VI. On U.S. Violations of Human Rights against Other Nations
The United States has a notorious record of international human rights violations.
The U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have caused huge civilian casualties. A trove, released by the WikiLeaks website on October 22, 2010, reported up to 285,000 war casualties in Iraq from March 2003 through the end of 2009. The documents revealed that at least 109,000 people were killed in the Iraq war, and 63 percent of them were civilians (World Journal, October 23, 2010). In an attack in Baghdad in July 2007, an American helicopter shot and killed 12 people, among whom were a Reuters photographer and his driver (The New York Times, April 5, 2010). On February 20, 2011, a U.S. military operation in northeastern Afghanistan killed 65 innocent people, including 22 women and more than 30 children, causing the most serious civilian casualties in months (The Washington Post, February 20, 2011). According to a report in the Washington Post on October 15, 2010, Iraq' s Human Rights Ministry reported in 2009 that 85,694 Iraqis were killed from January 2004 to October 31, 2008. Iraq Body Count, an organization based in Britain, said that a total of 122,000 civilians had been killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq (Newsday, October 24, 2010).
The U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and other regions have also brought tremendous casualties to local people. According to a report by McClatchy Newspapers on March 2, 2010, the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops had caused 535 Afghan civilian deaths and injuries in 2009. Among them 113 civilians were shot and killed, an increase of 43 percent over 2008. Since June 2009, air strikes by the U.S. military had killed at least 35 Afghan civilians. On January 8, 2010, an American missile strike in the northwestern region of Pakistan killed four people and injured three others (The San Francisco Chronicle, January 9, 2010). During an American Special Operation in Afghanistan on February 12, five innocent civilians were shot to death, and two of them were pregnant mothers (The New York Times, April 5, 2010, page A4). On April 12, American troops raked a passenger bus near Kandahar, killing five civilians and wounding 18 others (The New York Times, April 13, 2010). The Washington Post reported on September 18, 2010, that from January 2010, a "kill team" formed by five soldiers from the 5th Stryker Combat Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, had committed at least three murders, where they randomly targeted and killed Afghan civilians, and dismembered the corpses and hoarded the human bones (The Washington Post, September 18, 2010).
The U.S. counter-terrorism missions have been haunted by prisoner abuse scandals. The United States held individuals captured during its "war on terror" indefinitely without charge or trial, according to a joint study report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council in May 2010 by the UN's Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. The report said the United States established detention centers in Guantanamo Bay and many other places in the world, keeping detainees secretly. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established secret detention facilities to interrogate so-called "high-value detainees". The study said the U.S. Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stephen G. Bradbury had stated that the CIA had taken custody of 94 detainees, and had employed "enhanced techniques" to varying degrees, including stress positions, extreme temperature changes, sleep deprivation, and "waterboarding," in the interrogation of 28 of those detainees (UN document A/HRC/13/42). The United States makes arrests outside its border under the pretext of the "war on terror." According to a report of the Associated Press on December 9, 2010, documents released by the WikiLeaks website indicated that in 2003, some U.S. agents were involved in an abduction of a German citizen mistakenly believed to be a terrorist. The U.S. agents abducted him in Macedonia, and secretly detained him in a CIA-run prison in Afghanistan for five months. However, a top diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin warned the German government not to issue international arrest warrants against the involved CIA agents.
The United States has seriously violated the right of subsistence and right of development of Cuban residents. On October 26, 2010, the 65th session of the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a resolution entitled "Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba," the 19th such resolution in a row. Only two countries, including the United States, voted against the resolution. The blockade imposed by the United States against Cuba qualifies as an act of genocide under Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted in 1948.