Nr. 20

On this eve of the September 11, 2001 tragedy when two airplanes hit two buildings unleashing indescribable suffering and deaths of thousands of innocent people, there is an imperative for all of us to remember another September 11 tragedy when two airplanes hit one building unleashing analogously suffering and the deaths thousands of innocent people.

The 2001 event was caused overwhelmingly by Saudi Arabian criminals in those planes, yet the US, in reprisal attacks,  invaded first Afghanistan and then Iraq, on false claims in the case of the latter and on the basis of there having been a violent extremists training camp in the case of the former.  It should be noted that there was a violent extremist training camp in the Everglades where Alpha-66  Cubans were trained to carry out violent attacks which included the bombing of the car of the former Chilean ambassador Orland Letelier at Sheridan Circle on Massachusetts Avenue, an operation launched by General Pinochet’s DINA intelligence officials with the cooperation of Miami Cuban Americans, and one leader of these right-wing extremist elements, Posada Carilles, actually boasted to have been the ideologue of the planting of a bomb on a Cubana airliner which exploded killing all 76 passengers, mostly young members of a fencing team.   There were ever hardly any prosecutions of any of these criminals.

The 1973 event was a US supported occurrence.   It was the crushing of democracy in Chile,  and the criminals were the Chilean military led by US supported General Pinochet who President Nixon and Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger along with elements of the CIA and of ITT corporation, embraced this macabre figure who eventually was protected by British PM Thatcher when he was indicted for heinous crimes against humanity.

The US worldwide crushing of democracies led by democratically elected leaders has not been an unusual phenomenon at all.  The US and Britain were instrumental in the crushing of the Iranian democracy of Mossadegh in 1953 and Eisenhower and Churchill and the Dulles brothers were instrumental in that operation,  the US was actively supportive of the crushing of the Arbenz democracy in Guatemala, the US under President Johnson invaded in 1965 the Dominican Republic to overthrow democratically elected President Bosh, in Indonesia the US supported the overthrow of Sukarno, in Brazil the US supported the overthrow of President João Goulart, in Nicaragua the US supported the Somoza dynasty and when finally the people of Nicaragua liberated themselves from that oppression the US supported the Contras (Somoza remnant criminals).  More recently the US supported vicious dictator Rios Montt of Guatemala  was sentenced to life in prison for genocide against its indigenous population, and it was President Reagan who supported him at a time when Congress forbade the shipment of arms to this violent autocrat, so Reagan circumvented that by covertly engaging the support of Israel for said arms shipments as he did in the Iran Contra scandal.

Finally, not least, our President Obama has opted to continue funding the Egyptian military under the command of General al Sissi, after he crushed the only democratically elected government Egypt ever experienced, and thereafter a massacre of the supporters of the abducted legitimate President Morzi did not, incredibly, change the mind of President Obama to call a coup a coup, and a massacre a massacre, and hence $ 1.3 billion in aid to Egypt has not been cut off.  It should also be noted that while the mainstream media with rare exceptions mentions it, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt has been an organization which has been fundamentally devoted to non-violent protest and most of its countless leaders languished in prison during the Mubarak dictatorship which the US and Israel supported and now these people a returning to their former concentration camp type incarcerations.

So, the often post 9/11 question posed by George Bush “why do they hate us” is largely rhetorical and disingenous as is the thought that “we” are merely policing the world to make it safe for freedom and democracy.

“We” is used here not referring to us, as in “we the people” , but to the politicians whose lack of humanistic values allows them to corrupt our own democracy and render it one non genuinely representative of us the governed, in deference to the nothing but political and economical interests of those elected by us who are  are focused almost exclusively on maximization of profit for the benefit of the moneyed elites whose undue influence lobbies intoxicate the Constitution our Founding Fathers envisioned for us.

With this preamble I therefore share with all the most important reason of this article, namely the link to a “Democracy Now” program dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the victims of the Chilean September 11 of 1973.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?hl=en&shva=1#inbox/141040f91504ccc8

I also want to end this article by noting that I was in New York only a couple of weeks after September 11, 2001 and witnessed on Washington Square the booths set up by desperate loved ones of the dead and missing victims of that savage attack and the salient message of most of them was “…no reprisal wars in our name…” !