Chile Supreme Court upholds Pinochet indictment (Henry Kissinger next?)

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.turkishpress.com/world/news.asp?id=050104234911.p3kchwjw.xml

SANTIAGO (AFP) - Chile's Supreme Court upheld Augusto Pinochet's indictment on murder and kidnapping charges, bringing the former dictator closer to standing trial for the first time for abuses during his 1973-1990 rule.

The three-to-two vote upholds a lower court ruling rejecting a defense the claim that Pinochet is mentally unfit to stand trial, and upholds Pinochet's house arrest.

The charges -- one murder and nine kidnappings of people whose bodies were never found -- are related to Operation Condor, a 1970s conspiracy of South American dictatorships to collaborate in eliminating opponents.

Pinochet, 89, has never stood trial for the disappearance and presumed murder of some 3,000 political opponents who vanished during his dictatorship, according to official count.
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http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=1951d91231e1373bb86de9ca1e1f8c7c

Teflon Tyrants: After Pinochet, Prosecute Kissinger

Commentary, Roger Burbach and Paul Cantor,
Pacific News Service, Dec 14, 2004

Editor's Note: The arrest by Chile of former military strongman Augusto Pinochet is a human rights victory. But complicent in the rise of Pinochet and his crimes, the writers say, is former Nixon advisor Henry Kissinger and other U.S. officials.

The Chilean government has arrested Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who led a brutal military coup in 1973 and ruled the country with an iron hand until 1990. The United States should now follow suit by prosecuting Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon's former national security advisor, for breaking U.S. and international law by helping foment the coup that brought Pinochet to power.

Before Pinochet, Chile had a well-deserved reputation as one of the most vibrant democracies in the world. It had a democratically elected president and a Congress just as we do. It had a wide range of political parties from the far right to the far left, all of which participated in the political process. It had numerous newspapers, magazines and radio stations that together represented the views of people across the political spectrum. All of its citizens, including illiterates, had a right to vote.

Pinochet, with Kissinger's help, changed all that.

The military junta Pinochet led dissolved Congress, outlawed political parties and the largest labor union in the country, censored the press, banned the movie "Fiddler on the Roof" as Marxist propaganda, publicly burned books ("on a scale seldom seen since the heyday of Hitler," according to the New York Times), expelled students and professors from universities, designated military officers as university rectors and arrested, tortured and killed thousands who opposed the regime.

Among those who died in the coup and its aftermath were: Salvador Allende, Chile's democratically elected president; Victor Jara, its most famous folk singer; Carlos Prats, the commander in chief of the Chilean armed forces until the coup plotters forced him out of office; Jose Toha, a former vice president; Alberto Bachelet, an air force general who opposed the coup; and two North American friends of ours, Charles Horman and Frank Terrugi.

The Pinochet regime was condemned for torturing political prisoners and for other human rights abuses by the United Nations, the Organization of American States, Amnesty International and many other respected international organizations. Among those tortured was a 24-year-old young man who, according to the Wall Street Journal, "was stripped naked and given electrical shocks...They started with wires attached to his hands and feet and finally to his testicles." Newsweek magazine wrote on March 31, 1975, "Each day Chileans are picked up for interrogation by the secret police. Some are held for weeks without charge, many are tortured, a few disappear altogether."

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[diamond14]

1. it would be to my GREAT joy to see kissinger in the docket....

I've been waiting a LONG time....


sadly, in bush* wars...kissinger keeps popping up as the BIG TIME behind-the-scenes criminal...after nixon, you'd think kissinger would have SHUT UP and quietly gone away....but NO...reTHUGlicans have ELEVATED kissinger to their AUTHORITARIAN on wars and diplomacy....reTHUGlicans just love criminals....

[NNN0LHI]

2. The day HK is ever indicted I will be handing out candy. The good stuff too

Milk chocolate covered butter cremes.

Don

[burrowowl]

5. And good beer on

the house!

[0007]

12. The repukes even backed 'Meyer Lansky' an organized crime family and

dictator Fulgencio Batista of Cuba before Castro run em out of town in 59.

[imenja]

3. Aren't there indictments pending against Kissinger?

in certain European countries? I thought there were places he couldn't go without fearing arrest?

[proud patriot]

4. If I were president for the day I'd extradite Kissinger to Chile

you may say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one

[imenja]

6. Chilean courts dream too

This is an article from the Guardian from two years ago: Kissinger may face extradition to Chile

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4431760,00.html

[imenja]

7. Kissinger implicated in Argentina's "Dirty War"

Probably old news for everyone here, but in case you missed it:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1204-01.htm

[Judi Lynn]

8. Grand news! Thanks for adding the second link. Very helpful.

No doubt we can expect Pinochet to ape another physical emergency.

From another source:

The military junta Pinochet led dissolved Congress, outlawed political parties and the largest labor union in the country, censored the press, banned the movie "Fiddler on the Roof" as Marxist propaganda, publicly burned books ("on a scale seldom seen since the heyday of Hitler," according to the New York Times), expelled students and professors from universities, designated military officers as university rectors and arrested, tortured and killed thousands who opposed the regime.

Among those who died in the coup and its aftermath were: Salvador Allende, Chile's democratically elected president; Victor Jara, its most famous folk singer; Carlos Prats, the commander in chief of the Chilean armed forces until the coup plotters forced him out of office; Jose Toha, a former vice president; Alberto Bachelet, an air force general who opposed the coup; and two North American friends of ours, Charles Horman and Frank Terrugi.

The Pinochet regime was condemned for torturing political prisoners and for other human rights abuses by the United Nations, the Organization of American States, Amnesty International and many other respected international organizations. Among those tortured was a 24-year-old young man who, according to the Wall Street Journal, "was stripped naked and given electrical shocks...They started with wires attached to his hands and feet and finally to his testicles." Newsweek magazine wrote on March 31, 1975, "Each day Chileans are picked up for interrogation by the secret police. Some are held for weeks without charge, many are tortured, a few disappear altogether."
(snip/...)

At the heart of the matter is Condor.

FBI agent Robert Sherrer, now deceased, filed his startling report from Argentina on Operation Condor on Sept. 28, 1976. He described it as a joint effort by Chile, Argentina and Uruguay to stamp out leftist opposition in exile. His cable noted that the "most secret phase of 'Operation Condor' involves the formation of special teams from member countries who are to travel anywhere in the world to nonmember countries to carry out sanctions up to assassination." It was "not beyond the realm of possibility" that the Letelier hit was part of Condor, the cable added.

Exiles had been hunted down in Italy and Spain, among other countries, in an overseas extension of the terror Pinochet had unleashed at home, torturing and "disappearing" thousands of leftists, socialists, communists or merely young foreigners attracted to Chile by the socialist government of Salvador Allende, which Pinochet had toppled. One was Charles Horman, a 31-year-old filmmaker, writer and human-rights activist, whose murder during the 1973 coup was dramatized in the Jack Lemmon-Sissy Spacek film "Missing." Hundreds of people were disappearing in Chile in the aftermath of the coup, as the U.S. well knew. One State Department memorandum to Henry Kissinger dated Nov. 16, 1973, said, "An internal, confidential report prepared for the junta puts the number of executions for the period Sept. 11-30 at 320," or more than three times the publicly acknowledged figure. The memo said Chile's leaders justified the executions as legal under martial law. "Also present is a puritanical, crusading spirit," it added. "A number of those executed seem to have been petty criminals."

In its foreign assassinations, DINA often contracted with right-wing anti-Castro Cuban exiles from New Jersey and Florida. For the Letelier mission, DINA selected a special agent, Michael Townley, the American-born son of a Ford Motor Company executive in Chile, to recruit the Cubans.

Pinochet was firmly in control of the operations, his secret police chief would testify in court years later.
(snip/...)http://archive.salon.com/news/1998/12/03news2.html

[Judi Lynn]

10. Sorry, I neglected to post the link to my first Pinochet source,can't edit

as it's been over an hour. Here it is:

http://www.redress.btinternet.co.uk/rburbach26.htm


Here are some photos of the famous Chilean folk singer, Victor Jara, whom they tortured, then murdered:



Song written to remember him:

Victor Jara
words by Adrian Mitchell, music by Arlo Guthrie

Victor Jara of Chile
Lived like a shooting star
He fought for the people of Chile
With his songs and his guitar
His hands were gentle, his hands were strong

Victor Jara was a peasant
He worked from a few years old
He sat upon his father's plow
And watched the earth unfold
His hands were gentle, his hands were strong

Now when the neighbors had a wedding
Or one of their children died
His mother sang all night for them
With Victor by her side
His hands were gentle, his hands were strong

He grew up to be a fighter
Against the people's wrongs
He listened to their grief and joy
And turned them into songs
His hands were gentle, his hands were strong

He sang about the copper miners
And those who worked the land
He sang about the factory workers
And they knew he was their man
His hands were gentle, his hands were strong

He campaigned for Allende
Working night and day
He sang "Take hold of your brothers hand
You know the future begins today"
His hands were gentle, his hands were strong

Then the generals seized Chile
They arrested Victor then
They caged him in a stadium
With five-thousand frightened men
His hands were gentle, his hands were strong

Victor stood in the stadium
His voice was brave and strong
And he sang for his fellow prisoners
Till the guards cut short his song
His hands were gentle, his hands were strong

They broke the bones in both his hands
They beat him on the head
They tore him with electric shocks
And then they shot him dead
His hands were gentle, his hands were strong

Repeat first verse

©1977, 1990 by by Adrian Mitchell & Arlo Guthrie
All Rights Reserved.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Four days of torture



Victor Jara: "Silence and screams are the end of my song"
On 11 September 1973 Victor Jara had been due to sing in the Santiago University.

Instead, with the coup of General Augusto Pinochet, underway, he was arrested and led to Santiago's boxing stadium.

Over four days he was tortured, beaten, electrocuted, his hands and wrists broken, before finally being machine-gunned to death, at the age of 38.

His widow, Joan, says his body was thrown to the street, and was later found in the morgue "among lots and lots of anonymous bodies" that she saw that day.
(snip/...)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/165363.stm

Other World Wide Web Pages about Victor Jara
http://www.msu.edu/~chapmanb/jara/elinks.html

I just located a site where you may hear snippets of his songs. See what you think:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000DZ3CD/qid=1104932257/sr=1-10/ref=sr_1_10/104-3916479-8219143?v=glance&s=music

[Just Me]

9. Ah ha!!! So, the neoCONs stole Pinochet's torture methods!!!

Among those tortured was a 24-year-old young man who, according to the Wall Street Journal, "was stripped naked and given electrical shocks...They started with wires attached to his hands and feet and finally to his testicles."

Birds of the same reviled feather!!!!

Of course, Kissinger is the neoCONs authority on war and nation-building,...the sick f*ck!!!

[Judi Lynn]

11. Here's an image some DU'ers might respect,

offered by a DU reader to some of his DU friends on a small message board. The poster has lived in Chile, and is well aware of the Pinochet atrocities.

This image concerns Victor Jara, whose hands were smashed by rifle butts in the torture center in Santiago, according to witnesses, before he was murdered by being shot 34 times: