Chile's 9/11

U.S.-Backed Terror

ROGER BURBACH / Fault Lines i.4, September 2004, 1sep04

The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks occurred exactly 28 years after Gen. Augusto Pinochet toppled the elected Chilean government of President Salvador Allende, an event I watched in Santiago, the Chilean capital. The bloody US-backed coup on September 11, 1973, marked the advent of a regime that systematically employed terror at home and abroad to remain in power for almost 17 years.

Before the attack on the Pentagon, the most sensational foreign-led terrorist action in the US capital came at the hands of Pinochet operatives. On September 21, 1976, agents of the Chilean secret police agency, the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), detonated a car bomb just blocks from the White House, killing a leading opponent of Pinochet’s, Orlando Letelier, and his assistant Ronni Moffitt. I met Letelier, who had served as Allende’s foreign minister, at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. He was deeply committed to democracy and a humane world.

These assassinations were linked to the hemisphere’s first international terrorist network, known as Operation Condor. Begun in 1974 at the instigation of the Chilean secret police, the network consisted of the intelligence services of at least six South American countries. They collaborated in tracking, kidnapping and assassinating political opponents. Documents divulged by President Bill Clinton’s administration show that the CIA knew about these international terrorist activities and may have even abetted them.

The Chilean secret police, often with the help of Condor partners, carried out a number of international terrorist operations. In 1974, a car bomb killed retired Gen. Carlos Pratts in Buenos Aires, where he had sought refuge after Pinochet replaced him as head of the military shortly before the coup. In 1975, DINA operatives attacked and maimed Chilean Christian Democratic politician Bernardo Leighton and his wife in Rome.

Papers found in Paraguayan archives in the 1990s reveal that Operation Condor also played a role in the assassination of a Brazilian general, two Uruguayan parliamentarians and scores of lesser-known political activists. After the murders of Letelier and Moffitt, the CIA appears to have distanced itself from Condor. But the network continued to operate throughout Latin America until at least the early 1980s. Chilean and Argentine military units assisted Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and helped set up death squads in El Salvador. Argentine units also aided and supervised Honduran military death squads that began operating in the early 1980s with CIA collaboration.

The day before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, ironically, the family of assassinated Chilean Gen. René Schneider announced that it intended to sue former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Chilean courts. Their charges are based on declassified U.S. government documents provided by the National Security Archive, an independent research center based in Washington D.C. These documents indicate that after Allende’s 1970 election, Kissinger approved a CIA plot to prevent him from being inaugurated. This conspiracy led to Schneider’s assassination a month later. Schneider, as the Chilean army’s commander in chief, had insisted on upholding the will of Chilean voters and the country’s constitution.

There are many parallels between the emergence of the terrorist network in Latin America and events in the Middle East and southwestern Asia. Osama bin Laden, the Saudi Arabian believed to be directing the attacks on the United States, became involved in militant Islamic activities when he went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to join U.S.-backed guerrillas known as the Mujahadeen. Even in the 1980s it was widely recognized that many of those fighting the pro-Soviet Afghan government were religious fanatics who had no allegiance to their U.S. sponsors, let alone democracy, religious tolerance and gender equality. The most fundamentalist faction of the Mujahadeen, the Taliban, gained control of most of the country by the late 1990s. Some Taliban leaders openly acknowledge that they have allowed bin Laden to operate in their country because they owe him for propelling their rise to power.

Yet many former US officials and their media supporters are arguing that bin Laden’s international terrorist network flourished because earlier U.S. collaboration with terrorists was constrained. Henry Kissinger, visiting Germany on September 11, alluded to 1975 hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, headed by Sen. Frank Church, that criticized covert operations approved by Kissinger when he headed the National Security Council; the hearings led to the first legal restrictions on CIA activities, including a ban on US assassinations of foreign leaders. Former President George H.W. Bush, who directed the CIA from 1975 to 1977, is blasting Clinton’s 1995 order barring the CIA from retaining foreign agents involved in torture and death squads.

Kissinger, Bush and their ilk are standing history on its head. Unless we acknowledge that the U.S. government has helped create international terrorist networks and unless the United States abandons the practice, the cycle of violence will only intensify, and we’ll have even more bloody anniversaries to celebrate on September 11.

Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas in Berkeley, California. He is co-editor, with Ben Clarke, of September 11 and the US War (City Lights, 2002) and Imperial Overstretch: George W. Bush & the Hubris of Empire (London: Zed Books, 2004, with Jim Tarbell).

source: http://www.indybay.org/uploads/issue4.pdf 23sep04
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