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Backpacker -> 911 in Context: A Marine Veteran's Perspective (9/9/2007 4:35:04 PM)
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On Sept 11, 2003 a US Marine veteran gave this speech
Excerpts:
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. 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. 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.
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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.
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