War Is A Crime

Trump wants to leave 31% of discretionary spending for all things non-military, while Bernie wants to move some unspecified amount of money from militarism to human needs, and Elizabeth Warren believes a budget is a statement of values.

Yet, to the best of my knowledge, no presidential candidate has now or within living memory ever produced a proposed federal budget, or ever been asked in any debate or interview, to even approximate — give or take $100 billion — what they’d like spent where, read more

Marcela Mulholland is a 21-year-old organizer with Sunrise Movement. Her personal experiences with the impacts of sea level rise in her hometown, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. motivate her to fight for coastal communities everywhere that will be devastated by climate change. She is currently a senior studying Political Science and Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida. In addition to being a student, Marcela is an organizer with Divest UF a group dedicated to financially disentangling the University of Florida from toxic industries including fossil fuels and private prisons.

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If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The advent of sound recording deep-sixed this age-old thought experiment and offered a definitive answer: Yes!

I’ve got another one for you, though: if you water-torture someone at a secure military compound and no one is around to see it, is it a war crime?

Tricky, right?

Well, what if someone does see it? And what if you admit to it — and to a criminal investigator, no less? And what if you add that you also used electrical torture, too? Is that, in fact, a war crime?

More cut and dried, right?

And what if criminal investigators identified 28 other members of your military unit as having beaten prisoners, tortured them with electric shocks, and water-boarded them? And what if 15 of them actually admitted to those acts? Is that, I ask you, a war crime?

Some people are charged with, tried, or even convicted, of torture: Nazis, Ford Motor Company executives in Argentina, and high-ranking Guatemalan military officers, for example. But others aren’t.

Years ago, when I investigated the particular set of crimes mentioned above that were carried out by U.S. military intelligence personnel in Vietnam, I found that only three of the soldiers involved were even punished. And by punished, I mean that the three received fines or reductions in rank. None served any prison time.

One of the admitted torturers I spoke with was still unrepentant. He explained to me that, were he placed in the same situation again, he would do exactly the same things. And why wouldn’t he? You don’t find Americans in the dock at the International Criminal Court (ICC). But if the Trump administration has its way, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon reports so strikingly today, the ICC’s judges and prosecutors might be the ones who find themselves charged and — though it’s a stretch of the imagination — behind bars. And given what we know about the U.S. prison system, that might also mean finding themselves at risk of torture.

“We were… nothing short of criminals in the eyes of everyone except our parents and close friends,” the admitted torturer told me, while complaining about the postwar treatment of Vietnam veterans. But he was never charged, let alone tried or convicted for the torture he admitted to meting out. Will ICC officials one day be convicted in American courts of meting out justice? For the moment, the jury is still out. Nick Turse
How to Make Yourself an Exception to the Rule of Law
John Bolton and Mike Pompeo Defy the International Criminal Court
By Rebecca Gordon

Events just fly by in the ever-accelerating rush of Trump Time, so it’s easy enough to miss important ones in the chaos. Paul Manafort is sentenced twice and indicted a third time! Whoosh! Gone! The Senate agrees with the House that the United States should stop supporting Saudi Arabia in Yemen (and Mitch McConnell calls this attempt to extricate the country from cooperation in further war crimes “inappropriate and counterproductive”)! Whoosh! Gone! Twelve Republican senators

cross
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Back before Donald Trump was inaugurated, I wrote an article called “Fantasies About Russia Could Doom Opposition to Trump.” Perhaps it is less quixotic, or perhaps it is more, to hope that, after more than two years of being barraged with those fantasies, but with their main focus having publicly flopped, more people will now be open to trying something else. That pre-inauguration article read:

“Trump should be impeached on Day 1, but the same Democrats who found the one nominee who could lose to Trump will find the one argument for impeachment that can explode in their own faces. . . . Meanwhile, we have a man planning to be president later this month whose business dealings clearly violate the U.S. Constitution in terms of not only foreign

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Who now remembers the classic 1956 sci-fi movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers? In it, alien spores drop to earth in… yes, California (undoubtedly not too far from the Mexican border)… and develop into seed pods that can replicate and then take over any nearby sleeping human being. What a nightmarish film. It certainly scared the hell out of 12-year-old me! What a terrifying, fantastical vision of alien “invasion” and “invaders,” terms that are now as comfortable for President Trump and his base as they were for the murderous Brenton Tarrant in New Zealand recently. In fact, both men used similar terms on the same day. Tarrant posted a 74-page white-nationalist screed in which he swore that his killing spree was “to show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands.” The president, vetoing a Congressional attempt to block his national emergency to build his “great, great wall,” claimed that “people hate the word ‘invasion,’ but that’s what it is.”

Of course, Trump, who has long wanted to militarize the U.S.-Mexico border and raised the possibility of sending troops there in the first days of his presidency (finally doing so last year), has regularly claimed that the citizens of this country face a literal “invasion” of aliens. As he tweeted last October, “This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!” He was then focused on one of the “caravans” of several thousand refugees from various devastated Central American countries who wanted to reach the border safely to present themselves as candidates for asylum here. Significantly — as TomDispatch regular and border expert William deBuys points out today — the cast of “invaders” crossing that border in recent years, like those filling the caravans, has increasingly been made up of parents (often mothers) and children.

In New Zealand, Tarrant’s response to such “invaders” — Muslims, not Mexicans or Central Americans — was to slaughter 50 people, the youngest a three year old, the oldest 78. n the U.S., it’s been other kinds of cruelty, but in both cases, the perpetrators are living in a distinctly sci-fi world in which modern versions of those body snatchers are the norm and, to take but one example, El Paso, Texas, was essentially the crime capital of the United States until it got its border wall. (It wasn’t faintly, but no matter.) So believe me, it’s a relief to leave the Trumpian body-snatching version of the border behind for a moment as deBuys explores what the realities of those borderlands actually are. Tom
How to Make a Difficult Situation Awful
Or Why Donald Trump’s Great Wall Is Viagra for Him, But a Border Disaster
By William deBuys

Borders are cruel. I know this because I’ve been studying the U.S.-Mexico border for more than 40 years. It features prominently in two of my books, written in different decades. It keeps pulling me back. Every time I cross that border, I say to myself that this is no big deal — I’m used to it. And every time, I feel that familiar fear-or-flight jolt of adrenaline and hear the inner warning: Watch out! Things go wrong here.

The border is cruel because it gives some people what they want and denies the needs of almost everybody else. Still, the hopeful come, lately in swelling numbers. Sadly, the cruelty of the border has ratcheted upward. It didn’t have to. U.S. policies have added unnecessary meanness to the innate hurt of the dividing line we share with Mexico. Here are a dozen “realities” of the border that I try to keep in mind while mulling the latest disasters.

1. Nothing will “fix” the border, not a wall, not troops, not presidential bombast

Some of the thousands of families from Central America now streaming to the border and surrendering themselves to U.S. authorities are desperate because crop failure and poverty have denied them the means of subsistence. Others are desperate because the gangs that now control large portions of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador threaten them with murder, extortion, and persecution. In many cases the families are desperate for both reasons.

This is an immigration phenomenon of recent vintage, but it belongs to an old tradition. Steep differences in wealth, opportunity, and political security divide the societies on either side of the border and, as long as those differences exist, have-nots on the poorer side will keep trying to join the haves on the other.

Unsolvable predicaments like this require management — continuous care, if you will — in the same way that chronic disease or steadily rising sea levels require it. Our efforts to manage the situation can be wise or stupid, mostly benign or downright sadistic, cost-effective or absurdly wasteful, realistic or hallucinatory. The task facing this country is to make it less awful and more humane than we have so far shown much talent for doing.

2. Donald Trump’s “Great Wall” is about gratification, not immigration

For every complex problem, there exists a simple solution — which is completely wrong. In the case of the U.S.-Mexico border, Exhibit A is the president’s proposal to build a 30-foot-high (or 55-foot-high), 1,900-mile (or 1,000-mile) wall — the president’s numbers vary with the moment — to provide security. The imperative behind his fixation arises from his boisterous, demagogic, and chronically over-counted political rallies. More than Fox News, more than the sycophants who surround him, the rallies are the mirror before which he preens. They are his political Viagra, a drug that takes effect when the crowd begins to chant. Even two years into his presidency, Trump can’t stop talking about Hillary Clinton and, when he mentions her, his admirers rock the rafters, yelling “Lock her up!” It’s the MAGA mob’s way of reconfirming that he hates who we hate, which is the DNA of Trump’s appeal.

Another chant at every rally is invariably “Build the Wall!” Its origins are instructive. The problem the border wall was initially intended to address was candidate Trump’s lack of mental discipline. It began as a mnemonic. Advisers Roger Stone and Sam Nunberg wanted to ensure that Trump pushed the hot button of immigration at his campaign rallies. They correctly thought that the simple, monosyllabic notion of a wall would help him remember to do so.

The Trump campaign soon learned that invocations of a wall embraced a larger range of prejudices. Like yelling about Hillary, it indulged the visceral enjoyment of hatred. It celebrated keeping people out and putting them in their place. It was racist, but more than that as well. The incantation “Build the wall!” conjured up walling out and excluding everything that was threatening — dark-skinned people, scary ideas, social and economic change, even complexity itself. Trump’s present desire is not so much to build an actual wall as to keep the chant going or, even better for purposes of the 2020 election, to morph it into “We built the wall!”

3. Support for a border wall decreases the closer you get to the actual border

People who live on the border know that walls don’t work. Instead, wall construction diverts money from more pressing needs, while damaging land and communities. In sleepy Columbus, New Mexico, which jarred to full wakefulness in 1916 when Mexican revolutionaries set the town on fire, opinion runs 90% to 10% against Trump’s border wall. All nine congresspersons representing districts along the border similarly oppose the wall. The same may be said of most local governments in the borderlands.

It’s not that local officials don’t want to address border problems. It’s just that they would rather see federal money applied to strengthen law enforcement, improve vehicle inspections, and speed traffic through busy ports of entry. These are the places where, as seizure statistics show, the vast majority of hard drugs actually pass from Mexico into the U.S. Even less publicized is the reality that official ports of entry are also where the preponderance of illegal arms, as well as considerable amounts of cash from drug revenues, pass in the other direction, from this country to Mexico.

4. Drugs underlie the crisis at the border, but not the way Trump says

The U.S. imports drugs because people want them. Appetites for hard drugs here are the driving force behind a significant portion of the global traffic in illegal substances, whose value is estimated in the trillions of dollars. The cash spent by American citizens in the pursuit of getting high is sufficiently astronomical to corrupt governments and destabilize nations. The rise of gang rule in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador partly results from those countries serving as conduits for moving Colombian cocaine and other drugs into this country. Put simply, the U.S. imports drugs and exports anarchy. That anarchy, in turn, puts people in motion.

5. The identity of border crossers has changed — again

In the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration launched Operation Gatekeeper and began building walls to curb illegal entry, the typical migrant was a Mexican male seeking work in the U.S. The idea behind Gatekeeper was that, by walling off the border in urban centers like San Diego/Tijuana and El Paso/Juarez, migrants would have to cross through desert so inhospitable that they would desist. Of course, they didn’t. Crossing just became more arduous and expensive because a migrant now needed a guide — a coyote — to find his way through harsh terrain and reach contacts on the other side.

An unintended consequence of this policy was to curtail the “circularity” of migration. Because border crossing had become more difficult and costly, workers couldn’t regularly go home to see their families and return to jobs in el norte. So they called for their families to join them. This triggered a shift in the identities of the migrantes. Women and children began to make up a growing proportion of the “illegals” entering the U.S.

In recent years, the mix of migrants shifted again, with an increasing proportion consisting of asylum-seekers, often whole families, fleeing the destabilization of Central America. They sometimes travel in caravans hoping that the strength of numbers will protect them from gangs that they are trying to escape. Their intention is not to sneak across the border but to get to the border and ask for asylum.

So here’s the rub: the infrastructure of the border is designed to deal with young Mexican men seeking work, not families, including young children, who arrive destitute and often sick. Although the border agreement that ended the recent government shutdown authorized upwards of $400 million for new facilities — the total is debated, with some Republicans arguing that as much as $750 million might be available — adequate structures don’t yet exist. And so people, often children, have been held in cages in jury-rigged, overcrowded, and distinctly punitive facilities.

6. But asylum seekers shouldn’t need to be detained

Ports of entry could be equipped and staffed to process asylum requests quickly and in volume instead of the “metered” trickle that is current practice — sometimes 10 or less a day. The immigration court system also needs to be fully staffed (funding exists for 107 more judges than the 427 currently serving), as well as expanded. The effect of this bottleneck, in an echo of Operation Gatekeeper, is to force groups of refugees into the desert where they cross the border illegally and at great risk (meanwhile distracting Border Patrol officers from legitimate law enforcement duties). Once in the U.S., they surrender themselves so that their cases will have to be addressed.

Another alternative is to allow prospective immigrants to apply for asylum at U.S. embassies and consulates in their home countries, as was the case for certain foreigners under an Obama-era policy that the Trump administration curtailed. (The administration recently took yet another step backward by ordering the closure of all U.S. immigration offices abroad.) A third alternative, presently applied in limited fashion, would be to release asylum seekers in this country under the sponsorship of third parties while their cases are pending.

7. The cruelty business

The hurt inflicted at the border increases when people behave like… well, people. Every job has frustrations, and border work has more than most. Maybe an officer twisted his knee working double shifts or got scared one night when he thought he saw a narco with a gun. So he roughs up a few people or tightens their handcuffs until they hurt. To be sure, U.S. Border Patrol officers commit many acts of mercy in their work, but they also sometimes deny or delay medical treatment for people in need or slash life-saving water jugs set out by humanitarians to aid migrants crossing the desert (and sometimes federal attorneys then prosecute the humanitarians).

Even harder to understand is the cranked-up air conditioning in Customs and Border Protection facilities. For good reason the detainees call the holding centers hieleras (iceboxes). Most migrants have no jackets or extra clothing. They receive a flimsy foil or paper “blanket,” one for each person, and then must sleep on cold slab floors for days at a time. Many a mother will double wrap her baby and shiver on her own until she and her child are released. This is what happened to Deña, a Salvadoran asylum seeker who spoke to a friend of mine in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in January. She came out of the hielera sick, a frequent result of the widespread and needless refrigeration of detainees.

The most extreme cruelties, however, come from the highest levels. The forcible separation of young children from their parents, when carried out by civilians, is called kidnapping. When carried out by the Trump administration, such barbarity fell under the rubric of “zero-tolerance.” The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that thousands more children than the 2,737 identified in a 2018 court case have been involved. Scandalously, the Department of Homeland Security and other responsible agencies failed to keep thorough records so that, even after the policy was reversed, no one could be sure that all of the children were properly reunited with their families. Moreover, separations, without the sanction of policy, apparently continue.

At the top of the cruelty list as well are the deaths from exposure, heat stroke, and dehydration caused by wall construction that drives migrants to undertake longer treks through ever more inhospitable terrain. The NGO Humane Borders has cataloged and mapped 3,244 migrant fatalities since 1999 in Arizona alone, but the actual number of deaths is acknowledged to be considerably higher, as many bodies remain undiscovered and unrecorded. What’s going on in the desert these days is not a war, but it’s producing war-level suffering and casualties.

8. Both Republicans and Democrats have built sections of the border wall

But until Trump came along, both parties ran from the semantics of calling it a “wall.” Officially, it was a border fence. The Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations feared castigation for applying a second-century technology to a twentieth- and twenty-first-century problem. The optics of being identified with other famous wall-builders — Roman Emperor Hadrian (122 CE), China’s Ming Dynasty (14th-17th centuries), the USSR (Berlin, 1961), or even contemporary Israel — were considered unappealing. Of course, President Trump not only embraced the negative connotations of wall construction, but pretended that the 654 miles of barriers, including approximately 354 miles of wall, erected by his predecessors did not exist.

9. If Trump gets his way, the steel in his border wall will contain a high percentage of irony

The U.S. went to war in 1846, ostensibly to assert that its southern border was the Rio Grande and not the Nueces River, as Mexico claimed. Trump’s campaign for a border wall, however, puts the U.S. in retreat, sovereignty be damned, because it effectively returns to Mexico some of the land conquered in the Mexican War.

Let me explain: you can’t build a wall in the middle of a river. The river will eventually wash the wall away, or it will make a new channel where no one wants it. It is also inadvisable to build a wall in the floodplain adjacent to the river, because, well, it floods. Moreover, a wall designed to keep humans out can’t have big gaps or people will get through, and in a flood small drainage gaps quickly clog with debris, backing up flows, causing property damage, and undermining the wall itself. (Even away from the river, the wall causes flooding and damage in places like downtown Nogales, Sonora, where its design ignored local drainage.)

Because the Rio Grande is a low-volume river with big-river storm flows, new sections of wall are nowadays sited on high ground out of the flood zone and some distance from the main river channel. This means the border will effectively be moved back from its internationally agreed placement in the middle of the river. No deed will change hands, but this de facto relocation of the southern boundary of the U.S. is tantamount to a cession of land to Mexico. One wonders if this matter has received the attention of America’s chest-thumper-in-chief.

10. As usual, the environment takes a blow

The Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge encompasses a significant chunk of floodplain and adjacent ground where Trump’s great wall is to be built. So does the chain of protected areas constituting the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) National Wildlife Refuge, as well as other nature preserves held by private non-profits. Past wall construction has already fragmented portions of the area. Additional wall construction will decimate it. At stake is vital habitat for the last ocelots existing in the U.S., as well as for scores of other species.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service calculates that planned wall segments will negatively affect 60%-75% of the LRGV’s lands. The wall would also plow through the National Butterfly Sanctuary like a superhighway.

Across the borderlands, the roster of species detrimentally affected by Trump’s wall amounts to a who’s who of southwestern fauna — from jaguars, Mexican gray wolves, pronghorn antelopes, and bison (yes, there is a wild herd in the Chihuahuan desert) to cactus ferruginous pygmy owls (which fly close to the ground and so can’t cross the wall), leopard frogs, and lesser long-nosed bats. The Center for Biological Diversity reports that “a minimum of 93 species at risk of extinction will be further imperiled by construction of Trump’s border wall, including impacts to critical habitat for 25 of these species.”

11. Defense-in-depth works better

An excellent book on the border is the late Jefferson Morganthaler’s The River Has Never Divided Us. Morganthaler explains that, from the Spanish colonial era forward, defending the border as a hard barrier has rarely been an effective strategy. It “seduces us into establishing our own Maginot Line. It lures us into attempting the impossible… and distracts us from more promising solutions.” The most appealing alternative, applied in the eighteenth century by Spain’s Teodoro de Croix, was defense in depth: addressing “problems at their source and destination, rather than trying to dam them up somewhere in the middle.” Accepting amnesty applications at U.S. facilities in the applicants’ countries of origin would be a modern adaptation of such a policy.

12. Get ready for the problems of migration to worsen

The president and just about all the members of his administration believe in walls but not in climate change, a guarantee of disaster. It’s possible that refugees now appearing at the southern border, who say that the corn they planted last year failed to produce a harvest, are lying or are bad farmers. It’s far more likely, however, that they are climate-change refugees. One thing is certain: as climate change intensifies, it will displace ever more people. Subsistence agriculture is always a gamble. When the weather changes so radically that subsistence farmers can’t bring in a crop, they have to move. At least in the short term, the vigor and diversity of the U.S. economy will buffer most of its citizens against the full effects of climate disruptions. There will be no such buffer for people hoeing milpas in Central America. This is not a matter of speculation and one consequence is clear. People who lack the means of subsistence will pick up and move. Wall or no wall, a fair portion of them will head northward.

Maybe the best borderland novel of recent years is Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, in which an early scene pretty well sums up future prospects for the southern border, especially if current policies persist. A sheriff and his deputy are near the Rio Grande, inspecting the aftermath of a shootout between narco gangs. They walk past smoldering vehicles and gory corpses. The deputy says, “It’s a mess, aint it sheriff?”

And the sheriff replies, “If it aint it’ll do till a mess gets here.”

William deBuys is the author of nine books, including

The
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“His Excellency Daniel Mulhall, Ambassador of Ireland to the United States, will speak as part of the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ Ambassador Series in the Rotunda Dome Room on April 2 from 3:30-4:45 p.m. Ambassador Mulhall will address the relationship between Ireland and the United States with emphasis on the countries’ Declarations of Independence for which Ireland celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2019.”

While I’ll be in Washington, D.C., that day, I very much hope someone will take the time to videotape themselves asking His Excellency how Ireland can be considered independent when the U.S. military uses Ireland’s airports to fight U.S. wars, in gross violation of Ireland’s legal commitment to neutrality and against the will of the people of Ireland.

“We Serve Neither King nor Kaiser, But Ireland,” it said 100 years ago on the facade of Liberty Hall in Dublin as the Irish successfully refused to be drafted into a British war. “We Welcome Neither President Nor Imperial Buffoon,” might be a good new banner for an Ireland that has thus far been spared the embarrassment of a visit from His Idiocy Donald Trump.

But the last time an Irish Ambassador, Anne Anderson, spoke at the University of Virginia, two years ago, she effectively told me that Ireland would bow to Trump’s wishes.

I asked her this: “Since the U.S. government assures the Irish government that all U.S. military aircraft being refueled at Shannon are not on military operations and are not carrying weapons or munitions, and since the Irish government insists on this in order to comply with Ireland’s traditional policy of neutrality, why does the Irish department of transportation almost daily approve civilian aircraft on contract to the U.S. military to carry armed U.S. troops on military operations, weapons, and munitions through Shannon Airport in clear breach of international laws on neutrality?”

Ambassador Anderson replied that the U.S. government at the “highest levels” had informed Ireland that it was in compliance with the law, and Ireland accepted that. So, the highest level of the U.S. government says that black is white, and Ireland says “Whatever you say, master.” I’m sorry, my Irish friends, but with all due respect, my dog has a better relationship with me than you have with the United States.

On March 17, 2019, two of my friends were arrested in Ireland. Tarak Kauff and Ken Mayers are peace activists, members of Veterans For Peace, and veterans of the U.S. military. They participated in a protest rally at Shannon Airport. Then they entered the air field in order to inspect one of the U.S. airplanes on its way to a U.S. war. They were thrown into the jail in Limerick, denied bail, and threated with two-years imprisonment pre-trial.

Will Ambassador Mulhall use the following words in his speech at UVA: “freedom”? “liberty”? “human rights”? Will he claim that those who won what independence Ireland has and what rights Catholics in Ireland have did so without violating any petty laws? Will he defend long-term lawless imprisonment as an indication of advanced civilization?

Under Hague Convention V in force since 1910, and to which the United States has been a party from the start, and which under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution is part of the supreme law of the United States, “Belligerents are forbidden to move troops or convoys of either munitions of war or supplies across the territory of a neutral Power.” Under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which both the United States and Ireland are parties, and which has been incorporated into very selectively enforced felonies in the U.S. Code since before George W. Bush left Texas for Washington, D.C., any complicity in torture must be investigated and prosecuted. Under both the U.N. Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, to both of which the United States and Ireland have been parties since their creation, the war in Afghanistan and all the other U.S. wars since 2001 have been illegal.

The people of Ireland have a strong tradition of resisting imperialism, dating back even before the 1916 revolution, and they aspire to representative or democratic government. In a 2007 poll, by 58% to 19% they opposed allowing the U.S. military to use Shannon Airport. In a 2013 poll, over 75% supported neutrality. In 2011, a new government of Ireland announced that it would support neutrality, but it did not. Instead it continued to allow the U.S. military to keep planes and personnel at Shannon Airport, and to bring troops and weapons through on a regular basis.

The United States military has no need for Shannon Airport. Its planes could reach other destinations without running out of fuel. One of the purposes of regularly using Shannon Airport, perhaps the main purpose, is very likely simply to keep Ireland within the coalition of the killing. On U.S. television, announcers thank “the troops” for watching this or that major sporting event from 175 countries. The U.S. military and its profiteers ought to hardly notice if that number dropped to 174, except that their goal, perhaps their main purpose and driving objective, is to increase that number to 200.

Hey, you Irish rabble, Trump knows better than you, so stay out of the way!

Hurrah for Independence!

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

If you live among the Other 96% — that portion of humanity that the U.S. government does not claim to represent, but where the U.S. military maintains some 1,000 major military bases, here are some helpful tips and past examples of success.

First of all, do everything you can to let people in the United States know how much they are paying financially for the bases in your country. While some of us in the United States primarily object to bases because of their use in creating and conducting campaigns of mass murder, many, including some who control U.S. media outlets, find the topic of financial cost far more acceptable.

One of those many is a rather insignificant and dimwitted member of the U.S. population who nonetheless matters because he is the president of the country. We want to encourage him to demand of your country higher and higher fees for the “benefit” of being “served” by your occupation by the U.S. bases that endanger your lives and pollute your water. And then we want to encourage your government to reply with a hearty “Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.”

Secondly, make sure that every liberal militarist in the United States understands, and that everyone in your country understands the motivation for the bases. It is not to colonize or to extract resources. It is not to be close to areas of the world where wars are likely to spontaneously erupt and require U.S. participation for the good of us all. The United States can fly its instruments of death to anywhere on earth quite rapidly from the U.S. mainland, not to mention actual U.S. colonies. The reason for keeping bases on your land is that you are, in the eyes of the U.S. government, inferior creatures incapable of properly determining your own fate. So, the superior and whiter and more divinely favored U.S. government has a duty to dominate everyone else, and that includes you. Remember that U.S. liberals like to think they aren’t bigoted, so you’ll have to explain this to them several times.

Third, study the examples of what has worked before.

Austria in 1955 created a Constitutional ban on foreign bases, removed Soviet and all other foreign bases and troops

Farmers in Japan prevented the construction of a U.S. base in 1957.

In 1963, the U.S. departed from bases in Trinidad and Tobago.

In 1963 and 1977, the United States left its bases in Morocco.

In 1967, France evicted U.S. troops from all bases.

In 1969, the Ogasawara Islands were returned to Japan.

In 1970, the U.S. departed from its base in Libya.

The people of Puerto Rico kicked the U.S. Navy out of Culebra in 1974, and after years of effort, out of Vieques in 2003.

In 1975, the U.S. departed from at least four air bases in Thailand.

A U.S. Army base in Eritrea closed in 1977.

Native Americans evicted a Canadian military base from their land in 2013.

People of the Marshall Islands shortened a U.S. base lease in 1983.

The people of the Philippines kicked out all U.S. bases in 1992 (though the U.S. later returned).

The U.S. left an air base in Zaragosa, Spain, in 1992.

A women’s peace camp helped get U.S. missiles out of England in 1993.

U.S. bases left Midway Island in 1993 and Bermuda in 1995.

Hawaiians won back an island in 2003.

In 2007 localities in the Czech Republic held referenda that matched national opinion polls and demonstrations; their opposition moved their government to refuse to host a U.S. base.

Saudi Arabia closed its U.S. bases in 2003 (later reopened), as did Uzbekistan in 2005, Kyrgyzstan in 2009.

The U.S. military decided it had done enough damage to Johnston/Kalama Atoll in 2004.

Activists compelled the United States to give up a firing range in South Korea in 2005.

Activism in Vicenza, Italy, (and around Italy and Europe and in Washington, D.C.) between 2005 and 2010 resulted in the United States getting only 50% of the land it wanted for its new bases.

In 2007, the President of Ecuador answered public demand, and exposed hypocrisy, by announcing that the United States would need to host an Ecuadorean base in Miami, Florida, or shut down its base in Ecuador.

In 2010, bases were blocked by the Colombian Supreme Court.

Iraq closed bases in 2011, reopened in 2013.

As ever so slightly touched on in the preceding list, there have been a great many partial and short-live successes. We need to study what has worked most often and most lastingly.

At World BEYOND War we are putting a major focus on this effort, and have helped to start up a D.C. insider coalition called Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition, drawing heavily on the work of David Vine and his book Base Nation. We’ve also been part of launching a global activist coalition to educate and mobilize people for the closure of U.S. and NATO military bases. This effort has produced a conference in Baltimore, Md., in January 2018, and one in Dublin, Ireland, in November 2018.

Some of the angles finding traction and being shared around the world are environmental. U.S. bases are poisoning ground water, not just all over the United States, where the Pentagon is seeking to legalize such practices, but all over the world, where it needn’t bother.

The reasons the Pentagon needn’t bother legalizing destruction abroad ultimately depend on the last remaining widely accepted bigotry in U.S. culture, namely that against every non-U.S. culture. When the world figures that out, and when the people of the United States figure that out, who knows what could happen.

Sincerely,

David Swanson, Director, World BEYOND War