title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: Terrorism experts, including Peter R. Neumann, cited the Great Replacement conspiracy theory as a common factor among several similar attacks. The Southern Poverty Law Center's "Hatewatch" blog linked the shooting with the earlier Christchurch mosque shootings and the Poway synagogue shooting, citing the similar white nationalist contents of the respective attackers' manifestos. Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation league, said that the shooting, as part of a series of similar attacks, indicated a "global threat" of white supremacy. NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg urged countries to work together to prevent "lone wolf" attackers who find inspiration in one another's actions. Others, including the writer Daniel Okrent, disputed the "lone wolf" idea, pointing to the ways in which technology allows those with similar violent ideologies to congregate online.


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: Several commentators attributed both the El Paso and Christchurch shootings to an ideology of eco-fascism. "The Washington Post" described the El Paso and Christchurch shootings as examples of an eco-fascist trend among white supremacists. Writing in "GQ", Luke Darby referred to the "distinctly environmental theme" of Crusius' alleged manifesto. Jeet Heer in "The Nation" described the manifesto as being based in "Malthusian fascism", a worldview in which different races vie against one another in the face of environmental crises such as global warming. Mainstream environmentalists, including the executive director of the Sierra Club, denounced the attacker's alleged white-supremacist motivations.


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: President Donald Trump condemned the shooting as "hateful" and an "act of cowardice" later that day. He promised that his administration would provide "total support". In a later statement, Trump announced after the shootings in El Paso and in Dayton, Ohio, that all US flags, both domestic and abroad, would be flown at half-staff until sunset on August 8. In a speech from the White House on August 5, Trump said: "In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America." On August 7, Trump said he was "concerned about the rise of any group of hate", whether it was "white supremacy, whether it's any other kind of supremacy, whether it's antifa".


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: Within two days of the shooting, #WhiteSupremacistInChief reached the number one trend on Twitter as critics pointed out that statements in the suspect's alleged manifesto mirrored comments Trump had made in the past, including references to illegal immigration as an "invasion" and telling an unspecified group of "'Progressive' Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe" to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came". Media outlets also highlighted an incident in May 2019 where an audience member at a campaign rally suggested shooting illegal migrants crossing the border, to which Trump responded with a joke, saying, "only in the Panhandle you can get away with that".


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: A statement released by former president Barack Obama stated, "We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments," which has widely been interpreted as a criticism of Trump's specific rhetoric. Trump's remark that violent video games contributed to such mass shootings, a view echoed by other politicians such as House Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy and Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, drew criticism from the video game industry, as past studies have found that no link exists between shootings and video games, and accused the government of using the medium as a scapegoat.


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: U.S. Representative Veronica Escobar, who represents El Paso in Congress, brought a town hall meeting in the city to an early close following the shooting. Escobar later said there was also a hate epidemic, with domestic terrorism resulting from the dehumanization of others. Texas Senator Ted Cruz issued a written statement deploring "this unspeakable evil." Beto O'Rourke, a native of El Paso who represented the city in Congress from 2013 to 2019, said he was "incredibly saddened" but that "The [El Paso] community is going to stay together. Everyone's resolved to make sure this doesn't continue to happen in this country." Texas Governor Greg Abbott called the shooting "a heinous and senseless act of violence". Texas Senator John Cornyn said that gun violence would not be solved by focusing on law-abiding citizens. Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick said violent video games were partly to blame.


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: Members of the Democratic Party criticized Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric in the wake of the shooting, including congresswoman Escobar and 2020 presidential candidates O'Rourke, Cory Booker, and Joe Biden. Other 2020 candidates called for political action to eliminate gun violence, including Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Andrew Yang. The incident also caused many celebrities and media figures to debate gun rights within the United States, with some condemning the perceived inaction of many political figures in stopping the large number of mass shootings in the country. That same evening, Moms Demand Action, which had a convention that weekend in Washington, DC, led a march and vigil outside the White House in support of gun control in the United States and the ban of assault weapons.


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: The day after the shooting, some prominent Republicans, including Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, also spoke of the need to combat white-supremacist terrorism. Texas senator Ted Cruz decried the shooting as a "heinous act of terrorism and white supremacy". On Twitter, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein classified the attack as "white terrorism". Many Latinos interviewed by "The New York Times" said they felt disturbed at becoming targets of white-nationalist violence.


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: Dan Stein, the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), issued a statement on Twitter denouncing the shooting, with no mention of Crusius' alleged manifesto. The group regularly makes similar anti-immigration arguments to those contained in the document, prompting worries of political fallout from the shooting among FAIR and similar groups, according to David Nakamura in "The Washington Post". Both Stein and Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which also advocates restrictions on immigration, dismissed any connections between Crusius' ideology and their own.


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: In response to the shooting, some 8chan users claimed that the shooter was "our guy". The purported manifesto of the shooter, after being deleted, was re-uploaded by some users, while others commented that it showed "zero effort", or claimed that it was fake. Following the attack, Cloudflare terminated its website security service for 8chan, commenting that "8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate". The site later went dark after its server rental provider Voxility discontinued its service. Journalist Robert Evans has cited the shooting and the preceding Christchurch and Poway shootings as being part of a series of mass shootings driven by the "high score" culture that began with the Columbine High School massacre.


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: Trump visited El Paso and Dayton on August 7. The president and first lady also met with the mayors of El Paso and Dayton. In El Paso, protesters showed up at the site of the shooting, some claiming that Trump's attitude and statements had led to the shooting; Two days before the visit, congresswoman Escobar said that Trump was "not welcome" in the city and declined an invitation to meet with him. The White House published photos and a video of Trump's trip; in some photos, Trump was pictured smiling and giving thumbs up gestures, while the video was focused on Trump shaking hands and posing for photos. Trump said that he had an "amazing day" of visits, praising the "love, the respect for" him as president.


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: Two days after the shooting, a Walmart corporate employee sent a memorandum to Walmart's entire e-commerce division, which includes thousands of employees, urging a "sick-out" strike to force the corporation to stop selling guns. Walmart later sent out a memo instructing workers to remove signs and displays that "contain violent themes or aggressive behavior" and pledged $400,000 for funds that were aimed at helping the victims of the mass shooting. On September 3, the company announced it would stop selling ammunition for handguns and assault rifles in the United States, as well as ask customers not to openly carry firearms into their stores.


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador extended his condolences to the families of the victims, both Americans and Mexicans. López Obrador also criticized the "indiscriminate use of weapons" in the United States. The Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Affairs (SRE) identified the eight Mexican citizens killed, and the seven Mexican citizens wounded, in the attack. The Mexican victims killed in the attack came from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua City, and Torreón, Coahuila. One of the victims, identified only as "Rosa," who had also offered to testify, was deported on January 30, 2021, because of a minor traffic violation.


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: Javier Corral Jurado, the governor of the Mexican state of Chihuahua, offered his assistance to Texas governor Greg Abbott and El Paso mayor Dee Margo, and said that Chihuahua authorities were ready to assist in any capacity if needed by the U.S. government. The Chihuahua government also directed Chihuahua residents and Mexican citizens affected by the attack to Mexico's executive committee for Victims (Spanish: "Comisión Ejecutiva de Atención a Víctimas"), and set up a phone line for Mexican citizens who needed assistance. The Mexican Consulate in El Paso provided consular assistance to Mexican nationals affected by the attack, and sent personnel to visit Mexican victims treated at the hospitals. The SRE confirmed that the consul Mauricio Ibarra Ponce de León would coordinate with El Paso and Ciudad Juárez officials.


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: On August 4, Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs Marcelo Ebrard announced that Mexico would issue a formal charge against the suspect for terrorism against Mexican nationals should Mexico's Attorney General's Office (FGR) support it, and possibly request his extradition from the U.S. to Mexico to face those charges. If the suspect is charged with terrorism, it would be the first time in history that Mexico issues a criminal charge of this nature for a crime committed in the U.S. In addition, it would guarantee Mexico access to information about the case. Ebrard also stated that the Mexican government would remain in contact with the victims' families throughout the investigation and trial, and that they would press charges against the individual(s) or firm who sold the weapons to the suspect. Former Mexican president Felipe Calderón offered his condolences on Twitter, and also directed a message against Trump. He said that notwithstanding if the attack was confirmed to be a hate crime or not, that Trump should stop his "hate speech" and "stigmatization".


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned "in the strongest terms the terrorist attack against Latinos on Saturday in the Texas city of El Paso" and called for everyone to work together to combat violence born of hate, racism and xenophobia. Recently the UN launched an action plan to "fight against discourses that incite hatred".


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: The incident was mentioned by Pope Francis during a speech in St. Peter's Square on August 4, in which he condemned attacks on defenseless people and said he was spiritually close to the victims, the wounded, and the families affected by the attacks that had "bloodied Texas, California, and Ohio". The Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting happened in California around a week before the El Paso shooting, while the 2019 Dayton shooting occurred in Ohio less than 24 hours after.


title: 2019 El Paso shooting

text: Uruguay and Venezuela issued travel warnings to avoid certain cities in America, including Baltimore, Detroit, Albuquerque, Cleveland, Memphis, Oakland, and Buffalo and citing "proliferation of acts of violence" and "growing indiscriminate violence, mostly for hate crimes, including racism and discrimination". Both countries warned their citizens to avoid any place with large crowds, including shopping malls, festivals, and "any kind of cultural or sporting events". Japan issued a similar travel warning, advising its citizens to pay attention to the potential for gunfire "everywhere" in the U.S., which they described as a "gun society". President Trump threatened undefined retaliation against countries and organizations that issue travel warnings on the United States because of gun violence.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: Without Remorse (also known as Tom Clancy's Without Remorse) is a 2021 American action thriller film loosely based on the 1993 novel of the same name by Tom Clancy. It is directed by Stefano Sollima from a screen story and screenplay by Taylor Sheridan and Will Staples, and stars Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Bell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Jacob Scipio, Jack Kesy, Lauren London and Guy Pearce. The plot follows John Kelly, a U.S. Navy SEAL who sets out on a path of revenge after his pregnant wife and unit members are killed by Russian hitmen.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: The film had been in development since the novel was published in 1993, with various actors, including Keanu Reeves and Tom Hardy, approached for the role of Kelly. After over 20 years in development hell, Jordan was announced as the lead role in September 2018, and Sheridan was hired to rewrite a script originally written in the 1990s. Filming began in Berlin in October 2019, and completed production in October 2020.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: "Without Remorse" was originally produced and set for a theatrical release by Paramount Pictures, but was delayed and then acquired by Amazon Studios, who digitally released on Amazon Prime Video on April 30, 2021. It received mixed reviews from critics, who praised Jordan's performance but called the film generic.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: In Aleppo, Syria, a team of US Navy SEALs, including Senior Chief Petty Officer John Kelly, rescue a CIA operative taken hostage by a suspected pro-Assad paramilitary group. The situation escalates as the SEALs discover that the captors are actually Russian military, which CIA officer Robert Ritter denies. Three months later, in apparent retaliation for their role in the mission, several members of the team are covertly killed by Russian FSB operatives. Kelly's pregnant wife Pam is murdered when the Russians break into their house. Kelly kills all but one of the attackers before being rushed to the hospital with near-fatal wounds.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Kelly's SEAL team leader and friend, Lt. Commander Karen Greer, meets with Ritter and Secretary of Defense Thomas Clay to discuss how the FSB discovered the SEALs' identities and review their response options. Leaked news of Russia's unprecedented attack on American soil has caused the already-strained relationship between the two nations to sour further, possibly causing a new cold war. The CIA refuses to conduct an investigation into the murders, motivating Greer to pass confidential information to Kelly.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: Healed from his injuries, Kelly tracks down the Russian diplomat who issued the passports to the FSB operatives, and forces him to give up the name of the surviving assassin before killing him. Incarcerated for murder, Kelly bargains his way out by revealing the escaped operative is Victor Rykov, an ex-Spetznaz officer who is hiding in Murmansk, Russia. Despite Greer's objections, Clay allows Kelly to participate in Rykov's capture on the condition that Kelly serves his sentence after the mission.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: Kelly flies to Murmansk with Greer and a CIA black ops team, planning to HALO jump into Russia. Intercepted and attacked by a Russian fighter, their plane crashes into the Barents Sea. Kelly dives into the wreckage to recover essential equipment, including a zodiac boat. The team arrives in Murmansk and finds Ritter, whom Kelly suspects is to blame for the intelligence leaks. Ritter swears he is not responsible and leads the team to Rykov. Kelly goes off mission to confront Rykov, finding him wearing a suicide vest and learns that he is a deep cover CIA asset. Rykov detonates his vest, killing himself as the team becomes pinned down by sniper fire. As police arrive, the team realizes that the mission was a set-up to have American soldiers killed on Russian soil to start a war.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: Kelly volunteers to cover the team's escape; since he is a convicted murderer, his death could be plausibly denied. Kelly buys the team time to reach safety but is badly injured. He then uses an explosion as cover to steal a police uniform and hijacks an ambulance to escape. Kelly and the surviving team members leave the country by boat. Ritter officially reports Kelly as dead, allowing Kelly to hunt for the traitor.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: Back in D.C., Kelly confronts Clay and forces him into his car. After Kelly threatens Clay's family, he confesses to being behind the intelligence leaks and orchestrating the conflict between the U.S. and Russia, intending to start a war with Russia to boost the economy and unite the American people against a common enemy. Kelly drives the car over a bridge and lets it sink to the bottom of the Potomac River, drowning Clay. Kelly escapes with a recording of the confession, with the help of Greer, who was waiting in the river with diving gear. At Washington Union Station, Greer gives Kelly a new identity provided by Ritter, he leaves to begin his new life as "John Clark".


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: One year later, Clark meets with Ritter, newly promoted to Deputy Director, and proposes the creation of a multinational counter-terrorism team, codename: Rainbow.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: Savoy Pictures first bought the film rights to "Without Remorse" soon after the novel was released, for $2.5 million. At one point, Keanu Reeves was offered the role as John Kelly for $7 million but declined. Although the film failed to meet its expected December 1995 release date, it was fast tracked after John Milius joined the production with the intent to write and direct the film, working in close consultation with the original book's author Tom Clancy. "Variety" magazine reported that Laurence Fishburne and Gary Sinise were later attached to star in the adaptation; however, production was shut down for script problems and financial woes with the production company. The film went under development hell for years until Christopher McQuarrie signed on with Paramount Pictures to direct the adaptation in 2012. Tom Hardy was approached by Paramount to play Kelly, and Kevin Costner was slated to reprise his role as mentor William Harper from another Clancy-based film, "" (2014), but this version did not happen.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: In 2017, it was announced that Akiva Goldsman signed on with the same studio to produce another film adaptation starring Clark, "Rainbow Six". On September 20, 2018, Michael B. Jordan was announced to be playing the character in a two-part film series, which will be composed of "Without Remorse" and "Rainbow Six" and produced by Goldsman, Jordan, Josh Appelbaum, and Andre Nemec. In December 2018, Stefano Sollima was hired to direct the film. On January 9, 2019, "Variety" announced that Taylor Sheridan would rewrite the screenplay.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: In September 2019, Jamie Bell and Jodie Turner-Smith were cast, with Luke Mitchell, Jacob Scipio, Cam Gigandet, Jack Kesy, Todd Lasance and Brett Gelman joining in October.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: Filming began in Berlin on October 25, 2019. Some filming was scheduled to begin on December 19 near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. The film possibly completed filming in Los Angeles on October 19, 2020.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: Jónsi composed the film score. Paramount music has released the soundtrack, coinciding with the film's release.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: "Without Remorse" was originally scheduled to be released on September 18, 2020 by Paramount Pictures, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was delayed to October 2, 2020, and again to February 26, 2021. In July 2020, Amazon Studios entered talks to acquire the distribution rights to the film and release it digitally on Amazon Prime Video. Paramount officially took the film off its theatrical release calendar in November 2020. The film was teased in Amazon's commercial featuring Alexa and Jordan made for Super Bowl LV.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: The film was released on Prime Video on April 30, 2021. According to Samba TV, the film was watched in 4.8 million households in its first 30 days of release.


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 45% approval rating based on 191 reviews, with an average score of 5.3/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Despite a commanding performance from Michael B. Jordan, "Without Remorse" fails to escape its outdated patriotic tropes and forced franchise place settings." Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 41 out of 100, based on 41 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: "The Hollywood Reporter"s David Rooney called the film "pacey and punchy, buoyed by its magnetic lead" and wrote: "The result is a solid entry in the Clancy screen canon — gritty, briskly paced, laced with vigorously choreographed fight scenes, explosive weapons action and twisty political intrigue that seems prescient as it taps into the most strained period in U.S.-Russian relations since the Cold War."


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: Randy Meyers of "The Mercury News" wrote ""Without Remorse" improves on its source material and delivers a satisfyingly sleek and ultra-violent spy thriller." Owen Gleiberman of "Variety" called the film "...a lively formulaic action-hero origin story, dunked in combat grunge, that demonstrates how a resourceful lead actor can bend and heighten the meaning of a commercial thriller."


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: Barry Hertz of "The Globe and Mail" wrote: ""Without Remorse" is a half-hearted attempt to exfiltrate an espionage brand that just won't come in from the cold. If you like your shootouts generic, your characters disposable, and your plot twists as predictable as airport newsstand merchandise, then have I got the far-from-impossible mission for you." David Ehrlich of "IndieWire" gave the film a grade of C− and said: ""Without Remorse" doesn't understand the role it's meant to serve as the foundation of a potential franchise. It's a movie locked in a tedious custody battle between legacy and potential, too safe to whet appetites for what's to come while also too sequel-oriented to stand on its own two legs."


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: Anupama Chopra of Film Companion wrote, "The action is fierce and relentless. The body count is high. But it isn't seductive."


title: Without Remorse (film)

text: The September 2018 announcement of Michael B. Jordan's selection to play John Kelly said he would also appear in "Rainbow Six", the intended sequel to the film.


title: United States war crimes

text: United States war crimes are violations of the law of war committed by members of the United States Armed Forces after the signing of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the Geneva Conventions. The United States prosecutes offenders through the War Crimes Act of 1996 and articles from the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). The United States signed the 1998 Rome Statute but never ratified the treaty, taking the position that the International Criminal Court (ICC) lacks fundamental checks and balances. The American Service-Members' Protection Act of 2002 further limited US involvement with the ICC. The ICC was conceived as a body to try war crimes when states do not have effective or reliable processes to investigate for themselves. The United States says that it has investigated many of the accusations alleged by the ICC prosecutors as having occurred in Afghanistan, and thus does not accept ICC jurisdiction over its nationals.


title: United States war crimes

text: This article contains a chronological list of incidents in which war crimes occurred or were alleged to have occurred that include the summary execution of captured enemy combatants, the mistreatment of prisoners during interrogation, the use of torture, the use of violence against civilians and non-combatants, and the unnecessary destruction of civilian property.


title: United States war crimes

text: War crimes are defined as acts which violate the laws and customs of war established by the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, or acts that are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I and Additional Protocol II. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 extends the protection of civilians and prisoners of war during military occupation, even in the case where there is no armed resistance, for the period of one year after the end of hostilities, although the occupying power should be bound to several provisions of the convention as long as "such Power exercises the functions of government in such territory."


title: United States war crimes

text: Following the end of the Spanish–American War in 1898, Spain ceded the Captaincy General of the Philippines to the United States as part of the peace settlement. This triggered a conflict between the United States Armed Forces and revolutionary First Philippine Republic under President Emilio Aguinaldo, and the Moro fighters.


title: United States war crimes

text: During the March across Samar, Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith ordered Major Littleton Waller, commanding officer of a battalion of 315 U.S. Marines assigned to Smith's forces in Samar, to kill all persons "who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities" over the age of ten years old. The widespread massacre of Filipino civilians followed as American columns marched across the island. All food and trade to Samar were cut off, and the widespread destruction of homes, crops, and draft animals occurred, with the intention of starving the Filipino revolutionaries and the civilian populace into submission. Smith used his troops in sweeps of the interior to search for guerrilla bands and in attempts to capture Philippine General Vicente Lukbán, but he did nothing to prevent contact between the guerrillas and the population. Waller stated in a report that over an eleven-day period his men burned 255 dwellings, shot 13 carabaos, and killed 39 people. An exhaustive research made by a British writer in the 1990s put the figure at about 2,500 dead; Filipino historians believe it to be around 50,000. As a consequence of his order in Samar, Smith became known as "Howling Wilderness Smith". In May 1902, Smith was convicted at his court-martial in the United States for the order he gave to Waller in Samar.


title: United States war crimes

text: On March 5, 1906, the First Battle of Bud Dajo, also known as the Moro Crater Massacre, began when an assault force consisting of soldiers from the 6th Infantry, the 19th Infantry, the 4th Cavalry, the 28th Artillery Battery, the U.S. naval gunboat "Pampanga", and men from the Philippine Constabulary opened fire with mountain guns against Moro fortifications in the Bud Dajo crater which was populated by 800 to 1,000 Tausug villagers. Additionally, a machine gun was used to sweep the crest of the mountain. At the battle's conclusion by March 8, only six Moros had survived, with 99% having been killed. Moro men in the crater possessed melee weapons, and while fighting was limited to ground action on Jolo, use of naval gunfire contributed significantly to the overwhelming firepower brought to bear against the Moros. One account claims that the Moros, armed with knives and spears, refused to surrender and held their positions. Some of the defenders rushed the Americans and were cut down by artillery fire. The Americans charged the surviving Moros with fixed bayonets, and the Moros fought back with their kalis, barung, improvised grenades made with black powder and seashells.


title: United States war crimes

text: Despite the inconsistencies among various accounts of the battle, one in which all occupants of Bud Dajo were gunned down, another in which defenders resisted in fierce hand-to-hand combat, all accounts agree that few, if any, Moros survived, and the description of it being a "battle" became a matter of dispute. The author Vic Hurley wrote, "By no stretch of the imagination could Bud Dajo be termed a 'battle'". Mark Twain strongly condemned the incident in several articles he published,


title: United States war crimes

text: and commented: "In what way was it a battle? It has no resemblance to a battle. We cleaned up our four days' work and made it complete by butchering these helpless people." Major Hugh Scott, the province's District Governor said that those who fled to the crater "declared they had no intention of fighting, ran up there only in fright, and had some crops planted and desired to cultivate them."


title: United States war crimes

text: In response to criticism, Wood's explanation of the high number of women and children killed stated that the women of Bud Dajo dressed as men and joined in the combat, and that the men used children as living shields. Hagedorn supports this explanation, by presenting an account of Lieutenant Gordon Johnston, who was allegedly severely wounded by a female warrior. A second explanation was given by the Governor-General of the Philippines, Henry Clay Ide, who reported that the women and children were collateral damage, having been killed during the artillery barrages. These conflicting explanations of the high number of women and child casualties brought accusations of a cover-up, further adding fire to the criticism. According to Joshua Gedacht, Wood's and Ide's explanation is at odds with the use of the machine-gun that was placed to the edge of the crater to fire upon its occupants; Gedacht states that the high number of non-combatants killed can be explained as the result of indiscriminate machine-gun fire.


title: United States war crimes

text: During the First (1915) and Second (1918-1920) Caco Wars which were both waged during the United States occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), human rights abuses were committed against the native Haitian population. Overall, the United States Marine Corps and the Haitian gendarmerie killed several thousands of Haitian civilians during the rebellions between 1915 and 1920, though the exact death toll is unknown. During Senate hearings in 1921, the commandant of the Marine Corps reported that, in the 20 months of active unrest, 2,250 Haitians had been killed. However, in a report to the Secretary of the Navy, he reported the death toll as being 3,250. Haitian historian Roger Gaillard, estimated that in total, including rebel combatants and civilians, at least 15,000 Haitians were killed during the occupation. According to Paul Farmer, the higher estimates are not accepted by most historians outside Haiti.


title: United States war crimes

text: Mass killings of civilians were allegedly committed by United States Marines and their subordinates in the Haitian gendarmerie. According to Haitian historian Roger Gaillard, such killings involved rape, lynchings, summary executions, burning villages and deaths by burning. Internal documents of the United States Army justified the killing of women and children, describing them as "auxiliaries" of rebels. A private memorandum of the Secretary of the Navy criticized “indiscriminate killings against natives”. American officers who were responsible for acts of violence were given Haitian Creole names such as "Linx" for Commandant Freeman Lang and "Ouiliyanm" for Lieutenant Lee Williams. According to American journalist H.J. Seligman, Marines would practice "bumping off Gooks", describing the shooting of civilians in a manner which was similar to killing for sport.


title: United States war crimes

text: During the Second Caco War of 1918–1919, many Caco prisoners were summarily executed by Marines and the gendarmerie on orders from their superiors. On June 4, 1916, Marines executed caco General Mizrael Codio and ten others after they were captured in Fonds-Verrettes. In Hinche in January 1919, Captain Ernest Lavoie of the gendarmerie, a former United States Marine, allegedly ordered the killing of nineteen caco rebels according to American officers, though no charges were ever filed against him due to the fact that no physical evidence of the killing was ever presented.


title: United States war crimes

text: The torture of Haitian rebels and the torture of Haitians who were suspected of rebelling against the United States was a common practice among the occupying Marines. Some of the methods of torture included the use of water cure, hanging prisoners by their genitals and "ceps", which involved pushing both sides of the tibia with the butts of two guns.


title: United States war crimes

text: On January 26, 1943, the submarine USS "Wahoo" fired on survivors in lifeboats from the Imperial Japanese Army transport ship "Buyo Maru". Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood asserted that the survivors were Japanese soldiers who had turned machine-gun and rifle fire on the "Wahoo" after it surfaced, and that such resistance was common in submarine warfare. According to the submarine's executive officer, the fire was intended to force the Japanese soldiers to abandon their boats and none of them were deliberately targeted. Historian Clay Blair stated that the submarine's crew fired first and the shipwrecked survivors returned fire with handguns. The survivors were later determined to have included Allied POWs of the British Indian Army's 2nd Battalion, 16th Punjab Regiment, who were guarded by Japanese Army Forces from the 26th Field Ordnance Depot. Of 1,126 men originally aboard "Buyo Maru", 195 Indians and 87 Japanese died, some killed during the torpedoing of the ship and some killed by the shootings afterwards.


title: United States war crimes

text: During and after the Battle of the Bismarck Sea (March 3–5, 1943), U.S. PT boats and Allied aircraft attacked Japanese rescue vessels as well as approximately 1,000 survivors from eight sunken Japanese troop transport ships. The stated justification was that the Japanese personnel were close to their military destination and would be promptly returned to service in the battle. Many of the Allied aircrew accepted the attacks as necessary, while others were sickened.


title: United States war crimes

text: American servicemen in the Pacific War deliberately killed Japanese soldiers who had surrendered, according to Richard Aldrich, a professor of history at the University of Nottingham. Aldrich published a study of diaries kept by United States and Australian soldiers, wherein it was stated that they sometimes massacred prisoners of war. According to John Dower, in "many instances ... Japanese who did become prisoners were killed on the spot or "en route" to prison compounds." According to Professor Aldrich, it was common practice for U.S. troops not to take prisoners. His analysis is supported by British historian Niall Ferguson, who also says that, in 1943, "a secret [U.S.] intelligence report noted that only the promise of ice cream and three days leave would ... induce American troops not to kill surrendering Japanese."


title: United States war crimes

text: Ferguson states that such practices played a role in the ratio of Japanese prisoners to dead being 1:100 in late 1944. That same year, efforts were taken by Allied high commanders to suppress "take no prisoners" attitudes among their personnel (because it hampered intelligence gathering), and to encourage Japanese soldiers to surrender. Ferguson adds that measures by Allied commanders to improve the ratio of Japanese prisoners to Japanese dead resulted in it reaching 1:7, by mid-1945. Nevertheless, "taking no prisoners" was still "standard practice" among U.S. troops at the Battle of Okinawa, in April–June 1945. Ferguson also suggests that "it was not only the fear of disciplinary action or of dishonor that deterred German and Japanese soldiers from surrendering. More important for most soldiers was the perception that prisoners would be killed by the enemy anyway, and so one might as well fight on."


title: United States war crimes

text: Ulrich Straus, a U.S. Japanologist, suggests that Allied troops on the front line intensely hated Japanese military personnel and were "not easily persuaded" to take or protect prisoners, because they believed that Allied personnel who surrendered got "no mercy" from the Japanese. Allied troops were told that Japanese soldiers were inclined to feign surrender in order to make surprise attacks, a practice which was outlawed by the Hague Convention of 1907. Therefore, according to Straus, "Senior officers opposed the taking of prisoners on the grounds that it needlessly exposed American troops to risks ..." When prisoners were taken at the Guadalcanal campaign, Army interrogator Captain Burden noted that many times POWs were shot during transport because "it was too much bother to take [them] in".


title: United States war crimes

text: U.S. historian James J. Weingartner attributes the very low number of Japanese in U.S. prisoner of war compounds to two important factors, namely (1) a Japanese reluctance to surrender, and (2) a widespread American "conviction that the Japanese were 'animals' or 'subhuman' and unworthy of the normal treatment accorded to prisoners of war." The latter reason is supported by Ferguson, who says that "Allied troops often saw the Japanese in the same way that Germans regarded Russians—as "Untermenschen" (i.e., "subhuman")."


title: United States war crimes

text: In the Pacific theater, American servicemen engaged in human trophy collecting. The phenomenon of "trophy-taking" was widespread enough that discussion of it featured prominently in magazines and newspapers. Franklin Roosevelt himself was reportedly given a gift of a letter-opener made of a Japanese soldier's arm by U.S. Representative Francis E. Walter in 1944, which Roosevelt later ordered to be returned, calling for its proper burial. The news was also widely reported to the Japanese public, where the Americans were portrayed as "deranged, primitive, racist and inhuman". This, compounded by a previous "Life" magazine picture of a young woman with a skull trophy, was reprinted in the Japanese media and presented as a symbol of American barbarism, causing national shock and outrage.


title: United States war crimes

text: Based on several years of research, Okinawan historian Oshiro Masayasu (former director of the Okinawa Prefectural Historical Archives) writes:


title: United States war crimes

text: According to interviews carried out by "The New York Times" and published by them in 2000, several elderly people from an Okinawan village confessed that after the United States had won the Battle of Okinawa, three armed Marines kept coming to the village every week to force the villagers to gather all the local women, who were then carried off into the hills and raped. The article goes deeper into the matter and claims that the villagers' tale—true or not—is part of a "dark, long-kept secret" the unraveling of which "refocused attention on what historians say is one of the most widely ignored crimes of the war": "the widespread rape of Okinawan women by American servicemen." Although Japanese reports of rape were largely ignored at the time, one academic estimated that as many as 10,000 Okinawan women may have been raped. It has been claimed that the rape was so prevalent that most Okinawans over age 65 around the year 2000 either knew or had heard of a woman who was raped in the aftermath of the war.


title: United States war crimes

text: Professor of East Asian Studies and expert on Okinawa, Steve Rabson, said: "I have read many accounts of such rapes in Okinawan newspapers and books, but few people know about them or are willing to talk about them." He notes that plenty of old local books, diaries, articles and other documents refer to rapes by American soldiers of various races and backgrounds. An explanation given for why the US military has no record of any rapes is that few Okinawan women reported abuse, mostly out of fear and embarrassment. According to an Okinawan police spokesman: "Victimized women feel too ashamed to make it public." Those who did report them are believed by historians to have been ignored by the U.S. military police. Many people wondered why it never came to light after the inevitable American-Japanese babies the many women must have given birth to. In interviews, historians and Okinawan elders said that some of those Okinawan women who were raped and did not commit suicide did give birth to biracial children, but that many of them were immediately killed or left behind out of shame, disgust or fearful trauma. More often, however, rape victims underwent crude abortions with the help of village midwives. A large scale effort to determine the possible extent of these crimes has never been conducted. Over five decades after the war had ended, in the late-1990s, the women who were believed to have been raped still overwhelmingly refused to give public statements, instead speaking through relatives and a number of historians and scholars.


title: United States war crimes

text: There is substantial evidence that the U.S. had at least some knowledge of what was going on. Samuel Saxton, a retired captain, explained that the American veterans and witnesses may have intentionally kept the rape a secret, largely out of shame: "It would be unfair for the public to get the impression that we were all a bunch of rapists after we worked so hard to serve our country." Military officials formally denied the mass rapes, and all surviving related veterans refused request for interviews from "The New York Times". Masaie Ishihara, a sociology professor, supports this: "There is a lot of historical amnesia out there, many people don't want to acknowledge what really happened." Author George Feifer noted in his book "Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb", that by 1946 there had been fewer than 10 reported cases of rape in Okinawa. He explained it was "partly because of shame and disgrace, partly because Americans were victors and occupiers. In all there were probably thousands of incidents, but the victims' silence kept rape another dirty secret of the campaign."


title: United States war crimes

text: Some other authors have noted that Japanese civilians "were often surprised at the comparatively humane treatment they received from the American enemy." According to "Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power" by Mark Selden, the Americans "did not pursue a policy of torture, rape, and murder of civilians as Japanese military officials had warned."


title: United States war crimes

text: According to numerous academics, there were also 1,336 reported rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa prefecture after the Japanese surrender, however, Brian Walsh states that this claim originated from a misreading of crime figures and that the Japanese Government had actually recorded 1,326 criminal incidents of all types involving American forces, of which an unspecified number were rapes.


title: United States war crimes

text: In the Laconia incident, U.S. aircraft attacked Germans rescuing survivors from the sinking British troopship in the Atlantic Ocean. Pilots of a United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) B-24 Liberator bomber, despite knowing the U-boat's location, intentions, and the presence of British seamen, killed dozens of "Laconia"'s survivors with bombs and strafing attacks, forcing "U-156" to cast its remaining survivors into the sea and crash dive to avoid being destroyed.


title: United States war crimes

text: During the Allied invasion of Sicily, some massacres of civilians by US troops were reported, including the Vittoria one, where 12 Italians died (including a 17-year-old boy), and in Piano Stella, where a group of peasants was murdered.


title: United States war crimes

text: The "Canicattì massacre" involved the killing of Italian civilians by Lieutenant Colonel George Herbert McCaffrey; a confidential inquiry was made, but McCaffrey was never charged with any offense relating to the massacre. He died in 1954. This fact remained virtually unknown in the U.S. until 2005, when Joseph S. Salemi of New York University, whose father witnessed it, reported it.


title: United States war crimes

text: In the "Biscari massacre", which consisted of two instances of mass murder, U.S. troops of the 45th Infantry Division killed 73 prisoners of war, mostly Italian.


title: United States war crimes

text: According to an article in "Der Spiegel" by Klaus Wiegrefe, many personal memoirs of Allied soldiers have been wilfully ignored by historians until now because they were at odds with the "greatest generation" mythology surrounding World War II. However, this has recently started to change, with books such as "The Day of Battle", by Rick Atkinson, in which he describes Allied war crimes in Italy, and "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy", by Antony Beevor. Beevor's latest work suggests that Allied war crimes in Normandy were much more extensive "than was previously realized".


title: United States war crimes

text: Historian Peter Lieb has found that many U.S. and Canadian units were ordered not to take enemy prisoners during the D-Day landings in Normandy. If this view is correct, it may explain the fate of 64 German prisoners (out of the 130 captured) who did not make it to the POW collecting point on Omaha Beach on the day of the landings.


title: United States war crimes

text: Near the French village of Audouville-la-Hubert, 30 "Wehrmacht" prisoners were massacred by U.S. paratroopers.


title: United States war crimes

text: In the aftermath of the 1944 Malmedy massacre, in which 80 American POWs were murdered by their German captors, a written order from the headquarters of the 328th U.S. Army Infantry Regiment, dated 21 December 1944, stated: "No SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoner but [rather they] will be shot on sight." Major-General Raymond Hufft (U.S. Army) gave instructions to his troops not to take prisoners when they crossed the Rhine in 1945. "After the war, when he reflected on the war crimes he authorized, he admitted, 'if the Germans had won, I would have been on trial at Nuremberg instead of them. Stephen Ambrose related: "I've interviewed well over 1000 combat veterans. Only one of them said he shot a prisoner ... Perhaps as many as one-third of the veterans...however, related incidents in which they saw other GIs shooting unarmed German prisoners who had their hands up."


title: United States war crimes

text: In the "Chenogne massacre" during the Battle of the Bulge on January 1, 1945, members of the 11th Armored Division killed an estimated 80 German prisoners of war, which were assembled in a field and shot with machine guns. The events were covered up at the time, and none of the perpetrators were ever punished. Postwar historians believe the killings were carried out on verbal orders by senior commanders that "no prisoners were to be taken". General George S. Patton confirmed in his diary that the Americans "...also murdered 50 odd German med [sic]. I hope we can conceal this".


title: United States war crimes

text: "Operation Teardrop" involved eight surviving captured crewmen from the sunken German submarine "U-546" being tortured by U.S. military personnel. Historian Philip K. Lundeberg has written that the beating and torture of "U-546's" survivors was a singular atrocity motivated by the interrogators' need to quickly get information on what the U.S. believed were potential missile attacks on the contiguous United States by German submarines.


title: United States war crimes

text: Among American WWII veterans who admitted to having committed war crimes was former Mafia hitman Frank Sheeran. In interviews with his biographer Charles Brandt, Sheeran recalled his war service with the Thunderbird Division as the time when he first developed a callousness to the taking of human life. By his own admission, Sheeran participated in numerous massacres and summary executions of German POWs, acts which violated the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the 1929 Geneva Convention on POWs. In his interviews with Brandt, Sheeran divided such massacres into four different categories.


title: United States war crimes

text: Secret wartime files made public only in 2006 reveal that American GIs committed 400 sexual offenses in Europe, including 126 rapes in England, between 1942 and 1945. A study by Robert J. Lilly estimates that a total of 14,000 civilian women in England, France and Germany were raped by American GIs during World War II. He estimates that there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war. Historian William Hitchcock states that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common.


title: United States war crimes

text: The No Gun Ri massacre refers to an incident of mass killing of an undetermined number of South Korean refugees by U.S. soldiers of the 7th Cavalry Regiment (and in a U.S. air attack) between 26 and 29 July 1950 at a railroad bridge near the village of Nogeun-ri, southeast of Seoul. In 2005, the South Korean government certified the names of 163 dead or missing (mostly women, children, and old men) and 55 wounded. It said that many other victims' names were not reported. The South Korean government-funded No Gun Ri Peace Foundation estimated in 2011 that 250–300 were killed. Over the years survivors' estimates of the dead have ranged from 300 to 500. This episode early in the Korean War gained widespread attention when the Associated Press (AP) published a series of articles in 1999 that subsequently won a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.


title: United States war crimes

text: RJ Rummel estimated that American forces killed around 5,500 people in democide between 1960 and 1972 in the Vietnam War, from a range of between 4,000 and 10,000. Benjamin Valentino estimates 110,000–310,000 deaths as a "possible case" of "counter-guerrilla mass killings" by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces during the war. During the war, 95 U.S. Army personnel and 27 U.S. Marine Corps personnel were convicted by court-martial of the murder or manslaughter of Vietnamese.


title: United States war crimes

text: U.S. forces also established numerous free-fire zones as a tactic to prevent Viet Cong fighters from sheltering in South Vietnamese villages. Such practice, which involved the assumption that any individual appearing in the designated zones was an enemy combatant that could be freely targeted by weapons, is regarded by journalist Lewis M. Simons as "a severe violation of the laws of war". Nick Turse, in his 2013 book, "Kill Anything that Moves", argues that a relentless drive toward higher body counts, a widespread use of free-fire zones, rules of engagement where civilians who ran from soldiers or helicopters could be viewed as Viet Cong and a widespread disdain for Vietnamese civilians led to massive civilian casualties and endemic war crimes inflicted by U.S. troops.


title: United States war crimes

text: The My Lai massacre was the mass murder of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam, almost entirely civilians, most of them women and children, conducted by U.S. soldiers from the Company C of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the 23rd (American) Infantry Division, on 16 March 1968. Some of the victims were raped, beaten, tortured, or maimed, and some of the bodies were found mutilated. The massacre took place in the hamlets of Mỹ Lai and My Khe of Sơn Mỹ village during the Vietnam War. Of the 26 U.S. soldiers initially charged with criminal offenses or war crimes for actions at My Lai, only William Calley was convicted. Initially sentenced to life in prison, Calley had his sentence reduced to ten years, then was released after only three and a half years under house arrest.


title: United States war crimes

text: The incident prompted widespread outrage around the world, and reduced U.S. domestic support for the Vietnam War. Three American Servicemen (Hugh Thompson, Jr., Glenn Andreotta, and Lawrence Colburn), who made an effort to halt the massacre and protect the wounded, were sharply criticized by U.S. Congressmen, and received hate mail, death threats, and mutilated animals on their doorsteps. Thirty years after the event their efforts were honored.


title: United States war crimes

text: Following the massacre a Pentagon task force called the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group (VWCWG) investigated alleged atrocities by U.S. troops against South Vietnamese civilians and created a formerly secret archive of some 9,000 pages (the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group Files housed by the National Archives and Records Administration) documenting 320 alleged incidents from 1967 to 1971 including 7 massacres (not including the My Lai Massacre) in which at least 137 civilians died; 78 additional attacks targeting noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded and 15 sexually assaulted; and 141 incidents of U.S. soldiers torturing civilian detainees or prisoners of war. 203 U.S. personnel were charged with crimes, 57 were court-martialed and 23 were convicted. The VWCWG also investigated over 500 additional alleged atrocities but could not verify them.


title: United States war crimes

text: Operation Speedy Express was a controversial military operation aimed at pacifying large parts of the Mekong delta from December 1968 to May 1969. The U.S. Army claimed 10,899 PAVN/VC were killed in the operation, while the US Army Inspector General estimated that there were 5,000 to 7,000 civilian deaths from the operation. Robert Kaylor of United Press International alleged that according to American pacification advisers in the Mekong Delta during the operation the division had indulged in the "wanton killing" of civilians through the "indiscriminate use of mass firepower."


title: United States war crimes

text: The Phoenix Program was coordinated by the CIA, involving South Vietnamese, US and other allied security forces, with the aim identifying and destroying the Viet Cong (VC) through infiltration, torture, capture, counter-terrorism, interrogation, and assassination. The program was heavily criticized, with critics labeling it a "civilian assassination program" and criticizing the operation's use of torture.


title: United States war crimes

text: Tiger Force was the name of a long-range reconnaissance patrol unit of the 1st Battalion (Airborne), 327th Infantry, 1st Brigade (Separate), 101st Airborne Division, which fought from November 1965 to November 1967. The unit gained notoriety after investigations during the course of the war and decades afterwards revealed extensive war crimes against civilians, which numbered into the hundreds. They were accused of routine torture, execution of prisoners and the intentional killing of civilians. US army investigators concluded that many of the alleged war crimes took place.


title: United States war crimes

text: On 12 August 1965 Lcpl McGhee of Company M, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, walked through Marine lines at Chu Lai Base Area toward a nearby village. In answer to a Marine sentry's shouted question, he responded that he was going after a VC. Two Marines were dispatched to retrieve McGhee and as they approached the village they heard a shot and a woman's scream and then saw McGhee walking toward them from the village. McGhee said he had just killed a VC and other VC were following him. At trial Vietnamese prosecution witnesses testified that McGhee had kicked through the wall of the hut where their family slept. He seized a 14-year-old girl and pulled her toward the door. When her father interceded, McGhee shot and killed him. Once outside the house the girl escaped McGhee with the help of her grandmother. McGhee was found guilty of unpremeditated murder and sentenced him to confinement at hard labor for ten years. On appeal this was reduced to 7 years and he actually served 6 years and 1 month.


title: United States war crimes

text: On 23 September 1966, a nine-man ambush patrol from the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, left Hill 22, northwest of Chu Lai. Private First Class John D. Potter, Jr. took effective command of the patrol. They entered the hamlet of Xuan Ngoc (2) and seized Dao Quang Thinh, whom they accused of being a Viet Cong, and dragged him from his hut. While they beat him, other patrol members forced his wife, Bui Thi Huong, from their hut and four of them raped her. A few minutes later three other patrol members shot Dao Quang Thinh, Bui, their child, Bui's sister-in-law, and her sister in- law's child. Bui Thi Huong survived to testify at the courts-martial. The company commander suspicious of the reported "enemy contact" sent Second Lieutenant Stephen J. Talty, to return to the scene with the patrol. Once there, Talty realized what had happened and attempted to cover up the incident. A wounded child was discovered alive and Potter bludgeoned it to death with his rifle. Potter was convicted of premeditated murder and rape, and sentenced to confinement at hard labor for life, but was released in February 1978, having served 12 years and 1 month. Hospitalman John R. Bretag testified against Potter and was sentenced to 6 month's confinement for rape. PFC James H. Boyd, Jr., pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 4 years confinement at hard labor. Sergeant Ronald L. Vogel was convicted for murder of one of the children and rape and was sentenced to 50 years confinement at hard labor, which was reduced on appeal to 10 years, of which he served 9 years. Two patrol members were acquitted of major charges, but were convicted of assault with intent to commit rape and sentenced to 6 months' confinement. Lt Talty was found guilty of making a false report and dismissed from the Marine Corps, but this was overturned on appeal.


title: United States war crimes

text: PFC Charles W. Keenan was convicted of murder by firing at point-blank range into an unarmed, elderly Vietnamese woman, and an unarmed Vietnamese man. His life sentence was reduced to 25 years confinement. Upon appeal, the conviction for the woman's murder was dismissed and confinement was reduced to five years. Later clemency action further reduced his confinement to 2 years and 9 months. Corporal Stanley J. Luczko, was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to confinement for three years


title: United States war crimes

text: From 31 January to 1 February 1967, 145 civilians were purported to have been killed by Company H, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, during the Thuy Bo incident. Marine accounts record 101 Viet Cong and 22 civilians killed during a 2-day battle.


title: United States war crimes

text: On 5 May 1968, Lcpl Denzil R. Allen led a six-man ambush patrol from the 1st Battalion, 27th Marines near Huế. They stopped and interrogated two unarmed Vietnamese men who Allen and Private Martin R. Alvarez then executed. After an attack on their base that night the unit sent out a patrol who brought back three Vietnamese men. Allen, Alvarez, Lance Corporals John D. Belknap, James A. Maushart, PFC Robert J. Vickers, and two others then formed a firing squad and executed two of the Vietnamese. The third captive was taken into a building where Allen, Belknap, and Anthony Licciardo, Jr., hanged him, when the rope broke Allen cut the man's throat, killing him. Allen pleaded guilty to five counts of unpremeditated murder and was sentenced to confinement at hard labor for life reduced to 20 years in exchange for the guilty plea. Allen's confinement was reduced to 7 years and he was paroled after having served only 2 years and 11 months confinement. Maushart pleaded guilty to one count of unpremeditated murder and was sentenced to 2 years confinement of which he served 1 year and 8 months. Belknap and Licciardo each pleaded guilty to single murders and were sentenced to 2 years confinement. Belknap served 15 months while Licciardo served his full sentence. Alvarez was found to lack mental responsibility and found not guilty. Vickers was found guilty of two counts of unpremeditated murder, but his convictions were overturned on review


title: United States war crimes

text: On the morning of 1 March 1969 an eight-man Marine ambush was discovered by three Vietnamese girls, aged about 13, 17, and 19, and a Vietnamese boy, about 11. The four shouted their discovery to those being observed by the ambush. Seized by the Marines, the four were bound, gagged, and led away by Corporal Ronald J. Reese and Lance Corporal Stephen D. Crider. Minutes later, the 4 children were seen, apparently dead, in a small bunker. The Marines tossed a fragmentation grenade into the bunker, which then collapsed the damaged structure atop the bodies. Reese and Crider were each convicted of four counts of murder and sentenced to confinement at hard labor for life. On appeal both sentences were reduced to 3 years confinement.


title: United States war crimes

text: On February 19, 1970, during the Son Thang massacre, 16 unarmed women and children were killed in the Son Thang Hamlet by Company B, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines. One person was sentenced to life in prison, another sentenced to 5 years, but both sentences were reduced to less than a year. with those killed reported as enemy combatant.


title: United States war crimes

text: On 2 June 1971, Brigadier General John W. Donaldson was charged with the murder of six Vietnamese civilians but was acquitted due to lack of evidence. In 13 separate incidents Donaldson was alleged to have flown over civilian areas shooting at civilians. He was the first U.S. general charged with war crimes since General Jacob H. Smith in 1902 and the highest ranking American to be accused of war crimes during the Vietnam War. The charges were dropped due to lack of evidence.


title: United States war crimes

text: In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001, the U.S. Government adopted several new measures in the classification and treatment of prisoners captured in the War on Terror, including applying the status of unlawful combatant to some prisoners, conducting extraordinary renditions and using torture ("enhanced interrogation techniques"). Human Rights Watch and others described the measures as being illegal under the Geneva Conventions. The torture of detainees was extensively detailed in the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture.


title: United States war crimes

text: A presidential memorandum of February 7, 2002, authorized U.S. interrogators of prisoners captured during the War in Afghanistan to deny the prisoners basic protections required by the Geneva Conventions, and thus according to Jordan J. Paust, professor of law and formerly a member of the faculty of the Judge Advocate General's School, "necessarily authorized and ordered violations of the Geneva Conventions, which are war crimes." Based on the president's memorandum, U.S. personnel carried out cruel and inhumane treatment on captured enemy fighters, which necessarily means that the president's memorandum was a plan to violate the Geneva Convention, and such a plan constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, according to Professor Paust.


title: United States war crimes

text: U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others have argued that detainees should be considered "unlawful combatants" and as such not be protected by the Geneva Conventions in multiple memoranda regarding these perceived legal gray areas.


title: United States war crimes

text: Gonzales' statement that denying coverage under the Geneva Conventions "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act" suggests, to some authors, an awareness by those involved in crafting policies in this area that U.S. officials are involved in acts that could be seen to be war crimes. The U.S. Supreme Court challenged the premise on which this argument is based in "Hamdan v. Rumsfeld", in which it ruled that Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions applies to detainees in Guantanamo Bay and that the military tribunals used to try these suspects were in violation of U.S. and international law.


title: United States war crimes

text: Human Rights Watch claimed in 2005 that the principle of "command responsibility" could make high-ranking officials within the Bush administration guilty of the numerous war crimes committed during the War on Terror, either with their knowledge or by persons under their control. On April 14, 2006, Human Rights Watch said that Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could be criminally liable for his alleged involvement in the abuse of Mohammed al-Qahtani. On November 14, 2006, invoking universal jurisdiction, legal proceedings were started in Germany—for their alleged involvement of prisoner abuse—against Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, George Tenet and others.


title: United States war crimes

text: The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is seen by some as an amnesty law for crimes committed in the War on Terror by retroactively rewriting the War Crimes Act and by abolishing "habeas corpus", effectively making it impossible for detainees to challenge crimes committed against them.


title: United States war crimes

text: Luis Moreno-Ocampo told "The Sunday Telegraph" in 2007 that he was willing to start an inquiry by the International Criminal Court (ICC), and possibly a trial, for war crimes committed in Iraq involving British Prime Minister Tony Blair and American President George W. Bush. Though under the Rome Statute, the ICC has no jurisdiction over Bush, since the U.S. is not a State Party to the relevant treaty—unless Bush were accused of crimes inside a State Party, or the UN Security Council (where the U.S. has a veto) requested an investigation. However, Blair does fall under ICC jurisdiction as Britain is a State Party.


title: United States war crimes

text: Shortly before the end of President Bush's second term in 2009, news media in countries other than the U.S. began publishing the views of those who believe that under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, the U.S. is obligated to hold those responsible for prisoner abuse to account under criminal law. One proponent of this view was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (Professor Manfred Nowak) who, on January 20, 2009, remarked on German television that former president George W. Bush had lost his head of state immunity and under international law the U.S. would now be mandated to start criminal proceedings against all those involved in these violations of the UN Convention Against Torture. Law professor Dietmar Herz explained Nowak's comments by opining that under U.S. and international law former President Bush is criminally responsible for adopting torture as an interrogation tool.


title: United States war crimes

text: In 2005, "The New York Times" obtained a 2,000-page United States Army investigatory report concerning the homicides of two unarmed civilian Afghan prisoners by U.S. military personnel in December 2002 at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility (also "Bagram Collection Point" or "B.C.P.") in Bagram, Afghanistan and general treatment of prisoners. The two prisoners, Habibullah and Dilawar, were repeatedly chained to the ceiling and beaten, resulting in their deaths. Military coroners ruled that both the prisoners' deaths were homicides. Autopsies revealed severe trauma to both prisoners' legs, describing the trauma as comparable to being run over by a bus. Seven soldiers were charged in 2005.


title: United States war crimes

text: The Maywand District murders involved the killing of three Afghan civilians by a group of soldiers during the period June 2009 to June 2010. The soldiers referred to their group as "Kill Team" and were members the 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, and 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. They were based at FOB Ramrod in Maiwand, from Kandahar Province of Afghanistan. During the summer of 2010, the military charged five members of the platoon with the murders of three Afghan civilians in Kandahar Province and collecting their body parts as trophies.


title: United States war crimes

text: The Kandahar massacre was a mass murder that occurred in the early hours of 11 March 2012, when Staff Sergeant Robert Bales killed 16 Afghan civilians and wounded six others in the Panjwayi District of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Nine of the victims were children, and eleven of the dead were from the same family. Bales was taken into custody later that morning when he confessed to authorities that he had committed the murders.


title: United States war crimes

text: First Lieutenant Clint Lorance was an infantry platoon leader in the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division. In 2012, Lorance was charged with two counts of unpremeditated murder after he ordered his soldiers to open fire on three Afghan men who were on a motorcycle. He was found guilty by a court-martial in 2013 and sentenced to 20 years in prison (later reduced to 19 years by the reviewing commanding general). He was confined in the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas for six years. Lorance was eventually pardoned by President Donald Trump on November 15, 2019.


title: United States war crimes

text: During the early stages of the Iraq War, a group of soldiers committed a series of human rights violations including physical and sexual abuse against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The abuses came to public attention with the publication of photographs of the abuse by CBS News in April 2004. The incidents caused shock and outrage, receiving widespread condemnation within the United States and internationally. The Department of Defense charged eleven soldiers with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault and battery. Between May 2004 and April 2006, these soldiers were court-martialed, convicted, sentenced to military prison, and dishonorably discharged from service. Two soldiers, found to have perpetrated many of the worst offenses at the prison, Charles Graner and Lynndie England, were subject to more severe charges and received harsher sentences. Graner was convicted of assault, battery, conspiracy, maltreatment of detainees, committing indecent acts and dereliction of duty; he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and loss of rank, pay and benefits. England was convicted of conspiracy, maltreating detainees and committing an indecent act and sentenced to three years in prison. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commanding officer of all detention facilities in Iraq, was reprimanded and demoted to the rank of colonel.. Several more military personnel who were accused of perpetrating or authorizing the measures, including many of higher rank, were not prosecuted. In 2004, President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld apologized for the Abu Ghraib abuses.


title: United States war crimes

text: On March 12, 2006, a 14-year-old Iraqi girl named Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi was raped and subsequently murdered along her 34-year-old mother Fakhriyah Taha Muhasen, 45-year-old father Qassim Hamza Raheem, and 6-year-old sister Hadeel Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. The killings took place in the family home in Yusufiyah, a village to the west of the town of Al-Mahmudiyah, Iraq. Five soldiers from the 502nd Infantry Regiment were charged with rape and murder: Paul E. Cortez, James P. Barker, Jesse V. Spielman, Bryan L. Howard, and Steven Dale Green. Green was discharged from the U.S. Army for mental instability before the crimes were known by his command, whereas Cortez, Barker, Spielman and Howard were tried by a military court martial, convicted, and sentenced to decades in prison. Green was tried and convicted in a United States civilian court and was sentenced to life in prison, but committed suicide in prison in 2014.


title: United States war crimes

text: John E. Hatley was a first sergeant who was prosecuted by the Army in 2008 for murdering four Iraqi detainees near Baghdad, Iraq in 2006. He was convicted in 2009 and sentenced to life in prison at the Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks. He was released on parole in October 2020.


title: United States war crimes

text: The Hamdania incident involved the alleged kidnapping and subsequent murder of an Iraqi man by United States Marines on April 26, 2006, in Al Hamdania, a small village west of Baghdad near Abu Ghraib. An investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service resulted in charges of murder, kidnapping, housebreaking, larceny, Obstruction of Justice and conspiracy associated with the alleged coverup of the incident.


title: United States war crimes

text: The Haditha massacre occurred on November 19, 2005, in Haditha, Iraq. After Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas (20 years old) was killed by a roadside improvised explosive device, Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich led Marines from the 3rd battalion into Haditha. 24 Iraqi women and children were fatally shot. Wuterich acknowledged in military court that he gave his men the order to "shoot first, ask questions later" after the roadside bomb explosion. Wuterich told military judge Lt. Col. David Jones "I never fired my weapon at any women or children that day." On January 24, 2012, Frank Wuterich was given a sentence of 90 days in prison along with a reduction in rank and pay. The day prior, Wuterich pled guilty to one count of negligent dereliction of duty. No other marine that was involved that day was sentenced to any jail time. For the massacre, the Marine Corps paid $38,000 total to the families of 15 of the dead civilians.


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: "Rip Van Winkle" is a short story by the American author Washington Irving, first published in 1819. It follows a Dutch-American villager in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who meets mysterious Dutchmen, imbibes their liquor and falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains. He awakes 20 years later to a very changed world, having missed the American Revolution.


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: Irving, inspired by a conversation on nostalgia with his American expatriate brother-in-law, wrote his story while temporarily living in Birmingham, England. It was published in his collection, "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent." While the story is set in New York's Catskill Mountains near where Irving later took up residence, he admitted, "When I wrote the story, I had never been on the Catskills."


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: Rip Van Winkle, a Dutch-American man with a habit of avoiding useful work, lives in a village at the foot of New York's Catskill Mountains in the years before the American Revolution. One autumn day, he goes squirrel hunting in the mountains with his dog Wolf to escape his wife's nagging. As evening falls, he hears a voice calling his name and finds a man dressed in antiquated Dutch clothing and carrying a keg. Rip helps the man carry his burden to a cleft in the rocks from which thunderous noises are emanating; the source proves to be a group of ornately dressed and bearded men playing nine-pins. Not asking who these men are or how they know his name, Rip joins them in drinking from the keg he has helped carry and soon becomes so intoxicated that he falls asleep.


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: Rip awakens on a sunny morning, at the spot where he first saw the keg-carrier, and finds that many drastic changes have occurred; his beard is a foot long and has turned gray, his musket is badly deteriorated, and Wolf is nowhere to be found. Returning to his village, he discovers it to be larger than he remembers and filled with people in unfamiliar clothing, none of whom recognize him. When asked how he voted in the election that has just been held, he declares himself a loyal subject of King George III, unaware that the American Revolution has taken place in his absence. He learns that many of his old friends were either killed in the war or have left the village, and is disturbed to find a young man who shares his name, mannerisms, and younger appearance. A young woman states that her father is Rip Van Winkle, who has been missing for 20 years, and an old woman recognizes him as Rip. The young woman and the young Rip are his children, and the former has named her infant son after him as well.


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: Rip discovers that his wife has been dead for some time, but is not saddened by the news. He learns that the men whom he met in the mountains are rumored to be ghosts of the crew of the "Halve Maen" ("Half-Moon"), captained by English sea explorer Henry Hudson. His daughter takes him into her home, and he soon resumes his usual idleness and begins telling his story to every stranger who visits the village. The tale is solemnly taken to heart by the Dutch settlers, particularly by the children who say that, whenever thunder is heard, the men in the mountains must be playing nine-pins.


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: After a failed business venture with his brothers, Irving filed for bankruptcy in 1818. Despondent, he turned to writing for possible financial support, although he had difficulty thinking of stories to write. He stayed in Birmingham, England, where his brother-in-law Henry Van Wart had opened a trading firm. The two were reminiscing in June 1818 when Irving was suddenly inspired by their nostalgic conversation. Irving locked himself in his room and wrote non-stop all night. As he said, he felt like a man waking from a long sleep. He presented the first draft of "Rip Van Winkle" to the Van Wart family over breakfast.


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: "Rip Van Winkle" was one of the first stories Irving proposed for his new book, "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent." Irving asked his brother Ebeneezer to assist with publication in the United States. As Irving wrote, "I shall feel very anxious to hear of the success of this first re-appearance on the literary stage – Should it be successful, I trust I shall be able henceforth to keep up an occasional fire." A British edition was published shortly afterward, by John Miller, who went out of business immediately thereafter. With help from his friend Walter Scott, Irving was able to convince John Murray to take over British publication of the "Sketch Book".


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: Following the success of Rip Van Winkle in print and on stage, later celebrated editions were illustrated by Arthur (Heinemann, 1905) and N.C. Wyeth (McKay, 1921).


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: One story in Judaism concerns Honi HaMe'agel, a miracle-working sage of the 1st century BC, who was a historical character but to whom various myths were attached. While traveling one day, Honi saw a man planting a carob tree and asked him about it. The man explained that the tree would take 70 years to bear fruit, and that he was planting it not for himself but for the generations to follow him. Later that day, Honi sat down to rest but fell asleep for 70 years; when he awoke, he saw a man picking fruit from a fully mature carob tree. Asked whether he had planted it, the man replied that he had not, but that his grandfather had planted it for him.


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: In Christian tradition, there is a similar, well-known story of "The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus", which recounts a group of early Christians who hid in a cave circa 250 AD, to escape the persecution of Christians during the reign of the Roman emperor Decius. They fell into a miraculous sleep and woke some 200 years later during the reign of Theodosius II, to discover that the city and the whole Empire had become Christian. This Christian story is recounted by Islam and appears in a famous Sura of the Quran, Sura Al-Kahf. The version recalls a group of young monotheists escaping from persecution within a cave and emerging hundreds of years later.


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: Another similar story in the Islamic tradition is of Uzair (usually identified with the Biblical Ezra) whose grief at the Destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians was so great that God took his soul and brought him back to life after Jerusalem was reconstructed. He rode on his revived donkey and entered his native place. But the people did not recognize him, nor did his household, except the maid, who was now an old blind woman. He prayed to God to cure her blindness and she could see again. He meets his son who recognized him by a mole between his shoulders and was older than he was. (see Uzair#Islamic tradition and literature).


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, under which a person traveling at near light speed would experience only the passage of a few years but would return to find centuries had passed on Earth, provides a broad new scope to express essentially the same literary theme – for example, in the opening chapter of Ursula K. Le Guin's "Rocannon's World". In Robert Heinlein's "Time for the Stars", Earth sends out a fleet of relativistic ships to explore the galaxy, their crews hailed as stalwart pioneers – but after a century, which they experience as only a few years, faster-than-light ships are developed and the earlier ones are recalled, their crews discovering that they had become unwanted anachronisms on a changed Earth. The protagonist notices a newspaper headline disparagingly announcing the arrival of himself and his shipmates as "yet another crew of Rip Van Winkles".


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: In the tenth chapter of his book "Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers", the third-century AD Greek historian Diogenes Laërtius relates the story of the legendary sage Epimenides of Knossos, who was said to have been a shepherd on the island of Crete. One day, Epimenides followed after a sheep that had wandered off and, after becoming tired, went into a cave under Mount Ida and fell asleep. When he awoke, he continued searching for the sheep, but could not find it, so he returned to his father's farm, only to discover that it was under new ownership. He went home, only to discover that the people there did not know him. Finally, he encountered his younger brother, who had become an old man, and learned that he had been asleep in the cave for fifty-seven years. According to the different sources that Diogenes relates, Epimenides lived to be 154, 157, or 299 years old. Multiple sources have identified the story of Epimenides as the earliest known variant of the "Rip Van Winkle" fairy tale.


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: The story of "Rip Van Winkle" itself is widely thought to have been based on Johann Karl Christoph Nachtigal's German folktale "Peter Klaus", which is a shorter story set in a German village. It tells of a goatherd named Peter Klaus who goes looking for a lost goat. He finds some men drinking in the woods and, after drinking some of their wine, he falls asleep. When he wakes back up, twenty years have passed.


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: The story also bears some similarities to stories from East Asia, including the third century AD Chinese tale of "Ranka", as retold by Lionel Giles in "A Gallery of Chinese Immortals", and the eighth-century Japanese tale "Urashima Tarō". The Hindu story of Muchukunda from the "Bhagavatam" also displays many similarities to the story of "Rip Van Winkle".


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: The theme is taken up in numerous modern works of science fiction. In H. G. Wells's "The Sleeper Awakes", a man who sleeps for 203 years wakes up in a completely transformed London where he has become the richest man in the world. In the original Buck Rogers book, the protagonist falls asleep under the influence of a gas in a mine, sleeps for four centuries and wakes to find America under the rule of Mongol invaders – whereupon he places himself at the head of the freedom fighters. In Roger Zelazny's science-fantasy series "The Chronicles of Amber", protagonist Corwyn experiences drinking and revelry in an underground lair with otherworldly people who try to entice him into slumber; he knows this is a centuries-of-sleep trap and resists; the passage is similar in theme to both "Rip Van Winkle" and especially the Orkney story.


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: The story has been adapted for other media over the past two centuries, in cartoons, films, stage plays, music, and other media.


title: Rip Van Winkle

text: There is a [[Rip Van Winkle Statue (Irvington, New York)|statue of Rip Van Winkle]] in Irvington, New York.


title: Hathor

text: Hathor (, , , Meroitic: ) was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion who played a wide variety of roles. As a sky deity, she was the mother or consort of the sky god Horus and the sun god Ra, both of whom were connected with kingship, and thus she was the symbolic mother of their earthly representatives, the pharaohs. She was one of several goddesses who acted as the Eye of Ra, Ra's feminine counterpart, and in this form she had a vengeful aspect that protected him from his enemies. Her beneficent side represented music, dance, joy, love, sexuality, and maternal care, and she acted as the consort of several male deities and the mother of their sons. These two aspects of the goddess exemplified the Egyptian conception of femininity. Hathor crossed boundaries between worlds, helping deceased souls in the transition to the afterlife.


title: Hathor

text: Hathor was often depicted as a cow, symbolizing her maternal and celestial aspect, although her most common form was a woman wearing a headdress of cow horns and a sun disk. She could also be represented as a lioness, cobra, or sycamore tree.


title: Hathor

text: Cattle goddesses similar to Hathor were portrayed in Egyptian art in the fourth millennium BC, but she may not have appeared until the Old Kingdom (). With the patronage of Old Kingdom rulers she became one of Egypt's most important deities. More temples were dedicated to her than to any other goddess; her most prominent temple was Dendera in Upper Egypt. She was also worshipped in the temples of her male consorts. The Egyptians connected her with foreign lands such as Nubia and Canaan and their valuable goods, such as incense and semiprecious stones, and some of the peoples in those lands adopted her worship. In Egypt, she was one of the deities commonly invoked in private prayers and votive offerings, particularly by women desiring children.


title: Hathor

text: During the New Kingdom (), goddesses such as Mut and Isis encroached on Hathor's position in royal ideology, but she remained one of the most widely worshipped deities. After the end of the New Kingdom, Hathor was increasingly overshadowed by Isis, but she continued to be venerated until the extinction of ancient Egyptian religion in the early centuries AD.


title: Hathor

text: Images of cattle appear frequently in the artwork of Predynastic Egypt (before ), as do images of women with upraised, curved arms reminiscent of the shape of bovine horns. Both types of imagery may represent goddesses connected with cattle. Cows are venerated in many cultures, including ancient Egypt, as symbols of motherhood and nourishment, because they care for their calves and provide humans with milk. The Gerzeh Palette, a stone palette from the Naqada II period of prehistory (), shows the silhouette of a cow's head with inward-curving horns surrounded by stars. The palette suggests that this cow was also linked with the sky, as were several goddesses from later times who were represented in this form: Hathor, Mehet-Weret, and Nut.


title: Hathor

text: Despite these early precedents, Hathor is not unambiguously mentioned or depicted until the Fourth Dynasty () of the Old Kingdom, although several artifacts that refer to her may date to the Early Dynastic Period (). When Hathor does clearly appear, her horns curve outward, rather than inward like those in Predynastic art.


title: Hathor

text: A bovine deity with inward-curving horns appears on the Narmer Palette from near the start of Egyptian history, both atop the palette and on the belt or apron of the king, Narmer. The Egyptologist Henry George Fischer suggested this deity may be Bat, a goddess who was later depicted with a woman's face and inward-curling horns, seemingly reflecting the curve of the cow horns. The Egyptologist Lana Troy, however, identifies a passage in the Pyramid Texts from the late Old Kingdom that connects Hathor with the "apron" of the king, reminiscent of the goddess on Narmer's garments, and suggests the goddess on the Narmer Palette is Hathor rather than Bat.


title: Hathor

text: In the Fourth Dynasty, Hathor rose rapidly to prominence. She supplanted an early crocodile god who was worshipped at Dendera in Upper Egypt to become Dendera's patron deity, and she increasingly absorbed the cult of Bat in the neighboring region of Hu, so that in the Middle Kingdom () the two deities fused into one. The theology surrounding the pharaoh in the Old Kingdom, unlike that of earlier times, focused heavily on the sun god Ra as king of the gods and father and patron of the earthly king. Hathor ascended with Ra and became his mythological wife, and thus divine mother of the pharaoh.


title: Hathor

text: Hathor took many forms and appeared in a wide variety of roles. The Egyptologist Robyn Gillam suggests that these diverse forms emerged when the royal goddess promoted by the Old Kingdom court subsumed many local goddesses worshipped by the general populace, who were then treated as manifestations of her. Egyptian texts often speak of the manifestations of the goddess as "Seven Hathors" or, less commonly, of many more Hathors—as many as 362. For these reasons, Gillam calls her "a type of deity rather than a single entity". Hathor's diversity reflects the range of traits that the Egyptians associated with goddesses. More than any other deity, she exemplifies the Egyptian perception of femininity.


title: Hathor

text: Hathor was given the epithets "mistress of the sky" and "mistress of the stars", and was said to dwell in the sky with Ra and other sun deities. Egyptians thought of the sky as a body of water through which the sun god sailed, and they connected it with the waters from which, according to their creation myths, the sun emerged at the beginning of time. This cosmic mother goddess was often represented as a cow. Hathor and Mehet-Weret were both thought of as the cow who birthed the sun god and placed him between her horns. Like Nut, Hathor was said to give birth to the sun god each dawn.


title: Hathor

text: Hathor's Egyptian name was "ḥwt-ḥrw" or "ḥwt-ḥr". It is typically translated "house of Horus" but can also be rendered as "my house is the sky". The falcon god Horus represented, among other things, the sun and sky. The "house" referred to may be the sky in which Horus lives, or the goddess's womb from which he, as a sun god, is born each day.


title: Hathor

text: Hathor was a solar deity, a feminine counterpart to sun gods such as Horus and Ra, and was a member of the divine entourage that accompanied Ra as he sailed through the sky in his barque. She was commonly called the "Golden One", referring to the radiance of the sun, and texts from her temple at Dendera say "her rays illuminate the whole earth." She was sometimes fused with another goddess, Nebethetepet, whose name can mean "Lady of the Offering", "Lady of Contentment", or "Lady of the Vulva". At Ra's cult center of Heliopolis, Hathor-Nebethetepet was worshipped as his consort, and the Egyptologist Rudolf Anthes argued that Hathor's name referred to a mythical "house of Horus" at Heliopolis that was connected with the ideology of kingship.


title: Hathor

text: She was one of many goddesses to take the role of the Eye of Ra, a feminine personification of the disk of the sun and an extension of Ra's own power. Ra was sometimes portrayed inside the disk, which Troy interprets as meaning that the eye goddess was thought of as a womb from which the sun god was born. Hathor's seemingly contradictory roles as mother, wife, and daughter of Ra reflected the daily cycle of the sun. At sunset the god entered the body of the sky goddess, impregnating her and fathering the deities born from her womb at sunrise: himself and the eye goddess, who would later give birth to him. Ra gave rise to his daughter, the eye goddess, who in turn gave rise to him, her son, in a cycle of constant regeneration.


title: Hathor

text: The Eye of Ra protected the sun god from his enemies and was often represented as a uraeus, or rearing cobra, or as a lioness. A form of the Eye of Ra known as "Hathor of the Four Faces", represented by a set of four cobras, was said to face in each of the cardinal directions to watch for threats to the sun god. A group of myths, known from the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC) onward, describe what happens when the Eye goddess rampages uncontrolled. In the funerary text known as the "Book of the Heavenly Cow", Ra sends Hathor as the Eye of Ra to punish humans for plotting rebellion against his rule. She becomes the lioness goddess Sekhmet and massacres the rebellious humans, but Ra decides to prevent her from killing all humanity. He orders that beer be dyed red and poured out over the land. The Eye goddess drinks the beer, mistaking it for blood, and in her inebriated state reverts to being the benign and beautiful Hathor. Related to this story is the myth of the Distant Goddess, from the Late and Ptolemaic periods. The Eye goddess, sometimes in the form of Hathor, rebels against Ra's control and rampages freely in a foreign land: Libya west of Egypt or Nubia to the south. Weakened by the loss of his Eye, Ra sends another god, such as Thoth, to bring her back to him. Once pacified, the goddess returns to become the consort of the sun god or of the god who brings her back. The two aspects of the Eye goddess—violent and dangerous versus beautiful and joyful—reflected the Egyptian belief that women, as the Egyptologist Carolyn Graves-Brown puts it, "encompassed both extreme passions of fury and love".


title: Hathor

text: Egyptian religion celebrated the sensory pleasures of life, believed to be among the gods' gifts to humanity. Egyptians ate, drank, danced, and played music at their religious festivals. They perfumed the air with flowers and incense. Many of Hathor's epithets link her to celebration; she is called the mistress of music, dance, garlands, myrrh, and drunkenness. In hymns and temple reliefs, musicians play tambourines, harps, lyres, and sistra in Hathor's honor. The sistrum, a rattle-like instrument, was particularly important in Hathor's worship. Sistra had erotic connotations and, by extension, alluded to the creation of new life.


title: Hathor

text: These aspects of Hathor were linked with the myth of the Eye of Ra. The Eye was pacified by beer in the story of the Destruction of Mankind. In some versions of the Distant Goddess myth, the wandering Eye's wildness abated when she was appeased with products of civilization like music, dance, and wine. The water of the annual flooding of the Nile, colored red by sediment, was likened to wine, and to the red-dyed beer in the Destruction of Mankind. Festivals during the inundation therefore incorporated drink, music, and dance as a way to appease the returning goddess. A text from the Temple of Edfu says of Hathor, "the gods play the sistrum for her, the goddesses dance for her to dispel her bad temper." A hymn to the goddess Raet-Tawy as a form of Hathor at the temple of Medamud describes the Festival of Drunkenness (Tekh Festival) as part of her mythic return to Egypt. Women carry bouquets of flowers, drunken revelers play drums, and people and animals from foreign lands dance for her as she enters the temple's festival booth. The noise of the celebration drives away hostile powers and ensures the goddess will remain in her joyful form as she awaits the male god of the temple, her mythological consort Montu, whose son she will bear.


title: Hathor

text: Hathor's joyful, ecstatic side indicates her feminine, procreative power. In some creation myths she helped produce the world itself. Atum, a creator god who contained all things within himself, was said to have produced his children Shu and Tefnut, and thus begun the process of creation, by masturbating. The hand he used for this act, the Hand of Atum, represented the female aspect of himself and could be personified by Hathor, Nebethetepet, or another goddess, Iusaaset. In a late creation myth from the Ptolemaic Period (332–30 BC), the god Khonsu is put in a central role, and Hathor is the goddess with whom Khonsu mates to enable creation.


title: Hathor

text: Hathor could be the consort of many male gods, of whom Ra was only the most prominent. Mut was the usual consort of Amun, the preeminent deity during the New Kingdom who was often linked with Ra. But Mut was rarely portrayed alongside Amun in contexts related to sex or fertility, and in those circumstances, Hathor or Isis stood at his side instead. In the late periods of Egyptian history, the form of Hathor from Dendera and the form of Horus from Edfu were considered husband and wife and in different versions of the myth of the Distant Goddess, Hathor-Raettawy was the consort of Montu and Hathor-Tefnut the consort of Shu.