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Comment by dandare | Hacker News Reader

Of course not, there are several examples of democratically elected governments overthrown and replaced with brutal dictators, Tuskegee, MKUltra, COINTELPRO, Iran Contra, Dark Alliance. But most of these fuckups were illegal - or at least not officially sanctioned. That changed with 9/11 and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Until then the US never publicly sanctioned torture and kidnapping of individuals.

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    > most of these fuckups were illegal
    > - or at least not officially
    > sanctioned.

To people outside the US that are the subject of these campaigns this amounts to nothing more than obscure inside baseball.

Unless something like war crime trials are held, or reparations are paid to the relevant countries it doesn't matter in the least for the end result, or for future such operations whether or not these operations were legal or sanctioned. Nobody involved of any significance ever got charged or convicted, and the US certainly didn't help reinstate the governments that had been overthrown.

The only thing that happened post-9/11 was that the official narrative started more closely resembling the realities on the ground.

That is a good point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Tribunal

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