Could a Vietnamese Court Fine the U.S. $ Trillions for a Thousand 9/11 Equivalents?
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.
Not only is compassion lacking in the business and advertising oriented programming of U.S. mass media war reports, but honesty as well. Viewers and readers are informed that the 9/11 suicide bombers from Saudi Arabia struck on orders from Osama bin Laden, all Islamic fundamentalists. Viewers are never told that President Jimmy Carter unwittingly started the whole ball rolling by the devious and secret funding, arming and training of fundamentalist hill tribes, attacking a modern women emancipating government in Kabul, in order to sucker the Soviets into entering Afghanistan six months LATER, as Brzezinski would brag afterward to a French Newspaper. ('Le Nouvel Observateur' (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76, U.S. Library of Congress)
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.
Musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England and the US, and now resides in New York City.
Yours is a wonderful article and much needed, but it proceeds from the point of view that 19 Arab (primarily Saudi) hujackers carried off 9/11.
Have you researched 9/11 itself? Any amount of research causes the embarrassingly-transparent official story to fall apart and reveals Bush and Cheney and other unknown parties as the prime movers and directors of 9/11.
I have an article on OpEdNews on the subject ("In the Name of All Who Died on 9/11, We Must Act Now"). I also have a website chocabloc with attributed quotes that should make writing on the subject easy for any journalist - that's what it was designed to do (www.freewebs.com/truthseekers22/ )
If you add to the mix the use of depleted-uranium by the western forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and southern Lebanon, turning those areas into lethal wastelands forever, then why would any youth want to enlist? Fight for mass murderers and high traitors? Become contaminated with DU and miserably suffer or die?
I personally would stay as far away as I could from the U.S. military. If you don't die from radiation poisoning, you'll be permanently disabled, as are 500,000 + out of 589,000 from Iraqi wars and the Vets Admin won't give you the time of day.
Nonetheless, why the peoples of the world don't sue America for what it has done to them is a good and timely question and I thank you for having raised it so eloquently.
Steve Beckow
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Steve Beckow (18 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 46 comments)
on Tuesday, September 11, 2007 at 11:10:05 AM
Criminal Insanity of Foreign Policy Reflects a Sick Nation
Author thanks for comment approving article's dramatization of the complete lawlessness of the United States and its protective blanket, conglomerate media.
Have long realized, as an expat American, that it is difficult for lawbreakers and their fellow citizens to take their own lawlessness seriously.
My previous OpEdNews article solves this by putting the Americans in the shoes of their victims, and America's victims in the shoes of American criminals.
That's right. Thanks for bringing this up. A few of us ex or sadly still American citizens (nationalized what's worse) know all too well the abuses and covert devastation of this empire to entire regions around the world.
I guess your article comes in light of the latest report that a US Federal Judge/Court ordered Iran to pay $24.6 Billions for casualties to US soldiers in the Lebanon attack of 198?.
But you're absolutely right. If - IF this country USA was accountable to some force in the universe, all its corrupt corporations together could not pay the debt of so many lives, nations, resources, etc.. they have destroyed.
Right on. There is soooo much ignorance in this nation its unbelievable. Thank your government/Media. "Conservatives" for almost 40 years have ruled this nation in the most wreckless, inhumane of fashions. Saddly the (little)democrast are in bed with them as well.
I was telling some high schoolers how this administration has more charges (with the exception of 7 million Jews massacred at once) to be prosecuted for, some day, than Hitler and his disgraced regime themselves. Now that is News worthy.
History may render to Caesar what’s Caesars’
What goes around comes around , etc…
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Frank gr (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 48 comments)
on Wednesday, September 12, 2007 at 11:32:31 AM
Sorry for the misquotes in my above response. I should have finished reading your whole article. Yes it is $2.65 billion to the families of the 241 US ....
Still. It its the epitome of arrogance of this Imperilistic regime. As the world advances/progresses in technology, cooperation, business, etc.. the US only believes in Military/Agessive Takeover. Shamefull!
Do you have to be an american to denounce their crimes?
Albert Einstein supported/promoted the idea of the US to be the keeper of nuclear technology because it was thought to be the only civilized "cool-headed" nation that could be trusted to mediate....
roll over in his grave.
by
Frank gr (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 48 comments)
on Wednesday, September 12, 2007 at 12:16:35 PM
4 comments
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