Remember Sept 11th.
1973.
The point i've been trying to get across is that while The United States Government is a great country, sometimes it's government(s) do some pretty rotten self-serving things in the name of it's own interests. Such as the CIA/United Fruit Companies overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan Government in 1954 and the CIA backed coup of 9/11/73 in Chile. For some inexplicable reason, some of you choose to pretend some historical facts never happened or if they did, don't care one way or another about them. Then if they're brought up, it's because someone "hates America". If other nations and people distrust or "hate" America, then it's because they're jealous or because they're propagandized.
It's never because perhaps we may have deserved some measure of suspicion or distrust.
I think it's important to know FACTS and HISTORY so that we can collectively ensure that we become better than that and never let some Administrations/Governments have their way with other nations for their own self-serving desires. Again, it's the quote about loving your country like an adult and not like a child where we can do no wrong and whoever says differenly is "bad".
If you can never se your own faults, how the hell then do you ever grow as a person??
quote:
The Pinochet File
A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability
Edited by Peter Kornbluh
The New Press: 552 pp., $29.95
Exactly 30 years ago, on that other Tuesday, Sept. 11, as Chilean Air Force jets bombed the government palace where I worked as a young translator to elected socialist President Salvador Allende, as Chilean troops trampled a century of democratic rule (and the dark night of a dictatorship that would last 17 years descended), we understood that the U.S. played some role in the coup.
A year before, Jack Anderson made public some of the anti-Allende machinations concocted by the Nixon administration in cahoots with the ITT corporation. In the ensuing years, kick-started by the 1976 Senate Church Committee investigations, much more about American covert action has come to light in dribs and drabs.
Now, thanks to Peter Kornbluh, we have the first complete, almost day-to-day and fully documented record of this sordid chapter in Cold War American history. Much in the way Stephen Kinzer's "Bitter Fruit" fully chronicled the CIA intromission into Guatemala, "The Pinochet File" should be considered the long-awaited book of record on U.S. intervention in Chile. Here is a veritable catalog of all the smoking guns used by Washington to obliterate Chilean democracy. But anyone hoping to find documentary evidence only of an arrogant imperial power blithely manipulating its pliant Latin American ally for its geopolitical gain is in for some surprises.
As a senior researcher at the nonprofit National Security Archives, Kornbluh was instrumental in securing almost 25,000 new Chile-related documents released after the 1998 London arrest of former dictator Augusto Pinochet. Kornbluh has done much more than assemble a clump of dense photocopied files full of bureaucratese. Instead, he's written a crisp, compelling narrative, almost a political thriller, wisely including scores of government documents as only secondary documentation. "The Pinochet File" reads as the definitive and damning indictment of Pinochet and his regime as well as his enablers, protectors and apologists in Washington. It's also a cautionary tale of the consequences incurred when a great power squanders its prestige and principles in defense of dictators and despots.
And if some of you can't fathom my stance on Iraq, perhaps it's the fact that what usually accompanies U.S./CIA/corporate lies and manipulation of foreign governments (historically) is right wing administrations being in command of our government at the time.
