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70 hours to remember the forgotten victims

Along with much of the UK my workplace gathered together at 11 am on Friday for three minutes to remember the 5000 or more innocent victims killed by bloodthirsty fanatics in Tuesday's appalling and tragic events.

Yet compassion must be universal - never limited, two-tiered or exclusive.

Were I also to have remembered those deliberately forgotten victims of US military and CIA actions around the world from the end of WWII to the present I would have been standing in silence for something like 70 hours, rather than 3 minutes.

These victims include the ‘several tens of thousands' the former German ambassador to Sudan Werner Daum estimates died after the US - promising to hit at Osama bin Laden - bombed a wholly innocent medicine factory there, denying that country's poor many WHO essential medicines for over three months. (Daum's article appears in the Summer 2001 issue of ‘Harvard International Review', alongside others by Kofi Annan etc). The US blocked a UN inquiry into this action, Noam Chomsky has said.

The 70 hours estimate comes from the ‘minimum figure' of six million victims estimated by a former CIA Director in Africa turned whistleblower, John Stockwell, (in his 1991 book ‘The Praetorian Guard - the US Role in the New World Order') to have been killed by US military/CIA activity since 1945; along with more recent information from William Blum (ex-State Department) in his recent one-sided but immensely eye-opening book ‘Rogue State - A Guide to the World's Only Superpower'.

The Washington Office of Amnesty International's 1996 report ‘Human Rights and US Security Assistance' concluded that: "Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or ‘disappeared', at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame."

Also unmentioned in the media is Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski's proud 1998 admission that the official story that US support for the Afghan mujahedeen began after the Russian invasion is false - the US in fact began its support six months before the invasion, in order to trap the Russians in their own Afghan ‘Vietnam'.