Many of us long time peace activists watching the horror of 9/11 on television in 2001 could not help but to have immediately imagined that this wrenchingly painful graphic display of suffering in our New York, right in front of our very eyes, would make people think of the thousand times greater and longer intense suffering we Americans had permitted our military to bring down on the heads of the Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians under six U.S. presidents.
We will never know if Americans, back in 2001, as the World Trade Center Towers fell, thought of what we did to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The war-promoting conglomerate owned entertainment/news media would never tolerate discussing such compassionate rumination, though the population of the Indochinese peninsula suffered the equivalent of a 9/11 from American hands every month over a period of fifteen years.
As everyone watches the replays of the 9/11 tragedy now in 2007, neither will America hear our commercial media anchors and commentators compare the U.S. suffering of six years ago to the immensely greater suffering of Iraqis, Afghanis and recently, Somalis. In American mass media, foreigners killed by American military are never presented as having suffered. Only suffering experienced by foreigners in earthquakes or at the hands other foreigners is allowed to be poignantly described.
Likewise is the general public to this day uniformed of the CIA and Saudi millions of dollars which paid for the founding of thousands of extreme fundamentalist study centers and schools in Afghanistan, with substantial amounts going directly to al Qaida associates.
The images of 9/11 inspire enlistment into the U.S military with thoughts of defending and avenging one's country. Those innocent naïve young men signing up know nothing about The Muslim terrorist apparatus having being created by US Intelligence as a cold war tool.
President Carter's heartless criminally homicidal secret attack on a small friendly nation's government using ethnic and religious divisions to foment civil war is not only unprosecuted but completely unknown. Our presidential CIA, well protected from public scrutiny by acquiescent silence and cover-ups of conglomerate entertainment/news media, is placed above all laws, treaties, and our own constitution.
Mainstream clergy in America is also very silent, though Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “Silence is treason.” It is only in resurgent activist churches that one might hear the Bible quote “Those who live by the sword die by the sword.”
Subway riders are warned to look under their seats, and “If you see something, don’t keep it to yourself!” Malcolm X, had he been alive on 9/11, would surely have repeated, “The chickens have come home to roost.” his comment upon hearing the news of President Kennedy’s assassination. (Kennedy had given the go ahead for the assassination of U.S. puppet dictator President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, and had approved CIA attempts to kill Fidel Castro.)
The world’s single superpower has a double standard when it comes to the jurisdiction of law – the superpower kettle calls a lot of pots black, and the world quietly accepts this.
Associated Press, Sat Sep 8, 2007
TEHRAN, Iran - Iran on Saturday rejected a U.S. federal judge's ruling that the Islamic Republic must pay $2.65 billion to the families of the 241 U.S. service members killed in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.
It will not bring the dear young men blown to pieces back to life and home to their loved ones, but if the government of Iran was really behind the suicide bombers who blew up a 300 U.S. soldiers in Lebanon, is it not just for a U.S. court to order Iran to pay compensation to family members?
BUT CONVERSELY, If the administration of President Ronald Reagan was found to have been behind Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, with the bombing and gassing costing one million lives, could not Iraqi and Iranian judges order the U.S. to pay compensation in the trillions of dollars to both Iranian and Iraqi families. (The U.S. sales of gas making chemical components, arms, armaments, military vehicles, helicopters, even with funding loans, are well documented, as is the supplying of Iraqi armed forces with U.S. satellite photos of Iranian troop positions.)
And if the government of the U.S. were judged to have been behind the French war of re-conquest of its colony Vietnam after the Japanese surrender, would it not be just for a Vietnamese court to order the U.S. to pay compensation to families of the hundred thousand Vietnamese who were killed by the French Army. (It is well known that President Truman brought in French Army, in U.S. Navy ships and funded it for the eight years up to the French defeat.)
Could a Vietnamese court order the U.S. to pay trillions of dollars for the thousand 9/11 equivalents from 1954 to 1975, during which time it dropped more than twice the tonnage of bombs dropped in all of World War Two by all sides? No, of course not, “Might makes Right!” as the imperialist dictum reads.
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