It’s just the name of the bogeyman that’s changed....

[kpete]

“We should be looking at a democratic evolution,” said Kissinger. But he warned that the U.S. should cultivate key democratic reformists and military leaders in a low-key fashion during the process. “It should not look like an American project. The Egyptians are a proud people. They threw out the British and they threw out the Russians.”

On the other hand, when thin-skinned right-wing dictators in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay were kidnapping and murdering “democratic reformists” by the thousands in 1976, Kissinger, then secretary of state—not having to worry about lurid accounts of torture on Twitter and Facebook and Al-Jazeera—advised South American generals to get on with their grisly task so as not to provoke censure from a U.S. Congress beginning to waken to the ongoing slaughter. Or, as Kissinger put it to Argentine Foreign Minister Adm. Cesar Augusto Guzzetti in June 1976: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures.”

The things to be done were no secret: Human rights organizations and State Department memorandums supplied all necessary details. In Argentina alone more than 10,000 people had been “disappeared” by the end of 1976. But, in the name of fighting the Cold War, messy things had to be done, said the generals and their apologists—Kissinger included.

Ironically, for the past 30 years Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and his allies abroad have justified his brutal repression in similar terms. Some are still doing it. It’s just the name of the bogeyman that’s changed: from communism to radical Islam aka the Muslim Brotherhood—from Fidel Castro’s revolutionary virus to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida. The fact that al-Qaida’s leaders have condemned the Muslim Brotherhood for its willingness to participate in Egyptian politics is an inconvenient detail.

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

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/give_us_a_break_henry_20110209/

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[pacalo]

2. I was a teenager then & I'm learning about this for the first time.

I wonder what was reported about Uruguay by Cronkite back then; what kind of b.s. was going out to the reporters -- back when the news was legitimate & highly respected.

Republicans always need a bogeyman to cover their dirty business. We should be very thankful for the high-tech communications we have today.

[jwirr]

3. Some of us knew but I do not remember it being the MSM that informed

us. I think those stories were pretty well covered up by the war protests and the war.

[Wilms]

4. In essence, then, the war also provided a distraction from doings in Latin America.

I never it looked at it that way before.