HYPOCRITUS

The U.S. government didn't manage to stop its hideous, perverse, illegal, and unethical syphilis experiments on black prisoners at Tuskegee until 1972: thirty years on--and well-hidden. Now we have news of further U.S. government sponsored syphilis "research"--again hideous, perverse, illegal and unethical--involving intentionally infecting otherwise uninfected Guatamalan men with syphilis. Why Guatamalan? Not just because they were poor? Not just because they were not "white"? (Well, we might say, at least they weren't U.S. citizens this time.)

Of, course, since the beginning of the Tuskegee experiments, the U.S. government had been spewing propaganda about medical experiments the Japanese were supposedly carrying out on prisoners. According to U.S. propaganda, this proved that the Japanese were "evil," even "sub-human," and deserved to be "exterminated." U.S. propaganda wasn't so hard on the Nazis: after all, they were only doing bad things to Jews.

Now? Well, the U.S. has its government kidnappers and murder squads all over the world, its secret "rendition" prisons and torture camps, and its illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. And the U.S. president won't do anything to stop them. U.S. military courts absolved almost everybody in the torture crimes scandal in Iraq. The U.S. Army almost managed to keep anyone from knowing about the "kill-for-sport" soldiers in the Army's Stryker unit--but one brave young man and his father finally made these continuing war crimes public knowledge. And the U.S. government has had Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for more than four months now, at Quantico; he is the young U.S. Army soldier who heroically and honorably leaked videos of U.S. military's murders of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, published as "Wikilinks."

Is there anything that connects all these things? Of course there is. And there are surely more links in this chain of violence, war crimes, and constant dishonor.

The Nuremburg War Crimes trials which the U.S. ran did not punish individual Nazi soldiers. It punished leaders. Of course: and in those days U.S. President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk, "The Buck Stops Here." It's time to conduct similar trials for the U.S. leaders responsible for these recent and continuing crimes. And if the U.S. court system is compromised--contaminated--and we don't have a working democracy any more, then the World Court should do it.

Or do 10,000 nuclear weapons and a lack of any sense of honor put us above anything like law or justice?