The Gulf War (US), Operation Desert Storm (US)



The Gulf War (US), Operation Desert Storm (US)

DATES OF CONFLICT:

BEGAN: August 2, 1990 -Iraqi invasion of Kuwait

ENDED: March 3, 1991- Iraq accepts cease-fire

CAUSES OF CONFLICT:

There are two basic causes to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. First, Iraq had long considered Kuwait to be a part of Iraq. This claim led to several confrontations over the years, and continued hostility. Also, it can be argued that with Saddam Hussein's attempted invasion of Iran defeated, he sought easier conquests against his weak southern neighbors.

Second, rich deposits of oil straddled the ill-defined border and Iraq constantly claimed that Kuwaiti oil rigs were illegally tapping into Iraqi oil fields. Middle Eastern deserts make border delineation difficult and this has caused many conflicts in the region.

DESCRIPTION OF CONFLICT:

Amid growing tension between the two Persian Gulf neighbors, Saddam Hussein concluded that the United States and the rest of the outside world would not interfere to defend Kuwait. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait and quickly seized control of the small nation. Within days, the United States, along with the United Nations, demanded Iraq's immediate withdrawal. U.S. and other UN member nations began deploying troops in Saudi Arabia within the week, and the world-wide coalition began to form under UN authority.

CONSEQUENCES OF CONFLICT:

1. Saddam's second war of foreign conquest ended even worse than the first one. Iraq again stood defeated with the liberation of Kuwait.

2. Despite the crushing defeat and subsequent Shiite and Kurdish rebellions, Saddam's government retained a strong grip on power in Iraq.

3. As a result of the cease-fire terms, Iraq had to accept the imposition of "no-fly zones" over her territory and United Nations weapons inspection teams sifting through her nuclear and other weapons programs.

4. The economic and trade sanctions begun during the war continue to the present day, contributing to severe economic hardship in Iraq. Some reports say hundreds of thousands of children have died due to the sanctions. There are no indications that the government or military suffer undo hardships.

Profile of a serial Killer: Jeffery Dahmer

Dahmer killed 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991

 

Dahmer was born Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960 to a fundamentalist family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As a child he was molested by a neighbor. First his father left the home. Then after a bitter divorce, his mother took his brother, and left Dahmer with his father. His parents weren’t speaking and Dahmer didn’t even know how to contact his mother and brother. Dahmer’s history of abandonment left him with feelings of loss and rejection.

When young, he impaled the heads of animals he killed on stakes in his yard. He collected dead animals and had necrophilia desires. His stepmother Shari Dahmer said, "When he was young, he liked to use acid to scrape the meat off dead animals."

As a teen, he had fantasies of killing and mutilating men. After graduating from high school at age 17 he was left alone at home, without money, or food and a broken refrigerator. It is believed by some that this experience, abandonment, and mental illness, gave him the justification he needed to commit crimes.

In 1978, he committed his first murder in Bath Township, Ohio, at age 18. He killed a young hitchhiker, Stephen Hicks, he invited to his house, where he killed him with a barbell, then smashed his bones with a hammer because he "didn't want him to leave." He wouldn't kill again for another nine years. Eventually he got a factory job in Milwaukee. He discovered gay bars and picked up Steven Toumi, 24, his second victim in 1987.

Dahmer killed another 15 young men; by July 1991 he was claiming one victim a week. His fantasy was for a compliant sexual partner, and necrophilia. Most of Dahmer's all male victims were minorities, usually African Americans. Dahmer was not really a racist, he chose predominantly black and other minority victims because he lived in a predominantly ethnic area.

Two cops were driving through Dahmer's neighborhood late on July 22, 1991, when they saw a dazed black man with a single handcuff on his wrist. Tracy Edwards, 32, told them about watching a video with a "weird dude," and being drugged, handcuffed, and

threatened with a knife. He had fought back and escaped from the apartment. The cops had him take them to the apartment.

 

Dahmer answered the door and explained that he lost his job at a chocolate factory, (true), got drunk and lost his temper. When he went to get the handcuff key to from his bedroom, a cop followed him in. The stench of death and rotting flesh was overwhelming. He spotted Polaroid photos of dismembered bodies and skulls in a refrigerator. He went into the kitchen and the refrigerator covered with Polaroids of mutilated men. He screamed when he opened the door. A human head sat on a refrigerator shelf.

 

"There's a goddam head in here," he screamed to his partner.

 

Dahmer's fought back hard as they handcuffed him. Edwards recalled Dahmer’s threats to "cut out your heart and eat it." Three more heads and human meat were in the freezer, were in the freezer. Hands from several victims and a penis were in a stockpot in a close. Two boiled skulls painted grey were on a bedroom closet shelf. Male genitalia were also found preserved in formaldehyde. A bottle of chloroform was found that which had been used to drug the victims. There were hundreds of photos of victims before, during the murders, and after death.

 

There was an altar of candles and human skulls in his closet. He planned to create a shrine using skulls, human trophies and a statue of a griffin he owned to honor evil. He said it would give him "special powers and energies to help him socially and financially."

Dahmer admitted to his crimes. He made no excuses and blamed nobody but himself. Wisconsin does not have capital punishment. After being charged with fifteen counts of murder, he entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Beyond the sheer horror of his killings and gruesome evidence found in his house, the public were stunned by the well-spoken seemingly intelligent man. On February 17, 1992, the court rejected his insanity plea and sentenced Dahmer to fifteen consecutive life sentences, a minimum of 936 years. May 16, 1992, a consecutive life sentence was added for a 1978 murder.

 

On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was murdered in a Portage, Wisconsin by another inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institute. Inmate Christopher Scarver, a double murderer, beat Dahmer and inmate Jesse Anderson to death with a broom while all three were cleaning a bathroom. Scarver said he was the "son of God” acting on his "father's" command to kill. Shortly before death, Dahmer was rebaptized into Christianity. His father would not grant permission for his brain to be studied on religious grounds.

 

The Waco Massacre

Many people believe that David Koresh and his followers, the Davidians, were responsible for the deaths of the 74 men, women and children who died in the inferno at Waco on April 19, 1993. The guns they had were legal. The local sheriff investigated and found no basis for complaints against them. These were law-abiding American citizens, even if they thought differently to most other folks. They trusted the U.S. Constitution to ensure their political rights, but they were murdered by agents acting under the authority of the U.S. government.

Waco occurred under the presidency of Bill Clinton. Already back in 1993 the US government demonstrated its contempt of "cults" by ordering a massacre to "demonstrate" its supposed "authority."

Few Americans realize that on February 28, 1993 when BATF agents in National Guard helicopters zoomed in on the Davidians' church and home, Mount Carmel Center, they did so with guns blazing. It is likely FBI agents deliberately sabotaged negotiations with Davidians to prevent their exiting Mount Carmel. Their goal was to destroy the building and its damaging evidence.

After the February raid by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) of David Koresh's dissident religious community at Waco, Texas, the FBI and the U.S. Army took over, mounting a 51-day siege. This included such psy-war tactics as sleep deprivation of the inhabitants of the community by means of all-night broadcasts of recordings of the screams of rabbits being slaughtered.

Finally, despite David Koresh's pledge to surrender upon completion of his written explanation of the meaning of the Seven Seals, the FBI and the Army attacked. At dawn on April 19, 1993, and throughout the morning, tanks rammed holes in the main building and pumped (in the FBI's words) "massive amounts" of CS gas into the building, despite knowing that inside were more than a dozen children. The tanks demolished parts of the compound and created tunnels for the wind to blow through. The buildings at this point were saturated with inflammable CS gas and spilled kerosene.

Around midday two U.S. military pyrotechnic devices were fired into the main building, igniting a fire which spread rapidly through the complex of buildings and became an inferno. 74 men, women and children died — including twelve children younger than five years of age. Fire trucks were prevented by the FBI from approaching the inferno. After the compound had burned down the BATF flag was hoisted aloft to signify 'victory'. Subsequently the burned-out ruin was razed in an attempt to remove all evidence of this premeditated murder of innocent civilians by agents of the U.S. government. Thus occurred an atrocity which many Americans believe could never happen in their country.

The lawyer for one of the survivors said at one of the U.S. government 'investigations' (or rather, whitewashes): In this country when people are accused of a crime they are arrested and given a trial — that's 'due process'. If found guilty of murder then maybe they are killed. We don't just kill them first — which is what happened at Waco.

OJ Simpson Trial

Although the 1995 criminal trial of O. J. Simpson for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman has been called "a great trash novel come to life," no one can deny the pull it had on the American public.  If the early reports of the murder of the wife of the ex-football-star-turned-sports-announcer hadn't caught people's full attention, Simpson's surreal Bronco ride on the day of his arrest certainly did--ninety-five million television viewers witnessed the slow police chase live. The 133 days of televised courtroom testimony turned countless viewers into Simpson trial junkies.  Even foreign leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Boris Yeltsin eagerly gossiped about the trial.  When Yeltsin stepped off his plane to meet President Clinton, the first question he asked was, "Do you think O. J. did it?"  When, at 10 a.m. PST on October 3, Judge Ito's clerk read the jury's verdict of "Not Guilty," 91% of all persons viewing television were glued to the unfolding scene in the Los Angeles courtroom.

Exactly what happened sometime after ten o'clock on the Sunday night of June 12, 1994 is still disputed, but most likely a single male came through the back entrance of Nicole Brown Simpson's condominium on Bundy Drive in the prestigious Brentwood area of Los Angeles.  In a small, nearly enclosed area near the front gate, the man brutally slashed Nicole, almost severing her neck from her body.  Then he struggled with and repeatedly--about thirty times--stabbed Ronald Goldman.  Ronald Goldman was a twenty-five-year-old  acquaintance of Nicole's, who had come to her condominium to return a pair of sunglasses that her mother had left earlier that evening at the Mezzaluna restaurant.  (A person would later post a sign outside the Mezzaluna reading, "Don't forget your sunglasses.")

Just after midnight, Nicole's howling Akita, with blood on its belly and legs, attracted the attention of a neighbor, who then discovered the two bodies.  The ill-fated investigation of the Brown-Simpson and Goldman murders began.

Nicole Brown Simpson's ex-husband, former football great and media personality O. J. Simpson, meanwhile, was aboard American Airlines flight #668 to Chicago.  Simpson had taken off from Los Angeles at 11:45 after receiving a ride to the airport in a limousine driven by Allan Park, an employee of the Town and Country Limousine Company.  The limousine had left the Simpson estate on Rockingham Avenue about half an hour late, after Park called to report at 10:25 that no one answered his ring at the door.  Park observed a man he assumed to be Simpson enter his house at 10:56.

Police called Simpson early Monday morning at the O'Hare Plaza Hotel in Chicago, where Simpson had planned to attend a convention of the Hertz rental car company.  When informed that his wife had been killed, Simpson did not ask how, when, or by whom.  He did--according to his later testimony--smash a glass in grief, badly cutting his left hand.  Prosecutors would have a different explanation for the injury.  Simpson boarded the next flight to Los Angeles, arriving home about noon to find a full-scale police investigation underway.  Police tape stretched across his front gate and cardboard tags marked bloodstains on the driveway.

The Investigation Focuses on Simpson

Los Angeles police questioned Simpson for about a half hour that day.  They asked Simpson a number of questions about the deep cut on his right hand.  Simpson initially claimed not to know the source of the cut. Later in the interview he suggested the hand was cut when he reached into his Bronco on the night of the murders, then reopened the cut when he broke a glass in his Chicago hotel room after being informed of Nicole's murder.  From the standpoint of the police, the interview was remarkably inept.  Officers did not ask obvious follow-up questions and whole areas of potentially fruitful inquiry were ignored.  So unhelpful was this interview that neither side chose to introduce it into evidence at the trial. Eventually, however, police accumulated enough evidence indicating Simpson's guilt in the murders that they sought and obtained a warrant for his arrest. 

By the time closing arguments began in the Simpson case, the trial had already broken the record set by the Charles Manson case as the longest jury trial in California history.  The jury had been sequestered for the better part of a year and was showing signs of strain and exhaustion.  Judge Ito was under attack for the allowing the trial to drag on and his seeming inability to keep lawyers under control.

Marcia Clark's summation for the prosecution sought, among other things, to do damage control on the Fuhrman issue.  Clark denounced Fuhrman as a racist, the "worst type" of cop, and as someone we didn't want "on this planet."  But, she told the jury, that doesn't mean there was a frame-up.  She took the jury again through the prosecution's "mountain of evidence" as puzzle pieces on a video screen accumulated to reveal the face of O. J. Simpson.  Christopher Darden followed Clark, telling the jury that Simpson could be "a great football player" and "a murderer" as well.

Johnnie Cochran's summation for the defense added controversy to an already very controversial trial.  His co-counsel, Robert Shapiro, was later to condemn his closing for "not only playing the race card, but playing it from the bottom of the deck."  Cochran compared the prosecution case to Hitler's campaign against the Jews:

There was another man not too long ago in this world who had those same views, who wanted to burn people, who had racist views, and ultimately had power over people in his country.  People didn't care.  People said he's crazy.  He's just a half-baked painter.  And they didn't do anything about it.  This man, this scourge, became one of the worst people in the world, Adolf Hitler, because people didn't care, didn't stop him.  He had the power over his racism and his anti-religionism.  Nobody wanted to stop him....And so Fuhrman.  Fuhrman wants to take all black people now and burn them or bomb them.  That's genocidal racism.  Is that ethnic purity?  We're paying this man's salary to espouse these views...

The jury spent only three hours deliberating the case that had produced 150 witnesses over 133 days and had cost $15 million to try.  As America watched at 10 a.m. PST on October 3, 1995, Ito's clerk, Deidre Robertson, announced the jury's verdict: "We the jury in the above entitled action find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder."  Simpson sighed in relief, Cochran pumped his fist and slapped Simpson on the back.  The Dream Team gathered in a victory huddle.  From the audience came the searing moans of Kim Goldman, Ron's sister, and the cry of his mother Patti Goldman, "Oh my God! Oh my God!"

Oklahoma City Bombing

The Oklahoma City bombing was a terrorist bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. It would remain the most destructive act of terrorism on American soil until the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Oklahoma blast claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6, and injured more than 680 people. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings. The bomb was estimated to have caused at least $652 million worth of damage. Extensive rescue efforts were undertaken by local, state, federal, and worldwide agencies in the wake of the bombing, and substantial donations were received from across the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) activated eleven of its Urban Search and Rescue Task Forces, consisting of 665 rescue workers who assisted in rescue and recovery operations.

Within 90 minutes of the explosion, Timothy McVeigh was stopped by Oklahoma State Trooper Charlie Hanger for driving without a license plate and arrested for unlawfully carrying a weapon. Forensic evidence quickly linked McVeigh and Terry Nichols to the attack; Nichols was arrested, and within days both were charged. Michael and Lori Fortier were later identified as accomplices. McVeigh, an American militia movement sympathizer, had detonated an explosive-filled Ryder truck parked in front of the building. McVeigh's co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, had assisted in the bomb preparation. Motivated by his hatred of the federal government and angered by what he perceived as its mishandling of the Waco Siege (1993) and the Ruby Ridge incident (1992), McVeigh timed his attack to coincide with the second anniversary of the deadly fire that ended the siege at Waco.

The official investigation, was the largest criminal investigation case in American history. The bombers were tried and convicted in 1997. McVeigh was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001, and Nichols was sentenced to life in prison. Michael and Lori Fortier testified against McVeigh and Nichols; Michael was sentenced to twelve years in prison for failing to warn the U.S. government, and Lori received immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony.

Ruby Ridge

When federal agents set up Randy Weaver on minor weapons violations, Weaver refused to show up in court for the charge, instead holing up with his wife and four children in his mountain cabin on Ruby Ridge, forty miles south of the Canadian border.

A Justice Department attorney got an arrest warrant for Weaver, despite knowing that a court official notified Weaver of an incorrect court date. (Weaver wasn't going to show up anyway.)

For the charge of refusing to appear in court for a minor weapons violation, the government conducted a military siege of Ruby Ridge worthy of a small war. As reported by James Bovard in the Jan. 10, 1995, Wall Street Journal, after Weaver's February 1991 missed court appearance:

Federal agents then launched an elaborate 18-month surveillance of Mr. Weaver's cabin and land.

David Niven, a defense lawyer involved in the subsequent court case, noted later: "The U.S. marshals called in military aerial reconnaissance and had photos studied by the Defense Mapping Agency. ... They had psychological profiles performed and installed $130,000 worth of solar-powered long-range spy cameras. They intercepted the Weavers' mail. They even knew the menstrual cycle of Weaver's teenage daughter, and planned an arrest scenario around it."

On August 21, 1992, the siege began in earnest. Six U.S. marshals, armed and camouflaged, went onto Weaver's property to conduct undercover surveillance. When Weaver's dogs started barking, they shot one of them.

Weaver's 25-year-old friend Kevin Harris and 14-year-old son Sammy and saw the dog die. Sammy Weaver fired his gun towards the agents as his dad yelled for him to come back to the cabin. "I'm coming, Dad," were Sammy Weaver's last words before he was shot in the back and killed by a U.S. Marshal.

Kevin Harris, witnessing the agents' killing of the dog and child, fired at the agents in self-defense, killing one of them.

After the initial shootout, the Weavers and Harris retreated into their cabin, and a small army surrounded the area. Says Bovard: "the commander of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team was called in, and ordered federal agents to shoot any armed adult outside the Weaver cabin, regardless of whether that person was doing anything to threaten or menace federal agents. (Thanks to the surveillance, federal officials knew that the Weavers always carried guns when outside their cabin.)"

Against a handful of rural Idahoans with shotguns, the U.S. arrayed four hundred federal agents with automatic weapons, sniper rifles and night vision scopes.

On August 22, 1992, Randy Weaver went to see his son's body in the shack where it lay. He was shot and wounded from behind by FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi. As Weaver struggled back to his house, Horiuchi assassinated his wife Vicki as she stood in the doorway, holding their 10-month-old baby.

Although the feds later claimed Vicki Weaver's killing was an accident, the New York Times reported in 1993 that an internal FBI report justified the killing by saying she put herself in danger. Horiuchi testified in court that he was an accurate shot at 200 yards.

Everything about the federal government's actions in this case is sickening, but possibly the worst was their taunting of the Weaver family after Vicki Weaver's murder: "Good morning, Mrs. Weaver. We had pancakes for breakfast. What did you have?" That was one of the FBI's tactics revealed in court records, reported by Jerry Seper in the Washington Times in September 1993.

After the initial shootout, the only shots fired were by federal agents. Eleven days after the shootout Randy Weaver surrendered.

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