The Thirtieth Anniversary of 9-11
September 11, 2003
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.