U.S. Not Prepared To Declare Russia State Sponsor of Terrorism

Dec. 4, 2022 (EIRNS)—CNN’s Jake Tapper took the opportunity to interview Secretary of State Tony Blinken asking to why the Biden Administration is not prepared to declare Russia a “state sponsor of terrorism” as a result of its bombing of Ukrainian power plants and the electricity grid. Blinken said such a designation had consequences whose effects are predictable, but that he would be talking with his members in Congress with regard to measures to take against Russia. The question was posed in terms of  “Putin” (as if that were the Russian Federation) trying

“to erase Ukraine from the map, erase its identity, subsume it back into Russia—that failed.  Then he engaged in a land grab in eastern Ukraine and southern Ukraine—that’s been failing.... Now, to your point, what he’s doing is trying to weaponize winter—turn out the lights, turn off the heat, put the Ukrainian people into darkness and cold just as they head into the winter months.”

However, as even Putin has said, the Russian special military operation is carefully striking only infrastructure that the Kiev regime uses to deploy the weapons NATO has given it, and the number of civilian deaths is generally reduced to stemming from misfired Ukrainian counter-missiles striking apartment buildings and the like.

However, from the standpoint of civilian deaths from war crimes, the first criminal would be the late British Gen. Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who authored the fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945. The city was not a military target, and in fact, a number of American POWs, including one Kurt Vonnegut, were housed by the Germans in the meat locker of an underground Dresden abattoir, allowing them to survive. Vonnegut’s description of the city, in which some 130,000 died, leaves no doubt that the fire-bombing was a war crime and a crime against humanity. Similarly U.S. Gen. Curtis LeMay’s March 1945 fire-bombing of Tokyo. Still, heading up the list would be President Harry Truman for his nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.