Bush is just as bad as Pinochet

[spooked911]

according to Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=6254

"General Augusto Pinochet, approaching his 90th year, has survived many years of legal harassments resulting from alleged human rights violations during the period of the Chilean military government's war on terrorism. On the basis of a U.S. Senate staff report, Pinochet is now going to be investigated for stashing $13 million in U.S. banks.

What is interesting about the Pinochet case is that everything the former president of Chile is accused of, George W. Bush and his cronies are guilty of. Indeed, why are Senate staff wasting their time on 30-year-old alleged crimes of an elderly Chilean when the president of the United States ought to be in the dock? The prosecutor's brief – the Downing Street Memo – is already written."
(snip)

[DrDebug]

1. Well Henry Kissinger defended Pinochet as well

(...)
According to the first transcript dated October 1, 1973, when Kissinger was informed by his assistant secretary of inter-American affairs of initial reports of massacres following the coup he told his staff that the U.S. should not defend what the regime was doing. However, he emphasized: "But I think we should understand our policy--that however unpleasant they act, the government is better for us than Allende was."

As pressure from human rights advocates mounted for Washington to distance itself from the Pinochet regime, according to the transcripts, Kissinger argued that the Chilean military government was no worse than other Latin American nations and repeatedly voiced concern that the junta would collapse without U.S. support. "I think the consequences could be very serious, if we cut them off from military aid," Kissinger told his staff during a December 3, 1974, meeting.

The transcripts also capture Kissinger disparaging his own State Department staff for being soft on the human rights issue. In an exchange with Assistant Secretary for Latin America, William Rogers, on December 3, 1974, for example, Kissinger accuses his staff of "egging on" Senator Edward Kennedy who was the leading advocate of cutting assistance to the Pinochet regime on human rights grounds. "How many of our people are really egging Kennedy on," Kissinger demands to know. At the beginning of a September 1975 meeting with Pinochet' foreign minister, Adm. Patricio Carvajal, according to another transcript, Kissinger told him:

Well, I read the briefing paper for this meeting and it was nothing but Human Rights. The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there were no enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State.

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB110/index.htm

And later on in his autobiography he denied it of course

It may seem strange that in a book describing my stewardship of affairs I should feel obliged to include a chapter on the downfall of Chile President Salvador Allende Gossens in September 1973. It is a testament to the power of political mythology – for, contrary to anti-American propaganda around the world and revisionist history in the United States, our government had nothing to do with planning his overthrow and no involvement with the plotters.

–Henry A. Kissinger, The Years of Upheaval (1982)