Could
A Vietnamese Court Fine
The U.S. $ Trillions For A Thousand 9/11 Equivalents?
By Jay Janson
12 September, 2007
Countercurrents.org
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.
The United States of America,
its President, and the President’s CIA and its military are all
above the law – all laws, anywhere, including its own laws.
The 1989 invasion of Panama
to arrest and remove its President, who had for seventeen years worked
for the CIA, code named “Just Cause” in which by U.S. Army
estimate, a least a thousand lives were lost is a good example.
The Organization of American
States Charter, to which the US is a signatory and party, prohibits
members from invading other members for any reason. The United States
ratified the Charter of the OAS in 1948. Under the U.S. Constitution,
Article VI, treaties ratified by the U.S. are among the supreme law
of the land of the U.S.
The General Assembly of the
United Nations voted 75–20 with 40 abstentions to condemn the
invasion as a "flagrant violation of international law.”
A Security Council resolution condemning the invasion was vetoed by
the United States.
To top of all arguments that
the U.S. is bound by any sort of law at all, it should never be forgotten
that when in 1986, the International Court of Justice found the U.S.
guilty of violating international law in mining Nicaragua’s harbors
and other "unlawful use of force", the U.S. ignored the court's
orders to pay reparations and to desist from further violence, simply
stating that the court had no jurisdiction.
In 2002 The International
Criminal Court (ICC) was established in 2002 as a permanent tribunal
to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war
crimes, and the crime of aggression. The U.S. has threatened nations
that might allow an American citizen to be brought before this court,
which it also does not recognize as having any authority to judge any
U.S. action.
So then, lets recognize U.S.
lawlessness, denounce it and demand a law-abiding America. If the strongest
nation in the world cannot be fair and kind, then we can expect the
worst. If the superpower owning half the earth’s resources would
lead in kindness, we could expect a better world coming about as a result.
9/11 should have been a wake
up call. If violence against America is awful, violence by Americans
can be understood to be awful as well.
Jay Janson- 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.
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