The 40th anniversary of the "other September 11" was not a big deal in the U.S. media, except for the more open-minded news outlets like Democracy Now. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. 12 years ago certainly changed the world, perhaps more than the attackers themselves even imagined they would. But it was not so directly from their own killing and destruction. Rather it was due to the pretext that they served up to a more violent organization of jihadists known as the U.S. government, which then launched two wars that have killed more than a million people and contributed to ongoing instability and violence that has no end in sight. These 9/11 attacks also served as an excuse for an assault on civil liberties at home, and as we now know, unprecedented levels of surveillance.
The U.S. government was one of the main organizers and perpetrators of the September 11, 1973 military coup in Chile, and these perpetrators also changed the world -- of course much for the worse. The coup snuffed out an experiment in Latin American social democracy, established a military dictatorship that killed, tortured, and disappeared tens of thousands of people, and for a quarter-century mostly prevented Latin Americans from improving their living standards and leadership through the ballot box.
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