Door Opens for Legal Actions in Chilean Coup vs. Kissinger et.al.
Cheers to all - justice is still pursued by those who do not forget.
As Door Opens for Legal Actions in Chilean Coup, Kissinger Is Numbered Among the Hunted
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: March 28, 2002
With a trial of Gen. Augusto Pinochet increasingly unlikely here, victims of the Chilean military's 17-year dictatorship are now pressing legal actions in both Chilean and American courts against Henry A. Kissinger and other Nixon administration officials who supported plots to overthrow Salvador Allende Gossens, the Socialist president, in the early 1970's.
In perhaps the most prominent of the cases, an investigating judge here has formally asked Mr. Kissinger, a former national security adviser and secretary of state, and Nathaniel Davis, the American ambassador to Chile at the time, to respond to questions about the killing of an American citizen, Charles Horman, after the deadly military coup that brought General Pinochet to power on Sept. 11, 1973.
General Pinochet, now 85, ruled Chile until 1990. He was arrested in London in 1998 on a Spanish warrant charging him with human rights violations. After 16 months in custody, General Pinochet was released by Britain because of his declining health. Although he was arrested in Santiago in 2000, he was ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial.
The death of Mr. Horman, a filmmaker and journalist, was the subject of the 1982 movie ''Missing.'' A civil suit that his widow, Joyce Horman, filed in the United States was withdrawn after she could not obtain access to relevant American government documents. But the initiation of legal action here against General Pinochet and the declassification of some American documents led her to file a new suit here 15 months ago.
Last fall, after gaining approval from Chile's Supreme Court, Judge Juan Guzmán, who is also handling the Pinochet case, submitted 17 questions in the Horman case to American authorities. An American Embassy official here confirmed that the document, known as a letter rogatory, has been received in Washington, but said it has not yet been answered and that he did not know if or when there would be a response.
''We're pressing the case in Chile because this is the first opportunity we have had to see if there is still some real evidence there,'' Mrs. Horman said by telephone from New York. ''But the letters rogatory seem to be in a paralyzed state.''
William Rogers, Mr. Kissinger's lawyer, said in a letter that because the investigations in Chile and elsewhere related to Mr. Kissinger ''in his capacity as secretary of state,'' the Department of State should respond to the issues that have been raised. He added that Mr. Kissinger is willing to ''contribute what he can from his memory of those distant events,'' but did not say how or where that would occur.
Relatives of Gen. René Schneider, commander of the Chilean Armed Forces when he was assassinated in Oct. 1970 by other military officers, have taken a different approach than Mrs. Horman. Alleging summary execution, assault and civil rights violations, they filed a $3 million civil suit in Washington last fall against Mr. Kissinger, Richard M. Helms, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and other Nixon-era officials who, according to declassified United States documents, were involved in plotting a military coup to keep Mr. Allende from power.
In his books, Mr. Kissinger has acknowledged that he initially followed Mr. Nixon's orders in Sept. 1970 to organize a coup, but he also says that he ordered the effort shut down a month later. The government documents, however, indicate that the C.I.A. continued to encourage a coup here and also provided money to military officers who had been jailed for General Schneider's death.
''My father was neither for or against Allende, but a constitutionalist who believed that the winner of the election should take office,'' René Schneider Jr. said. ''That made him an obstacle to Mr. Kissinger and the Nixon government, and so they conspired with generals here to carry out the attack on my father and to plot a coup attempt.''
In another action, human rights lawyers here have filed a criminal complaint against Mr. Kissinger and other American officials, accusing them of helping organize the covert regional program of political repression called Operation Condor. As part of that plan, right-wing military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay coordinated efforts throughout the 1970's to kidnap and kill hundreds of their exiled political opponents.
Argentina has also begun an investigation into American support for and involvement in Operation Condor. A judge there, Rodolfo Cancioba Corral, has said he regards Mr. Kissinger as a potential ''defendant or suspect.'' But lawyers say it is virtually impossible for a foreign court to compel former American officials to answer a summons.
During a visit by Mr. Kissinger to France last year, for instance, a judge there sent police officers to his Paris hotel to serve him with a request to answer questions about American involvement in the Chilean coup, in which French citizens also disappeared. But Mr. Kissinger refused to respond to the subpoena, referred the matter to the State Department, and flew on to Italy.
''I think it is clear that Kissinger is now one of many, many officials who have to think twice before they travel,'' said Bruce Broomhall, director of the international justice program at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. ''It will be surprising to many that an American secretary of state is among that group, but times have certainly changed'' as a result of the Pinochet case, he said.
The uproar appears to have forced Mr. Kissinger to cancel a trip to Brazil. He was scheduled to make a speech and receive a government medal in São Paulo on March 13, but withdrew after leftist groups there said they would demonstrate against him and also called on judges and prosecutors to detain him for questioning about Operation Condor.
A spokeswoman for Kissinger Associates in New York attributed the change of plans to a ''scheduling conflict.'' But the organizer of the event, Rabbi Henry Sobel of the Congregacão Israelita Paulista, said ''the situation had become politically uncomfortable'' both for Mr. Kissinger and local Jewish community leaders who had invited him.
''I spoke with him many times on the telephone and made it very clear to him what was happening behind the scenes, and he was very sensitive to that,'' Rabbi Sobel said in a telephone interview. ''This was a way to avoid any problems or embarrassment for him and for us.''
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE4DA113BF93BA15750C0A...
Huffington Post attempts to regain credibility
35 Years After Original 9/11: New Transcripts of Kissinger's Role in Chilean Coup
Posted September 10, 2008 | 03:33 PM (EST)
When Henry Kissinger began secretly taping all of his phone conversations in 1969, little did he know that he was giving history the gift that keeps on giving. Now, on the 35th anniversary of the September 11, 1973, CIA-backed military coup in Chile, phone transcripts that Kissinger made of his talks with President Nixon and the CIA chief among other top government officials reveal in the most candid of language the imperial mindset of the Nixon administration as it began plotting to overthrow President Salvador Allende, the world's first democratically elected Socialist. "We will not let Chile go down the drain," Kissinger told CIA director Richard Helms in a phone call following Allende's narrow election on September 4, 1970, according to a recently declassified transcript. "I am with you," Helms responded.
The "telcons"--telephone conversations transcripts made by Kissinger's secretary from audio tapes that were later destroyed--captured for posterity all of Kissinger's outgoing and incoming phone calls during his tenure as national security advisor and secretary of state. When Kissinger left office in January 1977, he took more than 30,000 pages of the transcripts, claiming they were "personal papers," and using them, selectively, to write his memoirs. In 1999, my organization, the National Security Archive, initiated legal proceedings to force Kissinger to return these records to their rightful owner--the government. At the request of Archive senior analyst William Burr, telcons on foreign policy crises from the early 1970s, including four previously unknown conversations on Chile, were recently declassified by the Nixon Presidential library.
'THE BIG PROBLEM TODAY IS CHILE'
September 15, 1970, when Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to ""prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him," has been considered, the starting point of the covert operations that eventually helped topple the socialist government, until now. According to the transcripts, however, Nixon and Kissinger set in motion plans to roll back Allende's election three days earlier on September 12. At noon on that day, Kissinger called Helms to schedule an urgent meeting of the "40 Committee"--an elite group that oversaw covert operations. And approximately 35 minutes later, in the middle of briefing Nixon on a major terrorist hijacking/hostage crisis in Amman, Jordan, Kissinger is recorded as telling the President: "The big problem today is Chile."
The transcript of their conversation, kept secret for 35 years, reveals just how focused the U.S. president became on overseeing the effort to block Allende. In that call, Nixon demanded to see all instructions being sent to U.S. ambassador Edward Korry in Santiago; indeed, he ordered that the State Department be alerted that "I want to see all cables to Chile."
"I want an appraisal of what the options are," Nixon told Kissinger. When Kissinger told him that the State Department's position was to "let Allende come in and see what we can work out," Nixon immediately vetoed the idea: "Like against Castro? Like in Czechoslovakia? The same people said the same thing. Don't let them do that."
But Nixon cautioned: "We don't want a big story leaking out that we are trying to overthrow the Govt."
Secretary of State William Rogers, who Nixon and Kissinger largely excluded from deliberations over Chile, was similarly sensitive to such a story leaking out. Indeed, the transcript of his conversation with Kissinger two days later underscored just how concerned the State Department was to the possibility that Washington might get caught trying to undermine Chile's electoral democracy. In their September 14th discussion, Rogers accurately predicted that "no matter what we do it will probably end up dismal." He also cautioned Kissinger to cover up any paper trail on U.S. operations "to be sure the paper record doesn't look bad."
"My feeling--and I think it coincides with the President's--is that we ought to encourage a different result from the [censored reference]," Rogers conceded to Kissinger, "but should do so discretely so that it doesn't backfire." Their conversation continues:
Kissinger: The only question is how one defines 'backfire.'
Rogers: Getting caught doing something. After all we've said about elections, if the first time a Communist wins the U.S. tries to prevent the constitutional process from coming into play we will look very bad.
Kissinger: the President's view is to do the maximum possible to prevent an Allende takeover, but through Chilean sources and with a low posture."
The next day, during a 15 minute meeting at the White House attended by Kissinger, Nixon instructed CIA director Helms that Allende's election was "not acceptable" and ordered the agency to "make the economy scream" and "save Chile," as Helms recorded in his notes. The CIA launched a massive set of covert operations--first to block Allende's inauguration, and, when that failed, to undermine his ability to successfully govern. "Our main concern in Chile is the prospect that [Allende] can consolidate himself and the picture projected to the world will be his success," Nixon told his National Security Council on November 6, 1970, two days after Allende took office.
'THAT CHILEAN GUY MIGHT HAVE SOME PROBLEMS'
So far, the declassification of Kissinger's telcons has not yielded much evidence of phone discussion on Chile as CIA operations to destabilize Allende evolved over the next several years. But at 11am on July 4, 1973, Kissinger's clandestine tape recorder captured another previously unknown conversation with President Nixon. Two weeks after an aborted coup in Santiago, Nixon phoned Kissinger from his summer home in San Clemente, California, to chat about Allende and the prospects that he might be soon overthrown.
Nixon: You know, I think that Chilean guy might have some problems.
Kissinger: Oh, he has massive problems. He has definitely massive problems.
Nixon: If only the Army would get a few people behind them.
Kissinger: And that coup last week - we had nothing to do with it but still it came off apparently prematurely.
Nixon: That's right and the fact that he just set up a Cabinet without any military in it is, I think, very significant.
Kissinger:. It's very significant.
Nixon: Very significant because those military guys are very proud down there and they just may - right?
Kissinger: Yes, I think he's definitely in difficulties.
Only ten weeks later, the military did move to overthrow Allende in a bloody coup on September 11, 1973. On September 15, Nixon called Kissinger again. They commiserated about what Kissinger called "the bleeding [heart] newspapers" and the "filthy hypocrisy" of the press for focusing on the Chilean military's repression and the condemnations of the U.S. role. In this telcon--which was declassified in May 2004--Nixon noted that "our hand doesn't show on this, though." "We didn't do it," Kissinger replied on the issue of direct involvement in the coup. I mean we helped them. [Deleted] created the conditions as great as possible."
As Kissinger told the President: "In the Eisenhower period we would be heroes."
You can see all the new Kissinger documents at www.nsarchive.org.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-kornbluh/35-years-after-original-9_b...
Of course, just because her
Of course, just because her website carried this story does not mean we will forget what she said.
from Politico:
While there are certain computer technologies that can flag inappropriate comments based on key words, Huff Post Editor in Chief Arianna Huffington says that it still requires a human eye to keep the comments in line with her site’s posting policies.
“There are certain obvious things we have, certain specific things,†says Huffington. “Conspiracy theories — we don’t allow conspiracy theories. If you thought Sept. 11 was caused by the Bush administration, your comment is not going to appear unless it is a mistake.â€
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11890_Page3.html
May Arriana share a jail cell one day with the mass murderer perps of 9-11 that she is protecting.