A taste of your own medicine drones are easy to buy and make

The dual tragedies of September force us to recognize that the United States government has assisted in the creation Of international terrorist networks and has rarely let a commitment to democracy stand in the way of its global ambitions. But until the attack of September 11, 2001, American citizens seldom experienced the horror, the anguish, the profound loss, and the lingering sense of vulnerability that the survivors of terrorism in other parts of the world know too well. From Chile to East Timor, Congo, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, and many other cold war battlegrounds, ordinary people who desired land reform, better wages, improved health care, education, and the basic right of self-determination were labeled communists by U.S.-backed regimes and murdered, tortured, and disappeared by shadowy paramilitary death squads and state security forces trained by the United States. The perpetrators were almost never held accountable, and officials acknowledged the dead and the abused very slowly, if at all. The Third World victims of cold war atrocities usually did not receive public commemorations, such as those so fittingly published by the New York Times for each individual killed in the World Trade Center, nor were memorials constructed in their honor. Forgetting the proxy wars and covert operations carried out by the United States and the Third World security forces that do its bidding obscures the extent to which modern America emerged as the result of an imperial project that brutalized and oppressed peoples around the world. To understand these international adventures, a broad conceptualization of imperialism is useful, one that begins with the intrusion of U.S. economic interests into other countries and extends to the multiple and varied practices of political, military, and cultural domination. The empire which the United States now possesses is notable for the constellation of military bases that dot the globe; the defense budget that, even before September 11, 2001, totaled billions of dollars; the stockpile of nuclear weapons capable of destroying humankind; the ongoing alliances with repressive regimes that range from the Saudi royal family to the unrepentant military of Guatemala that rules behind a facade of civilian government, and the history of military intervention that continues unabated, as the invasion and occupation of Iraq so amply demonstrates.



It's the latest drone war which will come back to bite you in the butt