The Examples of the Human Rights Violations by the United States

1) The United States is the greatest environmental degradation factor

•  The United States Department of Defense Is the World’s Biggest Polluter which produces more hazardous wastes than any of the five major American chemical manufacturers.

• Releasing uranium, petroleum products, oils, insecticides, toxic chemicals such as Agent Orange, and more importantly, radiation emitted from weapons testing units are all part of the contaminates entered by the United States Army into the environment.

 • Thousands of kilos of radioactive material and highly toxic wastes produced by the United States Army, have contaminated the Middle East, Central Asia and the Balkans.

• The United States has produced a variety of mines and cluster bombs some of which have been left in large parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, in a way that even after the war, still causes deaths and destruction.

•  The nuclear tests conducted in the southwest of the United States and the southern islands in the Pacific Ocean have contaminated water and millions of hectares of land with dangerous rays.

The Abandoned US Army waste in Iraq

2) The most horrifying human experiments

Some of the United States’ betrayal of human rights are as follows:

1. Mind control experiments
2. Mustard gas experiments carried out on soldiers in gas chambers
3. Chemical bombardment
4. Infecting Guatemala
5. Studying the effects of atomic bombs on humans
6. Agent Orange injection (dioxidine) to inmates
7. Operation Paperclip
8. Infecting Puerto Rico’s people with cancer
9. Carrying out irradiation experiments on humans
10. Operation Midnight Climax
11. Atomic dust in the Pacific Ocean
12. “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” that was conducted on African-Americans

The effect of the orange factor on the body of a Vietnamese soldier

 

3) Burning the Branch Davidians Alive[3]

The Branch Davidians are a Christian cult in the United States. The United States federal police carried out an attack on their place of residence in order to arrest some individuals who were affiliated with this cult.[4] This took place while dozens of families were living there. Police laid siege to the compound for days. Although the United States government was able to arrest the suspects using nonviolent methods but decided to set the town on fire. Eventually, after 51 days of conflict (February 28 - April 19, 1993), David Koresh and 80 of his followers, along with 25 children[5] who were living peacefully near the city of Waco, Texas, were burned alive and killed during the operation carried out by two United States security agencies, namely FBI2 and ATF3.

Katherine Andrade and Shari Doyle(18 years old) before and after the fire

4) Fatal interventions of the United States.

1. The use of terrorist training books by the CIA
2. Production and distribution of pamphlets to train military forces or other people in other countries, including training them to commit murder, subversion, sabotage, torture, repression, mental torture as well as to create death squads, etc.
3. Special torture campaigns
4. Making and launching direct campaigns to develop torture as a means of creating panic and social control for the governments of Greece, Vietnam, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Panama.
5. Harbouring and sheltering terrorists
6. Helping to grow and support along with giving weapons to terrorists such as:
7. Klaus Barbie and other German Nazis as well as Italian and Japanese fascists after World War II, Manuel Noriega (Panama), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Osama bin Laden (Afghanistan) and other terrorists whose terrorism has come to our hunt (The United States).
8. Founding the Great War College (Brazil) and the first “School of the Americas” which is a military training institution that is focused on training repressive agents and oppressors, death squads’ members and torturers. The second “American School” is still running at Fort Benning in Georgia and currently is operating under the name of “The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.”
9. Providing safe havens to terrorists, dictators and torturers of Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Chile, Argentina, Iran, South Vietnam and other countries.
10. The assassination of world leaders – the employment of different techniques of killing and assassination as an instrument of foreign policy, by which the CIA has attempted to kill at least 40 heads of countries over the last 50 years was able to murder some of them, such as Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), (Ngo Dinh Diem) (Vietnam) and Salvador Allende (Chile).
11. The arms trade and presence of United States troops:
12. The United States is the largest arms dealer in the world that has sold and provided weapons for dictators, armies and terrorists who suppress and kill people and spark violent conflicts and tensions throughout the world.
13. The United States is the world’s largest producer of landmines that are killing or injuring several people every day.
14. The United States has military bases in at least 50 countries, of which local people are innocent victims.
15. Since 1983, the United States has been always involved in attacking Muslim countries or the Middle East, including Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

5) Torture and Violation of the Human Rights of Prisoners in the United States.

A) The violation of the Geneva Conventions and Torture in United States prisoners

• While the United States constitutes only 5 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of the world’s prisoners are being held in the country’s prisons.

• The United States has the highest number of prisoners in the world. According to the latest United States Bureau of Justice statistics and the United States Federal Bureau of Prisons, more than 2,400,000 prisoners are kept in Federal and State prisons.

B) the highest rate of prisoners who await execution/ juvenile offenders who await execution

3,111 death row prisoners in the United States are awaiting execution. The number of these offenders in 2013 has increased significantly by 20% compared to 2012 and 2011. As far as the rate of death penalty among the United States prisoners is concerned, the juveniles have a special position. During these years, at least 22 inmates have been sentenced to death who were under 18 at the time of execution. Moreover, among the executions carried out in different states across the United States, at least 4 percent of all the defendants eligible for the death penalty somehow had suffered from mental disorders. 

C) American secret prisons around the world.

On July 25, 2005, the Daily Kos forum published some photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, showing the American soldiers beating an Iraqi detainee violently, raping a prisoner woman, disrespecting one of the prisoner’s dead body and encouraging Ba’athist guards to rape young boys. According to the same report, the guards had raped the women before the eyes of their children. Abu Ghraib prison guards confessed that they had received orders for torture and killing from senior officials of the United States army. In addition to Abu Ghraib and other dreaded prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, the CIA has secret prisons in 66 other countries around the world, including Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Libya, Tunisia, India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Poland, Romania, Thailand and Lithuania. About 1,000 children and adolescents under the age of 15 have been subjected to brutal interrogation in CIA prisons in the Czech Republic, Romania and Poland.

D) Forging medical records and intentional avoidance of providing medical treatment at Guantanamo

Only 9 percent out of the 166 Guantanamo detainees who are from 23 different countries, were formally charged or accused of a criminal offence. Guantanamo detainees are being held in such a way that not be able to make contact with others. They spend 22 hours of a day in a single small cell without fresh air and natural light or with a little fresh air and natural light.

In 2004, a United States military official confirmed that prisoners who did not cooperate should take off their clothes except the underwear, and while their hands and feet are bound to the chair, they would be forced to bear intense light and listen to rock and rap music that is played at excruciating volumes through the headphones. The medical staff of the United States Army had forged various medical documents in an attempt to cover up the issue of torturing Iraqi prisoners during interrogations at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, they have issued fake death certificates for those who would not survive the torture and harsh interrogation at Abu Ghraib in order to pretend that they were died because of a heart attack, heatstroke etc.

The spokesman of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Florian Westphal, described the deliberate avoidance of American physicians to treat Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, as an obvious violation of international law.

E) 1% of Americans are in prison

According to Amnesty International, nearly 5,000 of a total of 121,000 California prisoners have been kept in solitary confinements that do not have windows, for a long period of time. This is the case for American detainees since they are being held in such places for 23 hours a day with only one hour spared to exercise in a small courtyard.

Many prisoners do not have the right to make phone calls and visit their families, and only cases of necessity such as the death of one of their relatives would make this possible. Inmates who are in solitary confinements do not have access to any entertainment tool or personal belongings. Books, newspapers and even pen and paper are rarely available for prisoners. According to the statistics published in August 2013, the country has the world’s highest incarceration rate with about 2,911,000 prisoners. In this country, 1 in 10 is behind bars. Nearly, 4 percent of federal and state prisoners reported having experienced one or more sexual abuse incidents in prison. In July 2013, around 30,000 offenders in the California prison system went on strike over the conditions of solitary confinement.

F) No more privacy; spying on American citizens

According to the documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, the United States citizens’ phone calls have been wiretapped and recorded until 2014. the NSA, the United States Federal Police, State Police, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and other United States security agencies have extensively collected and stored information of the United States citizen phone calls, the Civil Liberties Union report adds.

Many of these actions were carried out without a court order and were included phone calls of which the parties had not been suspected of committing any crime. In addition to listening and recording telephone conversations, in 2012, the United States security agencies have targeted the privacy of Internet users extensively and without a court order. The United States National Security Agency (NSA) has established more than 25 centers for telephone tapping in San Jose, San Diego, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other American cities. The head of the United States National Security Agency, William Binney, believes that the NSA collects about 100 billion emails per day and 20 billion of all kinds of communications in a year.

G) Abu Ghraib prison

 • Abu Ghraib is one of the world’s most notorious prisons that is located 32 kilometres west of Baghdad; torture, weekly executions, and difficult living conditions were the instances of misconduct with prisoners.

 • All the interchangeable equipment of this huge prison was changed by NATO officials after the collapse of the Saddam regime. Abu Ghraib prison currently belongs to the United States government.

 • Since 2003, the United States has detained some 2,400 children in Iraq, including children as young as 10. Also, the United States forces have detained 513 Iraqi children under the pretext of “essential threats to security.” Children in Iraq’s prisons were at risk of physical abuse.

Picture of Ali Shallal al-Qaisi, one of the prisoners subjected to torture and abuse by U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib

• American soldiers in this prison employed immoral techniques to torture prisoners. Likewise, they have insulted and showed contempt toward what is considered sacred in Islam to obtain a confession.

• Bagram Prison, which is called “Afghanistan’s Guantanamo,” has become one of the examples of human rights abuses by the United States government. Human Rights Watch investigations on American torture in Bagram prison show that at least 111 American military forces and civilians have been involved in mistreatment or murder of detainees. Philip Sands, professor of the School of Law at the University of London, in a book entitled “The Torture Team,” talks about other techniques of torture used in Bagram: “parading of naked men in front of female soldiers, forcing them to wear women’s underwear, dance with other men and watch porn movies.” These methods were used while sexual violence was considered a war crime. Waterboarding and threatening with raping family members are among common torture techniques in American prisons around the world.

H) California prisons.

• Between 1984 and 2005, 33 new prisons were built in California whereas only 12 ones had been built over the past 132 years.

• Long-term physical and psychological torture along with solitary confinement in United States prisons peaked in 2013. On July 1, 2013, California’s prisons witnessed the largest hunger strike in the history of the United States. Thousands of detainees participated in the strike, some of whom continued their strikes for about two months. Nearly 5,000 of a total of 121,000 California prisoners were kept in solitary confinements with no windows.

I) East Mississippi Correctional Facility

The East Mississippi Correctional Facility witnessed one of the largest organized acts of violating United States prisoners’ rights. The United States Civil Liberties Union has listed the following as the most important treatments that are against detainees’ basic human rights at Mississippi prison:

• The denial of accessing primary health and medical care for mental health patients.
• Keeping prisoners in cells with no windows, light and bathroom.
• The failure to protect prisoners from rape and other physical fights inside prison.
• The use of violence against the inmates by security agents.

According to a June 2015 report in the New York Times, Majid Khan, a Guantanamo detainee who was twice tortured with artificial drowning and hung naked from a wooden rod for three days.

J) CIA secret prisons in other countries

• There are CIA secret prisons in unknown places. The CIA is said to have between 50 and 100 secret prisons in about 30 countries.

• The CIA would recruit criminals in different countries, transport them to these secret prisons and torture them.

• Human rights activists state that the CIA has used these prisons for long-term arrests, torture, and detaining suspects without a court order.

K) Painful executions

• The lethal injection was first developed in 1982 in Texas, the United States. Using this technique would prolong the person’s suffering.

• These types of executions are not only against the international conventions but also violate the principle of the prohibition of inflicting “cruel and unusual punishment” in the fourth amendment to the United States Constitution.

Archive of The Enemies of the Islamic Revolution