Could A Vietnamese Court Fine
The U.S. $ Trillions For A Thousand 9/11 Equivalents?By Jay Janson
12 September, 2007
Countercurrents.orgMany 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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