The Relationship between Torture and Occupation/Dictatorship

[Time for change]

Since the economic policy was extremely unpopular among the most numerous sectors of the population, it had to be implemented by force – Truth commission report explaining the use of torture in Brazil in the 1960s and 70s, titled “Torture in Brazil: A Shocking Report on the Pervasive Use of Torture by Brazilian Military Government, 1964-79”

The Bush/Cheney administration presents its use of torture alternatively as the work of “a few bad apples” or as the necessary means to win their “War on Terror”. It is neither. Rather, it is a systematic and widespread policy that is used to achieve imperial domination, with all that that entails.

They have presented our invasion and occupation of Iraq alternatively as the means of defending ourselves against nuclear attack, bringing “freedom and democracy” to the Iraqi people, or as the necessary means to win their “War on Terror”. It is none of those things. Rather it is the imperial domination of a country that posed no threat to us, with the goal of enriching certain U.S. corporations and of achieving geo-strategic dominance in the Middle East.

These things cannot be emphasized too much. What little support there is in our country for Bush/Cheney torture and imperial policies is based largely upon a tragic misunderstanding by the American people of the reasons for and consequences of those policies. Our leaders have created that misunderstanding through its lies (the Bush/Cheney administration) and the utter failure to challenge those lies (the U.S. Congress and news media).

In this post I will review those two things – the Bush/Cheney torture policies and the motives for the occupation of Iraq – and follow that with a discussion of the relationship between them, how that relates to our current situation in Iraq, and what that appears to portend for the future. I’ve previously discussed the Bush/Cheney torture policies and the motives for the occupation of Iraq in other posts, so if you’ve already read those you might want to skip to the section “The relationship between torture and occupation or dictatorship”.


The Bush/Cheney Torture Program

The use of torture by the Bush administration is much more widespread than is commonly realized. In a recent post, titled “The Only Way to Stop the Bush/Cheney Torture Program Is to Cut it out at its Rotten Core”, I discuss in detail the abundant evidence for widespread torture condoned by the Bush/Cheney administration, referencing numerous Bush administration memos, the testimony of eyewitnesses, and evidence put forth by human rights organizations and journalists. Charlie Savage sums up the situation in his recent book, “Takeover – The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy”:

This coercive system of interrogation was put into widespread use following the 9/11 attacks. Eyewitness accounts put it all over – at Guantanamo, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in CIA prisons, and… in a military brig on U.S. soil. There were clearly hundreds and hundreds of U.S. officials employing these techniques in many contexts simultaneously around the globe… and the president had declared that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the war on terrorism.

Furthermore, the problem appears to be far more widespread than most Americans are aware of. Estimates of how many prisoners have disappeared into the Bush administration’s Gulag system cannot be precise because of the secrecy. Estimates have varied from 8,500 to 35,000. An AP story estimated around 14,000:

In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former Chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had put the blame on Dick Cheney for much of the administration’s “torture guidance”, claims that the number of “disappeared” approximates 35,000.

And despite claims to the contrary, there is very good evidence that a large proportion of our tortured prisoners are killed as a result of their torture. For example, a 2005 analysis of 44 autopsies reported by the ACLU, of men who died in our detention facilities, found 21 of the 44 deaths evaluated by autopsy to be homicides:

The American Civil Liberties Union today made public an analysis of new and previously released autopsy and death reports of detainees held in U.S. facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom died while being interrogated. The documents show that detainees were hooded, gagged, strangled, beaten with blunt objects, subjected to sleep deprivation and to hot and cold environmental conditions.

Keep in mind that that study involved only a small fraction of the total number of detainees dying in the largely secret U.S. prison system since September 11, 2001. We will probably never know for sure the full extent of these barbaric homicides.


The purpose of the invasion and occupation of Iraq

The purpose of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that I discussed in a previous post was based mostly on a book by Antonia Juhasz, “http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3D%2522the%2Bbush%2Bagenda%2522%2Bjuhasz%26btnG%3DGoogle%2BSearch&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title">The Bush Agenda – Invading the World One Economy at a Time”. In a nutshell, the invasion provided a great opportunity for many of George Bush’s wealthy supporters to make millions, billions, or tens of billions of dollars from contracts with the U.S. government to assist in the war effort and the reconstruction of Iraq and through access to Iraqi oil and other resources. Iraq also provides a launching site to occupy much of the Middle East, in order to satisfy the Bush administration’s imperial ambitions and acquire access to literally trillions of dollars worth of oil and other resources.

Soon after U.S. forces established military control over Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, Bush’s appointee as the administrator of Iraq, quickly put into effect 100 orders which facilitated the recommendations of Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force and plans for the economic transformation of Iraq: All members of the Ba’ath Party and of the Iraqi Army were fired from their jobs without pay, thus putting hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (many who were highly skilled) out of work and paving the way for U.S. corporations to receive billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts; the “Trade Liberalization Policy” provided many benefits to U.S. corporations, devastating Iraq’s businesses and industries in the process; an order for “Prohibited media activity” essentially outlawed any news media criticisms of the Bush administration’s role in Iraq; the Foreign Investment Order provided the legal framework for the invasion of U.S. corporations into Iraq; Americans were placed in numerous key positions; and many other repressive orders were decreed by Bremer, including the granting of criminal and civil immunity for all Americans from Iraq’s pre-existing laws.

Billions of dollars worth of no-bid contracts were provided by the U.S. government for reconstruction and security purposes. But while almost all of this money was awarded to Bush and Cheney cronies, the Iraqis were almost totally excluded from the process. Furthermore, the reconstruction effort was a miserable failure, with electricity, potable water, and sewage services remaining far below pre-war levels. Audits of U.S. taxpayer funds found contract files to be unavailable, incomplete, and unreliable, while $8.8 billion from the Development fund for Iraq were completely unaccounted for. Yet none of this interfered with U.S. corporations receiving the full amounts of their contracts plus much more.

As for U.S. oil companies, Production Sharing Agreements were put in place to ensure their access to Iraq’s oil, their profits have skyrocketed since the occupation began, and the Bush administration remains hard at work to ensure that their access to oil increases and becomes permanent.


The relationship between torture and occupation or dictatorship

Naomi Klein, in her new book, “The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”, provides a vivid and clear explanation for the relationship between torture and occupation or dictatorship. In the early chapters of her book she provides examples from the 1960s and 70s, involving Indonesia and several South American countries, including Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.

The common sequence of events for all of those examples was economic policies that were moving towards improving opportunities for the poorer segments of the population, followed by a military coup and the replacement of the leftist trend in economic policies with polices that served to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class. I won’t go into the details of those policies except to note that they were subsumed under the banner of “free trade” or laissez-faire economics, they are often required by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a condition of loans to developing countries, and yet governments in developing countries are hesitant to use them because they are so unpopular with the great majority of people.

Klein explains the common sense relationship between torture and the imposition of these economic policies:

Torture is not particularly complicated or mysterious…. A tool of the crudest kind of coercion, it crops up with great predictability whenever a local despot or a foreign occupier lacks the consent needed to rule. (Several examples are provided including the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq)… Torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.

She explains the reason why torture is required and used in these situations:

As a means of extracting information during interrogations, torture is notoriously unreliable, but as a means of terrorizing and controlling populations, nothing is quite as effective… There are no “abuses” or “excesses” here, simply an all-pervasive system… There is no humane way to rule people against their will. There are two choices: accept occupation and all the methods required for its enforcement, or else you reject, not merely certain specific practices, but the greater aim which sanctions them… Just as there is no kind, gentle way to occupy people against their determined will, there is no peaceful way to take away from millions of citizens what they need to live with dignity… Robbery, whether of land or a way of life, requires force or at least its credible threat; it’s why thieves carry guns, and often use them.

How this relates to our current situation

The above discussion could not be more relevant to our current situation in Iraq. Klein makes this point crystal clear at the end of chapter 5:

These days we are once again living in an era of corporatist massacres, with countries suffering tremendous military violence alongside organized attempts to remake them into model “free market” economies; disappearances and torture are back with a vengeance. And once again, the goals of building free-markets, and the need for such brutality are treated as entirely unrelated.

Though there is much to criticize about our current Congress, as least they reject torture. They fought long and hard against the Bush administration with regard to the use of torture, as they enacted the Military Commissions Act. In the end, though they desecrated many parts of our Constitution by passing that Act, at least they included in it an absolute ban against torture, by a vote of 90-9 in the Senate (Though Bush nullified the torture ban with a “signing statement”.)

Though many Congresspersons talk about the need to end the Iraq War, and most appear to be in favor of at least some sort of plan to end it, the urgency of ending the war is minimized by the prevalent attitude that the occupation of Iraq is basically a sound idea just hasn’t worked out well. It is that kind of attitude that enables the Bush administration to use minor signs of “progress”, such as a slight decrease in the monthly death toll of American soldiers, as a rationale for continuing the occupation.

What urgently needs to be recognized and admitted publicly is that the occupation of Iraq is NOT a basically sound idea. Iraq poses no threat to us now, just as it posed no threat to us when we invaded it. We are not bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq. And our occupation of Iraq is not helping in our “War on Terror” – to the contrary, it is impairing it by encouraging the development of ever more intense anti-American feeling throughout the world.

Our occupation of Iraq desperately needs to be recognized for the imperialist adventure that it is: It is a brutal occupation, against the will of the Iraqi people, and therefore it can be maintained only with continued violent repression of the Iraqi people. The results speak for themselves: torture; approximately a million dead (mostly civilians); and more than four million refugees. Once our occupation of Iraq is recognized and admitted for what it is, there can no longer be any excuse for a civilized nation to continue that occupation.


Implications for our future

It must be noted that the Bush/Cheney administration torture policies are not by any means confined to Iraq. They are in fact used all over the world in its conduct of our “War on terror. So we should ask ourselves: If torture of Iraqis is used to force them to acquiesce to our occupation of their country, then why do we torture other Muslims throughout the world? Clearly, the answer is that the imperial ambitions of our “leaders” extend way beyond Iraq.

We already know that to be the case, of course, with regard to Iran, as evidenced by all the saber-rattling aimed at that country. Also, the PNAC document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, written and signed by so many high level Neoconservatives in the Bush/Cheney administration, spells out their intentions clearly. After saying that we must “deter the rise of a new great-power competitor”, the document explains that the way we should do that is by “deterring or, when needed, by compelling regional foes to act in ways that protect American interests and principles.”

It is tempting to believe that the election of a Democratic President in 2008, if an election actually takes place, will put an end to these imperialist plans. But I’m not so sure. Though I have no doubt that any Democratic nominee will be far better than the Republican nominee, the two Democratic front runners in particular have consistently striven to appear “centrist” on the issue of the Iraq occupation, and in so doing they have utterly failed to characterize our imperialist occupation of Iraq for what it is. Consequently, I have serious concerns about their commitment to end that occupation if they are elected President. And for the same reason, I also have serious concerns about their commitment to reversing the wider imperialist plans of the current administration, which could well result in the destruction of our country and of our world if followed through to their conclusion.

[L. Coyote]

1. Torture is an Instrument of State Terrorism.

The United States has a history of support of torture. A good example involving the United States supporting state terrorism is seen in Latin America. I just focused on this issue in relation to the role of George Bush Sr. which overlaps with this post:

FROM: George Bush Sr. May Face Charges: Conspiring to Kidnap and Murder Political Activists
Dec-12-07 http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2459135

Former military dictator Jorge Rafael Videla and 16 other military leaders in Argentina will be prosecuted on charges of conspiring to kidnap and kill political activists in a scheme known as Plan Condor, developed by Henry Kissinger and George Bush Sr., head of the CIA at the time. Dictators in Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina killed opponents in the 1970s and 80s under the plan, also known as Operation Condor. The United States and Latin American military governments developed Operation Condor as a a transnational, state-sponsored terrorist coalition among the militaries of South America. In Argentina alone some 30,000 people were disappeared as result, leaving loved ones to seek justice decades later.

Coordinating Terror with U.S. support

Plan Condor began with the U.S. supported military coup against Chile's democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. Allende's government was targeted as a threat to U.S. strategic policy in Latin America early on. White House tapes reveal that on Sept. 14, 1970, then-President Richard Nixon ordered measures to force the Chilean economy into bankruptcy. "The U.S. will not accept a Marxist government just because of the irresponsibility of the Chilean people," declared Henry Kissinger, Nixon´s secretary of State.

Declassified U.S. Department of State documents have provided evidence to Plan Condor's broad scope. The Operation was an ambitious and successful plan to coordinate repression internationally. FBI special agent intelligence liason to the Southern Cone countries Robert Scherrer (now deceased) sent the letter to the U.S. embassy in Argentina on September 28, 1976: "'Operation Condor' is the code name for the collection, exchange and storage of intelligence data concerning so-called 'leftists,' communists and Marxists, which was recently established between cooperating intelligence services in South America in order to eliminate Marxist terrorist activities in the area."

The memo also specified Argentina's enthusiasm over the plan. "Members of 'Operation Condor' showing the most enthusiasm to date have been Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. The latter three countries have engaged in joint operations, primarily in Argentina, against the terrorist target." Operation Condor has been difficult to investigate, due to the selectivity of victims and lack of official declassified documents from the CIA and Department of State. Many of the documents that have been released have been heavily censored. However, following an extensive investigation by Argentine courts beginning in 1999 and the decade long work of human rights groups to collect forensic evidence, 17 military leaders will be put on trial for their participation in the illegal persecution of social activists.

............

After US Marines began the 21 year occupation of Nicaragua, Pres. Taft said,

"The day is not far distant when three Stars & Stripes
at three equidistant points will mark our territory:
one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal and
the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will
be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race,
it already is ours morally."

The Bush junta has seemingly expanded this vision to the entire globe.

[L. Coyote]

2. Operation Condor: Clandestine Inter-American System.

Operation Condor: Clandestine Inter-American System.
by J. Patrice McSherry - http://larc.sdsu.edu/humanrights/rr/PLAarticles/mcsherr...

McSherry, J. Patrice. "Operation Condor: Clandestine Inter-American System." Social Justice, Winter 1999 v26 i4 p144.
*Article used with author's permission. Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Crime and Social Justice Associates

IN THE 10 YEARS SINCE THE COLD WAR'S END, THE WORLD HAS SEEN A GRADUAL
opening up of formerly Secret state archives on both sides of the East-West divide,
as well as truly astonishing developments in human rights and international law.
Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon's request for the arrest and extradition of
General Augusto Pinochet in October 1998 was perhaps one of the most
astounding of these developments, not least because this case involved a
former ally of the U.S. government in the Cold War. Clearly, the collapse of
the Communist bloc and the end of the bipolar system were major structural
changes on the international level, allowing concerns with human rights and
justice to emerge with new strength and begin to challenge the limits set by
Cold War geopolitics. In effect, the struggle against impunity is becoming
"globalized," a positive aspect of the larger phenomena of globalization. Yet
profound questions remain. If a new threat to global U.S. interests were to
emerge or a powerful challenge to the hegemony over the Western political and
economic model were to arise, w ould concerns with human rights again be swept
aside in the name of national security? Would the ends again justify the
means?

The arrest of Pinochet refocused world attention on the dirty wars of the Cold
War era in Latin America. A key focus of Garzon's investigation is Operation
Condor, a shadowy Latin American military network whose key members were
Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil. Condor represented a
striking new level of coordinated repression among the anticommunist
militaries in the region, and its existence was suspected, but undocumented,
until fairly recently. Condor enabled the Latin American military states to
share intelligence and to hunt down, seize, and execute political opponents in
combined operations across borders. Refugees fleeing military coups and
repression in their own countries who sought safe havens in neighboring
countries were "disappeared" in combined transnational operations. The
militaries defied international law and traditions of political sanctuary to
carry out their shared anticommunist crusade. This article shows that Condor
was a parastatal system that used criminal me thods to eliminate "subversion,"
while avoiding constitutional institutions, ignoring due process, and
violating all manner of human rights. Condor made use of parallel prisons,
secret transport operations, routine assassination and torture, extensive
psychological warfare (PSYWAR, or use of black propaganda, deception, and
disinformation to conquer the "hearts and minds" of the population, often by
making crimes seem as though they were committed by the other side), and
sophisticated technology (such as computerized lists of suspects).

Condor must be understood within the context of the global anticommunist
alliance led by the United States. .........

[L. Coyote]

3. Condor Assassinations "Kissinger strenuously objected to criticism of the pro-U.S. military regimes"

The Undead Ghost of Operation Condor
by J. Patrice McSherry
http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.2/mcsherry.htm

Condor Assassinations -

The most secret level of Condor operations was known as “Phase III”: its worldwide program of assassinations of democratic and progressive leaders. Phase III proved that Condor’s targets were not only “subversives” or guerrillas, but also progressive leaders contesting military rule and the anticommunist crusade. The Condor prototype murdered Carlos Prats and his wife in 1974 by blowing up their car, and in 1975 attempted the assassination of Chilean Christian Democrat leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife, Ana Fresno, in Rome, Italy. The couple was severely wounded, but survived. Condor units kidnapped and assassinated exiled Uruguayan legislators Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz in Buenos Aires in May 1976, Bolivian ex-president Torres in Buenos Aires in June, and Letelier and Moffitt in September. The assassinations of such prominent democratic figures caused shock waves in the region and the world.

Michelini had been one of the founders of the center-left Frente Amplio in Uruguay, formed in 1970 to seek progressive change through the electoral system. Michelini became a senator representing the Frente. In the Senate, he was a fierce critic of the slow-motion coup in that country and the use of torture by security forces. After dissolving Congress in 1973, the military declared him a seditious subversive. Gutiérrez Ruiz had been a member of the National (or Blanco) Party who had been president of the House of Representatives. Both left Uruguay under death threat in 1973 and moved to Argentina.

Heavily armed men in plain clothes seized both men on the same day in May 1976. Their apartments were ransacked and their families terrorized. The squadrons behaved with military precision, communicated via radios to their superiors, and showed no concern about acting in broad daylight. The Argentine military junta did not respond to repeated requests for help from the legislators’ families. The bullet-ridden, tortured bodies of the two men were discovered in a car several days later. Police documents recovered in Argentina and declassified by President Néstor Kirchner in 2004 provided evidence that the Uruguayans had been under surveillance coordinated between the regimes of Argentina and Uruguay.

In June 1976, when Kissinger learned that in May the U.S. Embassy in Argentina had delivered a formal protest to the Argentine junta regarding the human rights situation, he was infuriated. Kissinger strenuously objected to criticism of the pro-U.S. military regimes in the region. “In what way is it compatible with my policy?” he fumed to Harry Schlaudeman, Assistant Secretary for Latin America. “How did it happen?…What do you guys think my policy is?…You better be careful. I want to know who did this and consider having him transferred.”1

U.S. officials had information through several channels about Condor’s targeting of Letelier in Washington D.C. Two Condor assassins, one Chilean and one U.S. expatriate, had approached the U.S. ambassador in Asunción, Paraguay, to obtain U.S. visas to enter the United States. They already had Paraguayan passports falsely depicting them as Paraguayans, provided by the Stroessner dictatorship. It was a routine method of camouflaging the perpetrators of Condor operations. ...............

[Time for change]

13. Not surprising that Kissinger would do that

I doubt that Kissinger will ever be called to account for his crimes, and that is a terrible shame.

"After Pinochet, prosecute Kissinger"
http://www.alternet.org/rights/20761/

[L. Coyote]

5. General Walters, under director Bush, was fully informed of the "international activities" of Condor

Current member of the Bush Administration and the CIA have decades-long experience with
Dictatorships, Kidnapping, Torture, Death Squads, and Extermination of Political Opponents

Greg Grandin, On the Torturable and the Untorturable
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174873/greg_grandin_on_the_torturable_and_the_untorturable

According to Washington's ambassador to Paraguay, the heads of these agencies kept "in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which covers all of Latin America." This allowed them to "co-ordinate intelligence information among the southern cone countries." Just this month, Pinochet's security chief General Manuel Contreras, who is serving a 240-year prison term in Chile for a wide-range of human rights violations, gave a TV interview in which he confirmed that the CIA's then-Deputy Director, General Vernon Walters (who served under director George H.W. Bush), was fully informed of the "international activities" of Condor.

Torture: Torture is the animating spirit of this triad, the unholiest of this unholy trinity. In Chile, Pinochet's henchmen killed or disappeared thousands -- but they tortured tens of thousands. In Uruguay and Brazil, the state only disappeared a few hundred, but fear of torture and rape became a way of life, particularly for the politically engaged. Torture, even more than the disappearances, was meant not so much to get one person to talk as to get everybody else to shut up.

At this point, Washington can no longer deny that its agents in Latin America facilitated, condoned, and practiced torture. Defectors from death squads have described the instruction given by their U.S. tutors, and survivors have testified to the presence of Americans in their torture sessions. One Pentagon "torture manual" distributed in at least five Latin American countries described at length "coercive" procedures designed to "destroy capacity to resist."

As Naomi Klein and Alfred McCoy have documented in their recent books, these field manuals were compiled using information gathered from CIA-commissioned mind control and electric-shock experiments ......

[L. Coyote]

6. John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents

John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents
http://www.johndinges.com/condor /


"Kissinger explained his opinion that the Government of Argentina had done an outstanding job in wiping out terrorist forces." --State Department cable, 1978.

This is the underground history of the international Dirty Wars by U.S. allies in South America. It is the first "War on Terrorism" and the parallels to the current wars are a cautionary tale. For much of a decade, six allied military governments engaged in secret warfare intended to wipe out their enemies, kidnapping and murdering up to 30,000 people. At the initiative of Chilean president General Augusto Pinochet, and with initial encouragement from the CIA, they set up a multinational terrorist organization, Operation Condor, to pursue those who escaped to other Latin American countries, Europe and the United States. Award-winning journalist John Dinges, using newly available U.S. documents and the dictatorships' own files, tells this gripping story from the point of view of those who have tried to keep it secret. He dispassionately lays bare the true extent of U.S. complicity in the crimes of the dictators who called the United States "the leader." Revolutionaries, intelligence operatives, U.S. officials--many speaking for the first time--recount the brutal struggle between Condor and its enemies. Revelations in the book include the never before told story of U.S. intelligence lapses that detected, but failed to prevent an assassination by our anticommunist allies in Washington, DC.

Now, after decades of relentless pursuit, investigators and judges are using the international trail of Condor’s crimes to reverse the impunity the generals have enjoyed for so long, starting with Pinochet’s own arrest in London. The still-ongoing Condor prosecutions are changing international human rights law forever. ............

[L. Coyote]

7. "Operation Condor", an International Organization for Kidnapping Political Opponents

"Operation Condor", an International Organization for Kidnapping Political Opponents

Latin America in the 1970s: "Operation Condor", an International Organization for Kidnapping Opponents
Translated Monday 1 January 2007, by Liliane Bolland
http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/article478.html


Under the aegis of the CIA, and with the complicity of several Western countries, the dictatorships of Latin America in the 1970s united their "services" against activists and progressive opponents to military regimes.

......

In June 1976, Nixon’s senior advisor, Henry Kissinger and secretary of inter-American affairs, William Rogers, gave the green light to the dictatorship in Buenos Aires to "eliminate subversion within ten months".

The foundations of "Condor" were actually laid before the Pinochet coup d’état in 1973. Under the umbrella of the CIA ..... The first cooperation agreements were signed between the CIA and anti-Castro groups, fascist movements such as the Triple AAA - the Argentinean Anti-communist Alliance, set up by Lopez Rega, advisor to President Isabelle Peron .... Condor’s first phase was limited to Latin America, but this was followed by a second, in Europe, principally in France, Spain and Portugal, as well as inside the USA itself.

In 1974, the military chief of staff of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity Government, General Prats, died with his wife in an attack in Buenos Aires. The Argentinean capital would become the scene of the assassinations of the Uruguayan ex-parliamentarians, Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez and the ex-president of Bolivia, Juan José Torres.

In Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Asunción, activists of the Chilean Communist Party and militants MIR were assassinated. The list was long: the Peronista Montoneros, members of the MTO (the "All for the Country Movement"), two Argentinean groups that supported the armed struggle; the Uruguyan Tupamaros were kidnapped and transferred – many later figured among the "disappeared".

.........

Uruguay just arrested ex-president Bordaberry, his minister of foreign affairs and six military officers, responsible for the disappearance in Argentina in l976 of Uruguayan opponents to the regime.

..... It is sad to say that two of the pillars of the Condor Operation, Alfredo Stroessner and Augusto Pinochet, never paid for their crimes and died without ever answering charges about the "disappeared" - who continue to haunt the memory of people who had been crushed by fascist brutality.

[Time for change]

14. "The still-ongoing Condor prosecutions are changing international human rights law forever. "

That's great -- I didn't know that. I wonder if that means that there's a chance that they will get to Kissinger, Nixon, and then Bush/Cheney, etc.?

I've got to get that book.

[Time for change]

11. I think that the arrest of Pinochet was a major step in the right direction

Too bad that more Americans aren't aware of our role in these crimes against humanity.

Before anyone wants to claim that this is a great country, we need to have a national discussion about these kinds of issues. We are NOT a great country as long as we do these kinds of things. And until we have a national discussion about these issues and decide to do the right thing, we never will be a great country.

[L. Coyote]

12. It logically leads to the moment when Kissinger, Bush, and others will be indicted

for their roles in the same crimes. Crimes without borders requires justice without borders.
Politicians should no longer be allowed to hide behind the US border or behind the veil of
covert operations. No nation should be immune from justice and international law.

A precedent needs to be set ASAP to prevent the sort of abuses we are seeing today,
with national lawlessness and raw power imposed on the globe by raw power.

We also need a national dialogue to place the current "torture is good" talking point
into perspective and historical context, to shine a bright light on the continuum of
human rights criminality of state "security" apparatuses.

[Time for change]

17. Damn right

If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.

Robert Jackson, Chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials

[Time for change]

8. That would be a very good thing if he was tried for those crimes

Unfortunately, even if he was, our corporate news media would do everything it could to make sure as few people as possible in this country heard about it.

[L. Coyote]

9. And they are doing a sales job for torture this week. Buying Good Germans?

Spend enough on spin, and you can buy a nation of good Germans, I fear.

I'm seeing media complaining that Dems are against waterboarding. Up is Down.

Campaign slogan: George W. "Waterboard" Bush, named in honor of his father!

[Swamp Rat]

4. "It's the Inquisition, and it's here to stay!"

[Time for change]

15. I do hope you're wrong about that

[L. Coyote]

16. We are the Inquisition! And we are here to stay. The old Inquisition was so worse

it is beyond our imaginations today. Every word in the few surviving books was scrutinized! Massive piles of books were burned in the streets. The King decreed that nothing could be written about Natives in the New Spain (the Americas).... Heretics were burned at the stake after being paraded in the square in dunce caps ...

I know, what an improvement!! Now renditions happen out of sight and the torture is secret. And we are not told of how many are killed.

We are the Inquisition as long as we keep up the inquiries. We are going to do that until we are disappeared, or they burn us in the town square.

[crickets]

10. K&R -nt

[CaseyNM]

18. Think Outside the Box =

This is a great discussion, supported by evidence and details, but it does work through the many facets/trees/details in this maze or forest that we are not seeing. I am using metaphor because there is another level that needs to be discussed: motive and origin. We need to see the forest for the trees.

The motive for the war to torture, for the invasion of a Middle Eastern oil country to Haliburton, from Florida in 2000 to Ohio in 2004, and obfuscation of who, where, when and why are the same: profit, as in corrupt capitalism. Corporate America has gradually dominated and taken over the role the "people" were designated to have through the power of the Constitution. Corporations can not vote, but they count our votes, determine the winner of the people's elections, tell us in corporate owned media who won, dominate the congress through lobbies, build and profit from war machinery in wars committing mass murder, develop energy policies that causes global warming all while increasing their wealth, and Corporate America employs "elected officials" after their service in office. It is nepotistic and incestuous with rich empowering other rich associates and becoming more wealthy.

We need to not just look at Corporate American puppets, such as bush and cheney, but who is pulling the strings, or better said is what is controlling the strings. Corporations do and they are not people. They are a legal entity and only exist to make more profit. Their bottom line is focused on profit. Profit becomes a all guiding force, not the people or the people's best interests. Corrupt Corporate Capitalism is a pathology and a long way from democracy. Mussolini said fascism is the marriage of corporations and government.

We need corporations to make CPU's and cars, but they should have nothing to do with our government, elections, media, or elected officials before, during, or after service, and it should be a felony the first time and the third offense should me huge fines and dissolving the corporations found guilty of influence or direct association.

Corporate corruption of our government is the real issue these wars to fraudulent elections and huge profits for oil companies and the Military Industrial Complex, as Eisenhower warned, and we need to start removing corporate, the rich and special interest's influence if democracy and the power is to really be in the hands of the people.

We need to change the infrastructure in the U.S. and return to a people, as members of a world
community, centered country and government. War and global warming for profit is a very poor substitute for people centered democracy.

[L. Coyote]

19. Great analysis. Corporations have a free pass for criminality under their junta.

We need to seize the personal assets of CEOs if they commit crimes acting as corporations.
Corporations should not serve as cut-outs for crimes people (CEOs) decide to commit.

[Time for change]

21. I couldn't agree more

Welcome to DU Casey :toast:

[CaseyNM]

20. Materialism and Corrupt Capitalism Make People into Objects

You can torture and murder a target, a thing, a less than human easier and with less guilt. Giving people the same orange jump suit, hoods, stuffing rags in their mouths, tying their hands, reduces people into commodities.

Commodities is what capitalism is all about. Buy 10 at 100 times more than it would cost to buy 10,000. You trade objects. You can manipulate the market with your purchase power or wealth and how you apply wealth to buy services, favors, and contracts.

The CIA and other Gestapo metastasis from German fascism-defined as the union between corporate and state- has used people to obfuscate their interventions in the U.S., such as assassinations, election fraud, drug trafficking, government court witness payoffs-that are legal where private witnesses can not be paid- and a whole host of other supper shadowy legal limbo mumbo jumbo...

Point being when you can buy anything and have license to run the world and finance your wars and government coups with drug and arms deals, people are objects that can be used and discarded. Dehumanization is the psychological consequence of using absolute corrupt power to do anything you want or think you need to do to maintain power and control.

Corrupt Corporate American interests are best identified by looking at the history of the CIA and other agency's interventions in the U.S. and in other countries. Run away capitalism makes for empire tentacles to become ever more powerful and capable of anything, without accountability to anyone. The perfect mafia/Roman Empire model of pure wealth centered power seems to be idealized in the United States and other corrupt corporate dominated governments. They control the media and the population's view of what they do.

What about the torture tapes? There were "hundreds" of hours of water boarding and other torture methods used on the tapes. Now the media plays the legal card. "It was probably legal to do what they did or even have the tapes, but how they got rid of the tapes seems suspect." This isn't being said over and over again in the media to talk about legality; rather it is being said to declare that it is acceptable. The subject is getting rid of the tapes, NOT WHAT THE TAPES WERE ABOUT! ! !

The torture of hundred on the tapes and tens of thousands during the criminal bush regime are the point. America is a hate culture that does not value human life, if we condone the practice of water boarding or torture. They claim they got actionable information from the use of these methods. They got what the victims wanted them to know and not enough to really damage any Muslim organization or operation that was important.

The point is we will get nuced or WMD'd if we keep showing how we don't value people, treat them like objects we can torture, dehumanize them into bad objects at Guantanamo, or Abu Ghraib, and who knows how many other places.

Makes you proud to be a fascist state member when they torture people in your name doesn't it? The motive or why is more power, more money, more control, more world domination and that justifies it, or maybe not.

The infrastructure is sick and this cancer will kill the host if it goes unchecked. The use of this metaphor is inappropriate because the host has already died. There is no representation of the people in the government of the U.S.; rather there is control by the special interests, rich and powerful, and corrupt traditions that self perpetuate.

I heard today that the top 1% of Americans had an income INCREASE that was more than the remaining 99% of Americans total income between 2001 and 2005. Just the margin of increase was more than 99% of all Americans made put together. What would you do to get and keep that kind of income? Without billions in your bank account we all say, "No way, people have to respect the rights of others and every country has sovereignty that should not be violated." With all that money, not all but many, say, "We can't let those (dehumanized name calling) destroy our freedom and right to do business and protect our interests."

Materialism becomes a dehumanizing disease and social pathology that leads to psychopathic policies of torture and mass murder in trumped up wars and CIA interventions to make more wealth and secure more power. Corrupt Capitalism is a monster that consumes all those it touches including the ethics of the rich who profit from the tortured, wounded and dead.

This is what needs to be debated in the public media, not Britney Spears and O'J's newest gangster activities. Our media circumvents the real issues with frames and omissions. Sponsors and station owners vet the news and content of investigators and journalists. We get orange juice with calcium and General Motors newest SUV gas guzzler so we can add more carbon to the atmosphere-that way the oil Barons make more and more and more, but at what real ecological, ethical, and historical perspective price?

You want more evidence of the decades of corruption, war crimes, and the crimes against humanity you our name check out the material below. Then ask what the motive is. What is causing this surge of crimes against humanity?

Read Rodney Stich's work:

http://www.defraudingamerica.com/

http://www.druggingamerica.com

http://www.unfriendlyskies.com

http://www.defraudingamericablog.com