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 25th 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 9th Amendment and 14th
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 17th 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 17th 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 19th 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 5th, 13th,
and 14th 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