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• Orchestrated the invasion of Panama and arrest of Panama's dictator and former CIA employee Manuel Noriega. The reason given for the invasion was to capture a leader who was involved in the drug trade, although the US had backed him for many years with full knowledge of and no objection to his drug connections until he ceased to be cooperative in support of the US war on Nicaragua. In fact, Noriega had been trained, along with many brutal Central and South American military men, in the US, at The School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. Several thousand Panamanian civilians were killed and scores of thousands injured in the US invasion, many in bombing raids on civilian areas in Panama City. Panamanians have uncovered mass graves, into which many hundreds of killed and injured civilians were bulldozed by US troops. • Orchestrated the war against Iraq in which 177 million pounds of bombs were dropped in a genocidal six-week assault on the civilian population and infrastructure of the country, becoming the most concentrated aerial bombardment in the history of the world. The invasion included cluster bombs, fuel-air bombs, napalm, and the use of 375 tons of depleted uranium weaponry that will remain radioactive for an estimated 4.5 billion years. The campaign left behind 300-800 tons of radioactive waste from the depleted uranium ammunition all over Kuwait and Iraq, resulting in an alarmingly high increase in cancer and genetic defects in the Iraqi and Kuwaiti population. War plans included the systematic destruction of Iraqi civilian life. Thousands of helpless Iraqi conscripts and fleeing refugees were butchered in cold blood in the "turkey shoot" on the "Highway of Death," and hundreds of Iraqis were deliberately buried alive in the sand and large numbers were dumped in unmarked burial sites. US pilots systematically destroyed Iraq's civil society infrastructure essential to supporting life for millions of people. Bombing targets included power grids, factories, and water treatment plants. Throughout and following the war, Bush insisted on the continuation of economic sanctions to prohibit the importation of drugs, water purifying equipment and other necessities for the survival of the civilian population. 200,000 Iraqis, the majority civilians, were killed in the US military assault and hundreds of thousands more would die in the years following the war as a result of devastating effects of sanctions, which were enthusiastically upheld by future presidents. • Supported various efforts to overthrow of the government of Afghanistan by funding, arming and training fundamentalist forces. At the war’s conclusion, the Taliban took power with great support from the Bush administration and proceeded to brutally suppress the population, particularly women, who had been given equal rights under previous governments. The war in Afghanistan, which the US had helped to create in the fight against soviet influence, took the lives of 1 million people, with 3 million more disabled and produced 5 million refugees, in total about half of the population. • Continued the longstanding US support of dictatorships and the repression of progressive movements throughout the Americas. Bush supplied advisors and training to the Peruvian government, even after the State Department’s own human rights reports condemned the dictatorship for its medieval prisons, routine torture and other human rights violations. In Columbia, using the so-called “War on Drugs” as a rationale, Bush provided military assistance to the brutal Columbian government, who themselves are known drug profiteers, in attempts to crush leftist forces in Columbia’s civil war. Later continued by Clinton, US policy helped make Columbia the third largest recipient of US military aid and one of the most violent nations in the world. In a 1994 report, Amnesty International estimated that more than 20,000 people had been killed in Columbia since 1986. Far from being “drug lords”, many of the victims were “trade unionists, human rights activists and leaders of legal left-wing movements.”
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