed Black Americans for decades. Soon after his inauguration in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson ushered in one of the most far-reaching discrimination policies of that century. Wilson discreetly authorized his Cabinet secretaries to implement a policy of racial segregation across the federal bureaucracy. This policy, based on the demand for whiteness in government, imposed a color line on American opportunity and implicated Washington in the economic limitation of its Black citizens for decades.

In Baltimore in 1910, a black graduate of Yale Law School purchased a home in a previously all-white neighborhood. The Baltimore city government reacted by adopting a residential segregation ordinance, restricting Black Americans to designated blocks. Explaining the policy, Baltimore's then mayor proclaimed: "Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority."

Thus, began a century of federal, state, and local policies in USA; to quarantine black population in isolated slums-policies that continue to the present day, as federal housing subsidy policies still disproportionately direct low-income black families to segregated neighborhoods and away from middle-class suburbs. It was not a vague white society that created ghettos but government-federal, state, and local-that employed explicitly racial laws, policies, and regulations to ensure that black Americans would live impoverished, and separately from whites. Ghettos were not created by private discrimination, income differences, personal preferences, or demographic trends; but by purposeful action of the U.S. government in violation of the 5^th, 13^th, and 14^th Amendments of the American Constitution, constitutional violations that have never been remedied till date.

Black Americans were prevented from moving to white neighborhoods by explicit policy of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which barred suburban subdivision developers from qualifying for federally subsidized construction loans unless the developers committed to exclude Black Americans from the community. The FHA also barred Black Americans themselves from obtaining bank mortgages for house purchases even in suburban subdivisions which were privately financed without federal construction loan guarantees. The FHA not only refused to insure mortgages for black families in white neighborhoods, it also refused to insure mortgages in black neighborhoods-a policy that came to be known as "redlining," because neighborhoods were colored red on government maps to indicate that these neighborhoods should be considered poor credit risks as a consequence of African Americans living in (or even near) them.

Violence against black men and women at the hands of white authority is foundational to the United States, and continues to influence its policing culture to this day. Precursors to modern-day American police departments include violent slave patrols utilized in southern states before the civil war, then the legal enforcement of racist Black Codes, followed by the Jim Crow laws. Early municipal departments in growing US cities were overwhelmingly white, and brutalized vulnerable communities routinely. Thousands of lynching of black Americans by white vigilantes went unpunished by the judicial system. And during the civil rights era and well beyond, peaceful protest has been harshly suppressed by officers sworn to protect and serve. 

In recent times; in Ferguson town, in the American state of Missouri; Mike Brown’s body lay lifeless on the street for four hours after he was killed by a white officer. Witnesses claim that he had raised his hands in surrender before he was shot dead.

In New York City, Eric Garner told a white officer who placed him in a banned choke-hold that he could not breathe, before he died. He repeated the phrase 11 times and yet there was no reprieve for him from his white captor.

In Cleveland, Ohio, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was playing in the snow on a winter morning with a toy gun before he was shot dead by a white officer.

In 2015 it would be Tony Robinson (a bi-racial teenager shot dead by white police officers in his home) , Eric Harris (44 year old unarmed black man shot dead by a 73-year old white reserve deputy who claimed that he had intended to use a Taser), Walter Scott (an unarmed black man shot 8 times by a white police officer in North Charleston), Freddie Gray (25 year old black man who died under suspicious circumstances inside a police van) , William Chapman (18 year old unarmed black man who was shot dead by a white police officer), Samuel DuBose (43 year old unarmed black man shot dead by a white police officer in Cincinnati, Ohio). Since 2015 to January 2021, mostly white police officers have shot dead 135 unarmed black men, women and children, aged from 07 years to 54 years old.

“We lied, we cheated, we stole … It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment,” said the then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a speech on April 15, 2019. The remarks of U.S. politicians have completely exposed their hypocrisy of adopting double standards on human rights issues and using them to maintain hegemony.

Abuse of children, abuse and rape of women, abuse of the elderly, discrimination on basis of skin color, race, religion and sexual orientation and other human rights abuses have been and are a normal part of life in the United States of America. 

In 2001, the then President of USA, George W Bush announced a ‘war on terror’, which led to the invasions and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and armed aggression against Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia and the Pakistan–Afghanistan border region. When the number of direct and indirect deaths in the above war zones is added-up over the last 21 years, the total reveals that at least 5.8 to 6 million people are likely to have died due to the War on Terror.

The United States claims to be founded on human rights, touting itself as a world human rights defender. Following a framework of its own narrow understanding of human rights and using its core interests of pursuing global hegemony as a yardstick, the United States released annual reports on other countries’ human rights every year by piecing together innuendoes and hearsay. These reports wantonly distorted and belittled human rights situation in countries and regions that did not conform to U.S. strategic interests, but turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to the persistent, systematic and large-scale human rights violations in the United States itself.

 

 

Compiled by: 

Sardar Sanjay Matkar

sanjaymatkar@gmail.com