You decide where to pin the tail on that donkey. The future can be predicted by what has been going on in the past - unless WE CHANGE.
Christopher Hitchens describes the fascist style regime funded and encouraged by an element in the C.I.A.:
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What is striking, and what points to a much more direct complicity in individual crimes against humanity, is the microcosmic detail in which Kissinger kept himself informed of Pinochet's atrocities.
Carlos Prats
On 16 November, Assistant Secretary of State Jack B. Kubisch delivered a detailed report on the Chilean junta's execution policy which, as he notes to the new secretary of state, “you requested by cable from Tokyo."
Stroessner of Paraguay
The memo goes on to enlighten Kissinger in various ways about the first nineteen days of Pinochet's rule. Summary executions during that period, we are told, total 320. (This contrasts with the publicly announced total of 100, and is based on “an internal, confidential report prepared for the junta" to which US officials are evidently privy.)
Stroessner of Paraguay
Looking on the bright side, "On November 14, we announced our second credit to Chile-$24 million for feed corn. Our longstanding commitment to sell two surplus destroyers to the Chilean navy has met a reasonably sympathetic response in Senate consultations.
Frank Teruggi
Frank Teruggi
The Chileans, meanwhile, have sent us several new requests for controversial military equipment." Kubisch then raises the awkward question of two US citizens murdered by the junta–Frank Teruggi and Charles Horman-details of whose precise fate are still, more than a quarter-century later, being sought by their families.
Charles Horman
The reason for the length of the search may be inferred from a later comment by Mr. Kubisch, dated 11 February 1974, in which he reports on a meeting with the junta's foreign minister, and notes that he raises the matter of the missing Americans "in the context of the need to be careful to keep relatively small issues in our relationship from making our cooperation more difficult."
Charles Horman
To return, via this detour, to Operation Condor. This was a machinery of cross-border assassination, abduction, torture and intimidation, coordinated between the secret police forces of Pinochet's Chile, Stroessner's Paraguay, Videla's Argentina and other regional caudillos.
This internationalization of the death-squad principle is now known to have been responsible, to name only the most salient victims, for the murder of the dissident general Carlos Prats of Chile (and his wife) in Buenos Aires, the murder of the Bolivian general Juan Jose Torres, and the maiming of a Chilean Christian Democrat senator, Bernardo Leighton, in Italy.
Carlos Prats and Salvador Allende
A Condor team also detonated a car bomb in down-town Washington, DC, in September 1976, killing the former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his aide Ronni Moffitt.
Juan Jose Torres
United States Government complicity has been uncovered at every level of this network. It has been established, for example, that the FBI aided Pinochet in capturing Jorge Isaac Fuentes de Alarcón, who was detained and tortured in Paraguay, then turned over to the Chilean secret police, and “disappeared."
Carlos Prats
Astonishingly, the surveillance of Latin US dissident refugees in the United States was promised to Condor figures by US intelligence.
I was born a Chilean I am a Chilean I will die a Chilean. They, the Fascists, were born traitors, live as traitors and will be remembered forever as Fascist traitors.
ORLANDO LETELIER, 10 SEPTEMBER 1976
These and other facts have been established by the work of "truth and reconciliation" commissions set up by post-dictatorship forces in the countries of the southern hemisphere.
Orlando Letelier
Stroessner has been over-thrown, Videla is in prison, Pinochet and his henchmen are being or have been brought to account in Chile.
The United States has not so far found it convenient to establish a truth and reconciliation commission of its own, which means that it is less ready at present to face its historical responsibility than are the countries once derided as "banana republics."
All of the above-cited crimes, and many more besides, were committed on Kissinger's "watch" as secretary of state.
And all of them were and are punishable, under local or international law, or both. It can hardly be argued, by himself or by his defenders, that he was indifferent to, or unaware of, the true situation.
Videla of Argentina
In 1999 a secret memorandum was declassified, giving excruciating details of a private conversation between Kissinger and Pinochet in Santiago, Chile, on 8 June 1976. The meeting took place the day before Kissinger was due to address the Organization of American States.
The subject was human rights. Kissinger was at some pains to explain to Pinochet that the few pro forma remarks he was to make on that topic were by no means to be taken seriously.
My friend Peter Kornbluh has performed the service of comparing the “Memcon" (Memorandum of Conversation) with the account of the meeting given by Kissinger himself in his third volume of apologia, Years of Renewal: THE MEMOIR:
“A considerable amount of time in my dialogue with Pinochet was devoted to human rights, which were, in fact, the principal obstacle to close United States relations with Chile. I outlined the main points in my speech to the OAS which I would deliver the next day. Pinochet made no comment."
What seems to be the problem, Officer?
THE MEMCON: "I will treat human rights in general terms, and human rights in a world context. I will refer in two paragraphs to the report on Chile of the OAS Human Rights Commission. I will say that the human rights issue has impaired relations between the US and Chile. This is partly the result of Congressional actions. I will add that I hope you will shortly remove these obstacles.... I can .. do no less, without producing a reaction in the US which would lead to legislative restrictions. The speech is not aimed at Chile. I wanted to tell you about this. My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government that was going Communist."
Then what should we do about a government that's going totalitarian?