List of US atrocities

The United States government has been involved in national and international atrocities at various points throughout its history. These include genocide, bombings, massacres, systematic use of torture, imperialist geopolitical practice, and so on. The following is a list of known atrocities committed by US authorities.

Imperialism

The US empire currently maintains an imperialist network of over 800 military bases in 70 countries. (For comparison, all other countries combined have only 30 bases)

Middle East

In 1949, the US aided a Syrian coup d'état. The democratically elected government of Shukri al-Quwatli was overthrown by a junta led by the Syrian Army chief of staff at the time, Husni al-Za'im,who became President of Syria on 11 April 1949. The exact nature of US involvement in that coup is still highly controversial. However, it is well documented that the construction of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, which had been held up in the Syrian parliament, was approved by Za'im just over a month after the coup.
In 1953, the CIA in Iran overthrows the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in a military coup, after he threatened to nationalize British oil. The CIA replaces him with a dictator, the Shah of Iran, whose secret police, SAVAK, is as brutal as the Gestapo. After the initial coup failed and the Shah and his family fled to Italy, the CIA payed millions of dollars to bribe military officers and pay gangsters to unleash violence in the streets of Tehran.
In 1958, Eisenhower authorized Operation Blue Bat, an invasion of 14,000 US troops in the ongoing civil war in Lebanon. This was the first application of the Eisenhower Doctrine under which the U.S. announced that it would intervene to protect regimes it considered threatened by international communism. The goal of the operation was to bolster the pro-Western Lebanese government of President Camille Chamoun against internal opposition and threats from Syria and Egypt.
Since the 1960s, the US has given immense economic and military aid to Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has taken 100,000 - 200,000 lives. The US has used its UN veto power to block a two-state solution countless times.
From 1979-89, the CIA begins supplying arms and money ($630 million per year by 1987, and a total of 5-6 Billion USD) to factions fighting against the soviets in their invasion of afghanistan, In what was known as Operation Cyclone. the U.S. government secretly provided weapons and funding for the Mujahadin Islamic guerillas of Afghanistan fighting to overthrow the Afghan government and the Soviet military forces that supported it. Supplies were channeled through the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan.[[[ Although Operation Cyclone officially ended in 1989 with the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, U.S. government funding for the Mujahadin continued through 1992. Fanatical extremists now possess state-of-the-art weaponry, including Sheik Abdel Rahman, and Osama Bin Laden, who were later responsible for the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center bombings in New York. The architect of the war, Zbigniew Brzezinski, an advisor to president carter, admitted in a 1998 interview with the Parisian publication Le Novel Observateur, confirmed that Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the Mujahadin against the soviet-supported Kabul government, before the soviet invasion.
In 1980, the US funded and sold weapons to both sides in the Iran-Iraq War, hoping to destabilize the region and create a puppet regime favorable to US interests. Over 500,000 people died in the conflict.
In 1980, the US helped Turkish armed forces in the 1980 Turkish coup d'état, including supplying them with American-made Sikorski helicopters.
In 1988, a US navy cruise missile shot down Iran Flight 655, killing its 290 civilian passengers. In 1996 As part of the settlement, the US did not admit legal liability or formally apologize to Iran but agreed to pay on an ex gratia basis $61.8 million.
In 1990, The U.S. liberates Kuwait from Iraq in the Gulf War. Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, was formerly backed by the US when his regime invaded Iran in 1980, and before that was hired by the CIA in a botched assassination attempt on the then Iraqi president. During this costly eight-year war, the CIA built up Hussein’s forces with sophisticated arms, intelligence, training and financial backing, cementing Hussein’s power at home, and allowing him to crush the many internal rebellions that erupted from time to time, sometimes with poison gas. 20,000–35,000 Iraqis were killed in the Gulf War, along with 75,000+ wounded. A vindictive U.N. embargo followed that several years later still denied Iraq the technological resources to recover its food production, medical services, and sanitation facilities. As late as 1993, CNN reported that nearly 300,000 Iraqi children were suffering from malnutrition. Deaths exceeded the normal rate by 125,000 yearly, mostly affecting ‘the poor, their infants, children, chronically ill, and elderly’. Iraqi citizens, who previously had enjoyed a decent living standard, were reduced to destitution.
Approximately 250,000[ of the 697,000 U.S. veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf War are afflicted with an enduring chronic multi-symptom illness called Gulf War Syndrome. From 1995 to 2005, the health of combat veterans worsened in comparison with nondeployed veterans, with the onset of more new chronic diseases, functional impairment, repeated clinic visits and hospitalizations, chronic fatigue syndrome-like illness, posttraumatic stress disorder, and greater persistence of adverse health incidents.[. Suggested causes have included depleted uranium, sarin gas, smoke from burning oil wells, vaccinations, combat stress and psychological factors.
The September 11th 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, provoked an international military campaign of Middle East imperialism known as The War on Terror. Conflicts include the Nato led involvement in Afghanistan (2001–2014), the Insurgency in Yemen (1992–2015), the Iraq War (2003–2011), the War in North-West Pakistan (2004–present), and the International campaign against ISIL (2014–present). The enemy combatants of the war have mostly been people of the Middle East. Casualty numbers are in the millions, detailed here.
The attacks precipitated the signing into law in 2001 of the Patriot Act, which expanded the powers of the NSA to perform mass surveillance, allowed indefinite detention of immigrants, allowed warrant-less searching of phone and email records without a court order, . Thousands of people were jailed, and questioned under the new power the act granted to law enforcement agencies. Susan Lindauer, a congressional staffer turned activist, imprisoned from 2005-09 for violating the "acting as an agent of a foreign government" provision of the patriot act; the charges were later dropped after it was discovered no evidence ever existed. 1
Since 2001, many enemy combatants have been held at the Guantanamo bay detention camp, a prison camp in Cuba in which suspected enemies are jailed indefinitely without trial. Several inmates have been severely tortured, leading much of the world to decry its existence as a human rights abuse. The military acts as interrogators, prosecutors and defense counsel, judges, and when death sentences are imposed, as executioners. All trials are held in private. Trump has vowed to keep the prison open, saying, "[...] I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding... Don’t tell me it doesn’t work—torture works... if it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing to us." At least 108 detainees have died while in US custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo bay, with at least 20 being declared by the Army as murder.
On December 10, 2002, US military police, aided by the CIA, tortured and killed Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver, at Baghram prison, highlighting a scandal of torture and murder at the prison. Dilawar was chained to the ceiling of his cell, and suspended by his wrists for four days. His arms became dislocated from their sockets, and flapped around limplywhenever guards collected him for interrogation. During his detention, Dilawar's legs were beaten to a pulp. They would have had to have been amputated because damage was so severe. The murder and US torture complex is chronicled in the 2007 documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.
Starting with the Iraq war, the US increasingly began contracting private mercenary companies to do military operations. These private companies are authorized by the US to use lethal force. Blackwater, one such company known for its ruthless reputation for killing civilians, has been involved in various scandals, such as in Fallujah, and Nisour square. Its founder, Erik Prince, has close ties to the Trump administration.
In april, 2004, the US military lied to the family of Pat Tillman, a famous American athlete turned soldier, surrounding his death by friendly fire, and used a fake heroic story about his death as a recruiting poster. The jingoistic media coverage was created by the spin of several top US generals and Bush administration officials, who dictated a memo about how best to handle the embarrassing death of such a high profile soldier. This is chronicled in the documentary, A Tillman Story.
On April 14, 2004, Lieutenant Ilario Pantano of the United States Marine Corps, killed two unarmed captives. Lieutenant Pantano claimed that the captives had advanced on him in a threatening manner. All charges were dropped, and he received an honorable discharge. 1
On May 20, 2004, A US airstrike killed 42 civilians attending a wedding, in the Mukaradeeb wedding party massacre. 1
In 2004, accounts of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, including torture (whitewashed as enhanced interrogation techniques), rape, sodomy, and homicide of prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to public attention, revealing a systemic policy of torture during the Iraq war, primarily perpetrated by US Military police, and the CIA. Many of the torture techniques used were developed at Guantánamo detention centre, including prolonged isolation; sensory deprivation to induce psychosis, a sleep deprivation program whereby people were moved from cell to cell every few hours so they couldn’t sleep for days, weeks, even months, short-shackling in painful positions; nudity; extreme use of heat and cold; the use of loud music and noise and preying on phobias. Many, such as Manadel al-Jamadi, were tortured to death. 1
On November 19, 2005, a group of US marines killed 24 unarmed men, women and children in the city of Haditha in Western Iraq. Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich admitted to telling his men to "shoot first and ask questions later". The eight marines were found not guilty of voluntary manslaughter.
Beginning in 2005, the U.S. government secretly encouraged and advised a Pakistani Balochi militant group named Jundullah that is responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran.[ ABC News learned from tribal sources that money for Jundullah was routed to the group through Iranian exiles. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture," according to Professor Vali Nasr.[ U.S. intelligence sources later claimed that the orchestration of Jundallah operations was, in actuality, an Israeli Mossad false flag operation that Israeli agents disguised to make it appear to be the work of American intelligence.[
On March 12, 2006, US Soldiers gang raped and killed a 14-year-old Iraqi girl named Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, and murdered her parents, and her six year old sister, in the Mahmudiyah rape and killings. 1
On March 15, 2006, 11 Iraqi civilians were bound and executed by US troops in the Ishaqi incident. 1
On April 26, 2006 in the Hamdania incident, US troops killed an unarmed civilian, staging a fake firefight to cover it up. Members of the squad shot the stolen AK-47 rifle into the air to make it sound like a firefight was occurring, and after the Iraqi man was dead, the Marines scattered the expended AK-47 brass next to the body, removed the plastic restraints, and placed the rifle next to the body.
On May 9, 2006, U.S. troops executed 3 male Iraqi detainees at the Muthana Chemical Complex, called the Iron Triangle Murders.
On July 12, 2007, US AH-64 Apache helicopters bombed and killed ~15 Iraqi civilians, including two reuters journalists, and wounding two children, in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, New Baghdad. The attacks received worldwide coverage following the leaking of 39 minutes of classified gunsight footage, in a video released by wikileaks titled collateral murder. 22-year-old American Army intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley Manning) was arrested for leaking the video, along with a video of another airstrike and around 260,000 diplomatic cables, to WikiLeaks. She was being held in prison under the Espionage act, a law used to jail dissidents, intended to prohibit any interference with military operations, until early 2017. 1 On March 8, 2019, Manning was held in contempt of court by a United States District Court judge for refusing to testify to a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Manning said she was objecting to the "secrecy of the grand jury process". Except for a brief period of release between May 9 and May 16, she continues to be held in the Alexandria City Jail until she agrees to testify. Julian Assange, the founder of wikileaks, has also been the target of the CIA, who (aided by a spanish security firm) continually spied on him while in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.
On September 16, 2007, employees of Blackwater (since renamed Academi), a private military company, killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20 more in the Nisour Square massacre, revealing a wide-spread policy to employ and enable private security firms to use deadly force.
On July 6 2008, the US bombed a wedding party and killed 47 Afghan civilians in the Haska Meyna Wedding party airstrike. The first bomb hit a group of children who were ahead of the main procession, killing them instantly. A few minutes later, the aircraft returned and dropped a second bomb in the center of the group, killing a large number of women. The bride and two girls survived the second bomb, but were killed by a third bomb while trying to escape from the area. Hajj Khan, one of four elderly men who were escorting the party, stated that his grandson was killed and that there were body parts everywhere. 1
On 22 August 2008, A US airstrike killed ~90 civilians, mostly children, in the village of Azizabad, Afghanistan. 1
On 3 October 2015, a United States Air Force AC-130U gunship attacked and killed 42 people and wounded 30 more in the Kunduz Trauma Centre operated by Doctors Without Borders, in northern Afghanistan. The airstrike constitutes a war crime (attacks on hospitals are considered war crimes), and is the first instance of one Nobel peace prize winner (Obama) bombing and killing another (Doctors without borders). CNN and the New York Times deliberately obscured the US's responsibility for the bombing, with the headline, "US is blamed after bomb hits afghan hospital". 1,2
From 2000 up to the present day, the US has been carrying out a campaign of drone strikes and asassinations in the Middle East and Africa, including Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, resulting in thousands of civilian deaths, including women, children, and US citizens. 1 Drone strikes are used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill people the Obama administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without indictment or trial — worthy of execution. Drone strike targets are usually pinpointed through cell phone usage. The Obama asassination complex is detailed in the drone papers.
In 2010, Chelsea Manning's leak of the Iraq War Logs revealed US army reports on civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan; 66,081 out of 109,000 recorded deaths were civilians. They show that US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers, and that US troops killed almost 700 civilians for coming too close to checkpoints, including pregnant women and the mentally ill, and countless other atrocities.1
In 2010, President Obama directed the CIA to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, despite the fact that he had never been charged with any crime, killing him with a September, 2011 drone strike. Two weeks later, a separate CIA drone strike in Yemen killed his 16-year-old American-born son, Abdulrahman, along with the boy’s 17-year-old cousin and several other innocent Yemenis. In January 2017, Trump ordered a SEAL strike, and reports from Yemen quickly surfaced that 30 people were killed, including 10 women and children. Among the dead: the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar Awlaki, sister of the 16 year old killed by Obama. 1
US drone operator turned whistleblower Brandon Bryant told stories about his time as a drone operator in Afghanistan from 2006-2011. He estimates that he contributed directly to killing 13 people himself and says his squadron fired on 1,626 targets including women and children. He tells of one instance of killing a child, with his superiors telling him "it was a f**** dog, drop it". “That image on the screen is still in my head. Whenever I think about it, it still hurts me,” Mr Bryant said. “When I pulled the trigger, I knew that it was wrong. When the missile struck I knew in my soul I had become a murderer.” He tells of how his superiors would ridicule, punish, and threaten legal action against anyone who had misgivings about their orders. He believes that the US military is "worse than the nazis."
From 2011 up to the present day, the US ousted Mummar Gaddafi in Libya, and began conducting an extensive bombing campaign (>110 tomahawk cruise missiles) in the Libyan Civil Wars of 2011 and 2014. This includes 7,700 air strikes, resulting in 30,000 -100,000 deaths. Loyalist towns were bombed to rubble and ethnically cleansed, and the country is in chaos as Western-trained and armed Islamist militias seize territory and oil facilities and vie for power. The Misrata militia, trained and armed by Western special forces, is one of the most violent and powerful in the world.1 The country has since collapsed into a chaos of child soldiers, slavery, and violence between extremist groups, a haunting repetition of what US imperialism has left in its wake in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. An interview with Gaddafi's former spokesman about the US overthrow of Libya..
Since 2013, The US has intervened militarily in the ongoing Syrian Civil War, with airstrikes, naval bombardments, and funding and training Syrian Islamic and secular insurgents fighting to topple the Syrian government. Many have labeled the struggle as a proxy war between US and Russian interests in the Middle East, in a highly unstable region. Between 500-700 civilians , and over 50,000 ISIL militants and pro-bashad fighters have been killed. 1
In January 2015, the US killed 13-year-old Mohammed Tuaiman in Yemen with a drone strike. A month earlier, the guardian interviewed him, and he was quoted as saying: "“A lot of the kids in this area wake up from sleeping because of nightmares from them and some now have mental problems. They turned our area into hell and continuous horror, day and night, we even dream of them in our sleep...In their eyes, we don’t deserve to live like people in the rest of the world and we don’t have feelings or emotions or cry or feel pain like all the other humans around the world.” In 2011 an unmanned combat drone killed his father and teenage brother as they were out herding the family’s camels.
In 2016, the US under Obama dropped 26,171 bombs in the Middle East and North Africa, up 3000 from the previous year. The countries bombed include Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia. He authorized 10 times more drone strikes than George W Bush. 1
On February 15th, 2017, US-backed Saudi planes bombed a funeral in Yemen, killing 5 women and wounding dozens more. In the 2015 - Present Yemeni Civil War, 16,200 people have been killed including 10,000 civilians, 3 million have been displaced and left homeless, and over 200,000 people are facing shortages of food, water and medicine. The US has used drone bombers in Yemen, and has supported Saudi interests in the region, with military contracts providing weapons and planes. The US has weapons contracts with Saudi Arabia valuing over $110 billion. In August 2018, Saudi planes bombed a school bus, killing 50, including 40 children, and wounding another 80.1, 2, 3
On March 17th, 2017, A US airstrike killed ~112 civilians in Mosul, Iraq. In response, US Defense Secretary James Mattis said, "There is no military force in the world that is proven more sensitive to civilian casualties." 1
On March 21st, 2017, A US airstrike killed at least 30 Syrian civilians in an airstrike on a school in the Raqqa province. The week before, 49 people were killed when US warplanes fired on a target in in the 2017 al-Jinah airstrike, a village in western Aleppo province. US officials said the attack had hit a building where al-Qaeda operatives were meeting, but residents said the warplanes had struck a mosque where hundreds of people had gathered for a weekly religious meeting. 1
On April 4th, 2017, following the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, Trump ordered an airstrike of 59 tomahawk cruise missiles (worth $70 million) fired at the Shayrat air base in Syria (one that Trump claims is the source of the chemical attack) in the 2017 Shayrat Missile Strike. This is the first attack by the US directly targeting Ba'athist Syrian government forces, who are closely allied with Russia. Russian Prime Minister Dimitry Medvedev said the attack brought the U.S. "within an inch" of clashing with the Russian military, and could've sparked a nuclear war. The attack was praised by US politicians on both sides of the aisle, as well >30 countries. Over 700 children have been killed US coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since August 2014. The US conducted another airstrike against Syria on June 7th, 2017.1
Starting in June 2017, photos and videos from Syrian civilians in Raqqa showed that the US-backed coalition in Syria was illegally using white phosphorus in civilian areas. White phosphorus can burn human flesh down to the bone, and wounds can reignite up to days later. “No matter how white phosphorus is used, it poses a high risk of horrific and long-lasting harm in crowded cities like Raqqa and Mosul and any other areas with concentrations of civilians,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch. One attack on an internet cafe killed at least 20 civilians, while other deaths are still being confirmed. One of those civilians killed was in the process of sending a report to Humans Rights Watch, when the cafe was struck. The US killed 273 syrian civilians in April, slightly more than the number killed by ISIS. A US attack in July killed another 50 civilians. In August, the US killed another 60+ civilians. On May 17th, 2020, the US firebombed over 200 acres of wheat fields in Syria, leaving many food insecure. 1,2,3
On April 14, 2018, the US, UK, and France launched 100 more missiles at 3 different targets in Syria, again claiming that the Syrian government used chemical attacks against its own citizens in douma as justification. On 10 April, the Syrian government again invited the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to send a team to investigate the sites of the alleged attacks. Trump, Macron, and May have all issued statements saying that this is not an intervention in the Syrian civil war. 1. In a leaked email in Nov, 2019, an OPCW whistleblower stated that the US fabricated the evidence, and used it justify the air-strike. 2
In early 2018, US Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher stabbed a defenseless teenage captive to death in Iraq. According to two SEAL witnesses, Gallagher said over the radio "he's mine" and walked up to the medic and prisoner, and without saying a word, killed the prisoner by stabbing him repeatedly with his hunting knife. Gallagher and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Jake Portier, then posed for photographs of them standing over the body with some other nearby SEALs. Gallagher then text messaged a friend in California a picture himself holding the dead captive's head by the hair with the explanation "Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife.” After he was imprisoned, Gallagher's other crimes came to light: fellow soldiers said they witnessed Gallagher shooting and killing an unarmed old man in a white robe, as well as a young girl walking with other girls. Gallagher boasted that he averaged three kills a day over 80 days, including four women. In video interviews with investigators, multiple SEALs described how he would go on solo “gun runs,” emptying loads of heavy machine gun fire into neighborhoods with no apparent targets. “I think he just wants to kill anybody he can,” Corey Scott, a medic from the platoon, told Navy investigators. After his case went public, it became a conservative rallying cry: A website soliciting donations for his defense raised > $375k, and a prominent veterans’ apparel maker sold “Free Eddie” T-shirts. Spurred on by his family, 40 Republican members of Congress signed a letter in March calling for the Navy to free him, and soon after, US President Trump had him released from prison to house arrest. In July, 2019, he was acquitted of all charges. Gallagher was one of three military personnel accused or convicted of war crimes on whose behalf Trump had intervened to pardon or promote. Trump told a rally audience days after his intervention, "I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state." Gallagher has now started a chain of companies selling clothing and nutritional supplements.
In September 2019, the US killed at least 30 pine nut farmers, and injured 40 others via a drone attack in the nangarhar province in Afghanistan. Malik Rahat Gul, a tribal elder in Wazir Tangi, said the air raid happened at a time when tired workers, mainly daily wage earners, had gathered near their tent after harvesting pine nuts in a field nearby. "The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them". This marks the 18th year of war in Afghanistan.
On January 2nd, 2020, President Donald Trump ordered the drone assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani 2, in a blatant act of war against Iran. Soleimani was a beloved figure to the Iranian people, his death sending shockwaves among residents, and a 3-day national mourning period was declared. Hillary Mann Leverett, a former White House National Security official, said the killing of Soleimani was a "declaration of war" on Iran, and is "equivalent to the Iranians assassinating the US defence secretary". The drone attack was part of several targeted US airstrikes, and comes in the wake of turmoil following another series of US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria which killed 25 members of the Iraqi Kataib Hezbollah militia, after which outraged Iraqi protesters surrounded the US embassy in Baghdad. In response, the US blamed "Iranian infiltrators" for the embassy attack, and deployed an additional 750 troops, bolstering the 14k troops currently stationed in ~20 military bases surrounding Iran. Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi militia commander, was also killed in a pre-dawn raid on the same day. That evening, another US airstrike in Iraq killed 6 people.

Western hemisphere

In 1846, the US sent a small force into Mexico with the aim of bringing about a war, and started the Mexican-American War. The US prevailed, expanding its territory far into Mexico, and killed ~25,000 mexicans in the process, as part of an ideological goal of white supremacy in north america called manifest destiny. The shift in the Mexico-U.S. border left many Mexican citizens separated from their national government. For the indigenous peoples who had never accepted Mexican rule, the change in border meant conflicts with a new outside power.
In 1896, the US fought the Spanish-American War largely over economic interests in the Caribbean, primarily Cuba. Historian Eric Foner writes: "Even before the Spanish flag was down in Cuba, U.S. business interests set out to make their influence felt. Merchants, real estate agents, stock speculators, reckless adventurers, and promoters of all kinds of get-rich schemes flocked to Cuba by the thousands. Seven syndicates battled each other for control of the franchises for the Havana Street Railway, which were finally won by Percival Farquhar, representing the Wall Street interests of New York. Thus, simultaneously with the military occupation began . . . commercial occupation."
From 1895-1917, the Banana Wars refers to the military intervention on behalf of US business interests in Central America and the Caribbean (8 countries in total) after the Spanish American War. In Honduras, for example, the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company dominated the country's key banana export sector and associated land holdings and railways, and saw insertion of American troops in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924 and 1925
In 1903 the US backed its puppet state Panama's secession from Columbia. The Panama Canal was under construction by then, and the Panama Canal Zone, under United States sovereignty, was then created. The zone was transferred to Panama in 2000.1
In 1912, the US military invaded Nicaragua after intermittent landings and naval bombardments in the previous decades. It was occupied by the U.S. almost continuously from 1912 through 1933. With the onset of the Great Depression and Augusto C. Sandino's Nicaraguan guerrilla troops fighting back against U.S. troops, it became too costly for the U.S. government and a withdrawal was ordered in 1933.
In 1914, the US military invaded Veracruz, Mexico, after US sailors were arrested by the Mexican government for entering off-limits areas, in the Tampico Affair. Over 200 were killed in the invasion.
From 1915–34, Haiti was occupied by the US, which led to the creation of a new Haitian constitution in 1917 that instituted changes that included an end to the prior ban on land ownership by non-Haitians. Including the First and Second Caco Wars.[ At least 15,000 Haitians were killed.
From 1916-24, the US occupied the Dominican Republic, with repeated actions in 1903, 1904, and 1914.
In 1928, the Columbian army killed ~800-3000 striking workers in Cienaga, Columbia, after the US threatened to invade with U.S. Marine Corps troops if the Colombian government did not act to protect the United Fruit Company's interests, in the Banana Massacre. The banana plantation workers were demanding written contracts, eight-hour work days, six-day work weeks and the elimination of food coupons. The troops set up their machine guns on the roofs of the low buildings at the corners of the main square, closed off the access streets, and after a five-minute warning opened fire into a dense Sunday crowd of workers and their wives and children who had gathered, after Sunday Mass, to wait for an anticipated address from the governor.
In Smedley Butler's (A former US general and medal of honor recipient) 1935 pamphlet, War is a Racket, he recounted his experience as being an agent of American Imperialism: “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”1
In 1941, the US used its contacts in the Panama National Guard, which the U.S. had earlier trained, to have the government of Panama overthrown in a bloodless coup. The U.S. had requested that the government of Panama allow it to build over 130 new military installations inside and outside of the Panama Canal Zone, and the government of Panama refused this request at the price suggested by the U.S.
In 1953, A 2011 release of British intelligence files revealed that US and British MI5 forces overthrew the government of Cheddi Jagan, the elected leader of British Guyana. They showed how British spies kept up intense scrutiny on Cheddi Jagan and his wife Janet, who together founded the People's Progressive party (PPP) to campaign for workers' rights and independence from British rule for the sugar-producing colony in northern South America. Churchill and the US feared that the Jagans were communists, although MI5 found no foreign ties. Churchill dispatched a warship, HMS Superb, and brought hundreds of troops by air and sea to secure key sites. An outraged Cheddi Jagan appealed by telegram to Britain's opposition Labour party for help. Leader Clement Attlee replied curtly: "Regret impossible to intervene."
In 1954, the CIA overthrows the democratically elected Guatemalen Jacobo Árbenz in a military coup in operation PBSucess. Arbenz threatened to nationalize the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company, in which CIA Director Allen Dulles also owns stock. Arbenz is replaced with a series of US-backed right-wing dictators whose bloodthirsty policies will kill over 100,000 Guatemalans in the next 40 years, until 1996. The coup has been described as the definitive deathblow to democracy in Guatemala.1
In 1958, The United States supported the Batista dictatorship in Cuba. Batista aligned with the wealthiest landowners who owned the largest sugar plantations, and presided over a stagnating economy that widened the gap between rich and poor Cubans. Eventually most of the sugar industry was in U.S. hands, and foreigners owned 70% of the arable land. As such, Batista's increasingly corrupt and repressive government then began to systematically profit from the exploitation of Cuba's commercial interests, by negotiating lucrative relationships with both the American Mafia, who controlled the drug, gambling, and prostitution businesses in Havana, and with large U.S.-based multinational companies who were awarded lucrative contracts. To quell the growing discontent amongst the populace—which was subsequently displayed through frequent student riots and demonstrations—Batista established tighter censorship of the media, while also utilizing his Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities secret police to carry out wide-scale violence, torture and public executions; ultimately killing anywhere from hundreds to 20,000 people. After the Cuban revolution, the CIA launched a long campaign of terrorism against Cuba, training Cuban exiles in Florida, Central America and the Dominican Republic to commit assassinations and sabotage in Cuba. These include the cuban embargo, and over 638 failed assasination attempts on fidel castro. 1
In 1959, following the US occupation of Haiti, The U.S. military helps "Papa Doc" Duvalier become dictator of Haiti. He creates his own private police force, the Tonton Macoutes, who terrorize the population with machetes. They kill over 100,000 during the Duvalier family reign. The U.S. does not protest their dismal human rights record.
In 1961, the CIA sent 1,500 Cuban exiles to invade Castro’s Cuba in the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. B26 bombers attacked cuban airfields, providing initial air support. The planners had imagined that the invasion would spark a popular uprising against Castro -– which never happened. Several hundred were killed in the action. Castro's government returned the captured invaders for medical supplies. 1
After the Failed bay of pigs invasion, the CIA began Operation Mongoose, a series of covert operations to disrupt and destabilize Cuba. The operation included economic warfare, including an embargo against Cuba, “to induce failure of the Communist regime to supply Cuba's economic needs,” a diplomatic initiative to isolate Cuba, and psychological operations “to turn the peoples' resentment increasingly against the regime.”[ The economic warfare prong of the operation also included the infiltration by the CIA of operatives to carry out many acts of sabotage against civilian targets, such as a railway bridge, a molasses storage facilities, an electric power plant, and the sugar harvest, notwithstanding Cuba’s repeated requests to the United States government to cease its terrorist operations.[[ In addition, the CIA orchestrated a number of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, head of government of Cuba, including attempts that entailed CIA collaboration with the American mafia. 1
In 1961, the CIA assassinated Rafael Trujillo, a murderous dictator responsible for the deaths of more than 50,000 people, who Washington had supported since 1930. Trujillo’s business interests had grown so large (about 60 percent of the economy) that they had begun competing with American business interests. The US later provided troops on the side of the loyalists in the 1965 Dominican civil war, to ensure US interests. 1
In 1961, in Ecuador, the CIA-backed military forces the democratically elected President José María Velasco Ibarra to resign. Vice President Carlos Arosemana replaces him; the CIA fills the now vacant vice presidency with its own man. 1
From 1961 onward, The US School of Americas, a US Department of Defense institute in Fort Benning, Georgia, was assigned the specific goal of teaching "anti-communist counterinsurgency training," to CIA-supported right wing paramilitaries. It trained more than 19,000 students from 36 countries in the western hemisphere, including several Latin American dictators, and, during the 1980s, included torture in its curriculum.
In the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously agreed that a full-scale nuclear attack and invasion was the only solution, nearly plunging the world into nuclear war.
In 1964, A CIA-backed military coup in Brazil overthrows the democratically elected government of Joao Goulart. The junta that replaces it will, in the next two decades, become one of the most bloodthirsty in history. General Castelo Branco creates Latin America’s first death squads, or bands of secret police who hunt down communists and political opponents for torture, interrogation and murder. Later it is revealed that the CIA trained the death squads. Thousands were tortured, and hundreds were killed.
In 1965, The US intervened in the Dominican Civil War, providing air support and 1,700 marines. This later transformed into an Organization of American States occupation of the country. 1
In 1968, a CIA-organized military operation in Bolivia led by cuban exile and CIA agent Félix Rodríguez captures legendary guerilla Che Guevara, defeating the Ñancahuazú Guerrilla. The Bolivian president ordered his immediate execution to prevent worldwide calls for clemency, and the drama of a trial. Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie aka "The Butcher of Lyon", advised and possibly helped the CIA orchestrate Guevara's eventual capture.
In 1969, amid a collapsing economy, labor and student strikes in Uruguay, CIA operative Dan Mitrione initiates a campaign of torture and violence against the left-wing student group Tuparamos. Former Uruguayan police officials and CIA operatives stated Mitrione had taught torture techniques to Uruguayan police, including the use of electrical shocks delivered to his victims' mouths and genitals. It has been alleged that he used homeless people for training purposes, who were executed once they had served their purpose.
Starting in the 1970s, a CIA-backed coalition of right wing governments in Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, began Operation Condor, a campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of opponents, with the stated aim of "eliminating Marxist subversion." Victims included dissidents and leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests and nuns, students and teachers, intellectuals and suspected guerillas. An estimated 30,000 to 80,000 leftists or sympathizers were killed. 1
In 1971, A CIA operative told a reporter he delivered a strain of the African Swine Fever virus from an army base in the Canal Zone to anti-Castro Cubans. An outbreak of the disease then occurred in Cuba, resulting in the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide animal epidemic. It was labeled the "most alarming event" of 1971 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization.1
In 1971 in Bolivia, after half a decade of CIA-inspired political turmoil, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows the leftist President Juan Jose Torres, eventually being kidnapped and murdered by CIA backed right wing death squads, as part of Operation Condor. In the next two years, dictator Hugo Banzer will have over 2,000 political opponents arrested without trial, then tortured, raped and executed. Banzer wwas trained at the U.S.-operated School of the Americas in Panama and later at Fort Hood, Texas. A few years later the Catholic Church denounced an army massacre of striking tin workers in 1975, Banzer, assisted by information provided by the CIA, was able to target and locate leftist priests and nuns. His anti-clergy strategy, known as the Banzer Plan, was adopted by nine other Latin American dictatorships in 1977.
On 11 September 1973, The CIA backed a military coup to remove democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, in favor of right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet. His US-supported regime was characterized by the systematic suppression of political parties and the persecution of dissidents to an extent that was unprecedented in the history of Chile, backed by the neoliberal free-market economic policies of the Chicago Boys. Over-all, the regime left over 3,000 dead or "dissappeared", tortured thousands of prisoners, and forced 200,000 Chileans into exile. He's known for the Villa Grimaldi, a torture complex, and his Caravan of Death, a Chilean Army death squad guilty of countless atrocities, including dropping pregnant women and teenagers out of helicopters in the ocean, and executions where prisoners were shot by parts, over extended periods of time. Pinochet's forces are conservatively estimated to have killed over 11,000 people in his first year in power. 1, 2
In 1976, The CIA backed an overthrow of Argentinan leader Isabel Martínez de Perón by right wing anti-communist dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. In 1983, two years after the return of a representative democratic government, he was prosecuted in the Trial of the Juntas for large-scale human rights abuses and crimes against humanity that took place under his rule, including kidnappings or forced disappearance, widespread torture and extrajudicial murder of activists, and political opponents as well as their families at secret concentration camps, and harboring nazis. An estimated 13,000 -30,000 political dissidents vanished during this period. Videla was also convicted of the theft of many babies born during the captivity of their mothers at the illegal detention centres and passing them on for illegal adoption by associates of the regime. In his defence, Videla maintains the female guerrilla detainees allowed themselves to fall pregnant in the belief they wouldn't be tortured or executed. 1
In 1976, several CIA-linked anti-Castro Cuban exiles and members of the Venezuelan secret police DISIP were responsible for a terrorist bomb attack on Cuban flight 455, killing 73 people. CIA venezuelan operative Luis Posada Carriles, one of the bombers, fled and was granted amnesty in the US in 2007. 1
In 1979, the US-backed dictator Anastasios Samoza II falls, beginning the popular Nicaraguan Revolution. Remnants of his Guard will become the Contras, who fight a CIA-backed guerilla war against the left-wing Sandinista government throughout the 1980s, with Reagan authorizing covert support to anti-Sandinista forces. 1
In 1979, The CIA began to destabilize Grenada after Maurice Bishop became president, for his marxist, pro-cuba, anti-racism, and anti-apartheid stances. The previous leader, Eric Gairy, was a British/US puppet who furthered imperialist interests in the region, sacked the treasury, presided over 47% unenemployment, and a 200% cost of living increase. His right wing gang / secret police, the Mongoose gang, ruthlessly tortured Leftists, sending his police to Pinochet's Argentina to learn torture techniques, and even murdered Maurice's father. Under Bishop's leadership, Women were given equal pay and paid maternity leave, and sex discrimination was made illegal. Organisations for education (Center for Popular Education), health care, and youth affairs (National Youth Organization) were also established, as well as free education and health care. A literacy campaign lowered it to less than 5% in 3 years. The campaign against him resulted in his overthrow and the invasion by the U.S. of Grenada on October 25, 1983, with about 277 people dying.
In 1980, In El Salvador, The Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, pleads with President Carter to stop aiding the military government slaughtering his people. Carter refuses. Right-wing leader Roberto D’Aubuisson has Romero shot through the heart while saying Mass. The country soon dissolves into civil war, with the peasants in the hills fighting against the military government. The CIA and U.S. Armed Forces supply the government with overwhelming military and intelligence superiority, as well as over 3000 tons of US made bombs, training death squads to roam the countryside, committing atrocities like that of El Mozote in 1982, where 800 civilians were massacred. By 1992, some 63,000 Salvadorans were killed. Back then Salvador was controlled by a mafia of 13 families who owned 50% of the land and wealth. The 13 families were heavily linked with the United States. CIA provided weapons and military training to the Salvadorean Army, as well as $6B in aid, and US military training in Panama. As soon as the CIA discovered the priests were indoctrinating the masses, they began killing them.
In the 1980s the CIA supported Battalion 316, a torture/assassination squad in Honduras, which kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of its citizens. Battalion 316 used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations , and prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves. Declassified documents and other sources show that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy knew of numerous crimes, including murder and torture, yet continued to support Battalion 316 and collaborate with its leaders. These constitute war crimes.1
From 1982-89, The U.S. government attempted to topple the government of Nicaragua by secretly arming, training and funding the Contras, a terrorist group based in Honduras that was created to sabotage Nicaragua and to destabilize the Nicaraguan government.As part of the training, the CIA distributed a detailed "terror manual" entitled "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla War," which instructed the Contras, among other things, on how to blow up public buildings, to assassinate judges, to create martyrs, and to blackmail ordinary citizens. In 1986, the Nicaraguan government under the Sandinistas shoots down a C-123 transport plane carrying military supplies to the Contras. The lone survivor, Eugene Hasenfus, turns out to be a CIA employee, as are the two dead pilots, contradicting Reagan's claims that the US was not aiding the contras. 1
In 1987, the former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, John Stockwell, testified to Congress and told a grisly tale of US involvement on behalf of business interests in Latin America. He cited covert operations in Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. Over the course of his testimony, he estimated that given the bombings of water supplies and other essential infrastructure, the invasions, the coups, that the United States, on its quest for empire, has been responsible for 6,000,000 deaths. The CIA retaliated by suing him into bankruptcy. 1
In the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. supplied military equipment and substantial aid for the Columbian government in their civil war to fight against FARC, known as Plan Columbia. The weapons, ostensibly delivered for use against narcotics traffickers, was being used by the Colombian military to commit abuses in the name of “counter-insurgency.” One estimate is that 67,000 deaths have occurred from the 1960s to recent years due to support by the U.S. of Colombian state terrorism. Another 1994 Amnesty International report, stated that more than 20,000 people were killed for political reasons in Colombia since 1986, mainly by the military and its paramilitary allies.
In 1989, The U.S. invades Panama to overthrow a dictator of its own making, General Manuel Noriega, with the stated goal of "Defending democracy and human rights in Panama". Noriega had been on the CIA’s payroll since 1966, collecting at least $100,000 per year from the U.S. Treasury. As he rose to be the de facto ruler of Panama, he became even more valuable to the CIA, reporting on meetings with Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and supporting U.S. covert wars in Central America, and had been transporting drugs with the CIA’s knowledge since 1972. By the late 80s, Noriega’s growing independence and intransigence had angered Washington. Between 500-4,000 people died in the US invasion.
In 1990 in Haiti, Competing against 10 comparatively wealthy white candidates, leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide captures 68 percent of the vote. A few months later, the CIA-backed military deposes him in a coup. More military dictators brutalize the country, as thousands of Haitian refugees escape the turmoil in barely seaworthy boats. The CIA "paid key members of the coup regime forces, identified as drug traffickers, for information from the mid-1980s at least until the coup." Coup leaders Cédras and François had received military training in the United States. As popular opinion calls for Aristide’s return, the CIA begins a disinformation campaign painting the courageous priest as mentally unstable.1
In 1996, investigative journalist Gary Webb exposed a CIA-run business of selling cocaine produced in Nicaragua, to help fund the anti-communist Contras in their fight against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. These drugs were mostly sold to black communities in California, and helped spark the Crack epidemic. Several of the US dealers such as such as Ross and Oscar Danilo Blandon, were found to have CIA and DEA ties. Webb's reports were suppressed in the news media. In 1997, Webb stated: "If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me ... And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job ... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress." In 2004, Webb was found dead in his home, shot in the back of the head twice. His death was ruled a suicide.
In 2009, a coup in Honduras has led to severe repression and death squad murders of political opponents, union organizers and journalists. At the time of the coup, U.S. officials denied any role in the coup and used semantics to avoid cutting off U.S. military aid as required under U.S. law. But two Wikileaks cables revealed that the U.S. Embassy, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was the main power broker in managing the aftermath of the coup and forming a government that is now repressing and murdering its people, including popular leader Berta Cáceres. The two men who killed Berta Cáceres were trained in the US. A former soldier with the US-trained special forces units of the Honduran military asserted that Caceres' name was included on a hitlist distributed to them months before her assassination.[ According to a February 2017 investigation by The Guardian, court papers purport to show that three of the eight people arrested in connection with the assassination are linked to the US-trained elite troops. Two of them, Maj Mariano Díaz and Lt Douglas Giovanny Bustillo, received military training in the US.,2
Following a series of terrorist attacks against Cuba (such as the bombing of Cuban commercial flight 455, that originated from anti-Castro Cuban exile groups in the US, such as Alpha 66, the F4 Commandos, the Cuban American National Foundation, and Brothers to the Rescue), the Cuban government sent spies to infiltrate these insurgent groups operating in Miami. Afterwards, the Cuban government then provided 175 pages of documents to FBI agents investigating Posada Carriles's (a former CIA operative) role in the 1997 terrorist bombings in Havana, but the FBI failed to use the evidence to follow up on Posada. Instead, they used it to uncover and imprison the Cuban spies, known as the Cuban Five. [[. The Cuban Five said they were spying on Miami's Cuban exile community, not the US government. They were imprisoned from 1998, until their eventual release via a prisoner swap in 2014. The terrorist bomber Posada Carriles (who admitted to planning 6 bombings of Havana Hotels and Restaurants) lived in Miami and was safeguarded by the US government until his death in 2018. 2
In 2017, Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, leaving 3.4 million without electricity and fuel, and causing an estimated $50 Billion in damage. 55% of Puerto Ricans have no potable water, in one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades. In marked contrast to the initial relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, on September 22 the only signs of relief efforts were beleaguered Puerto Rican government employees. The US response has been dismal, leading many to believe that the US prefers a decapitalized Puerto Rico. On September 29, San Juan Mayor Cruz held a press conference to plead for aid and to highlight failures by FEMA, saying, "This is what we got last night. Four pallets of water, three pallets of meals, and 12 pallets of infant food — which, I gave them to the people of Comerío, where people are drinking off a creek. So I am done being polite. I am done being politically correct. I am mad as hell." Cruz continued. "So I am asking the members of the press, to send a mayday call all over the world. We are dying here... And if it doesn't stop, and if we don't get the food and the water into people's hands, what we are going to see is something close to a genocide." In response President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter: "Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help." 1
On Nov 10, 2019, newly re-elected Bolivian President Evo Morales was forced to resign by the Bolivian military as part of a US-backed right-wing coup. Right-wing violence in the wake of Evo's re-election ( a landslide victory of > 10% the next runner ) included the kidnapping of Evo's brother and sister, cutting the hair of a leftist mayor, painting her red and parading her down the street, forcing her resignation, burning the town hall, the firebombing of several leftist government members' houses, and street clashes in Cochabamba, Potosi, and La paz resulting in deaths and injuries. The Radio Education Network of Bolivia (Erbol) has released 16 recordings, 2, which uncover talks between U.S. officials, Bolivian opponents, and former military, outlining the coup strategy. In a three-part plan outlined by U.S. officials, former President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (2002-2003) is mentioned. Lozada had Carlos Mesa (the principal opponent of Morales in the last election) as his vice-president and currently lives in the U.S. U.S. senators Bob Menendez, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio are some of the American officials mentioned in the audios, linked to the Bolivian opposition planning a coup against President Evo Morales. A Wikileaks cable confirmed that the US was using Mesa to undermine Evo for years. The US government (through USAID) spent over $97M dollars to try to topple Morales and fund separatists in his first 7 years in office. World leaders have condemned the coup. The primary reason for the coup: a fight over Bolivia's lithium, a crucial mineral required for smartphone and electric car batteries. Bolivia is estimated to have over 70% of the world's lithium reserves, and was on the cusp of completing a deal with China and kicking out several French, US, and South Korea mining firms. Over the next few days, over 68k fake twitter accounts were created supporting the coup, many coming from airforce bases in Virginia. Debunking US propaganda on Bolivia.
In March 2020, the US placed a $15M dollar bounty on the head of the Venezuelan president, Maduro. This is the first time the US has publicly put a bounty on a ruling head of state, accusing Maduro and his government of drug trafficking, and harboring terrorists. The US Drug Enforcement agency itself states that less than 7% of drug movement through south america transits from Venezuela: 93% of cocaine comes from Columbia, a staunch US ally, 4% from Peru, and 3% from Unknown. 2 The US has historically been closely allied with South American drug traffickers, like Honduras's US-Backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez, Panamanian President Manuel Noriega, The Contras, and many more. The US-appointed "president of Venezuela", Juan Guaido, is closely connected to the Columbian cartel Los Rastrojos, a vicious cartel responsible for dozens of kidnappings and murders in Tachira VZ.

Africa

In 1801, and again in 1815, the US aided Sweden in subjugating a series of coastal towns in North Africa, in the Barbary Wars. The stated reason was to crack down on pirates, but the wars destroyed the navies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, and secured European and US shipping routes for goods and slaves in North Africa. US Representatives stated: “When we can appear in the Ports of the various Powers, or on the Coast, of Barbary, with Ships of such force as to convince those nations that We are able to protect our trade, and to compel them if necessary to keep faith with Us, then, and not before, We may probably secure a large share of the Meditn trade, which would largely and speedily compensate the U. S. for the Cost of a maritime force amply sufficient to keep all those Pirates in Awe, and also make it their interest to keep faith.” Thomas Jefferson echoed and carried out the war, saying that war was essential to securing markets along the Barbary Coast.
In 1961, the CIA assists in the assassination of the democratically elected congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, throwing the country into years of turmoil. Before his assassination the CIA sent one of its scientists, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to the Congo carrying “lethal biological material” intended for use in Lumumba’s assassination. This virus would have been able to produce a fatal disease indigenous to the Congo area of Africa and was transported in a diplomatic pouch. 1
In 1965, a CIA-backed military coup installs Mobutu Sese Seko, described as the "archetypal African dictator" in Congo. The hated and repressive Mobutu exploits his desperately poor country for billions.1
In 1966, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows he widely popular Pan-Africanist and Marxist leader Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, inviting the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to take a lead role in managing the economy. With this reversal, accentuated by the expulsion of immigrants and a new willingness to negotiate with apartheid South Africa, Ghana lost a good deal of its stature in the eyes of African nationalists.1
In 1975, Henry Kissinger launches a CIA-backed war in Angola, backing the brutal anti-communist leader of UNITAS, Jonas Savimbi, against Agostinho Neto and his Marxist-Leninst MPLA party, creating a civil war lasting for 30 years. The CIA financed a covert invasion via neighboring Zaire and a drive on the Angolan capital by the U.S. ally, South Africa. Congress continues to fund UNITAS, and their south-african apartheid allies until the late 1980s. By the end of the war, more than 500,000 people had died and over one million had been internally displaced. 1
In the 1980s, Reagan maintains a close relationship with the Apartheid South african government, called constructive engagement, while secretly funding it in the hopes of creating a bulwark of anti-communism and preventing a marxist party from taking power, as happened in angola. Later on, in the wars against Apartheid in South Africa and Angola, in which cuban and anti-apartheid forces fought the white south african government, the US supplied south africa with nuclear weapons via Israel. 1
In June 1982, with the help of CIA money and arms, Hissene Habre , dubbed Africa's Pinochet, takes power in Chad. His secret police, use methods of torture including the burning the body of the detainee with incandescent objects, spraying gas into their eyes, ears and nose, forced swallowing of water, and forcing the mouths of detainees around the exhaust pipes of running cars. Habré's government also periodically engaged in ethnic cleansing against groups such as the Sara, Hadjerai and the Zaghawa, killing and arresting group members en masse when it was perceived that their leaders posed a threat to the regime. Human Rights Watch claimed that Habre was responsible for thousands of killings. In 2001, while living in Senegal, he was almost tried for crimes committed by him in Chad. However, a court there blocked these proceedings. Then human rights people decided to pursue the case in Belgium, because some of Habre’s torture victims lived there. The U.S., in June 2003, told Belgium that it risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters if it allowed such a legal proceeding to happen. So the result was that the law that allowed victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad was repealed. However, two months later a new law was passed which made special provision for the continuation of the case against Habre. In May 2016 he was found guilty of human-rights abuses, including rape, sexual slavery and ordering the killing of 40,000 people, and sentenced to life in prison. 1
In 1998, the US bombed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, killing one employee and wounding 11. It was the largest pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, producing medicine both for human and veterinary use. The US had acted on false evidence of a VX nerve agent from a single soil sample, and later used a false witness to cover for the attack. It was the only pharmaceutical factory in Africa not under US control. 1
In early 2017, the US began conducting drone strikes in Somalia against Al Shabab militants. An attack on July 16th killed 8 people. 1

Asia

Throughout the 1800s, US settlers engaged in a genocide of native Hawaiians. The native population decreased from ~ 400k in 1789, to 40k by 1900, due to colonization and disease. In 1883, the US engineered the overthrow of Hawaii's native monarch, Queen Lili'uokalani, by landing two companies of US marines in Honolulu. Due to the Queen's desire "to avoid any collision of armed forces, and perhaps the loss of life" for her subjects and after some deliberation, at the urging of advisers and friends, the Queen ordered her forces to surrender. Hawaii was initially reconstituted as an independent republic, but the ultimate goal of the US was the annexation of the islands to the United States, which was finally accomplished in 1898. After this, the Hawaiian language was banned, English replaced it as the official language in all institutions and schools. The US finally apologized in 1993, but no land has been returned. 1
In 1899, after a popular revolution in the Philippines to oust the Spanish imperialists, the US invaded and began the Phillipine-American war. The US military committed countless atrocities, leaving 200,000 Filipinos dead. Jacob H Smith killed between 2,500 to 50,000 civilians, His orders included, "kill everyone over the age of ten" and make the island "a howling wilderness."1,2
In 1900 in China, the US was part of an Eight-Nation Alliance that brought 20,000 armed troops to China, to defeat the Imperial Chinese Army, in the the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-imperialist uprising. 1
In 1918, the US took part in the allied intervention in the Russian civil war, sending 11,000 troops to the in the Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions to support the anti-bolshevik, monarchist, and largely anti-semitic White Forces. 1
From 1942 to 1945, the US military carried out a fire-bombing campaign of Japanese cities, killing between 200,000 and 900,000 civilians. One nighttime fire-bombing of Tokyo took 80,000 lives. During early August 1945, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing ~130,000 civilians, and causing radiation damage which included birth defects and a variety of genetic diseases for decades to come. The justification for the civilian bombings has largely been debunked, as the entrance of Russia into the war had already started the surrender negotiations earlier in 1945. The US was aware of this, since it had broken the Japanese code and had been intercepting messages during for most of the year. The US ended up accepting a conditional surrender from Hirohito, against which was one of the stated aims of the civilian bombings. The dropping of the atomic bomb is therefore seen as a demonstration of US military supremacy, and the first major operation of the Cold War with Russia. 1,2
US Troops committed a number of rapes during the battle of Okinawa, and the subsequent occupation of Japan. There were 1,336 reported rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa prefecture alone.1 American Occupation authorities imposed wide-ranging censorship on the Japanese media, including bans on covering many sensitive social issues and serious crimes such as rape committed by members of the Occupation forces.
After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Douglas MacArthur pardoned Unit 731, a Japanese biological experimentation center which performed human testing of biological agents against Chinese citizens. While a series of war tribunals and trials was organized, many of the high-ranking officials and doctors who devised and respectively performed the experiments were pardoned and never brought to justice. As many as 12,000 people, most of them Chinese, died in Unit 731 alone and many more died in other facilities, such as Unit 100 and in field experiments throughout Manchuria. One of the experimenters who killed many, microbiologist Shiro Ishii, later traveled to the US to advise on its bioweapons programs. In the final days of the Pacific War and in the face of imminent defeat, Japanese troops blew up the headquarters of Unit 731 in order to destroy evidence of the research done there. As part of the cover-up, Ishii ordered 150 remaining subjects killed.1,2
Between 1946 and 1958, the US tested 23 nuclear devices at Bikini Atoll, using the native islanders and their land as guinea pigs for the effects of nuclear fallout. Significant fallout caused widespread radiological contamination in the area, and killed many islanders. A survivor stated, "What the Americans did was no accident. They came here and destroyed our land. They came to test the effects of a nuclear bomb on us. It was no accident." Many of the islanders exposed were brought to the US Argonne National laboratory, to study the effects. Afterwards the islands proved unsuitable to sustaining life, resulting in starvation and requiring the residents to receive ongoing aid. Virtually all of the inhabitants showed acute symptoms of radiation syndrome, many developing thyroid cancers, Leukimia, miscarriages, stillborn and "jellyfish babies" (highly deformed) along with symptoms like hair falling out, and diahrrea. A handful were brought to the US for medical research and later returned, while others were evacuated to neighboring Islands. The US under LBJ prematurely returned the majority returned 3 years later, to further test how human beings absorb radiation from their food and environment. The islanders pleaded with the US to move them away from the islands, as it became clear that their children were developing deformities and radiation sickness. Radion levels were still unacceptable. The United States later paid the islanders and their descendants 25 million in compensation for damage caused by the nuclear testing program. A 2016 investigation found radiation levels on Bikini Atoll as high as 639 mrem yr−1, well above the established safety standard threshold for habitation of 100 mrem yr−1. Similar tests occurred elsewhere in the Marshall Islands during this time period. Due to the destruction of natural wealth, Kwajalein Atoll's military installation and dislocation, the majority of natives currently live in extreme poverty, making less than 1$ a day. Those that have jobs, mostly work at the US military installation and resorts. Much of this is detailed in the documentary, The Coming War on China (2016). 1,2
The U.S. installed Syngman Rhee,a conservative Korean exile, as President of South Korea in 1948. Rhee became a dictator on an anti-communist crusade, arresting and torturing suspected communists, brutally putting down rebellions, killing 100,000 people and vowing to take over North Korea. Rhee precipitated the outbreak of the Korean War and for the allied decision to invade North Korea once South Korea had been recaptured. He was finally forced to resign by mass student protests in 1960.1
In 1949 during the resumed Chinese Civil War, the US supported the corrupt Kuomintang dictatorship of Chiang Kaishek to fight against the Chinese Communists, who had won the support of the vast majority of peasant-farmers and helped defeat the Japanese invasion. The US strongly supported the Kuomintang forces. Over 50,000 US Marines were sent to guard strategic sites, and 100,000 US troops were sent to Shandong. The US equipped and trained over 500,000 KMT troops, and transported KMT forces to occupy newly liberated zones as well as to contain Communist-controlled areas.[ American aid included substantial amounts of both new and surplus military supplies; additionally, loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars were made to the KMT.[ Within less than two years after the Sino-Japanese War, the KMT had received $4.43 billion from the US—most of which was military aid.[1
From 1948-1949, the Jeju uprising was an insurgency taking place in the Korean province of Jeju island, followed by severe anticommunist suppression of the South Korean Labor Party in which 14-30,000 people were killed, or ~10% of the island's population. Though atrocities were committed by both sides, the methods used by the South Korean government to suppress the rebels were especially cruel. On one occasion, American soldiers discovered the bodies of 97 people including children, killed by government forces. On another, American soldiers caught government police forces carrying out an execution of 76 villagers, including women and children. The US later entered the Korean civil war on the side of the South Koreans. 1
The US intervened in the 1950-53 Korean Civil War, on the side of the south Koreans, in a proxy war between the US and china for supremacy in East Asia. South Korea reported some 373,599 civilian and 137,899 military deaths, the US with 34,000 killed, and China with 114,000 killed.[ Overall, the U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of bombs—including 32,557 tons of napalm—on Korea, more than they did during the whole Pacific campaign of World War II.[[ The US killed an estimated 1/3rd of the north Korean people during the war. The Joint Chiefs of staff issued orders for the retaliatory bombing of the People's republic of China, should south Korea be attacked. Deadly clashes have continued up to the present day. 1
In the beginning of the Korean war, US Troops killed ~300 South Korean civilians in the No Gun Ri massacre, revealing a theater-wide policy of firing on approaching refugee groups. Trapped refugees began piling up bodies as barricades and tried to dig into the ground to hide. Some managed to escape the first night, while U.S. troops turned searchlights on the tunnels and continued firing, said Chung Koo-ho, whose mother died shielding him and his sister. No apology has yet been issued. 1
In the summer of 1950 in South Korea, anticommunists aided by the US executed at least 100,000 people suspected of supporting communism, in the Bodo League Massacre. For four decades the South Korean government concealed this massacre. Survivors were forbidden by the government from revealing it, under suspicion of being communist sympathizers. Public revelation carried with it the threat of torture and death. During the 1990s and onwards, several corpses were excavated from mass graves, resulting in public awareness of the massacre. 1
From 1955-1975, the US supported French colonialist interests in Vietnam, set up a puppet regime in Saigon to serve US interests, and later took part as a belligerent against North Vietnam in the Vietnam War. U.S. involvement escalated further following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was later found to be staged by Lyndon Johnson. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities (see Vietnam War casualties). Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from 966,000 to 3.8 million. Some 240,000–300,000 Cambodians, 20,000–62,000 Laotians, and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict, with a further 1,626 missing in action. Unexploded bomb continue to kill civilians for years afterward. 1
In 1955, the CIA provided explosives, and aided KMT agents in an assassination attempt against the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai. KMT agents placed a time-bomb on the Air India aircraft, Kashmir Princess, which Zhou was supposed to take on his way to the Bandung Conference, an anti-imperialist meeting of Asian and African states, but he changed his travel plans at the last minute. Henry Kissinger denied US involvement, even though remains of a US detonator were found. 16 people were killed. 1
Starting in 1957, in the wake of the US-backed First Indochina War, The CIA carries out approximately one coup per year trying to nullify Laos’ democratic elections, specifically targeting the Pathet Lao, a leftist group with enough popular support to be a member of any coalition government, and perpetuating the 20 year Laotian civil war. In the late 50s, the CIA even creates an "Armee Clandestine" of Asian mercenaries to attack the Pathet Lao. After the CIA’s army suffers numerous defeats, the U.S. drops more bombs on Laos than all the U.S. bombs dropped in World War II. A quarter of all Laotians will eventually become refugees, many living in caves. This was later called a “secret war,” since it occurred at the same time as the Vietnam War, but got little press. Hundreds of thousands were killed
From the 1960s onward, the US supported Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The US provided hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, which was crucial in buttressing Marcos's rule over the years. The estimated number of persons that were executed and disappeared under President Fernando Marcos was over 100,000. After fleeing to hawaii, marco was suceeded by the widow of an opponent he assasinated, Corazon aquino. 1
In 1965, The CIA overthrew the democratically elected Indonesian leader Sukarno with a military coup. The CIA had been trying to eliminate Sukarno since 1957, using everything from attempted assassination to sexual intrigue, for nothing more than his declaring neutrality in the Cold War. His successor, General Suharto, aided by the CIA, massacred between 500,000 to 1 million civilians accused of being communist, in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. The US continued to support Suharto throughout the 70s, supplying weapons and planes.
In 1967, the CIA helped South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in villages, in the Phoenix Program. By 1972, Phoenix operatives had executed between 26,000 and 41,000 suspected NLF operatives, informants and supporters.1
US Troops killed between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians, including women, children, and infants, in South Vietnam on March, 1968, in the My Lai Massacre. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated. Soldiers set fire to huts, waiting for civilians to come out so they could shoot them. For 30 years, the three US servicemen who tried to halt the massacre and rescue the hiding civilians were shunned and denounced as traitors, even by congressmen. 1
US dropped large amounts of Agent Orange, an herbicide developed by monsanto and dow chemical for the department of defense, in vietnam. Its use, in particular the contaminant dioxin, causes multiple health problems, including cleft palate, mental disabilities, hernias, still births, poisoned breast milk, and extra fingers and toes, as well as destroying local species of plants and animals. The Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that up to 1 million people are disabled or have health problems due to Agent Orange., 2
In 1969, The US initiated a secret carpet bombing campaign in eastern Cambodia, called, Operation Menu, and Operation Freedom Deal in 1970. An estimated 40,000 - 150,000 civilians were killed. Nixon lied about this campaign, but was later exposed, and one of the things that lead to his impeachment. 1
In 1970, In Cambodia, The CIA overthrows Prince Sihanouk, who is highly popular among Cambodians for keeping them out of the Vietnam War. He is replaced by CIA puppet Lon Nol, whose forces suppressed the large-scale popular demonstrations in favour of Sihanouk, resulting in several hundred deaths. This unpopular move strengthens once minor opposition parties like the Khmer Rouge (another CIA supported group), who achieve power in 1975 and massacres ~2.5 million people. 1 The Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, carried out the Cambodian Genocide, which killed 1.5-2M people from 1975-1979.
In 1971 in Pakistan, an authoritarian state supported by the U.S., brutally invaded East Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971. The war ended after India, whose economy was staggering after admitting about 10 million refugees, invaded East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and defeated the West Pakistani forces. The US gave W. pakistan 411 million provided to establish its armed forces which spent 80% of its budget on its military. 15 million in arms flowed into W. Pakistan during the war. Between 300,000 to 3 million civilians were killed, with 8-10 million refugees fleeing to India. 1
Between 1963 and 1973, The US dropped ~388,000 tons of napalm bombs in vietnam, compared to 32,357 tons used over three years in the Korean War, and 16,500 tons dropped on Japan in 1945. US also sprayed over 5 million acres with herbicide, in Operation Ranch Hand, in a 10 year campaign to deprive the vietnamese of food and vegetation cover. 1,2
In 2018 after the release of a suppressed ISC (International Scientific Commission) report, and the release of declassified CIA communications daily reports in 2020, it was revealed that the US used germ warfare in the Korean war. Many of these attacks involved the dropping of insects or small mammals infected with viruses such as anthrax, plague, cholera, and encephalitis. After discovering evidence of germ warfare, China invited the ISC headed by famed British scientist Joseph Needham, to investigate, but the report was suppressed for over 70 years.
In 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis, the CIA helped topple the democratically elected, left-leaning government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, by telling Governor-General, John Kerr, a longtime CIA collaborator, to dissolve the Whitlam government.
In December 1975, The US supplied the weaponry for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. This incursion was launched the day after U.S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had left Indonesia where they had given President Suharto permission to use American arms, which under U.S. law, could not be used for aggression. Daniel Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the UN. said that the U.S. wanted “things to turn out as they did.” The result was an estimated 200,000 dead out of a population of 700,000. Sixteen years later, on November 12, 1991, two hundred and seventeen East Timorese protesters in Dili, many of them children, marching from a memorial service, were gunned down by Indonesian Kopassus shock troops who were headed by U.S.- trained commanders Prabowo Subianto (son in law of General Suharto) and Kiki Syahnakri. Trucks were seen dumping bodies into the sea.
In the 1970s-80s, wikileaks cables revealed that the US covertly supported the Khmer Rouge in their fight against the Vietnamese communists. Annual support included an end total of ~$215M USD, food aid to 20-40k Khmer Rouge fighters, CIA advisors in several camps, and ammunition.
In 1996, after receiving incredibly low approval ratings, the US helped elect Boris Yeltsin, an incompetent pro-capitalist independent, by giving him a $10 Billion dollar loan to finance a winning election. Rather than creating new enterprises, Yeltsin's democratization led to international monopolies hijacking the former Soviet markets, arbitraging the huge difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities and the prices prevailing on the world market. Much of the Yeltsin era was marked by widespread corruption, and as a result of persistent low oil and commodity prices during the 1990s, Russia suffered inflation, economic collapse and enormous political and social problems that affected Russia and the other former states of the USSR. Under Yeltsin, Between 1990 and 1994, life expectancy for Russian men and women fell from 64 and 74 years respectively to 58 and 71 years. The surge in mortality was “beyond the peacetime experience of industrialised countries”. While it was boom time for the new oligarchs, poverty and unemployment surged; prices were hiked dramatically; communities were devastated by deindustrialisation; and social protections were stripped away.1,2
Between 1996-2006, The US has given money and weapons to royalist forces against the nepalese communists in the Nepalese civil war. ~18,000 people have died in the conflict. In 2002, after another civil war erupted, President George W. Bush pushed a bill through Congress authorizing $20 million in military aid to the Nepalese government.1

Europe

In the 1936-39 Spanish civil war, the Roosevelt administration sponsored a neutrality act that had the effect of shutting off help to the Spanish government while Hitler and Mussolini gave critical aid to Franco, aiding yet another fascist victory in Europe. American President Richard Nixon later toasted Franco's "firmness and fairness",[ and, after Franco's death, he stated: "General Franco was a loyal friend and ally of the United States
The US maintained a policy of neutrality during the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, discounting the rise of anti-semitism and European fascism. It was not Hitler's attacks on the Jews that brought the United States into World War II, any more than the enslavement of 4 million blacks brought Civil War in 1861. Italy's attack on Ethiopia, Hitler's invasion of Austria, his takeover of Czechoslovakia, his attack on Poland-none of those events caused the United States to enter the war, although Roosevelt did begin to give important aid to England. What brought the United States fully into the war was the Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941
In the summer of 1942, the US turned away a series of ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Most notoriously, in June 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis and its 937 passengers, almost all Jewish, were turned away from the port of Miami, forcing the ship to return to Europe; more than a quarter died in the Holocaust
In February 1945, 527 airplanes of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city of Dresden, Germany, killing ~25,000 civilians
In July, 1945, the predecessor to the CIA, the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), under the name Operation Paperclip, rescued and recruited 1,500 Nazi scientists, engineers, and spies. These included Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s master spy who had built up an intelligence network in the Soviet Union, SS intelligence officers Alfred Six and Emil Augsburg (who massacred Jews in the Holocaust), Klaus Barbie (the "Butcher of Lyon", who was used by the US to further anti-communist efforts in europe), Otto von Bolschwing (the Holocaust mastermind who worked with Eichmann) and SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny (a personal friend of Hitler’s). The policy of collaboration with nazi spies was deemed necessary to counter the threat from the USSR
A study by Robert J. Lilly estimates that a total of 14,000 civilian women in England, France and Germany were raped by American GIs during World War II.. It is estimated that there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war and one historian has claimed that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common.
The Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps) were a group of 19 US prison camps built in the Allied-occupied part of Germany to hold captured German soldiers at the close of the Second World War, holding between one and almost two million surrendered Wehrmacht personnel. Prisoners held in the camps were designated Disarmed Enemy Forces and not POWs, to avoid international treaty regulations. Throughout the summer of 1945, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was prevented from visiting prisoners in any of the Allies' Rheinwiesenlager. Visits were only started in the autumn of 1945, at a time when most camps had closed or were closing. During their visits, the delegates observed that German prisoners of war were often detained in appalling conditions. They drew the attention of the authorities to this fact, and gradually succeeded in getting some improvements made."[ Between 3,000 to 10,000 died from starvation, dehydration and exposure to the weather elements because no structures were built inside the prison compounds. 1
US soldiers killed 73 unarmed Italian and German prisoners of war in Santo Pietro, Italy on July 1943. The survivors were then shot at close range, directly through the heart. 1
During the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, eight unarmed Italian civilians, including an eleven year old girl, were killed by U.S. troops. 1
In the post-war period, while the USSR carried out de-nazification in East Germany, in West Germany many Nazis were kept in power. One study revealed that more than half of the leadership of the West German Justice Ministry were former members of the Nazi party, including dozens of former paramilitary SA members. Several former Nazi Generals, including Adolf Heusinger, and Hans Speidel, went on to become generals in West Germany, and then NATO.
In 1947, in Greek civil war and ensuing right wing military junta of 1967-74, Truman and the CIA provided money, 74,000 tons of military equipment, and advisors to support anti-communist Greek dictators with deplorable human rights records. Support for right-wing dictatorships in Greece and Turkey were funded and sold under the Truman Doctrine, an anti-soviet foreign policy platform, despite the fact that it was Yugoslavia who provided support to the Greek labor movement rebels, and not the Soviet Union.1
In 1948, the CIA corrupts the elections in Italy, where Italian communists threaten to win the elections. The CIA buys votes, broadcasts propaganda, threatens and beats up opposition leaders, and infiltrates and disrupts their organizations. The communists are defeated.1,2
From 1948 onwards, the CIA under Allen Dulles developed a program of media manipulation called Project Mockingbird, having major influence over the media, including >25 newspapers. The usual method was placing reports developed from intelligence provided by the CIA to cooperating or unwitting reporters, or employing media directly as American assets.1
In 1956, Radio Free Europe (a CIA funded propaganda outlet) broadcasts Khruschev’s Secret Speech, which played a role in the Hungarian revolution, and also hinted that American aid will help the Hungarians fight. The US fails to provide any military aid to Hungary in their ensuing conflict with the Soviet Union. 1
From the 1940s - 60s, the CIA provided an average of $5 million annually in covert aid towards financially supporting centrist Italian governments and using the awarding of contracts to weaken the Italian Communist Party's hold on labor unions. It was also involved in bombings and assassinations as a part of Operation Gladio.
In 1967 in Greece, the CIA installed Georgios Papadopoulos in a military coup, a CIA agent and former nazi collaborator, as the military ruler of Greece. He's seen today as an relic of authoritarianism , xenophobia, and anti-communism. 1 Phillips Talbot, the US ambassador in Athens, disapproved of the military coup which established the "Regime of the Colonels" (1967–1974), complaining that it represented "a rape of democracy"—to which Jack Maury, the CIA chief of station in Athens, answered, "How can you rape a whore?
Throughout the 1980-90s, the US, with the aid of the IMF and NATO, actively destabilized and aided in the breakup of Yugoslavia, with the goal of weakening and destroying the last surviving socialist bloc in Europe. These include stirring up ethnic tensions between the member countries, economic warfare, and military intervention. The Reagan administration in a 1982 secret memo, advocated "expanded efforts to promote a 'quiet revolution' to overthrow Communist governments and parties," while reintegrating the countries of Eastern Europe into a market-oriented economy. In November 1990, the Bush administration pressured Congress into passing the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, which provided that any part of Yugoslavia failing to declare independence within six months would lose U.S. financial support, demanded separate elections in each of the six Yugoslav republics, and mandated U.S. State Department approval of both election procedures and results as a condition for any future aid. In 1991, Yugoslav Army chief Veljko Kadijević stated: "An insidious plan has been drawn up to destroy Yugoslavia. Stage one is civil war. Stage two is foreign intervention. Then puppet regimes will be set up throughout Yugoslavia." 1, 2, 3
From the 1950s-90s, the CIA and NATO ran a series of clandestine networks, headquartered in Rome, Italy called Operation Gladio. Its purpose was supplying aid (primarily money and weaponry) to right wing paramilitaries to attack left-wing movements, and carry out assassinations and bombings, as well as funnel money to centrist political parties. It had operations in Belgium, Finland, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Turkey, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Austria. In Italy, the group had 600+ members, and carried out car bombings during Italy's years of lead. In Germany, it included former Nazi SS members—Staff Sgt. Heinrich Hoffman, Lt. Col. Hans Rues, and Lt. Col. Walter Kopp. CIA weapons caches are still being discovered in all the countries above.
In 1995, the US conducted a campaign of airstrikes called Operation Deliberate Force, as part of an intervention in the Bosnian civil war. 1
In February, 1998, A US marine core plane flying wrecklessly below regulations, cut a cable supporting aerial cable cars at a ski resort near Cavalese, Italy, killing 20 people, in the Cavalese Cable Car Disaster. The pilots destroyed the plane's tape, and were found not guilty. Italian prosecutors were outraged that the US refused to forgoe the NATO treaty that gives all jurisduction to US military courts. By February 1999, the victims' families had received USD $65,000 per victim as immediate help by the Italian government, which was reimbursed by the U.S. government. In May 1999, the U.S. Congress rejected a bill that would have set up a $40 million compensation fund for the victims. In December 1999, the Italian legislature approved a monetary compensation plan for the families ($1.9 million per victim). NATO treaties obligated the U.S. government to pay 75% of this compensation, which it did.
From March to June of 1999, After Serbs refused to acquiesce in the break-up of their republic, the US and NATO began bombing Yugoslavia killing ~500 civilians, leaving thousands homeless, destroying bridges, industrial plants, public buildings, private businesses, as well as barracks and military installations. 1, 2
In 2003, the CIA kidnapped Italian milanese Imam Abu Omar, took him to Egypt, then tortured, including rape, genital electro-shock, and resulted in him becoming deaf in one ear, in the Imam Rapito Affair. On 23 December 2005, a judge issued a European arrest warrant against 22 CIA agents, but the US hasn't responded.
In late 2019, CIA agent Anne Sacoolas hit and killed a British teenage pedestrian named Harry Dunn with her car, while she was driving on the wrong side of the road, near the RAF Croughton base in the UK where she and her husband (both CIA agents) worked. After the Foreign and Commonwealth office rejected Anne Sacoolas request for diplomatic immunity, Anne fled the UK on a US Air Force plane. Both the US and UK governments lied to the Dunn family, saying that she was a US diplomat, and hid the fact that she had fled for months. In October, the Dunn family visited the White House and met with Donald Trump. According to Seiger, Trump tried to buy off the couple, promising them that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was “standing by ready to write a check.” Trump reportedly blindsided the Dunns, telling them that Sacoolas was in the other room waiting to meet with them. The couple refused the offer, demanding her extradition. Sacoolas's lawyers have stated, “Anne will not return voluntarily to the United Kingdom to face a potential jail sentence for what was a terrible but unintentional accident.” As of February 2020, the extradition request is at an impasse, while at the same time the UK is complying with Julian Assange's extradition to the US. RAF Croughton base houses agents from the NSA and CIA, and is famous for being exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for forwarding information from German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone to the CIA.