The Pinochet File

[searchingforlight]

Did anyone hear the discussion on this book on NPR yesterday morning? It was about the previously sealed but released information on the Nixon/Kissinger takeover of the Allende government in Chile.

Why do we continue to let our country do these things in our name?

We now live in a country where the government can know anything about us. They can know what books we check out or buy, what toilet paper we purchase and what we charge on our credit cards. You name it. Nothing is sacred.

Why then are our leaders allowed to seal records for 20+ years to keep us from knowing facts about them or their acts?

What is the purpose of "Executive Privilege" anyway? It has been my understanding that it was meant to keep information from falling into the hands of OUR enemies.

How could knowing who was consulted about energy policy fall into that category? Or, knowing what happened at Bush's last company. Knowing about stock sales, etc.

DON'T THESE PEOPLE WORK FOR US????????

It is time for an accounting and we should end these loopholes that give our employees these firewalls to hide behind.

[w13rd0]

1. Oh, and hearing this...

...that Kissinger and Nixon were intimately involved in the Allende assassination and formenting unrest in Chile, I kept thinking...'and Bush appointed Kissinger to head up the 911 investigation...' Now, WHY would that be? WHY appoint a man known to overturn democracy, advocate and approve assassination, stonewall and orchestrate coverups? WHY?

[sweetheart]

2. because you ARE the enemy.

If the people were in the know, then the leaders would be in prison rather than in office... so executive priviledge is the right to commit heinous crimes indescriminantly.

I hear you. What secret is soooooo important that taxpaying hardworking american citizens are not to know? Crime... theft.

[Clete]

3. This was a real blotch on our country's credibility.

Since my mother was Chilean and I lived in Chile prior to Pinochet, I was able to get a lot of ancedotes from friends of mine over what was going on.

Unfortunately, a lot of Chileans like Pinochet because he turned the economy around and made people more prosperous. So they refuse to believe that he is a bad guy.

For my part, I still want to know why Henry Kissinger isn't in prison.

If you haven't read it, read "House of Spirits" by Isabel Allende. She is a writer and a neice of our CIA assassinated President Allende. It takes part over that period. So you get a good story and an insider's take on the history of that time in Chile.

[searchingforlight]

4. I read this wonderful book . Thank you.

I loved it! (Off my subject but did you read her book Aphrodite? Great women's book).

[Clete]

8. Not yet but it's on my list.

:-)

[Mairead]

12. What's interesting is that at least some people say it's a myth

That his 'turning the country around' didn't really happen:

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/42a/086.html

[Clete]

14. So the American trained economists the Chicago boys

weren't so hot after all? A friend of my mother's who visited Santiago every year was impressed because for the first time there was an abundance of consumer goods to be bought and this also created jobs.

When I lived there (before Pinochet) it was possible to walk around with $5 worth of pesos ($500.00 pesos on the exchange then) and not buy anything for months because there was nothing to buy. Clothes had to be made from scratch and many women supported their families as seamstresses.

There was a hot trade in bootlegged goods. The bootlegger was your friend. This was because import tariffs were so high, that if you imported let's say Kleenex a box would cost you the five dollars to make it worthwhile to import, so nobody bothered very much to import anything and yet there was hardly any domestic production to make consumer goods. Of course the bootleggers didn't pay taxes.

So people bought from the bootleggers or they bought from visitors or those who had been overseas and were able to bring in personal goods through the customs. I had my suitcase emptied every summer break when I would go there after being in the states at school all year and I would make more than I had paid for the clothes new.

This of course produced an economy with few jobs for the proletariat except in the mines and on the farms. The white collar jobs available went to the educated upper class. This was not a good economy as you can see. However, in a fascist society prosperity is an illusion for awhile and then it starts to fall apart. History has pretty much borne this out. I am rooting for the Chileans though. They are an industrious lot and very Democratic by nature, so I am sure they will come out on top eventually, if our government here in the USA doesn't interfere anymore.

[bluestateguy]

5. Kegger at my place when Pinochet dies

It will be a grand celebration!

[Blue_Chill]

7. What state are you in?

I may take you up on that.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Is there new declassified material?

EVERY DETAIL of this dirty business should be illuminated. What better time than when we're the undisputed most powerful, most dangerous country in the world?

Considering the image Bush has given this country, exposing the nasty business we conducted with Chile would only ENHANCE the Repubican profile.

Actually, it could be a terrific turning point to come clean, reveal our shady past, as a new Democratic President shows the world we can start deserving the honor we have loudly claimed for so long.


Kissinger, left, Pinochet, right

(snip) I recently got hold of a declassified memorandum about Henry Kissinger's only meeting with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The meeting occurred on June 8, 1976, in Santiago, and the internal State Department memorandum shows how hard Kissinger tried to shield the Chilean general from criticism and assure him that his human rights violations were not a serious problem as far as the U.S. government was concerned.

I had been trying since 1995 to get the memorandum, which was stamped Secret/Nodis (No Distribution). My initial request was refused, but suddenly, to my surprise, the State Department "memorandum of conversation" arrived in the mail in October, shortly after Pinochet's arrest, with a note explaining that, on re-review, it had been opened in full.

The memo describes how Secretary of State Kissinger stroked and bolstered Pinochet, how--with hundreds of political prisoners still being jailed and tortured--Kissinger told Pinochet that the Ford Administration would not hold those human rights violations against him. At a time when Pinochet was the target of international censure for state-sponsored torture, disappearances, and murders, Kis-singer assured him that he was a victim of communist propaganda and urged him not to pay too much attention to American critics. (snip/...)




http://www.thememoryhole.org/pol/kissinger-declass.htm

[AP]

10. Clinton declassified many documents which earlier gov'ts released

redacted. Clinton 'unredacted' them. The author of this book talks about how the new information is very revealing. It looks like the US might have helped Chile track down and kill two US citizens. One documents says "US intelligence shared with Pinochet might have unwittingly helped to locate" the American citizen. Earlier republican administrations had that part blacked out.

Unwitting, my ass.

[AP]

9. I heard the author of the Pinochet File at Welfleet MA Public Library

Man, was this an incredible story. There is no way Kissinger and Nixon are going to be any place other than hell for eternity.

And the schocking thing is that it's amazing that the RW US Gov't used to sabotage democratically elected socialist governments which tried to spread wealth among the working class (in order to create a middle class) rather than spread it around Huston, TX and Wall St, and today the RW tries to sabotage DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED MODERATELY LIBERAL GOVERNMENTS to achieve the same end.

The things this book talks about (which happened 30 years agor) are the same motivations the RW has had for sabotaging Clinton, Gore, Gerhard Schroeder, Tony Blair, and Hugo Chavez (who is no socialist) in the last 10 years.

[AP]

11. Incidentally, when you hear information like this, you think...

why the hell wouldn't the fascist RW in America assassinate Kennedy? Why draw the line there if they were willing to commit such unbelievable attrocities in other places, just to make sure money and political power wouldn't shift to the masses.

[Mairead]

13. Exactly.

I put nothing past them. All the right-wingers can scream 'tinfoil hat' as much as they like, but when you get people in power who can come up with a Project Northwoods and actually expect to be rewarded for it, or who are willing to carefully create a tissue of lies that justify killing and maiming thousands of innocent people just to get even more money when they already have more than they can spend in their entire lives...when that's possible, almost nothing is impossible.

[SharonAnn]

16. That's what we're doing in Venezuela right now

"US Gov't used to sabotage democratically elected socialist governments which tried to spread wealth among the working class (in order to create a middle class) rather than spread it around Huston, TX and Wall St, and today the RW tries to sabotage DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED MODERATELY LIBERAL GOVERNMENTS to achieve the same end."

[mountebank]

15. The Trials of Henry Kissinger

Those interested who haven't already should see The Trials of Henry Kissinger. It's a documentary that contains a lot of information from declassified documents - though they were heavily redacted.

Did the author of this new book have access to unredacted material that the directors of Trials did not?

Also, there is a book review in the L.A. Times Review of Books (sorry, no link) that basically says that although the book states that although the CIA had a cajoling and sympathetic view toward the coup plotters, it is not directly implicated in directly planning the coup - and that "lefties" will be disheartened by the news. This is a paraphrase from memory, so I hope I'm getting it right.

Anyone read the book care the comment on that characterization of its contents?