Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1999
              ....
Opinion of the people.


U.S. aggression

WASHINGTON-As the bombs, smart and dumb, fall ceaselessly on
Serbia,Montenegrins and sometimes Albanians, on bridges,
waterworks,electric generation plants and factories, and on
trains, trucks and homes, the remorseless crusade for
"humanitariansm" presses forward to the applause of journalistic
and academic shills. To paraphrase the Roman historian Tacitus,
we are busy creating a desert, which we can then call peace.

       For the United States, alias "NATO," the planning and
launching of this war by the president heightens the abuse
and undermining of warmaking authority under the Constitution.
(It seems to be accepted that the president can order his personal
army to attack any country he pleases). The bombing war also
violates and shreds the basic provisions of the United Nations
Charter and other conventions and treaties; the attack on Yugoslavia
constitutes the most brazen international aggression since the
Nazis attacked Poland to prevent "Polish atrocities" against Germans.
The United States has discarded pretensions to international leglity
and decency, and embarked on a course of raw imperlalism run amok.

       Our alleged concern with human rights borders on the
ludicrous. We dropped twice as many bombs on Vietnam as all the
countries involved in World War II dropped on each other.
We killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the course of
that war. Very recently, in Central America, we sponsored,
trained and endorsed the local armies - Guatemalan, Salvadoran,
and Nicaraguan Contras - in the killing of at least 2OO,OOO people.

We encouraged the Pinochet coup in Chile with the resulting
killing of another few thousand or so people, including the
democratically elected president. We saw nothing wrong with the
Croat slaughter and expulsion of 200,OOO Serbs from the Krajina
area. We have taken very little stand on the monumental slaughters
of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in Africa.
We have restrained the Iraqis from attacking Kurds but see nothing
amiss in Turks attacking Kurds. We cannot even agree to abondon
the use of land mines.

       In reality when we, the self-anointed rulers of the planet,
issue an ultimatum to another country, it is "surrender or die."
To maintain our "credibillty," we must crush any semblance of
resistance to our dictates to that country.

                               Walter J. Rockler
                               Former prosecutor
                               Nuremberg war crimes trials