The Thirtieth Anniversary of 9-11
Thirty years ago today, on September 11th 1973, terrorists attacked
Chile.
They overthrew the oldest functioning democracy in Latin America and
installed
a military dictatorship with General Augusto Pinochet at its
head.
The dictatorship set up concentration camps, suppressed opposition,
murdered thousands, tortured tens of thousands and employed former Nazi
Colonel Walter Rauff
(who supervised extermination of Jews at Auschwitz) to assist the
elimination
of dissidents. This coup was the culmination of a three-year
terrorist
campaign to destabilize the government that included assassinations,
arson,
bombings and economic sabotage.
The terrorist organization that did this is called the Central
Intelligence
Agency (CIA). In 1970 the Chileans committed the sin of electing
a
democratic socialist, Salvador Allende, President in a free and fair
election.
Upon coming to office, Allende increased civil liberties, instituted
agrarian
reform, and increased spending on health, education, housing and
sanitation.
Many foreign owned businesses were nationalized, including the copper
firms
(which were mostly owned by United States companies). This
threatened
US political and economic domination over South America, and so the CIA
launched
the coup that murdered Allende and put Pinochet in power.
Declassified documents conclusively prove CIA complicity in the coup
and
the preceding campaign of terrorism against the Democratic Socialist
government.
The CIA has done similar things in many other countries including
Guatemala,
Iran, Indonesia, and elsewhere. In recent years they are alleged
to
have engaged in terrorist actions in Algeria, Venezuela and Columbia
but
because recent covert activities remain classified definitive proof,
and
the exact nature of these actions, will probably remain unknown for
many
years.
The United States government has used terrorism as a tool to achieve
its
foreign policy goals for a long time and continues to sponsor, train
and
harbor terrorists today. Henry Kissinger is wanted in Chile for
his
role in the coup, but the US has refused to extradite him. The
government
has also refused to extradite many other terrorists, including Orlando
Bosch
and Emannuel Constant. It is well known that the US supported Bin
Laden
and his terrorist cohorts when they were terrorizing the Soviets.
The
US army maintains a terrorist training camp in Georgia called the
Western
Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly known as the
School
of the Americas) whose graduates have committed torture,
assassinations,
massacred thousands, were involved in many coups (including a 2002 coup
attempt
in Venezuela), and hundreds of other terrorist actions. One of
the
worst terrorist attacks in recent Middle Eastern history was a car bomb
detonated
by CIA proxies in Lebanon, killing eighty civilians. In the late
90s
the US supported Turkish state terrorism against the Kurds.
The FBI defines terrorism as “"violent acts… intended to intimidate or
coerce
a civilian population, influence the policy of a government, or affect
the
conduct of a government." That is precisely what these actions
are.
The most effective thing that the United States can do to stop
terrorism
is to stop supporting it; that this has not been done is proof that the
so-called
“war on terrorism” is a myth. The government has no intention of
actually
combating terrorism; if it did it would have stopped supporting and
harboring
terrorists. What is called the “war on terrorism” is actually a
propaganda
trick used by the government to help maintain control over the
population.
Anything the government strongly dislikes tends to be labeled
"terrorist;"
when the US sponsors terrorism some euphemism like “pacification,”
“counter-insurgency,”
or “counter-terrorism” is used. Fear of the terrorist enemy has
been
used to justify taking away our civil liberties, conquering Iraq and
even
to support free trade. Dissent has been demonized as
“unpatriotic”
and “anti-American.” In an effort to justify their hostile
position
towards Iran, and possible future invasion of that nation, the Bush
administration
has claimed that Iran has Al-Qaeda links – even though Iran considers
Bin
Laden an infidel, supported the US attack on Afghanistan and nearly
went
to war with the Taliban. Whenever the government wants to justify
attacking
another country it claims that country has terrorist links (even if
they
have no terrorist links) in order to get the public to support going to
war.