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Days of Infamy

Events you won't find in any history book

Since history is written by the victors, the following events have been mostly forgotten or justified by all sorts of rationalisations, such as "self-defense" or "in a humanitarian cause".
JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC

January 2

In 1904 US troops invaded the Dominican Republic and stayed until February 11 to enforce US interests at Puerto Plata, Sosua, and Santo Domingo. American customs agents took over the state's finances to assure payment of its external debt.

January 4

In 1948 Jewish terrorists from the Haganah bombed the Arab Semiramis hotel in Jerusalem on the night of January 4/5. A total of twenty-six people were killed, including a Spanish diplomat and numerous women and children. The British report called the bombing 'wholesale murder of innocent people.'

January 8

In 1948 Jewish terrorists placed a booby-trapped car and blew up the headquarters of the Arab National Committee in Jaffa. The explosion killed 70 Arabs and wounded many more.

January 16

In 1893 US Marines landed in Honolulu armed with Howitzer cannons and carbines. A group of 18 men – mostly American sugar farmers – staged a coup, proclaiming themselves the "provisional government" of Hawaii. The US minister to Hawaii, John L. Stevens, gave immediate recognition to them as Hawaii's true government.

In 1948 Jewish terrorists disguised in the uniforms of British soldiers entered a store near the "Maghrebi Building" located in Salahuddin street in the city of Haifa under the pretext of inspection. They placed a time bomb which exploded, destroying the building and its vicinity, killing 31 men, women and children and injuring double that number.

January 17

In 1961 Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the newly independent Congo was assassinated by the CIA under direct orders from US President Eisenhower, who had financial interests in the former Belgian colony. There followed several years of civil conflict and chaos and the rise to power of Mobutu Sese Seko, a man not a stranger to the CIA. Mobutu went on to rule the country for more than 30 years, with a level of corruption and cruelty that shocked even his CIA handlers. The Zairian people lived in abject poverty despite the plentiful natural wealth, while Mobutu became a multibillionaire.

January 18

In 2004 a US Apache helicopter attacked "armed militants" in Saghatho village in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan. According to local people 11 villagers,including four children, were killed.

January 23

In 1870 at first light, in numbing cold, 200 dismounted US cavalrymen lay spread out in ambush positions along snowy bluffs overlooking the Marias River in Montana and the large winter campsite of the Piegan leader Heavy Runner. The camp was surrounded, its warriors were away hunting, and the edgy troopers awaited the command to fire. Then the old chief came out of his lodge and walked toward the bluffs, waving a safe-conduct paper. An Army scout, Joe Kipp, shouted that this was the wrong camp; he was threatened into silence. Another scout, Joe Cobell, fired the first shot, dropping Heavy Runner in his tracks. What followed, according to Lt. Gus Doane who commanded F Company in the attack, was "the greatest slaughter of Indians ever made by US troops."

Some 200 Piegans, most of them either elderly or women and children, were killed by the relentless firing of the Army's Springfield rifles. The .50-70 shells, half an inch thick, riddled the lodges, collapsing some on to smoking firepits and suffocating the half-awake, terrified victims. Some of the big bullets killed children under the protecting bodies of mothers and grandmothers. Those who ran to the sheltering cutbanks of the river were rounded up later; a total of 140 captives was turned loose without adequate food and clothing – some of them froze to death trying to walk to Fort Benton, ninety miles away.

January 25

In 1999 a cruise missile stuck Basra's Al-Jumhuriya residential area, while US/British warplanes attacked Abu Flos, Abu Kaseeb, Basra airport and Al-Rumeila oil field. 17 people died, 100 persons were injured and 45 houses were damaged. A UN team visited on January 27.

January 26

In 1911 US troops landed in Honduras in support of former president Manuel Bonilla against the legitimate regime of Miguel Dávila, whose liberalism was opposed by Washington. Bonilla's revolt was financed by American banana tycoon Sam Zemurray and led by the American mercenary, Lee Christmas, who became Commander-in-Chief of the Honduran Army.

January 28

In 1948 Israeli terrorists of Hadar neighbourhood overlooking the Arab Abbas Street in the city of Haifa, hurled a barrel filled with explosives. It destroyed the houses with their inhabitants inside. Twenty Arabs were killed and about 50 were injured.

In 2004 Israeli occupation forces killed eight (some reports said 13) Palestinians in an assault on a neighborhood in the Gaza Strip. Among those killed were three teenagers: Sami Badawi, 16; Akram AbuAjami, 17; and Sameh Toteh, 16. Like many other such assaults, the mainstream media in the United States ignored this event or made cursory mention of it. No mainstream newspaper mentioned names of those killed, let alone described the Israeli assault as terrorism.

February 2

In 2003 Israeli soldiers raided the medical center of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC) in the Old City of Nablus. The soldiers destroyed three hospital beds, furniture, a defibrillator, and various containers of medicine. (Source: US State Department Human Rights Report)

February 4

In 1899, the US started the Philippine-American War by initiating an encounter with Filipino revolutionary forces. It used the false allegation that Filipino troops would start killing all foreign residents in Manila on February 15, 1899. US imperialism sent more than 126,000 troops to pacify the Filipino people and caused the death of up to 1.4 million Filipinos from 1899 to 1913.

February 7

In 1951 Israeli soldiers sneak over the Jordanian border and kill 10 people, mainly women and children in the village of Sharafat in Jordan.

February 11

In 2003 Asma Abu al-Haija was arrested at her home at 3 a.m. by Israeli troops. She is a sick woman with a brain tumor, who is going blind, has undergone brain surgery twice, who has five children left alone at home in the refugee camp, without a mother, without a father, without their older brother. She spent nine months in prison, sleeping on the floor of her cell. She was not accused of anything and was released nine months later, without any explanation.

February 13

In 1991 during the Gulf Massacre (Operation Desert Storm) the Allies first escalated their bombing strategy to terrorise the Iraqi people. Two missiles launched from a US stealth bomber hit a civilian establishment – an air raid shelter – killing 1,500 civilians, many of them women and children. In response to international concern and outrage, the US claimed that the shelter was a cover for a military outpost. Yet neighbourhood residents insistently pointed out the existence of constant Western aerial surveillance overhead which clearly would have observed the daily flow of women and children into the shelter, and Western reporters at the site admitted that absolutely no signs of military use could be discovered.

In 1989 Iktimal Dim (6) was killed, and her brother, 'Isam Dim (10), injured by shrapnel from an exploding device thrown from an Israeli helicopter hovering above the village of Tayasir.

February 14

In 1945 aerial slaughter in Europe reached a climax at Dresden. The briefing for air crews misrepresented Dresden as "an industrial city of first-class importance." Dresden had always been a center of art and artists, one of Europe's most magnificent cities, itself a work of art; Dresden's "heavy" industry was the manufacture of porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses.
Other industries, according to Kurt Vonnegut, held as a POW near Dresden, consisted largely of hospitals and cigarette and clarinet factories. The Royal Air Force gave the city and its civilians an all-out scourging with 1,400 bombers carrying high explosives and incendiaries. The following day, February 14, 1,350 USAAF heavy bombers attacked the marshaling yards with high explosives. USAAF tactical fighters flew over in daylight and strafed survivors who had sought refuge along the river banks. Estimates of the dead vary from 35,000 to 250,000. The raid was specifically described by Churchill as "simply for the sake of increasing terror".

In 1948 twenty houses were blown up together with their inhabitants in Sa'sa, and some sixty Arabs were killed, most of them women and children, by the Jewish Haganah.

February 20

In 1948 the "Lehi" Stern Jewish gang stole a British army vehicle, filled it with explosives then parked it in front of al-Salaam building in Jerusalem. The explosion killed 14 Arabs and injured 26.

February 21

In 1973 an Israeli aircraft shot down a peaceful Libyan civil Boeing 727 airliner, murdering 106 innocent passengers. This brazenly criminal act was perpetrated over the then illegally occupied Egyptian territory of Sinai. The airliner was in distress, and Israel's leaders, not caring about its civilian passengers of many different nationalities, had their fighters shoot it down. On the same day Israel landed commando units on the coasts of the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. They attacked two Palestinian refugees camps, dynamited several houses and buildings, some over the heads of their occupants, killing 35 refugees and wounding a similar number.

February 23

In 1991 the ground war part of the "Gulf War" begins. In this so-called war, between 100,000 and 200,000 Iraqis were slaughtered: American losses were 148, the majority caused by friendly fire.

February 24

In 1965 operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaign, began and lasted until the end of October 1968. The plan was to destroy the North Vietnamese economy and force it to stop helping guerrilla fighters in South Vietnam. In all, the US military flew 304,000 fighter bomber sorties and 2,380 B-52 bomber sorties over North Vietnam under Operation Rolling Thunder, dropping almost 1 million tons of bombs on the country. According to US estimates, 182,000 North Vietnamese civilians were killed.

February 25

In 1969 in an isolated peasant hamlet called Thanh Phong in Vietnam's eastern Mekong Delta, a group of US Navy Seals led by ex-senator Bob Kerrey deliberately killed at least 13 unarmed women and children.

In 1994 American-born West Bank settler Dr. Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslims praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. He killed 29 Palestinians before being beaten to death by the worshippers. Settlers established a shrine to him that was forcibly removed by the Israeli Government only in 1999.

February 26

In 1991, after a cease fire had been declared in the Gulf Massacre (Operation Desert Storm), US pilots spent 48 hours relentlessly bombing tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers in retreat from Kuwait. Initial bombing blocked escape from either end of the 60-miles-long column of vehicles on the highway to Basra. Thousands of civilian refugees were also incinerated in the atrocity, which US military personnel referred to as a "turkey shoot" and "like shooting fish in a barrel".

February 29

In 1948 the Jewish Stern group bombed the Cairo-Haifa train, killing 27 British soldiers.

March 3

In 2003 an Israeli bulldozer killed a nine-month pregnant Palestinian woman, Nuha Sweidan, while destroying the house next door in a dilapidated Gaza refugee camp. Palestinian witnesses said that Mrs. Sweidan, 33, bled to death under the rubble as she cradled her 18-month-old daughter. Her unborn baby also died.

March 4

In 2002 an Israeli tank fired at a civilian car in Ramallah governorate in an apparent attempt to assassinate a Hamas activist. He was not in the car at the time; instead, his wife was transporting three of their children family from the school. They and another two children were also killed.

March 9

In 1906 the US colonialist army slaughtered 600 Filipino resistance fighters including woman and children who had retreated to the Dajo crater. From the sides of the crater the US military used artillery and deadly small arms fire against a foe armed mainly with knives and clubs. The official report extolled the "gallantry of our troops".

March 10

In 1945 300 B-29s dropped 2,000 tons of incendiaries on one section of Tokyo – a space seven-tenths the size of Manhattan – and in 2½ hours "scorched and boiled and baked to death" 100,000 people. The quoted words are from General Curtis LeMay who later became famous for his boast of bombing Vietnam back to the Stone Age.

In 1998 Israeli soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons on a van full of unarmed Palestinian workers, killing Adnan Abu Zneid, 34, and two other Palestinians. Two more laborers were wounded as the group returned from helping to construct a building near Tel Aviv. Eyewitnesses described the Israeli gunfire as "indiscriminate." Israeli Army Maj. Uzi Dayan said that the soldiers acted "according to regulations" in opening fire on the van with automatic weapons at a checkpoint outside Hebron. Ali Abu Zneid, 37, a cousin of the deceased, was in the van and fell uninjured under the others' bodies. He said that the Jewish soldiers, "shot to kill." Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai described the killings as an "accident"

March 13

In 1948 the Israeli Haganah terrorist gang attacked the village of Al-Hussainiyya, an Arab village in the district of Safad, destroying its houses with explosives and killing 30 of the inhabitants.

March 14

In 1978 Israel invaded Lebanon and occupied the southern part of the country killing several thousand Lebanese and Palestinians, driving hundreds of thousands to the north, and leaving a region of the south under the control of a murderous proxy force, Major Haddad's militia. The militia originally known as the "Army of Free Lebanon" was later renamed the South Lebanon Army (SLA).

March 16

In 1968 the angry and frustrated men of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, Americal Division entered the village of My Lai in Vietnam. "This is what you've been waiting for – search and destroy – and you've got it," said their superior officers. A short time later the killing began. As the "search and destroy" mission unfolded it soon degenerated into the massacre of over 300 apparently unarmed civilians including women, children, and the elderly.

In 2003 Rachel Corrie, a young American was murdered by Israeli occupation forces while she was trying to prevent the destruction of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip.

March 17

In 1978 Israeli warplanes destroyed the mosque of the town of Abbasieh, South Lebanon over the heads of the women, children and the elderly who used the holy place as a shelter from the heavy Israeli shelling. 80 civilians aged from 2 to 80 died.

March 18

In 1970 the CIA overthrew the neutral government of Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia, and installed a puppet government under Lon Nol, the chief of staff of the Cambodian army. Demonstrations erupted against the fascist military regime in 17 of Cambodia's 19 provinces. But they were drowned in blood. Hundreds of Lon Nol's opponents were executed by beheading. When reporters later asked President Richard Nixon about Lon Nol's slaughter of unarmed men, women and children, he replied: "The Lon Nol government is a sovereign government. We cannot do anything." The American interference in Cambodia led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge which achieved power in 1975 and massacred millions of its own people.

March 21

In 1994 Israeli warplanes targeted a school bus in Nabateya, South Lebanon, killing two and wounding 28 children.

March 24

In 1976 Jorge Rafael Videla led the military coup which ousted the ineffective president, Isabel Peron. Though armed leftist groups had been shattered by the time of the coup, the generals still organized a counter-insurgency campaign to eradicate any remnants of what they judged political subversion. By 1983 during the so-called Dirty War the military slaughtered from 10,000 to 30,000 Argentinians. Relatives of the victims, however, continued to uncover evidence that children taken from their mothers' wombs sometimes were being raised as the adopted children of their mothers' murderers.

In October 1976 Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State, in a discussion with the visiting Argentinian foreign minister, Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti, reassured the foreign minister that he had US backing in whatever he did.

In 1999 NATO began the bombing of Serbia which lasted 79 days. Several thousand civilians were killed and more than 6,000 sustained serious injuries, while a large number of them will remain crippled for life. Children make up 30% of all casualties, as well as 40% of the total number of the injured, while 10% of all Yugoslav children (approximately 300,000) have suffered severe psychological traumas. For the most part, children have been victims of the sprinkle cluster bombs with delayed effect.

NATO strikes seriously damaged many clinical and hospital centres and abruptly put a stop to the education of close to one million pupils and students in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. More than 480 schools, faculties and facilities for students and children were damaged or destroyed (25 faculties, 15 colleges, 100 secondary, 320 elementary schools, 20 student dormitories), as well as more than 50 pre-school facilities.

NATO destroyed or damaged during its two month long bombing more than 365 monasteries, churches and other religious shrines, as well as other cultural and historic monuments of exceptional cultural and civilisational value, some under UNESCO protection.

Preliminary estimates indicate that barbaric air strikes of the NATO alliance against industrial, commercial and civil facilities and infrastructure throughout the territory of the FR of Yugoslavia, have incurred damages in excess of 100 billion dollars.

March 26

In 2003 at least 14 civilians were killed and 30 injured after coalition air strikes hit a market in Baghdad. Witnesses at the scene reported burned bodies on the streets of the northern residential Shaab district. Television footage showed a large crater in the middle of the road, smouldering and damaged buildings, a child with a head bandage, and bodies wrapped in plastic sheeting in the back of a pick-up truck. Wrecked cars were strewn across the roads, some still ablaze. The centre of the blast seems to have been a busy shopping street of ground floor shops under blocks of flats. Residents said there were no military targets in the area. Others described hearing a low flying aircraft followed by two loud explosions. Local people claimed "dozens and dozens" were dead while Lieutenant Colonel Hamad Abdullah, head of civil defence for the area, said 14 people were killed and 30 injured when two cruise missiles hit the area. In London, the Prime Minister's official spokesman said Downing Street was seeking information about the market blast, but at this stage did not know the cause of the explosion. He added: "We have always accepted that there will be some very regrettable civilian casualties."

March 28

In 1954 a force of Israeli paratroopers attacked the Palestinian Arab village of Nahalin, killing nine of its inhabitants and injuring 19 others. The commander of the operation was Ariel Sharon.

In 2003 some 55 Iraqi civilians were killed and 50 others injured when US and British warplanes bombed a residential marketplace in Baghdad. The attack occurred in a poor district in the western Sou'la district. Iraqi sources said Cruise or Tomahawk missiles were used in the new Anglo-American bombing.

March 29

In 2002 the Israeli army launched Operation Defensive Shield, the largest military offensive against Palestinian civillians since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. During the operation, the military used the most advanced weaponry at its disposal: Merkava tanks, Apache attack helicopters and F-15 fighter jets. When the operation ended on April 21, Israel had destroyed the Palestinian economic and social infrastructure, leveled large swathes of residential area, killed 220 people, injured hundreds more and arrested thousands.

April 1

In 1964 a CIA backed military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of João Goulart in Brazil. The junta that replaced it became one of the most blood-thirsty in history. General Castelo Branco created Latin America's first death squads (secret police who hunt down "Communists" for torture and murder, usually just political opponents). Later it was revealed that the CIA trained these death squads.

April 2

In 2002 the Israeli Army attacked the area around Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity. US-made Israeli helicopter gunships, backed by F-16 fighter jets, hovered over Manger Square machine-gunning Palestinians near Jesus' traditional birth site. Some ten Palestinians were killed in the onslaught, including an 80-year-old man. At the nearby Santa Maria Convent in downtown Bethlehem run by the Salesians, an order of nuns, a Palestinian mother and her son were also killed: 64-year-old Samieh Abdeh and her 38-year-old son Khaled, were wounded by Israeli fire, then bled to death after Israelis prevented ambulances from reaching them. A reporter for al-Jazeera satellite television, Majdi Benoura, was shot in the neck by Israelis as he was photographing the Israeli assault on Bethlehem from the roof of a hotel.

April 3

In 1948 the people of Cheju Island rose up to protest the rule of the US military government and the separate election in South Korea which threatened to divide the nation. The uprising lasted for seven years, during which nearly one-third of the island's population, or approximately 80,000 people, were killed because they were accused of being communists.

In 2002 the Israeli Army launched a massive military assault on the men, women and children of the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank, Palestine. For days on end the Israelis fired shells from tanks and missiles from Apache helicopter gunships into the houses of the densely populated camp, as Israeli snipers picked people off one by one, and Israeli soldiers went house to house, blowing people up, kicking in doors and machine-gunning everyone inside. The exact number of dead may never be known, because the Israelis made every effort to cover up their war crimes, literally. Using giant armored 60-ton Caterpillar bulldozers they tore down every house in the huge central area of the camp where most of the murders took place, burying some people alive, along with most of the corpses of those who were already dead.

April 9

In 1948 the Irgun Zwei Leumi led by Menachem Begin, a former Israeli Cabinet Minister and former leader of the Opposition in the Israeli Parliament, attacked the small Arab village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem. Three hundred persons were massacred ... without any military reason or provocation of any kind; old men women, children, newly-born were savagely murdered with grenades and knives by Jewish troops of the Irgun, entirely under the control of their chiefs.

April 12

In 1999 in Grdelica gorge on the bridge over the Juzna Morava river a NATO warplane destroyed a civilian passenger train that was crossing the bridge. In the description of this massacre, it is said that the F-15 pilot fired two bombs. The first one hit the metallic structure of the bridge after which the train stopped. But the pilot did not stop. After the first bomb, he fired another one directly at the train. 11 people were killed and several badly injured.

In 2002 the US supported a coup against the democratically elected (in 1998) government of Venezuela under President Hugo Chavez, an outspoken anti-Imperialist and the most popular Venezuelan president in history.

April 13

In 1929, protesting against the British enactment of Rowlatt Act in 1919, which gave wide coercive powers to the government, thousands of Indians gathered in the Jalianwalla Bagh in the heart of Amritsar city, one of the major towns of Punjab state. The occasion was Baisakhi Day, a traditional festival on which people celebrate the beginning of the harvesting season by congregating in community fairs. The gathering was in defiance of the prohibitory orders banning a gathering of five or more persons in the city. The Bagh, or park, was bounded on all sides by brick walls and had a single narrow entrance/exit.

Accounts of the British motives vary. One account says that the massacre was a reprisal for the deaths of four Europeans, and the beating of a woman missionary. Another explanation is that it was to crush the gathering.

Troops marched to the park accompanied by an armored vehicle on which machine guns were mounted. The vehicle was unable to enter the park compound due to the narrow entrance.

The troops were commanded by General Reginald Dyer who after a couple of perfunctory warnings to the crowds, ordered his men to open fire. Since there was no other exit but the one already manned by the troops, people desperately tried to exit the park by trying to climb the walls of the park. Some people also jumped into a well to escape the bullets.

When the firing was over, hundreds of people had been killed and thousands had been injured (official estimates were 379 killed and 1200 injured, though the actual figure could be much higher).

In 1996 in Mansouri, South Lebanon, an Israeli helicopter spotted an ambulance moving up a road near Tyre and hit it with a rocket, killing 3 small children, their mother and 3 other women. Israeli officials attempted to justify the attack by claiming that the driver was a known fighter with Hezbollah and that the ambulance belonged to the organization.

April 14

In 1989 Israeli border guards and settlers attacked the peaceful and unarmed village of Nahalin near Bethlehem. Eight Palestinians were massacred for no reason and over 50 were injured. The killings took place late in the night and at the beginning of the Holy month of Ramadan.

In 1999 in the NATO attack on two ethnic Albanian refugee columns on the Djakovica-Prizren road in Kosova with four cruise missiles, 75 civilians were killed (among them 19 children) and 100 wounded, of whom 26 critically.

April 15

In 1986 19 warplanes of the US Air Force took off from their bases in Great Britain and flew to Libya, whereupon the F111 pilots bombed the private house of Muammar Qadhafi and murdered his two-year-old daughter. At least 100 other people – including civilian men, women and children – were slaughtered as the heroic US Air Force pilots bombed private homes and mosques all over Tripoli and Benghazi.

April 18

In 1996 the Israelis perpetrated a horrible massacre against hundreds of civilians taking shelter in the UNIFIL headquarters in Qana, Lebanon because of fear of shelling. Not a single body could be recognized because they were burned to death in a massacre which shocked the world.

April 19

In 1993 the US government massacred at least 80 people including women and children in Waco, Texas using chemical weapons and gunfire.

April 20

In 1914 20 innocent men, women and children were killed in the Ludlow Massacre on a day of infamy for American workers.

In 1999 on the same day twelve people were gunned down at the Columbine school in Littleton, Colorado, the US dropped hundreds of bombs on Kosova, more than on any other day. Bill Clinton, the US president who ordered the bombings, said about Columbine that "[we must] hammer home to all the children of America that violence is wrong [and] show our children by the power of our own example how to resolve conflicts peacefully."

April 21

In 1967 the democratically elected government of Greece was overthrown by a CIA coup led by George Papadopoulos who became the dictator. During Papadopoulos' first month in power, 8000 so-called "leftists" were imprisoned and tortured. Greece was expelled from the European Commission on Human Rights but continued to receive US aid. The junta finally fell in 1974.

April 28

In 1965, in order to "prevent another Cuba", to suppress a popular insurrection, an estimated 20,000 US troops invaded the Dominican Republic. Most of the whites in the country were evacuated by US forces, the popular revolt was crushed and US troops remained in the country until 1966.

April 30

In 1999 US/British warplanes carried out several sorties over the areas of Ninewa Governorate, Iraq. The jets fired four missiles at Bashiqa area near Mosul city. At Kuban village (30 km from Mosul) 7 civilians were killed, a shepherd and six members of his family. 101 livestock died. A UN team visited on May 2.

May 1

In 1999 a NATO missile blew up a civilian bus on a bridge 10 miles north of the Kosovan capital Pristina, killing at least 24 people and critically wounding 16 others. Tanjug, Yugoslavia's official news agency, reported that 40 people had been killed. The private Beta news agency reported 60 people dead. The Yugoslav Foreign Ministry said 47 were killed. Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times reported that, "A bomb exploded on that bridge about 1:51 p.m., and when a clearly marked civilian ambulance tried to cross along a smaller, parallel bridge at 1:55 p.m., a second bomb struck. Shrapnel from that blast wounded a civilian medical technician in the forehead and prevented other ambulances from reaching the carnage at the destroyed bus."

May 4

In 1970 National Guard troops opened fire at American students at Kent State University in Ohio. Four unarmed students were murdered outright, another was permanently paralyzed, and eight others were wounded by gunfire. Some of the victims were involved in an anti-war protest, but others were merely walking by the killing zone on their university campus.

May 7

In 1999 in the southern city of Nis, Yugoslavia, NATO claimed it made a mistake. Instead of hitting a military building near the airport about three miles (5 km) away the bombers dropped their lethal load in a tangle of back streets close to the city centre. At least thirty-three people were killed and scores more suffered catastrophic injuries; hands, feet and arms shredded or blown away altogether, abdomens and chests ripped open by shards of flying metal. This had been no "ordinary" shelling, if such a thing exists. The area had been hit by cluster bombs, devices designed to cause a deadly spray of hot metal fragments when they explode."

May 12

In 1999 US/British war planes flew over the governorates of Thi-Qar, Muthana, Basrah and Missan. and fired at service facilities around Mosul. Two were killed and seven others wounded in the south. In an air strike between 11:00hrs and 13:00 hrs in the village of Abuwini, 90 km NW of Mosul 14 shepherds/farmers were killed and 22 injured. 300 livestock also died. 1 vehicle, 1 wagon and 1 harvester were destroyed. A UN team visited on May 14.

May 13

In 1985 police and National Guard forces were used to attack the MOVE activist community in Philadelphia, United States. In the process, the various forces opted to aerial bomb the MOVE activists, destroying 60 homes and killing eleven people, including small children.

May 14

In 1999 NATO planes bombed the village of Korisa near Prizren in Kosova, using cluster bombs. Officials said that the investigating team had so far registered 81 bodies of ethnic Albanians killed. Parts of the burned body parts could be found up to one kilometer away from the site....killing what Serbian officials and survivors say were more than 80 Albanian refugees. The attack on Korisa killed perhaps more Albanian civilians than any other in the two-month-old NATO air campaign, which has been criticized for its fatal mistakes. At the time, NATO officials said the village was a legitimate military target..."

May 16

In 1916 after years of interference in the Dominican Republic US troops landed to suppress a popular insurrection and stayed until 1924.

May 18

In 2002 eleven people at an Afghani wedding party were killed by US bombing in the village of Balkhiel, near the Pakistani border. US officials insisted their aircraft came under attack, but the Afghans said they were firing into the air to celebrate a wedding.

May 19

In 1999 NATO warplanes resumed the bombardment of Belgrade, striking the capital city of Yugoslavia repeatedly in the night of May 19-20. Bombs and missiles destroyed part of a major hospital complex and hit the embassies or residences of seven foreign ambassadors. It was the first large-scale strike on the city since the destruction of the Chinese embassy May 7. After the usual initial denials, NATO spokesmen admitted that a missile fired into the Dedinje district had hit the Dragisa Misovic hospital. The blast killed at least three people and injured many more. It destroyed the hospital's intensive care unit and neurological center and damaged the maternity unit and emergency room.

In 2004 Israeli tanks and helicopters fired missiles and shells at a Palestinian demonstration in the Gaza Strip, killing at least ten children and teenagers and wounding dozens.

May 20

In 1990 an Israeli soldier called Ami Bouber, using a machine-gun, opened fire on a group of Palestinian workers who assembled early in the morning in the Palestinian village of Oyon Qara near Tel-Aviv, killing seven of them on the spot.

May 21

In 1948 an Israeli force arrived in armored vehicles at Beit Daras, a Palestinian Arab village 46 kms northeast of the city of Gaza, and surrounded it to prevent the arrival of any reinforcements. The force began to heavily shell the village with artillery and mortars. The Israelis asked the women, children and elderly people to leave the village. When they reached the outskirts of the village, the Israelis opened fire on them, giving no regard to their being women, children and elderly.

May 22

In 1948 on the night of May 22/23 Israeli troops occupied al Tantura, a Palestinian Arab village located on the seaside of the Mediterranean, 24 kms to the south of the city of Haifa. The killers took the men of the village to the village cemetery and made them stand in lines. The Israeli commander asked his troops to select ten of the men, who were led near the cactus trees, where they fired on them. The killers then took the other men to remove the bodies of the first ten, whereupon they fired on them. This method continued unabated until more than 200 Tantura villagers, mostly unarmed young men, had been shot.

May 30

In 1999 NATO warplanes demolished the bridge on Velika Morava River near Varvarin in Yugoslavia. At least 11 civilians were killed and 40 persons were severely injured. The special hospital for tuberculosis, a home for the elderly and two pavilions of the Refugee centre in Surdulica were hit. At least 17 children and helpless old people lost their lives.

June 6

In 1982 the Israeli armed forces invaded Lebanon for the second time. Around 18,000 people were killed and 30,000 injured and between 500,000-800,000 made homeless in the first three months of the invasion.

June 7

In 1981 the Israelis bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osiraq. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) officials stated that no weapons had been manufactured at Osiraq and that Iraqi officials had regularly cooperated with agency inspectors. They also pointed out that Iraq was a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (informally called the Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT) and that Baghdad had complied with all IAEA guidelines. The Israeli nuclear facility at Dimona, it was pointed out, was not under IAEA safeguards, because Israel had not signed the NPT and had refused to open its facilities to UN inspections.

June 8

In 1967 Israel attacked the USS Liberty with aircraft and torpedo boats, killing 34 young men and wounding 171. The attack in international waters followed over nine hours of close surveillance.

June 18

In 1954 the CIA sponsored a military coup in Guatemala. Most historians now agree that the coup was the poison arrow that pierced the heart of Guatemala's young democracy. Code-named "PBSUCCESS," the covert operation overthrew Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, the second legally elected president in Guatemalan history. Guzman had threatened to nationalize the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company, in which CIA Director Allen Dulles also owned stock. Over the next four decades, a succession of military rulers would wage counter-insurgency warfare that also would shred the fabric of Guatemalan society. The violence caused the deaths and disappearances of more than 140,000 Guatemalans. Some human rights activists put the death toll as high as 250,000.

June 19

In 2004 US forces launched an air strike on a safe house they linked to elusive al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the flashpoint Iraqi city of Falluja, killing 22 people in a "precision strike"."An American plane hit this house and three others were damaged. Only body parts are left," a witness said, as rescuers dug through the rubble of the shattered house for survivors. "They brought us 22 corpses, children, women and youth," Ahmed Hassan, a cemetery worker, said after the blast.

June 21

In 2002 two Palestinian boys, 9-year-old Ahmad Ghazawi and 6-year old Sujud Fahmawi, were killed by Israeli tank fire in a market in Jenin after unknowing breaking the curfew. According to eyewitnesses, Israeli occupation soldiers fired tank shells aimed directly at the citizens who came out to buy bread and other foodstuffs they badly needed, after having been confined to their homes by the 3-day-old Israeli-imposed curfew. Two crowded market places and several neighborhoods were fired at, even though swarms of children as young as three were filling these areas, eyewitnesses confirm.

Ali Jabarin, vice chairman of Jenin's Al-Razi hospital, where many of the wounded were taken, said that hundreds of people were under the impression that the curfew had been lifted and were milling about in the streets when tanks fired shells and Israeli soldiers fired with machine guns in several areas: two market streets and a number of neighborhoods. "Even if everyone was mistaken and the curfew was still in force," he said, "that did not give the Israelis the right to fire on civilians with the 105mm or 120 mm cannons that commonly equip Israel's 65 -ton Merkava tanks. They could have said over a loudspeaker: 'People of Jenin, we did not lift the curfew, please go home or we will open fire in 10 minutes,'" he added. "But they did not. They just opened fire on people who were out to get food and water for their children." "The [Israeli] force erred in its action," said the Israeli occupation army yesterday in a short statement.

June 24

In 1999 Israeli war planes carried out a series of raids against bridges and the electricity network in Lebanon. The bombardment resulted in killing six Lebanese civilians and wounding 86 others.

In 2002 an Israeli Apache helicopter fired two missiles against a taxi carrying five passengers. When hit, the taxi was only about 500 m from Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital. The shelling completely destroyed the car, all five passengers were killed. In addition, other cars driving in the area, were hit by big pieces of shrapnel. Midhat 'Abdul Hadi al-Jourani, 17, who was sitting in the back seat of one of the cars, was killed when his head was separated from his body by shrapnel. Thirteen other bystanders were injured.

June 27

In 1973 the Uruguayan President and Military, backed by the US, formed a military-civilian dictatorship dissolving parliament and illegalizing unions. This marked the culmination of 5 years of military civilian cooperation in war on "communist" terrorism which was used as a cover to disrupt and repress social movements. In the 12 years of the dictatorship many activists were assassinated, one in every 50 Uruguayans were jailed, more than 300,000 fled into exile, and approx. 170 were disappeared. The fabric of society was torn apart through direct repression, censorship, and control.

In 1986 the World Court ruled that American actions to destabilize the democratically elected Sandinista Government in Nicaragua represented an unlawful use of force. The US completely ignored this ruling and continued to carry on their campaign of destruction.

June 30

In 1946 at 22:00:34 GMT (09:00:34 1 July local time) the first of 67 atomic/nuclear tests was conducted by the United States in the Marshall Islands. The first test in the "Crossroads" series, was the experimental "ABLE," 23KT, which was air-dropped over Bikini Atoll. The following links are just a starting point in the horrendous account of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands including first hand accounts by Bikini Elders and US seamen along with radio links, photos and artwork.

July 1

In 2002 a US AC-130 helicopter gun-ship and B-52 bomber blasted a wedding party in the village of Kakarak in Afghanistan, leaving scores of people dead – among them women and children – and at least 40 injured.

July 2

In 1954 an Israeli spy ring in Egypt planted firebombs at several locations, including the US Information Service libraries in Cairo and Alexandria. The attacks were intended to damage US-Egyptian ties.

July 3

In 1988 the USS Vincennes shot down Iranair Flight 655, which resulted in the deaths of over 290 innocent passengers.

July 6

In 1938 a member of the Irgun (the Israeli terrorist group under the leadership of Ze'ev Jabotinsky), disguised as an Arab, went to the Arab market in Haifa, placed a large parcel beside one of the barrows in the center of the market and left. Shortly afterwards there was a heavy explosion, which killed 21 Arabs and injured more than 50.

July 7

In 1898 the US annexed the Hawaiian Islands, the culmination of more than fifty years of growing US commercial interests in Hawaii.

July 11

In 1938 a Jewish terrorist hurled a bomb into a Mosque in Jerusalem. Ten people were killed and 30 other people saying their prayers were wounded.

July 17

In 1927 the US Marine Corps engaged in its very first aerial dive bombing attack. The dive bombing was against Nicaraguan peasants who had successfully surrounded US occupation troops at Ocotal, Nicaragua.

In 1982 US supplied Israeli F-4 and F-5 jets swooped low over Beirut, Lebanon in 4 passes, bombing the densely-populated Fakahani district. Five tall apartment buildings were destroyed, 200 people were killed and 800 wounded. Forty percent of the victims were small children, and one of the survivors was an unborn baby pulled by doctors from the dead mother's womb.

July 18

In 1999 US/British planes attacked several civilian facilities in the southern no-fly-zone in Abu Sukhayr between Najaf and Samawa (12 km south of Najaf, about 200 km from Baghdad) and Al-Khider on Samawa-Nasirriyah road (300 km south of Baghdad, about 40 km south of Samawa). Another airstrike took place in the northern no-fly-zone, several civilian facilities were hit. 17 persons were killed and 18 were injured. A number of houses were demolished in Al-Manathra area in Abu Sukhayr in Najaf governorate. 4 missiles crashes on or near a main road leading south from the city of Najaf and several cars were burnt out in Sunday's attack. A pregnant woman and her husband were killed in a pick-up truck and 6 others in an all-terrain car.

July 22

In 1946 the King David hotel in Jerusalem was bombed, killing 92 Britons, Arabs and Jews and wounding 58. It was not just an act of "Jewish extremists", but a premeditated massacre conducted by the Irgun (under the leadership of future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin) in agreement with the highest Jewish political authorities in Palestine – the Jewish Agency and its head David Ben-Gurion.

In 2002 an Israeli F-16 jet dropped a one-tonne guided bomb on an apartment block in Gaza City, resulting in the deaths of 15 people including nine children, one a 2-month-old baby. Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said “there was no intent on harming civilians.” Ariel Sharon described the attack as “one of the great successes”.

July 24

In 1943 Operation Gomorrah, the "total destruction" of Hamburg, Germany's second largest city, began, and continued for two more days with daylight raids by USAAF Fortresses. A final attack on the night of 27 July dumped another 1,200 tons of incendiaries on workers' housing.
A new and unforeseen weapon came into play at Hamburg – the firestorm. Martin Middlebrook describes one in The Battle of Hamburg. “A thermal column of wind generated heat in excess of 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, melting trolley windows and the asphalt in streets, the wind uprooting trees. When people crossed a street, their feet stuck in the melted asphalt; they tried to extricate themselves with their hands, only to find them stuck as well. They remained on all fours screaming. Small children lay like "fried eels" on the pavement. The firestorm sucked all the oxygen out of the city; a 15 year-old girl said that the brains of people in shelters "tumbled from their burst temples and their insides [extruded] from the soft parts under the ribs." There are claims that Bomber Command killed at least 45,000 men, women, and children at Hamburg.”

July 25

In 1898, US troops landed in Puerto Rico and seized the island as a prize of the Spanish-American War. The colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico has not fundamentally changed since that time. The island remains a political anachronism, a throwback to the age of gunboat diplomacy and the handlebar mustache. Colonialism is inherently anti-democratic. In Puerto Rico, the population cannot vote for president of the United States, but can be drafted to fight and die in the wars of the United States. The island is represented in Congress only by a non-voting resident commissioner, yet Congress controls virtually all significant aspects of Puerto Rican political life.

July 28

In 1915 the US invaded Haiti to suppress a popular insurrection and remained there until 1934, turning Haiti into an American protectorate. The US Marines' first action was to blast into the Haitian national treasury, take all the gold, and ship it to the First National City Bank in New York. They tore up the Haitian Constitution, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then Secretary of the US Navy, wrote a new one. His allowed foreigners to own land. US companies then grabbed the most fertile valleys and set up agribusinesses growing sugar, rubber, sisal, and other crops. Haitians were again enslaved. In a true expression of imperialist disdain for the Haitians, the US installed president of Haiti was banned from the US Officers' Club in Port-au-Prince because he was black.

In 1967 an elite US Army unit known as Tiger Force approached 10 elderly farmers in a rice paddy in Quang Ngai, Vietnam. With bullets flying, the farmers – slowed by the thick, green plants and muck – dropped one by one to the ground. Within minutes, it was over. Four were dead, others wounded. Some survived by lying motionless in the mud. Four soldiers later recalled the assault. "We knew the farmers were not armed to begin with," one said, "but we shot them anyway."

July 29

In 1999 US/British planes bombed several civilian facilities at Al-Kut (170 km southeast Baghdad). Several civilian facilities near Mosul (Al-Jarrar and Al-Numanniyah) were also hit. 8 persons were killed and 25 near Al-Kut. 1 person was injured in Mosul.

July 30

In 1999 US/British planes bombed several civilian facilities and service installations north and northwest of Mosul in Iraq. Another airstrike took place in the southern no-fly-zone, where a civilian facility in Najaf was hit. 6 persons were killed and 21 were injured near Mosul. In the south, 3 persons were killed and 2 were injured in Najaf.

August 6

In 1945 the US dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima even though Japan was trying to surrender. As a result hundreds of thousands of people died.

August 9

In 1945 the US dropped an atom bomb on Nagasaki even though though Japan was trying to surrender. As a result hundreds of thousands of people died.

August 11

In 2000 in Southern Iraq 2 civilians were killed and 19 injured in Samawa when British/US planes hit a warehouse used to store food for the UN oil-for-food deal as well as several homes.

August 19

In 1953 the CIA overthrew the popular prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh and re-installed Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran. Over 300 people were killed and many hundreds were wounded in the nine hours of fighting. The future cost to the people of Iran was incalculable. Thousands were executed during the next twenty-five years of the Shah's reign, and the people became more impoverished. SAVAK, the secret police created and trained by the CIA, was described by Amnesty International in 1976 as having a "history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran."

August 20

In 1995 in "Operation Infinite Reach" President Clinton launched a cruise missile attack against a civilian pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum on the spurious charge that it was involved in the production of nerve gas. Later it was confirmed that not only was the facility not used for making chemical weapons, it was even contracted to the United Nations. It produced 90 percent of Sudan's major pharmaceutical products. Sanctions against Sudan make it impossible to import adequate amounts of medicines required to cover the serious gap left by the plant's destruction. Thus, tens of thousands of people – many of them children – have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis, and other treatable diseases.

August 21

In 1971 the CIA backed a military coup in Bolivia against leftist President Juan Torres. He is replaced by the brutal dictator Hugo Banzer. Actively supported by right-wing leaders in the US and Britain, he was responsible for at least 72 murders and 33 disappearances of Bolivians in Bolivia, 36 murders and disappearances of Bolivians in Argentina, eight murders and disappearances of Bolivians in Chile, 15,000 arbitrary arrests and an indeterminate number of cases of torture, according to human rights groups.

August 23

In 1953 the Israeli army attacked Breij Camp, a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Sector and hurled hand grenades into the windows of the shacks. They then fired at the refugees who were trying to escape. They killed 20 persons, and injured 62 others. The massacre was perpetrated by Unit 101, led by Ariel Sharon, who personally took part in the massacre. The killers blew up a great number of houses. Israeli sources admitted killing 20 persons and wounding 20 others.

August 30

In 2004 eight Afghan villagers were killed and an Afghan aid worker injured when US-led coalition planes bombed a northeastern village after a firefight with militants, a Danish aid group said. It happened at Waradesh in Pech district in Kunar province. The Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees (DACAAR) staff operating a water pipeline project said their water supply tank was also bombed and an aid worker injured.

September 8

In 1972, without any apparent cause or reason, Israeli Phantoms bombed Palestinian targets in Lebanon and Syria in a series of raids killing hundreds of civilians. This action was explained by the Israeli prime minister the next day, who said in the Knesset, that "Israel had now adopted a new policy to strike at the terrorist organizations where ever we can reach them."

September 11

In 1973, in a bloody coup, Henry Kissinger and the CIA helped General Augusto Pinochet overthrow the democratically-elected leftist government of President Salvador Allende. The Fascist puppet-regime of Augusto Pinochet then embarked on a 17-year terror campaign against the people of Chile, which included mass arrests and executions, death squads, torture and disappearances. Many of the victims were fingered as "radicals" by lists provided by the CIA.

Santiago's national stadium was used as a mass execution site. Robert Saldias, the first army officer to come forward publicly without concealing his identity, said prisoners entering the stadium were identified by yellow, black, and red discs. "Whoever received a red disc had no chance," Saldias said.

Many of the professional torturers and assassins in the Chilean military (and in every other Fascist country of Central and South America) were trained at the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia.

September 16

In 1982 fifty members of the Falange, a group supported by Israel, entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon and butchered 3,500 Palestinian men women and children over a period of three days, while the Israeli invasion force looked the other way. Ariel Sharon was later found to be personally responsible by an Israeli inquiry.

September 17

In 1948 Count Folke Bernadotte, a UN mediator, was murdered by the Israeli terrorist group known as the Stern Gang. Bernadotte, a Swede with family ties to the Swedish King, gained international recognition through his work as head of the Swedish Red Cross during World War II. Bernadotte had used his position to negotiate with Heinrich Himmler and save thousands of Jews from concentration camps. The Stern Gang was at the time part of the Israeli military. The man generally acknowledged to have signed off on the hit, Yitzhak Shamir, went on to become a prime minister of Israel decades later.

September 26

In 2002 Israeli forces killed Gharam Mana', who is less than one year old. She died after exposure to tear gas, while being with her grandmother in Bab al-Zawiyya in Hebron. Israeli forces regularly discharge tear gas not only to quell demonstrations, but also as a means of punishment and harassment. When used improperly, tear gas is a lethal form of ammunition; hence practices such as throwing it into enclosed spaces or aiming it directly at individuals clearly violate the international principles of necessity and proportionality concerning law enforcement conduct.

September 28

In 2000 Ariel Sharon made a well-planned, provocative little “visit” to the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem accompanied by a thousand heavily-armed Israeli troops. (All authorized by Prime Minister Barak.) This touched off a spontaneous riot among the Palestinians who were there, during which six Palestinian people were shot dead by the Israelis.

September 30

In 2000 Muhammad al-Dura, a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy, was shot and killed in front of TV cameras by Israeli occupation forces. He is just one of the 450+ Palestinian children killed by the Israelis since September 2000.

October 3

In 1993 in Mogadishu, Somalia, a group of 40 Delta Force, Special Forces and about 75 Rangers set off to try to capture Somali leaders supporting General Mohammed Farah Aideed, the Mogadishu warlord, who were meeting in a house near the centre of town. Helicopter gunships began the ill-fated raid by firing anti-tank missiles into houses. The US troops took hostages and murdered wounded Somalis and a prisoner. They also used the bodies of Somalis as barricades. Ambassador Robert Oakley, the US special representative to Somalia, said that more than 1,000 Somalis were killed during the raid. In all, between 6,000 and 10,000 Somalis died during the US/UN intervention. US Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni estimated that two-thirds of the casualties were women and children.

October 6

In 1976, a Havana-bound Cubana Airlines DC-8 was destroyed in mid-air by a bomb. The plane had taken off from Caracas, Venezuela with 73 people aboard. Of those, 19 were members of the junior fencing team (mostly 18, 19 and 20 year olds) who had just won all the gold medals at a fencing competition in Caracas.The flight was routine and of no military significance. There were no survivors. Four anticommunist Cuban exiles were arrested in Venezuela and charged with this dreadful crime. All were revealed to have been trained by the US Central Intelligence Agency and had long-term associations with US intelligence agencies. All were veterans of the CIA-orchestrated invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.

The masterminds of the airplane bombing, spirited out of Venezuelan prison by bribing jailers and judges, still enjoy the protection of the US government and CIA. Luis Posada Carilles, who walked out of the prison and "disappeared", later surfaced as a CIA asset in El Salvador helping run the guns-for-cocaine flights for the Nicaraguan Contras. (He more recently turned up taking credit for the ordering the bombings of a number of Cuban hotels and restaurants that left one Italian-Canadian visitor dead, others scarred and mutilated, and many more traumatized.) The other, Orlando Bosch, freely walks the streets of Miami, after a judge was persuaded to turn down the Immigration Department's request to deport him as a proven and repeated terrorist.

October 7

In 2001 the US started the war against Afghanistan. An estimated 3,767 civilians were killed in the initial bombing campaign that lasted eight and a half weeks.

October 10

In 2001 the Sultanpur Mosque in Jalalabad, Afghanistan was hit by a US bomb during prayers, killing 17 people. As neighbours rushed into the rubble to pull out the injured, a second bomb was dropped killing at least another 120 people.

October 11

In 2001 the farming village of 450 persons of Karam, west of Jalalabad in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, was repeatedly bombed, 45 of the 60 mud houses were destroyed, killing at least 160 civilians.

October 13

In 2001, in the morning, an F-18 dropped 2000 lb JDAM bombs upon the poor Qila Meer Abas neighborhood, 2 km south of Kabul airport, killing 4.

October 14

In 1953, in the Jordanian village of Qibya, a total of 69 civilians were murdered in a six hour killing spree, which almost totally destroyed the town. The attackers blew up about forty houses, a school, water pumping station, police station and telephone office. At the head of the Israeli special forces group responsible was Ariel Sharon.

October 16

In 2001 the US bombed Red Cross warehouses in Kabul, Afghanistan, destroying vital food supplies. The warehouses contained food and blankets the Red Cross was in the process of distributing to 55,000 disabled and other needy Afghan civilians. Despite the buildings being marked by a 3m x 3m Red Cross flag, the Americans claimed it was an "accident". Ten days later they bombed the warehouses again, despite the buildings now being marked by a 9m x 9m Red Cross flag. On October 29, CNN reported, "Pentagon sources say despite a public apology, the United States intentionally bombed a Red Cross warehouse in Kabul for a second time, in order to deny food to the Taliban."

October 17

In 1948 Israeli planes attacked Al-Majdal, a Palestinian Arab town, 25 kms north of the city of Gaza. It had a population of 10,900. A large number of its inhabitants were killed, besides some Palestinians who had taken refuge in the north of Majdal and were living in tents.

October 18

In 2001 the central market place of Sarai Shamali in the Madad district of Kandahar, Afghanistan was bombed by the US, killing 47 civilians.

October 19

In 2001 US planes circled over Tarin Kot in Uruzgan, Afghanistan early in the evening, then returned after everyone went to bed and dropped their bombs on the residential area, instead of on the Taliban base two miles away. Mud houses were flattened and families destroyed. An initial bombing killed twenty and as some of the villagers were pulling their neighbors out of the rubble, more bombs fell and ten more people died. One of the villagers recalls: "We pulled the baby out, the others were buried in the rubble. Children were decapitated. There were bodies with no legs. We could do nothing. We just fled."

October 21

In 2001 at least twenty-three civilians, the majority of them young children, were killed when US bombs hit a remote Afghan village, Thori, located in the Urozgan province of Afghanistan.

In 2002 a 28 year old Palestinian male was kidnapped by Israeli settlers from Itmar, considered to be a haven for one of the most violent settlers on Palestinian territory. They kidnapped him while he was harvesting his family's olive groves alone. They ordered him down from the tree and began to viciously beat him by kicking him and punching him all over his body. The settlers then proceeded to bind his legs and arms and then took him to an undisclosed location where they continued to torture him by melting plastic pipes all over his body as he lay blindfolded and bound by hands and ankles. The Palestinian man escaped and was found by local fellow villagers who took him to the Nablus hospital known as Rafidya where he is in critical condition. He is suffering from burns and broken bones from his tragic ordeal with the settlers.

October 22

In 2001 at least twenty-five, and possibly as many as thirty-five, Afghan civilians died when US bombs and gunfire hit their village, Chowkar-Karez. Sardar Bibi, aged about forty, told Human Rights Watch, "I was wounded five days ago. It was at night, at about 11:30 or so, I don't know the exact time as we were sleeping. Suddenly the bombardment started. We went out of the house because we were afraid they would bombard the house. Then, we were running with our neighbors. Another bomb fell down. ...The plane was circling and also shooting. First, a plane came and dropped a bomb, but the other plane kept circling." Her husband, Daulat Khan, and all of her six children were killed during the attack. Her children included two one-and-one-half-year-old twins, Mohammed Yasin and Mohammed Yusof, fourteen-year-old Akhter Bibi, fifteen-year-old Najia, sixteen-year-old Maimana, and eighteen-year-old Mariam.

Later, unidentified Pentagon officials told CNN that Chowkar-Karez was "a fully legitimate target" because it was a nest of Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathizers. "The people there are dead because we wanted them dead," an official said.

October 25

In 1983 the United States invaded the island of Grenada, a tiny island nation with a population of 160,000 and a per capita income of $390 per year, causing civilian deaths of up to 4,000.

In 1999 a U.S bomb hit a fully loaded city bus at Kabul Gate, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, incinerating 10-20 passengers.

October 26

In 2002 the US bombed Red Cross warehouses in Kabul, Afghanistan for the second time. The first time was ten days earlier on October 16.

October 27

In 1948 Al Dawayama Village in the district of Hebron was attacked by Israeli stormtroopers using automatic weapons. The village was completely destroyed, 200 were killed and the surviving villagers fled. “The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead… one commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house … and to blow up the house with them. The sapper refused… the commander then ordered his men to put in the old women and the evil deed was done. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her…”

October 29

In 1956 the Suez War had just begun. Though Jordan was not involved in the war, a 5 p.m. to dawn curfew was declared on all the Arab villages in the area close to the Jordanian border. However, many of the Arabs of Kfar Kassem were away from the village when the curfew was declared and were not informed about it. As they returned to the village after 5 p.m., they were lined up and shot dead by Israeli Border Police.

October 30

In 1948 the Carmeli company of the Israeli army occupied the Palestinian Arab village of Al-Hulah without resistance. The acting company commander was Shlomo Lehis, who later on became the director general of the Jewish Agency. Shlomo assembled the 70 Arabs who remained in the village in one of the squares. He and another officer killed them all, then blew up the houses. Shlomo was tried in court and sentenced to prison, but before starting his prison sentence, he was pardoned by the head of State.

October 31

In 1948 Israeli troops surrounded the two towns of Ba'na and Dair al-Asad. The force's commander ordered the inhabitants of the two villages over loudspeakers to gather on the plain located between the two villages under guard by Israeli soldiers, then killed a group of young men in a way which was described by a UN observer as “brutal murder, since it took place without provocation or even an expression of anger on the part of the people.”

In 2001 the US bombed a hospital in Kandahar, Afghanistan, killing 15 staff and patients and severely injuring 25 others.

November 3

In 1956 in the Khan Younis refugee camp in south Gaza Israeli soldiers massacred 250 Palestinian civilians. Source: UN.

November 10

In 2001 the villages of Shah Aqa and a neighboring village, in the poppy-growing Khakrez district, 70 kilometers northwest of Kandahar, Afghanistan were bombed by US warplanes, resulting in over 300 civilian casualties.

November 11

In 1975 the democratically elected, left-leaning government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was toppled by a CIA-engineered coup. The CIA did this by giving an ultimatum to its Governor-General, John Kerr. Kerr, a longtime CIA collaborator, exercised his constitutional right to dissolve the Whitlam government. The Governor-General is a largely ceremonial position appointed by the Queen; the Prime Minister was democratically elected. The use of this archaic and never-used law stunned the nation.

November 12

In 1956 in the Khan Younis refugee camp in south Gaza, nine days after the first massacre, Israeli soldiers massacred a further 275 Palestinian civilians.

In 1991 on this and following days several hundred innocent East Timorese civilians were murdered in Santa Cruz by the brutal Indonesian troops which had illegally occupied their country for the last 21 years, with American, British and Australian support. Since 1975 the people of East Timor had been subjected to many massacres which the Indonesian military could deny. Again this time, their response was one of deceit and pretense that nothing had happened. Yet the world was deeply shocked by the images of the cold blooded murder that took place on that November day, shown on international television thanks to the courage of journalist Max Stahl.

The Indonesian authorities, forced to acknowledge that an 'incident' had taken place, tried to offer excuses devoid of credibility. Most foreign governments, keen on their lucrative business ties with Indonesia have so far tried to protect the Suharto dictatorship from criticism, despite ample evidence about the genocidal nature of the occupation of East Timor, and the clear signs of dissatisfaction of the oppressed people of Indonesia itself.

November 13

In 1966 a large Israeli force, including tanks and armoured cars, attacked the village of al-Sammou' in Jordan, destroying 125 houses, a school and a clinic and 15 houses in another village, killing 18 and wounding 54.

November 16

In 1989 26 US trained and armed Salvadoran soldiers killed and mutilated eight people, including six Jesuit priests. The UN Truth Commission investigating the massacre confirmed that 19 of the 26 soldiers involved were trained in torture by the US "School of the Americas".

November 17

In 2001 US bomb strikes in Khanabad near Kunduz, Afghanistan, killed over 100 people. The town of Charikar, 60 kms north of Kabul, was attacked with bombs and missiles, killing two entire families, one of 16 members and the other of 14, living in the same house.

November 18

In 2001 U.S planes bombed the mountain village of Gluco, located on the Khyber Pass, killing seven villagers. The village was far away from any military facilities. A reporter for The Telegraph visited Gluco, noting “their wooden homes looked like piles of charred matchsticks. Injured mules lay braying in the road along the mountain pass that stank of sulphur and dead animals…”

November 26

In 2001 after heavy U.S bombing in the preceding days of the Shamshad village in Nangarhar province, one or three Afghan children were blown up and seven wounded by a cluster bomb as they were collecting firewood for burning at home. The United Nations mine-clearing officials in the region, noted that 10-30% of the U.S missiles and bombs dropped on Afghanistan did not explode, posing a lasting danger.Such munition dropped in civilian areas poses a lasting danger. Fourteen thousand unexploded cluster bomblets littered the fields, streets and homes of Afghanistan by late November 2001.

November 29

In 1864 Colonel John Chivington led his troops, many of them drinking heavily, to Sand Creek and positioned them, along with their four howitzers, around the Indian village. An interpreter living in the village testified, "they were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their rifle butts, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word." By the end of the one-sided battle as many as 200 Indians, more than half women and children, had been killed and mutilated.

In 2001 American B-52's dropped 25 JDAM MK-83 1000 pound bombs on the village of Kama Ado in Afghanistan killing a reported 200-300 villagers. 156 were confirmed killed by a village elder. Khan-e-Mairjudden was also bombed and the death toll was as high as 200 with over 150 confirmed dead. Another nearby village Zaner Khel was also bombed, hitting a minor Taliban leader's house, with a death toll confirmed of at least 60 dead.

December 1

In 2001 US aircraft dropped bombs on the village of Kama Ado in Afghanistan, reportedly killing over one hundred civilians. Surviving villagers maintained that no members of al Qaeda were ever there. The US completely denied the incident occurred.

December 2

In 1980 four American women were abducted, raped and killed by Salvadorian soldiers. These soldiers were trained in the United States and used guns made in the US, yet, nothing happened when these women – Ida, Mora, Dorothy and Jean – were killed.

December 3

In 1984 Union Carbide's pesticide-manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India leaked 42 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate into a sleeping, impoverished community – killing more than 2,500 people in the first night of the disaster and injuring up to 200,000 others. Union Carbide has since abandoned its Bhopal plant which originally produced pesticides for use in cotton production and has refused to clean up the extensive pollution of water and soil it left behind. The International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal.

December 5

In 2003 the US bombed a compound near Gardez in Paktia province, Afghanistan and killed eight civilians, including six children.

December 6

In 1929 US Marines gunned down 264 protesting peasants in the town of Les Cayes, Haiti.

In 2003 US gunships attacked an Afghan village, Hutala, in Ghazni province, opening fire with rockets and bullets, and killed nine children.

December 7

In 1975, one day after Henry Kissinger and US President Gerald Ford gave the go-ahead, Indonesia invaded East Timor and systematically murdered about a third of its inhabitants over the next 17 years.

December 10

In 2001 two Israeli Apache gunships fired two missiles at a group of civilian cars stopped at a traffic light in the northwest of Hebron, apparently targeting Mohammed Ayoub Seder, an activist of the Islamic Jihad wanted by Israeli occupation forces. Two children, Burhan Mohammed Ibrahim El-Haimuni,3 and Shadi Ahmed 'Abdel Mu'ti 'Arafa,13 , were killed and 14 people were injured. Seder survived as he was able to get out of the car.

December 11

In 1981 in El Mozote, the inhabitants of a small Salvadoran hamlet were systematically exterminated by the Atacatl Battalion, a US-trained counterinsurgency force. The Reagan administration, determined to preserve US support for El Salvador's war against leftist guerrillas, downplayed reports of this massacre. The White House ignored and deflected reports that hundreds of unarmed women, children and men were shot, hung or beheaded.

December 12

In 1954 Israeli warplanes forced a Syrian Airways Dakota passenger craft carrying four passengers and five crewmen to land at Lydda airport inside Israel. The passengers were interrogated for two days before international protests, including strong complaints from Washington, finally convinced Israel to release the plane and its passengers.

December 13

In 1947 in the Palestinian village of Yehida a group of Jewish terrorists disguised as British soldiers arrived in four cars and sprayed the villagers with machine-gun fire. Only the arrival of real British troops saved the villagers, except for the seven who were murdered.

December 20

In 1989 the United States broke both international law and its own government policies by invading Panama in order to bring its President Manuel Noriega to justice for drug trafficking. It resulted in the loss of hundreds of Panamanian lives and damage to Panama City and El Chorillo.

In 2001 US warplanes bombed a convoy of tribal elders travelling to Kabul for the inauguration of President Karzai. Around 60 people are thought to have died in the attack, near the town of Khost, which turned up to 20 vehicles into flaming wrecks.

December 22

In 1998 seven members of a family were killed in the eastern Bekaa, Lebanon, during an Israeli air raid on a farm that was described by an Israeli spokesman as "the mistaken shelling of a building". Three other civilians were wounded when four Israeli fighter-bombers fired a single missile each at 2:40 P.M. at the farm near Junta and Nabi Sheet worked by Mohammed Amin Othman, wounding him and killing his wife and six of his children. A spokesman for the U.N. force said that the house in which the family was living was hundreds of kilometers away from the Israeli border and no military actions have been taken in its vicinity.

December 28

In 1968 Israeli commando units transported by helicopter attacked the Beirut civil airport in Lebanon and destroyed 13 civilian aircraft, causing damage of 22 million pounds sterling.

December 29

In 1890 the US Government (with Hotchkiss guns throwing 2 pound explosive shells at 50 a minute – always developing new weapons!) massacred more than 300 men, women and children at Wounded Knee.

In 2001 US bombs, missiles and cannon fire slaughtered at least 207 Afghan people in the village of Niazi Qalaye in Afghanistan. Many of the dead and wounded were women and children who were murdered as they slept in their beds. Some were blown to pieces. One Western cameraman saw scraps of flesh, pools of blood and clumps of human hair.

December 31

In 1947 on New Year's Eve Jewish armed forces massacred 60 Arab villagers in Balad El-Sheikh with hand grenades and machine-guns.

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For more articles and links on related topics see
Palestine and Israel/General
US Foreign Policy/Why do they hate US?
Alternative Media and Criticism of Western Media/Alternative History