11th September 1973: US stages coup in Chile. Democratically elected President Salvador Allende assassinated. Dictator Augusto Pinochet installed. 5,000 Chileans murdered. ibid.
1977: US backs military leaders of El Salvador. 70,000 Salvadoreans and 4 American nuns killed. ibid.
1980s: US trains Osama bin Laden and fellow terrorists to kill Soviets. CIA gives them $3 billion. ibid.
1981: Reagan administration trains and funds Contras. 30,000 Nicaraguans die. ibid.
1982: US provides billions in aid to Saddam Hussein for weapons to kill Iranians. ibid.
1983: White House secretly gives Iran weapons to kill Iraqis. ibid.
1989: CIA agent Manuel Noriega (also serving as President of Panama) disobeys orders from Washington. US invades Panama and removes Noriega. 3,000 Panamanian civilian casualties. ibid.
1990: Iraq invades Kuwait with weapons from the US. ibid.
1991: US enters Iraq. Bush reinstates dictator of Kuwait. ibid.
1998: Clinton bombs ‘weapons factories’ in Sudan. Factory turns out to be making Aspirin. ibid.
1991 to present: US planes bomb Iraq on a weekly basis. UN estimates 500,000 Iraqi children die from bombing and sanctions. ibid.
2000-2001: US gives Taliban-ruled Afghanistan $245 million in ‘aid’. ibid.
11th September 1991: Osama bin Laden uses his expert CIA training to murder 3,000 people. ibid.
One war after another after another – we become a warfare state. Chalmers Johnson, author Sorrows of Empire
A military juggernaut intent on world domination. Chalmers Johnson
It’s this kind of ideology which has grown up in the wake of the Cold War propounded quite openly by what we are calling Neo-Conservatives in America, that identifies the United States as a Colossus to thwart the world, a new Rome, beyond good and evil. Chalmers Johnson
Our military presence on foreign soil is as offensive to the people who live there as armed Chinese troops would be if they were stationed in Texas. We would not stand for it here but we have had a globe-straddling empire and a very intrusive foreign policy for decades that incites a lot of hate and resentment towards us. Ron Paul
What if American people learn the truth that our foreign policy has nothing to do with national security? That it never changes from one administration to the next? What if war and preparation for war is a racket serving the special interests? What if President Obama is completely wrong about Afghanistan? ... What if diplomacy is found superior to bombs and bribes in protecting America? Ron Paul, address 12th February 2009
The USA has bombed 50 countries since the end of the Second World War. Chris Everard, Illuminati I
We live in a nation hated abroad and frightened at home. A place in which we can reasonably refer to the American Republic in the past tense. A country that has moved into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of laws but an autocracy run by law breakers, law evaders and law ignorers. A nation governed by a culture of impunity ... a culture in which corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm. We all live in a Mafia neighbourhood now. Sam Smith
I believe every American should be forced to commiserate with people from other countries while they are growing up. Only when I talked to people from outside my borders did I realize how insanely myopic the entire establishment of the US is. People here really can’t seem to understand why the world gets mad at us. It is not evil that’s the problem here I think, just incredible, earth-shattering, incalculable, painfully entrenched ignorance. spf2119 2001
How would you feel if we were talking about Albania? This country is as unimportant to me as Albania except for its ability to create great military mischief. Culturally it isn’t anything. Gore Vidal, televised interview
We are not dealing with a civilised culture ... Americans are very narrow ... They’re slow. ibid.
For much of my lifetime the American media has been tightly controlled by a handful of corporations whose main task since 1945 was to terrify Americans into believing the Russians were coming and so we needed more missiles and nuclear warheads and submarines. They have had decades to create a false reality. Gore Vidal, speech World Political Forum, Venice, cited: Gore Vidal: United States of Amnesia
Every since the Cold War ended there were people who were fuming on the Right thinking this is the golden opportunity now that Russia’s out of the way for American to take over the world. We’re not doing anything about it. Those damned liberals, those soft-heads, are keeping us from doing what is our godly mission. Norman Mailer, author
And I think the whole business with Iraq is a terribly sour comedy abstracted down to its smallest motives ... the sense that Iraq had to be invaded because it was the first step in going toward American Empire. Norman Mailer
Of all nations, those submit to civilisation with the most difficulty which habitually live by the chase. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Democratie en Amerique
There are, at the present time, two great nations in the world, which seem to tend towards the same end, although they started form different points; I allude to the Russians and the Americans ... Their starting point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe. ibid.
We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world – bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts. Hunter S Thompson
If Reagan’s arms build-up and belligerent speeches unnerved the ageing Soviets, this was just the beginning. Only two weeks after the Evil Empire speech Reagan announced his most expensive, technically demanding weapons project to date: the Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as Star Wars. 1983: The Brink of Apocalypse, Channel 4 2008
The United States began to give secret aid to Pol Pot ... The American aid to Pol Pot was critical in restoring the Khmer Rouge as a military force. John Pilger, Cambodia – The Betrayal, ITV 1990
President Nixon and Mr Kissinger unleashed 100,000 tons of bombs, the equivalent of five Hiroshimas. The bombing was their personal decision. Illegally and secretly they bombed Cambodia, a neutral country, back to the Stone Age. John Pilger, Return to Year Zero, ITV 1993; viz also website
In the Spring of 1969 American B-52s had begun the secret bombing of neutral Cambodia ... The Cambodians who died were called collateral damage, and their burning villages were called friendly fire ... In 1970 the United States invaded Cambodia. ibid.
Of course if you’re in Geneva, New York or London you can’t hear the screams of the little boy I mentioned. ibid.
During the 1980s, the years of Ronald Reagan in the White House, a trail of carnage and grief was blazed across Central America. John Pilger, The War on Democracy, 2007
President Bush has promised to rid the world of evil and to lead the great mission to build free societies on every continent. To understand such an epic lie is to understand history – hidden history, suppressed history, history that explains why we in the west know a lot about the crimes of others, but almost nothing about our own. The missing word is empire. The existence of an American Empire is rarely acknowledged, or it’s smothered in displays of jingoism that celebrate war. And an arrogance that says no country has a right to go its own way unless that way coincides with the interests of the United States. For empires have nothing to do with freedom. They’re vicious. They’re about conquest and theft and control and secrets. Since 1945 the United States has attempted to overthrow fifty governments, many of them democracies. In the process thirty countries have been attacked and bombed, causing the loss of countless lives. ibid.
This is Santiago, the capital of Chile. In 1973 the national stadium was turned into a concentration camp, as a military coup backed by the United States overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The leader of the coup was a fascist, General Augusto Pinochet, who rounded up Allende’s supporters. ibid.