9/11 in Context -A Marine Veteran's Perspective

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Two years ago today, everyone in this room felt a sense of dread and fear perhaps unlike anything they could have imagined. My heart still aches whenever I think about the horrors that must have been felt by the victims of that day. Something virtually unknown in this country is that Chileans were also mourning on that day, but for a different reason. It was twenty-eight years before to the day the U.S. government assisted the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet that overthrew the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and led to the systematic murder of 3,000 Chileans and the torture of many thousands more, as well as a seventeen year dictatorship that we whole-heartedly supported. We observe 9/11 as a date to reflect on the wrongful deaths of 3,000 Americans, but why do we not mourn those who died at the hands of Americans?

Places such as Iran, where the CIA engineered a coup in 1953 that overthrew the democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and installed the Shah and supported his secret police force, SAVAK, who tortured and murdered thousands of Iranians, do not warrant American tears. Nor do the countless number of Filipinos, who suffered at the hands of the U.S.-backed dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. The tens of thousands of Guatemalans who were tortured, disappeared, and died at the hands of many U.S.-supported dictators and puppet presidents in the four decades that followed the 1954 CIA coup that overthrew the democratically-elected presidency of Jacobo Arbenz, do not receive official American sorrow. Nor do the 500,000 Indonesians or the 200,000 East Timorese who were slaughtered by the U.S.-backed dictator, General Suharto, after yet another CIA coup in 1965. The 2 million Vietnamese, the 300,000 Laotians, and the 600,000 Cambodians whom the U.S. military murdered in the 1960s and 1970s hold little place in our collective consciousness outside of Hollywood, and there exists no national day of remembrance for them like we have for our 3,000 victims of 9/11. The silenced voices of tens of thousands of Haitians killed by Marines in the early 1900s and at the hands of the U.S.-backed Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier during the Cold War, deserve no day of mourning in the country that applauded their sorrow and held contempt for their pursuits of happiness.

When the people of Zaire tried their hand at democracy in 1961, the CIA called for its death when it supported Patrice Lumumba's assassination and then supported the dictator Mobutu's reign of terror for the next three and half decades. Yet, Mobutu's tens of thousands of victims are virtually unknown in the U.S., nor are the many Zairians who died at the hands of U.S.-hired South African mercenaries during the 1960s, some of whom lynched their victims, because they were opposing a dictatorship. The thousands of Peruvians who were murdered by their U.S.-backed military in the 1980s receive no official moments of silence on a sacred date, as does our 9/11. The Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo, killed and tortured tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans during his three-decades of U.S. support, and yet we still have no day of mourning for his victims because we encouraged their suffering. The tens of thousands of Argentines, Brazilians, Uruguayans, Bolivians, Mexicans, and Paraguayans who were murdered under U.S.-backed dictators and de facto dictators during the Cold War only add to the list of millions of direct victims of U.S. intervention who go unnoticed, and in effect drop out of history. The hundreds of thousands more who were murdered in Iran, Angola, Grenada, Cuba, Libya, Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, and Iraq receive no official memorials or official moments of silence in the U.S., because we caused those deaths, and by definition of U.S. foreign policy, our victims ALWAYS deserve what comes to them.

As an American citizen whose tax dollars have contributed toward some of the above atrocities carried out in my name, I can not help but feel remorse. I am saddened by the victims of 9/11/2001, but I am more saddened by the fact that our nation as a whole has learned very little as a result of the attacks. Instead of looking at the reasons why we were attacked, we have declared war on everyone who hates us, hoping to stamp out this hate with even more hate. It is a war of indeterminate length that will cause an indeterminate amount of deaths, all in the name of creating the illusion that we will somehow be safer as a result. Funny how the atrocities we have carried out in the past have never correlated with an enhanced amount of actual safety for Americans, even though the flag of national security has always been waved to promote such policies.

http://www.counterpunch.com/white10282003.html