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• Expanded the US war in Laos and initiated war on Cambodia. Nixon contributed to training and arming of 30,000 insurgent troops and dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs - exceeding what the US dropped on Germany and Japan during all of World War II - upon the people of Laos, which resulted in the deaths of 500,000 men, women and children. Nixon supported numerous CIA operations throughout Southeast Asia and over the world, including "Operation Tailwind", in which aerosolized sarin nerve gas was dropped on a Loation village with the object of killing American military defectors who were reported to be living there. Nixon Initiated a massive genocidal covert "carpet bombing" campaign against neutral Cambodia, resulting in famine, economic chaos, and a staggeringly high death toll. Nixon supported the overthrow of the Cambodian government and the rise of dictator Pol Pot. Cambodian civilian death estimates range from 2,000,000 to 2,500,000 for the years of U.S. government involvement in Cambodia. • Escalated the US war in Vietnam and contributed to countless atrocities by means of direct policy and failure to recognize or stop known war crimes committed by US troops. In one well known atrocity, committed at My Lai, four hundred unarmed people, including women and babies, were lined up and shot in pits, in an action exactly equivalent to that of the German Einsatzgruppen in eastern Europe in World War II. Many of the women were raped, and some of the victims were tortured, before being murdered. "Its those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it," moaned President Nixon after the New York Times broke the story, with Seymour Hersh reporting. The US reaction, and the fate of US soldiers, is very instructive. The application of justice was handled in-house by the military and left up to Army court martial. Out of the scores of soldiers who participated and officers who covered-up the massacre, only five were ever court-martialed, while many of the original charges were dismissed in the "interests of justice”. Only Lieutenant William Calley was convicted for crimes at My Lai. It was Calley who, seeing a baby crawling away from a ditch already filled with dead and dying villagers, seized the child by the leg, threw the baby back in the pit, and shot it. Calley was initially sentenced to life at hard labor, and then an interesting political dance began. President Nixon immediately ordered him released to house arrest while various appeals proceeded. His sentence was cut to twenty years, then ten. He was freed on bail for a time, and then finally commanded to Leavenworth, where he served four and one half months, and was then paroled. Calley later wrote in his memoir, Body Count, "And babies. On babies, everyone's really hung up. 'But babies! The little innocent babies!' Of course, we've been in Vietnam for ten years now. If we're in Vietnam another ten, if your son is killed by those babies you'll cry at me, 'Why didn't you kill those babies that day?’” At the time of official withdrawal of US troops from Southeast Asia in 1973, 20,763 American, 109,230 South Vietnamese, and 496,260 North Vietnamese servicemen lost their lives. Estimated total civilian deaths range from 2,500,000 to 3,500,000 people. At the time of withdrawal, Nixon was quoted as saying, "As this long and difficult war ends, I would like to address a few special words to the American people: Your steadfastness in supporting our insistence on peace with honor has made peace with honor possible." 5 days after Nixon agreed to end the war he announced, “appropriate programs for the United States contribution to postwar reconstruction will fall in the range of $3.25 billion of grant aid over 5 years." Nothing of the promised reconstruction aid was ever paid. • Supported and provided arms to Pakistani General Yahya Khan for the overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Bangladesh in an action that led to a massive civilian bloodbath. Hundreds of thousands were killed. • Supported the CIA backed overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile and supported the installation of the murderous military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Nixon Knowingly provided practical assistance to the Pinochet regime to kill and torture thousands of civilians.
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