Paraguay? Why not!

[Octafish]

¿ Paraguay? ¡Porque no!



There's a big election in Paraguay today. Here's the guy who's ahead in the polls.

Ex-bishop Fernando Lugo shakes up politics in Paraguay

The leading presidential candidate is seen as an agent of change by supporters and as a leftist fanatic by critics.

By Patrick J. McDonnell
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
8:05 AM PDT, April 19, 2008

VILLARICA, PARAGUAY — A sense of new possibilities courses through the crowd even before "the bishop of the poor" shows up in the plaza of this sugar-cane farming center.

"I'm not here to hand out beer, liquor, sausages," Fernando Lugo advises, alluding to the traditional giveaways of Paraguayan pols on the stump. "I'm here to share the hope of change with the people."

Tiny, landlocked Paraguay, still recovering from the stultifying legacy of the 35-year dictatorship of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, will cast ballots Sunday to elect a new president. The stunning emergence of Lugo, a former Roman Catholic bishop, as the leading presidential candidate has turned the place upside down.

The so-called pink tide of left-leaning leaders has altered the face of Latin America. But there has been no candidate quite like Lugo. Supporters see him as the embodiment of hope amid gloom. Critics warn of an impending conflagration if the arm-waving orator wins.

"From today on, my cathedral will be the country," Lugo declared when he resigned the priesthood in December 2006. The Vatican, irritated by the public gesture, says Lugo remains a priest and is barred by canon law from seeking public office.

Voters in the United States may question whether any U.S. presidential aspirant will deliver on the "change" mantra. Here, not even Lugo's fiercest enemies doubt that he is capable of shaking up sleepy Paraguay.

CONTINUED…

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-lugo20apr20,0,886758.story

Paraguay is a happening place. Just ask Neil Bush and Rev Sun Myung Moon.



Here's Neil outside the presidential palace
with his new friend, current Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte.
The president wanted to change Paraguay's constitution
to allow him to run for a second term.
It's never too late, for friends of the Bush network.
With help from Rev Moon's Swiss bank account and
Poppy Bush's swell Cuban friends,
that could easily be arranged.

Rev. Moon-allied group hosts Bush brother in Paraguay

Neil Bush is the guest of a group founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon

President Bush's younger brother meets Paraguay's president, group delegation

ASUNCION, Paraguay (AP) -- Neil Bush, younger brother of President Bush, called on Paraguay's president as the guest of a business federation founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

A presidential press office source, who spoke on condition of not being named, confirmed the younger Bush met President Nicanor Duarte on Thursday along with a delegation from the Universal Peace Federation, a group associated with Moon.

SNIP...

Betancourt said Bush later attended a leadership seminar sponsored by the federation.

The federation's Web site says it is trying to promote peace in the Middle East, South Asia and other regions, as well as proposing a 50 mile (85-kilometer), $200 billion tunnel linking Siberia and Alaska.

A leading Paraguayan newspaper, ABC Color, reported Friday that Bush spoke at the leadership seminar about instilling a "culture of service" and better uniting individuals and organizations behind objectives that serve peace and the common good.

It said the seminar, held at an Asuncion hotel, was entitled "Toward a New Paradigm of Leadership and Government in Times of World Crisis."

CONTINUED...

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/02/29/paraguay.neil.bush.ap/index.html

Neil intside with Paraguay's president and one of Moon's sons in February, 2008.



The decider guy who ran Paraguay for 35 years was buds with Spain's Franco,
Europe's most-successful and longest-lived fascist dictator.
Stroessner's Colorado Party lasted 68 years in power -- longer than Mao's crowd.



One of the things about being dictator, Stroessner decided who could stay and who could go in Paraguay.



In his reign, President Gen. Stroessner sheltered NAZIs that include Klaus Barbie and Dr. Josef Mengele.

CONDOR archives unearthed in Paraguay expose U.S. allies' abuses

By Diana Jean Schemo, New York Times, 11 August 1999

A SUNCION, Paraguay—When Martin Almada asked a judge for records of his arrest under the dictatorship of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, he hoped merely to learn more about his own private tragedy: nearly four years of captivity, during which the police telephoned his wife so she would hear his screams under torture.

Instead, the one-time schoolteacher unearthed a mountain of records detailing repression among United States-backed military regimes throughout South America during the cold war. From floor to ceiling, five tons of reports and photos detailed the arrest, interrogation and disappearance of thousands of political prisoners during General Stroessner's 35-year dictatorship.

The documents trace the creation and work of Operation Condor, a secret plan among security forces in six countries to crush left-wing political dissent.

Paraguayans quickly named the files the archives of terror. Though discovered six years ago, the files have gained new prominence throughout Latin America with the arrest of Chile's former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, in London last October. To this day, they remain the only extensive collection of public records of a project by the region's military rulers that succeeded in exterminating thousands of political opponents.

The files have given a kind of vindication to survivors, their families and the families of those dead and missing by delivering concrete proof of a darkly secretive era.

The archives have also provided fodder for the developing case against General Pinochet, the only one of the region's dictators to face the prospect of trial. General Stroessner remains a fugitive from justice living in Brazil.

CONTINUED...

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/42/158.html

In the fight against communism...and leftists...and liberals...and intellectuals...tens of thousands were disappeared in South American countries.



Those new to the subject will find a wealth of information here:

LETELIER-MOFFITT ASSASSINATION
30 YEARS LATER

National Security Archive calls for Release of Withheld Documents Relating to Pinochet's Role in Infamous Act of Terrorism in Washington, D.C. on September 21, 1976

Archive releases new document on CIA approach to Manuel Contreras on Operation Condor

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 199

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB199/index.htm

Operation CONDOR enabled assassins to cross international borders anti-communist witch hunt. Its agents even killed former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and Amercan Ronni Moffitt in Washington, D.C. CIA Director George H. W. Bush covered up these murders as a matter of "national security." Ye-up.



Well, that's relatively well known compared to the other thing America's Corporate McPravda has ignored:

Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Hooking George Bush

By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews

Last fall, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's latest foray into the high-priced world of media and politics was in trouble. South American journalists were writing scathingly about Moon's plan to open a regional newspaper that the 77-year-old founder of the Korean-based Unification Church hoped would give him the same influence in Latin America that the ultra-conservative Washington Times had in the United States.

As opening day ticked closer for Moon's Tiempos del Mundo, leading South American newspapers were busy recounting unsavory chapters of Moon's history, including his links with South Korea's feared intelligence service and with violent anti-communist organizations that some commentaries said bordered on neo-fascist.

Indeed, in the early 1980s, amid widespread human rights abuses, Moon had used friendships with the military dictators in Argentina and Uruguay to invest in those two countries. Moon was such a pal of the Argentine generals that he garnered an honorary award for siding with Argentina's junta in the Falklands War.

More recently, Moon has been buying large tracts of agricultural lands in Paraguay. La Nacion reported that Moon had discussed these business ventures with Paraguay's ex-dictator Alfredo Stroessner. (Nov. 19, 1996)

Moon's disciples fumed about the critical stories and accused the Argentine news media of trying to sabotage the newspaper's inaugural gala in Buenos Aires on Nov. 23. "The local press was trying to undermine the event," complained the church's internal newsletter, Unification News.

Given the controversy, Argentina's elected president, Carlos Menem, did decide to reject Moon's invitation. But Moon had a trump card to play in his bid for South American respectability: the endorsement of an ex-president of the United States, George Bush. Agreeing to speak at the newspaper's launch, Bush flew aboard a private plane, arriving in Buenos Aires on Nov. 22. Bush stayed at Menem's official residence, the Olivos. But Bush failed to change the Argentine president's mind.

Still, Moon's followers gushed that Bush had saved the day, as he stepped before about 900 Moon guests at the Sheraton Hotel. "Mr. Bush's presence as keynote speaker gave the event invaluable prestige," wrote the Unification News. "Father (Moon) and Mother (Mrs. Moon) sat with several of the True Children (Moon's offspring) just a few feet from the podium."

Bush lavished praise on Moon and his journalistic enterprises. "I want to salute Reverend Moon, who is the founder of The Washington Times and also of Tiempos del Mundo," Bush declared. "A lot of my friends in South America don't know about The Washington Times, but it is an independent voice. The editors of The Washington Times tell me that never once has the man with the vision interfered with the running of the paper, a paper that in my view brings sanity to Washington, D.C. I am convinced that Tiempos del Mundo is going to do the same thing" in Latin America.

SNIP...

Money Talks

But Bush's boosterism was just what Moon needed in South America. "The day after," the Unification News observed, "the press did a 180-degree about-turn once they realized that the event had the support of a U.S. president." With Bush's help, Moon had gained another beachhead for his worldwide business-religious-political-media empire.

After the event, Menem told reporters from La Nacion that Bush had claimed privately to be only a mercenary who did not really know Moon. "Bush told me he came and charged money to do it," Menem said. (Nov. 26, 1996). But Bush was not telling Menem the whole story. By last fall, Bush and Moon had been working in political tandem for at least a decade and a half. The ex-president also had been moonlighting as a front man for Moon for more than a year.

In September 1995, Bush and his wife, Barbara, gave six speeches in Asia for the Women's Federation for World Peace, a group led by Moon's wife, Hak Ja Han Moon. In one speech on Sept. 14 to 50,000 Moon supporters in Tokyo, Bush insisted that "what really counts is faith, family and friends." Mrs. Moon followed the ex-president to the podium and announced that "it has to be Reverend Moon to save the United States, which is in decline because of the destruction of the family and moral decay." (Washington Post, Sept. 15, 1995)

In summer 1996, Bush was lending his prestige to Moon again. Bush addressed the Moon-connected Family Federation for World Peace in Washington, an event that gained notoriety when comedian Bill Cosby tried to back out of his contract after learning of Moon's connection. Bush had no such qualms. (WP, July 30, 1996)

Throughout these public appearances, Bush's office has refused to divulge how much Moon-affiliated organizations have paid the ex-president. But estimates of Bush's fee for the Buenos Aires appearance alone ran between $100,000 and $500,000. Sources close to the Unification Church have put the total Bush-Moon package in the millions, with one source telling The Consortium that Bush stood to make as much as $10 million.

Bush also may have other Argentine business deals in the works with Moon. On Nov. 16, 1996, La Nacion quoted businessmen as saying that Bush and Moon were keeping an eye on plans to privatize the hydroelectric complex of Yacyreta, a joint $12 billion Paraguayan-Argentine project to dam the Parana River.

CONTINUED….

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/moon1.html

Besides military, political and economic repression,
there's one big industry in the Cone...

Moonies accused of involvement in drugs

The Reverend Moon has carved out a section of Paraguay that is twice the size of Luxembourg. Séamus Mirodan went to see it. (Here’s his report.)

By Séamus Mirodan
Irish Times Thursday, Oct. 14, 2004

Paraguay -- The Reverend Moon has carved out a section of Paraguay that is twice the size of Luxembourg. Seamus Mirodan went to see it

Reverend Sun Myung Moon, spiritual leader of the Unification Church, self-proclaimed Messiah, multimillionaire and a generous contributor to the US Republican Party, has been showing a strong interest over the last five years in little-known Paraguay at the centre of the South American continent.

Since 1999, Rev Moon has built his personal empire which begins on the marshy banks of the River Paraguay and stretches beyond the hazy, level horizon through 600,000 hectares of arid land - equivalent to more than two Luxembourgs - punctuated by solitary clusters of withered trees and sad bushes which struggle desperately for air.

The scorching sun beats relentlessly on one of Latin America’s most desolate zones. It is here in the northern province of Chaco, directly above the GuaranI aquifer, the largest resource of fresh drinking water in the world, where Moon’s associates claim he wishes to build an ecological paradise.

Nevertheless, national Senator Domingo Laino sees a different pattern in Moon’s acquisitions. “There are two principal branches to Moon’s interest in Paraguay,” he said, “control of the largest fresh drinking water source in the world and control of the narcotics business”, which is so prevalent in this area. “President Lula told me that Brazil took serious measures to curb Moon a few years back as it became evident that he was buying up the border between our two countries,” said the senator.

CONTINUED...

http://www.rickross.com/reference/unif/unif240.html

Visitors also find the region relatively unpolluted and largely unspoiled.



And when the world's ecosystem goes kaput, they'll find plenty of water and relatively cool temperatures compared to what the proles and paupers of the northern hemisphere and southern Africa will have to deal with.

The US Military Descends on Paraguay

Written by Benjamin Dangl
The Nation
Monday, 17 July 2006

While hitchhiking across Paraguay a few years ago, I met welcoming farmers who let me camp in their backyards. I eventually arrived in Ciudad del Este, known for its black markets and loose borders. Now the city and farmers I met are caught in the crossfire of the US military's "war on terror."

On May 26, 2005, the Paraguayan Senate allowed US troops to train their Paraguayan counterparts until December 2006, when the Paraguayan Senate can vote to extend the troops' stay. The United States had threatened to cut off millions in aid to the country if Paraguay did not grant the troops entry. In July 2005 hundreds of US soldiers arrived with planes, weapons and ammunition. Washington's funding for counterterrorism efforts in Paraguay soon doubled, and protests against the military presence hit the streets.

Some activists, military analysts and politicians in the region believe the operations could be part of a plan to overthrow the left-leaning government of Evo Morales in neighboring Bolivia and take control of the area's vast gas and water reserves. Human rights reports from Paraguay suggest the US military presence is, at the very least, heightening tensions in the country.

Soy and Landless Farmers

Paraguay is the fourth-largest producer of soy in the world. As this industry has expanded, an estimated 90,000 poor families have been forced off their land. Campesinos have organized protests, road blockades and land occupations against displacement and have faced subsequent repression from military and paramilitary forces. According to Grupo de Reflexion Rural (GRR), an Argentina-based organization that documents violence against farmers, on June 24, 2005, in Tekojoja, Paraguay, hired policemen and soy producers kicked 270 people off their land, burned down fifty-four homes, arrested 130 people and killed two.

The most recent case of this violence is the death of Serapio Villasboa Cabrera, a member of the Paraguayan Campesino Movement, whose body was found full of knife wounds May 8. Cabrera was the brother of Petrona Villasboa, who was spearheading an investigation into the death of her son, who died from exposure to toxic chemicals used by transgenic soy producers. According to Servicio, Paz y Justicia (Serpaj), an international human rights group that has a chapter in Paraguay, one method used to force farmers off their land is to spray toxic pesticides around communities until sickness forces residents to leave.

GRR said Cabrera was killed by paramilitaries connected to large landowners and soy producers, who are expanding their holdings. The paramilitaries pursue farm leaders who are organizing against the occupation of their land. Investigations by Serpaj demonstrate that the worst cases of repression against farmers have taken place in areas with the highest concentration of US troops. Serpaj reported that in the department of San Pedro, where five US military exercises took place, there have been eighteen farmer deaths from repression, in an area with many farmer organizations. In the department of Concepción there have been eleven deaths and three US military exercises. Near the Triple Border, where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet, there were twelve deaths and three exercises.

"The US military is advising the Paraguayan police and military about how to deal with these farmer groups.... They are teaching theory as well as technical skills to Paraguayan police and military. These new forms of combat have been used internally," Orlando Castillo of Serpaj told me over the phone. "The US troops talk with the farmers and get to know their leaders and which groups, organizations, are working there, then establish the plans and actions to control the farmer movement and advise the Paraguayan military and police on how to proceed.... The numbers from our study show what this US presence is doing. US troops form part of a security plan to repress the social movement in Paraguay. A lot of repression has happened in the name of security and against 'terrorism.' "

CONTINUED…

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060717/dangl

Why would fleeing NAZIs, Rev. Moon and the Bush family want to go to Paraguay?
Why Paraguay? Lovely, little, lonely, landlocked Paraguay?

Did we say "unspoiled"?



Jenna visited Paraguay "for UNICEF" in 2006
and then met with El Supremo III o IV pa' din din.

Paraguay in a spin about Bush's alleged 100,000 acre hideaway

Tom Phillips in Cuiab
The Guardian, Monday October 23 2006

Meeting the new couple next door can be an anxious business for even the most relaxed home owner. Will they be international drug traffickers? Have they got noisy kids with a penchant for electronic music? As worries go, however, having the US president move in next door must come fairly low on the list.

Unless of course you are a resident of northern Paraguay and believe reports in the South American press that he has bought up a 100,000 acre (40,500 hectare) ranch in your neck of the woods.

SNIP...

Rumours of Mr Bush's supposed forays into South American real estate surfaced during a recent 10-day visit to the country by his daughter Jenna Bush. Little is known about her trip to Paraguay, although officially she travelled with the UN children's agency Unicef to visit social projects. Photographers from the Paraguayan newspaper ABC Color tracked her down to one restaurant in Paraguay's capital Asunción, where she was seen flanked by 10 security guards, and was also reported to have met Paraguay's president, Nicanor Duarte, and the US ambassador to Paraguay, James Cason. Reports in sections of the Paraguayan media suggested she was sent on a family "mission" to tie up the land purchase in the "chaco".

Erasmo Rodríguez Acosta, the governor of the Alto Paraguay region where Mr Bush's new acquisition supposedly lies, told one Paraguayan news agency there were indications that Mr Bush had bought land in Paso de Patria, near the border with Brazil and Bolivia. He was, however, unable to prove this, he added.

Last week the Paraguayan news group Neike suggested that Ms Bush was in Paraguay to "visit the land acquired by her father - relatively close to the Brazilian Pantanal and the Bolivian gas reserves".

CONTINUED...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/oct/23/mainsection.tomphillips

And Jenna can still drive a Mercedes.

[blm]

1. Go figure - who would EVER imagine Poppy Bush still dealing drugs, running arms all over the world

and his sons continuing the family business?

[Octafish]

4. Bush’s vacation get-away in Paraguay?

Drugs. Guns. Money. Jobs. And... Survivability.

Plus, your dollar stretches further in Paraguay, the second-poorest country in the hemisphere.

Bush’s vacation get-away in Paraguay?

Deanna Spingola
December 6, 2006

EXCERPT...

The privatization of warfare, rendition flights, torture, and economic destabilization has produced numerous enemies and vehement animosity. Most Americans, who get their daily dose of government-friendly 1984 Orwellian-style propaganda, have no idea why foreigners hate us.

Countries with huge populations of indigenous, brown-skinned “enemies” seem particularly vulnerable to resource pilfering, together with the atrocities and massacres that accompany such activities. After all, they are “uncivilized” and standing in the way of our “national interests,” without appreciation or vision for what their resources could produce in our insatiable, more sophisticated society. Incredulous Americans, comfy at home, don’t like hearing about the bloody, gory details. However, there are astute foreign leaders, though U.S. media-demonized, who won’t readily acquiesce to economic assailants or conform to globalist demands. In addition to the Middle East, the resource-rich countries of South America have been especially targeted.

Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador and Bolivia are fighting against United States control and hegemony, preferring, instead, to control their own country and resources. Their duly-elected, populist, egalitarian leaders, compassionately concerned about their own people, though deserving of admiration, would never receive respect from the greedy globalists. Rather they will be summarily accused of inciting unrest or supporting terrorists so that when our government announces that a regime change is essential, by military force or by Washington-directed election-riggers, obedient U.S. citizens will readily assent. For decades, America has attempted to influence politics in South America for our own national and business interests through such projects as Operation Condor.

The U.S., under the pretext of fighting terrorism, has conducted military exercises in Paraguay since July 2005 after threatening to withhold millions of dollars in aid if Paraguay failed to allow hundreds of our military, along with our planes, weapons and ammunition, into their country. <1> Ex-Secretary of Defense (War) Donald Rumsfeld, ironically the current owner of Mount Misery, visited Paraguay in August 2005. He said that Cuba and Venezuela were somehow instrumental in creating tensions in Bolivia. Although he claims keen perception into the internal problems of foreign countries, he apparently was deliberately inept with his own responsibilities. An audit revealed on September 10, 2001, that $2.6 trillion was missing in some pentagon accounts. This was conveniently forgotten with the horrifically distracting events of 9/11. <2> That sum, plus another $1 trillion, disappeared under Dov Zakheim’s* watch, the Pentagon Comptroller appointed by Bush in May 2001. Zakheim, like so many others, has left “through the traditional revolving door for government-corporate insiders” <3> and gone on to greener pastures. *(CFR)

The proposed U.S. military objective is to train our Paraguayan counterparts. Why we had to financially finagle them into accepting our help isn’t clear — obviously it was in our “national interests” rather than accommodation of their needs. Unless renewed, our contract ends December 31, 2006. Justifiably, local residents immediately protested our invasive military presence. “Some activists, military analysts and politicians in the region believe the operations could be part of a plan to overthrow the left-leaning government of Evo Morales in neighboring Bolivia and take control of the area’s vast gas and water reserves.” <4> The water reserves constitute the Guaraní Aquifer, an underground water reservoir shared by four nations. Morales signed a decree on May 1, 2006 which nationalized all of Bolivia’s gas reserves, an outrageous objective — certainly not conducive to U.S. interests. Imagine a national leader who puts his country’s needs first — rather than the needs of the American government!

“A major focus of the unrest in Bolivia is who controls its vast natural gas deposits, the second largest in the Western Hemisphere. Under pressure from the United States and the IMF, Bolivia sold off its oil and gas to Enron and Shell in 1995 for $263.5 million, less than 1% of what the deposits are worth.” <5>

CONTINUED...

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/spingola/061206

Hmm. Even our conservative friends are getting mad at monkey. A lot of your doing, I bet, blm!

[seemslikeadream]

27. I imagine

[a la izquierda]

32. the entirety of south america would probably

willingly send * to the hague as a war criminal.

oopsie, i meant to post this at the bottom...now it doesn't make sense.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

2. I love his face! Oh boy, what's going to happen now with Shrub's and the Rev. Moonie's

haciendas??? If we start a war with Paraguay within the next 7-8 months, we'll know why...

I can also understand Shrub's shrill insistence on having the Colombian Free Trade Agreement get through. It seems that Colombia is the last right(wrong)wing regime in South America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_American
During the first decade of the 21st century, South American governments have drifted to the political left, with social democratic leaders being elected in Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela and left-leaning presidents in Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, and Uruguay.

Now add Paraguay to the list.

On edit!!!! Most of Shrub's business decisions have turned to shit! This decision seems to be part of the norm!!!

:rofl:

[eleny]

7. Aret Guyana and Surinam also right wing countries

If so, then there are only 3 left.

It's amazing how one after another the wingnuts have been tossed out of power. Hopefully, the rest of SA can support efforts to peacefully get rid of the rest of the bullies.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

9. Sorry for the mistake. I forgot all about them.

I have the sames hopes as you do. Peacefully is the operative word.

[eleny]

18. They sit on one side of Venezuela and Columbia sits on the other

Their combined coastline looks as long as Columbia's. I'm surprised we don't hear more about them and our interference .... erm .... I mean involvement in their operations .... erm .... I mean governments.

[bluesmail]

13. This is one 'domino theory' I can live with.

[Octafish]

15. 737 U.S. Military Bases = Global Empire

Columbia gives them their major Base of Operations in SA.
The Org knows if they keep it solidly in the Reich, everything will be hunky-dory.



Paris Flammonde mentioned the other day to Dave Emory that the United States currently maintains a military presence in more than 130 countries around the world.

That's a lot.

737 U.S. Military Bases = Global Empire

By Chalmers Johnson, Metropolitan Books. Posted February 19, 2007.

With more than 2,500,000 U.S. personnel serving across the planet and military bases spread across each continent, it's time to face up to the fact that our American democracy has spawned a global empire.

The following is excerpted from Chalmers Johnson's new book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" (Metropolitan Books).

Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America's version of the colony is the military base; and by following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever more all-encompassing imperial "footprint" and the militarism that grows with it.

It is not easy, however, to assess the size or exact value of our empire of bases. Official records available to the public on these subjects are misleading, although instructive. According to the Defense Department's annual inventories from 2002 to 2005 of real property it owns around the world, the Base Structure Report, there has been an immense churning in the numbers of installations.

The total of America's military bases in other people's countries in 2005, according to official sources, was 737. Reflecting massive deployments to Iraq and the pursuit of President Bush's strategy of preemptive war, the trend line for numbers of overseas bases continues to go up.

Interestingly enough, the thirty-eight large and medium-sized American facilities spread around the globe in 2005 -- mostly air and naval bases for our bombers and fleets -- almost exactly equals Britain's thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons at its imperial zenith in 1898. The Roman Empire at its height in 117 AD required thirty-seven major bases to police its realm from Britannia to Egypt, from Hispania to Armenia. Perhaps the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty.

Using data from fiscal year 2005, the Pentagon bureaucrats calculated that its overseas bases were worth at least $127 billion -- surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic products of most countries -- and an estimated $658.1 billion for all of them, foreign and domestic (a base's "worth" is based on a Department of Defense estimate of what it would cost to replace it). During fiscal 2005, the military high command deployed to our overseas bases some 196,975 uniformed personnel as well as an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employed an additional 81,425 locally hired foreigners.

The worldwide total of U.S. military personnel in 2005, including those based domestically, was 1,840,062 supported by an additional 473,306 Defense Department civil service employees and 203,328 local hires. Its overseas bases, according to the Pentagon, contained 32,327 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and 16,527 more that it leased. The size of these holdings was recorded in the inventory as covering 687,347 acres overseas and 29,819,492 acres worldwide, making the Pentagon easily one of the world's largest landlords.

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/story/47998/

Really appreciate your understanding, OmmmSweetOmmm.

[eleny]

3. Lugo is a brave, brave man

I've only read the first two articles you posted and will go back to read the rest. But Lugo is one brave guy. I wish him all the luck in the world since he'll need it in the country the Bushes have obviously set aside as a refuge (imo).

Thanks for your work in posting all this for us to read in one place. :thumbsup:

[Octafish]

17. Leftist former bishop set for victory in Paraguay election

Lugo is a great guy. Above he's visiting Brasilia for some official reason a while back.

Leftist former bishop set for victory in Paraguay election

Oliver Balch in Asuncion and Rory Carroll in Caracas
guardian.co.uk, Friday April 18 2008 A

EXCERPT...

The bearded 57-year-old heads the Patriotic Alliance for Change, a coalition of centre and centre-left opposition parties, grassroots political movements, farmers groups and other social organisations.

SNIP...

Lugo has promised to give peasants more land and to charge Brazil more money for the power it imports from the Itaipu hydroelectric plant, which both countries jointly own.

He said if necessary he would take Brazil to the world court in the Hague to renegotiate a 1973 treaty that obliged Paraguay to sell surplus electricity to its giant neighbour at well below market value.

To avoid frightening conservative voters, the former bishop has called himself an independent, not a leftist, and has kept a distance from Venezuela's self-styled socialist revolutionary president, Hugo Chavez.

But he told the Guardian he was determined to tackle corruption and social exclusion.

"The gap between rich and poor is a scandal for Paraguayan society – it's a gap in which the few live at the banquet table while those at their side live in hunger."

CONTINUED...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/18/1

He says he's resigned.
The Church says he's still on the rolls.
Must be like the Mafia or CIA:
You're never really out.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

5. BTW....Octafish! Have I told you lately how I love and appreciate your posts???

:applause: :applause: :applause:

[Octafish]

19. Rev Moon allied group hosts Neil Bush in Paraguay

Same goes right back at ya, OmmmSweetOmmm.

Rev Moon allied group hosts Neil Bush in Paraguay

Neil Bush is the guest of a group founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon

President Bush's younger brother meets Paraguay's president, group delegation

ASUNCION, Paraguay (AP) -- Neil Bush, younger brother of President Bush, called on Paraguay's president as the guest of a business federation founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.


Neil Bush speaks with reporters Thursday in Asuncion after meeting with Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte.

A presidential press office source, who spoke on condition of not being named, confirmed the younger Bush met President Nicanor Duarte on Thursday along with a delegation from the Universal Peace Federation, a group associated with Moon.

Duarte had no statement on the meeting.

Antonio Betancourt, a spokesman for the federation, said that Bush visited Duarte and later met with an opposition congressional leader, Sen. Miguel Abdon Saguier, and that both expressed interest in the Bush family and discussed local matters.

Betancourt said Bush later attended a leadership seminar sponsored by the federation.

The federation's Web site says it is trying to promote peace in the Middle East, South Asia and other regions, as well as proposing a 50 mile (85-kilometer), $200 billion tunnel linking Siberia and Alaska.

A leading Paraguayan newspaper, ABC Color, reported Friday that Bush spoke at the leadership seminar about instilling a "culture of service" and better uniting individuals and organizations behind objectives that serve peace and the common good.

It said the seminar, held at an Asuncion hotel, was entitled "Toward a New Paradigm of Leadership and Government in Times of World Crisis."

The newspaper said other participants included Jose Maria Sanguinetti, the former Uruguayan president.

Groups allied with Moon publish a newspaper, operate businesses and have large land holdings in Paraguay, South America's second-poorest country. E-mail to a friend

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

CONTINUED...

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/02/29/paraguay.neil.bush.ap/index.html

Luv ya, Ommie! As you know, there's no enough money in the world worth to make up for filling my head with all this Bush Family Evil Empire nonsense.

[leftchick]

6. Imagine for a moment

if the US had never fucked around south of the border. What a wonderful world it would be. Not to mention how many hundreds of thousands of souls that would still be alive. :(


I would expect with a Lugo win that the USA would be effectively booted out for good! Stay safe Father, :scared:

K&R!

Thank you Octafish!

:hi:

[Octafish]

22. What Horrors May Await America, Kissinger, and the Disappeared - Operation CONDOR

A totally different world, my Friend.

More on "Operation Condor"

What Horrors May Await America, Kissinger, and the Disappeared

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 10/10/2006 - 4:21pm. Analysis
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

In our editorial that caromed around the Internet, "Torture, Murder, Bush, Kissinger and The Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina: America on the Brink of Horror," we warned that the legacy of U.S. governments – particularly under the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Kissinger/Bush leadership through various GOP administrations – supporting torture and murder to suppress dissent in other countries may be coming to America.

This is no idle conspiracy theory. As we pointed out in our editorial, the U.S. Congress has now given Bush enough legal maneuvering room to declare U.S. citizens supporters of terrorists. Since Bush has openly accused any American who disagrees with his disastrous "war on terror" a "tool of the terrorists," he is legally now able to "disappear" us. This is not idle theory. We no longer have the protection of habeas corpus, if Bush invokes his powers to fight "terror."

One of the key proponents, over the years, of torturing and murdering dissenters in nations that experience strong challenges to their oligarchies or ruling class elite is Henry Kissinger.

Bob Woodward recently told an interviewer that Dick Cheney called him up and swore at him for revealing that Kissinger is now advising Cheney and Bush.

We thought that for the record, we would amplify a bit the comment we made in our editorial that Kissinger avoids traveling to a number of nations because he would face judicial questioning about his role in "Operation Condor."

Here is one summary from Wikipedia that illustrates BuzzFlash’s point:

On May 31, 2001, French judge Roger Le Loire requested a summons served on Henry Kissinger while he was staying at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris. Loire claimed to want to question Kissinger for alleged U.S. involvement in Operation Condor as well as the death of French nationals under the Chilean junta. As a result, Kissinger left Paris that evening, and Loire's inquiries were directed to the U.S. State Department.

In July 2001, the Chilean high court granted investigating judge Juan Guzman the right to question Kissinger about the 1973 killing of American journalist Charles Horman, whose execution at the hands of the Chilean military following the coup was dramatized in the 1982 Costa-Gavras film, Missing. The judge’s questions were relayed to Kissinger via diplomatic routes but went unanswered.
In August 2001, Argentine Judge Rodolfo Canicoba sent a letter rogatory to the US State Department, in accordance with the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), requesting a deposition by Kissinger to aid the judge's investigation of Operation Condor. <11>

On September 10, 2001, a civil suit was filed in a Washington, D.C., federal court by the family of Gen. René Schneider, former Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army, asserting that Kissinger gave the order for the elimination of Schneider because he refused to endorse plans for a military coup. Schneider was killed by coup-plotters loyal to General Roberto Viaux in a botched kidnapping attempt, but U.S. involvement with the plot is disputed, as declassified transcripts show that Nixon and Kissinger had ordered the coup "turned off" a week prior to the killing, fearing that Viaux had no chance. As a part of the suit, Schneider’s two sons are attempting to sue Kissinger and then-CIA director Richard Helms for $3 million. On September 11, 2001, the 28th anniversary of the Pinochet coup, Chilean human rights lawyers filed a criminal case against Kissinger along with Augusto Pinochet, former Bolivian general and president Hugo Banzer, former Argentine general and dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, and former Paraguayan president Alfredo Stroessner for alleged involvement in Operation Condor. The case was brought on behalf of some fifteen victims of Operation Condor, ten of whom were Chilean.
In late 2001, the Brazilian government canceled an invitation for Kissinger to speak in São Paulo because it could no longer guarantee his immunity from judicial action.

CONTINUED...

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/analysis/121

The BFEE and their cronies and masters have a lot to account for.

And every day, thanks to you and all the people who care, we are closer to bringing their sorry hides to Justice.

[Greyhound]

8. I hope he survives. A bottom-up oriented government there would be more than inconvenient

to several major cabals, they will not give it up easily.

:kick: & R

[Octafish]

26. From your keypad to the Good Lord's to-do list.

News and analysis from like-minded Friends:

http://upsidedownworld.org/

Photo Essay - Paraguay Votes

[LongTomH]

38. I hope he survives too!

Maybe the "Bolivarian Revolution" can come to Paraguay too!

[Ichingcarpenter]

10. I'm afraid of the assassination squads which have already wounded

or killed major supporters and union workers. I hope they can change things around there.

Kick nominated.

[Octafish]

28. Anti-Terrorism Law Criminalizes Protest in Paraguay

This story may soon sound familiar all across the Americas:

Anti-Terrorism Law Criminalizes Protest in Paraguay

Written by Fionuala Cregan
Wednesday, 08 August 2007

The Government of Paraguay has introduced proposals for the modification of the penal code and an Anti-Terrorist Law which could result in the criminalisation of social protest and the paralysis of civil society organizations throughout the country. The law is due to be ratified by the Congress on August 9.

With the advance of soy plantations, thousands and thousands of rural poor are being forced from their land and social movements are organizing to fight for their right to land, health care and education. Incomplete and corrupt agrarian reform in Paraguay has made the occupation of unused land a way of life from most Paraguayan subsistence farmers. Farmers who can occupy land continuously can eventually apply for a legal title. Communities of occupying farmers have worked together to make schools, community governments and clinics for their communities.

Farmers have achieved these victories in spite of a complete lack of government support. In fact, under Article 142, land occupation, and the intention of occupying land, will become a crime punishable in some cases by five years in prison. In other words, the administrative procedures for gaining legal title to a land could result in legal proceedings. In addition, former probationary tactics known as “precautionary measures” will no longer apply, and those who are processed will go straight to prison.

Anyone Could be a Terrorist

The proposed anti-terrorist law does not include a clear definition of what exactly constitutes the crime of terrorism, leaving it to an arbitrary decision by a judge. Behaviour which could be considered terrorism include “dangerous interventions or obstacles on public roadways,” “noise pollution” and other actions which “intimidate Paraguayan citizens.” Under the law, financing terrorist activities is also a crime punishable by 5-15 years in prison, as is any kind of association with terrorist organizations.

“The law is so lax that anyone could be considered a terrorist, says Juan Martens, a lawyer with the National Coordinator of Human Rights In Paraguay (CODEHUPY).(1) “A lawyer giving a workshop, a journalist doing an investigation, or an international NGO providing financial support could all be accused of promoting terrorism.”

CONTINUED...

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/845/44/

Monkey's made a list.



He's checked it twice.

[NBachers]

45. Paraguay Assasination Squads

aren't the only assasination squads I'm worried about for electoral candidates.

[formercia]

11. Looks like Ratzinger didn't kill off Liberation Theology after all.

I doubt if the Fascists will go quietly.

[Octafish]

30. The Praxis of Suffering

It is one of my life's great honors to have met the late Father Arthur McGovern, PhD., S.J., a scholar in Liberation Theology who taught at the University of Detroit - Mercy.

The Praxis of Suffering

by Rebecca S. Chopp

Dr. Rebecca S. Chopp taught at Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. She currently is Dean of the Yale University Divinity School. The Praxis of Suffering was published in 1986 by Orbis Books. This book was prepared for Religion Online by Harry W. and Grace C. Adams.

Chapter 1: Latin American Liberation Theology

There is no central founding event for Latin American liberation theology. The faces of the poor, the midnight roundups of political prisoners, the gradual genocide of Indian races, and the constant fear of the masses are all points of origin for this theology that speaks of God and the poor as always together. If we are to understand this theology, then we must understand where it begins -- with the poor, in a history of domination, oppression, and colonialism. But it is not enough to understand the history of the poor; rather, we must, with this theology, wager that it is with the poor that God is found in Latin America. "The theology of liberation," writes theologian Ignacio Castuera, "reveals to us that theology is done by the pueblo oprimido, the oppressed people, those who are at the same time the senor de la historia, the Lord of history."1 It is a wager that we must travel along history in the journey of the poor -- a journey of faith, which will lead to greater understanding that is at the same time a transformation.

Having taken this wager that God is with the poor, we can begin to travel along with the Latin American liberation theologians. Segundo Galilea identifies the three assumptions of Latin American liberation theology: "(1) the present situation is one in which the vast majority of Latin Americans live in a state of underdevelopment and unjust dependence; (2) viewed in Christian terms, this is a 'sinful situation'; (3) hence it is the duty of Christians in conscience, and of the church in its pastoral activity, to commit themselves to efforts to overcome this situation."2 These assumptions force our theology to be concrete and social, and require us to investigate the conditions of poverty, dependence, and injustice. We must, in this sinful situation where we are committed to transformation, take the tradition of past theology and find new ways of understanding Christian symbols such as sin, redemption, and grace. With these assumptions, we must enlarge our conversation partners and consider issues that may seem oddly nontheological to those who are new to the journey of the poor. Yet in dialogue with Marxists or in working with the liberating educational methods of Paulo Freire we find a new experience of Christian witness and new ways of speaking of God.

Located within the church, which is one of the few sources of resistance and creative transformation in society, Latin American liberation theology is best understood as faith seeking understanding among the poor of Latin America. It is a church theology in its intentional focus on issues such as ecclesiology, pastoral practice, and the relation of church and world as well as in its clear intent to be located within basic Christian communities. This logos of the Theos is a new way of doing theology both because it interprets anew human existence and Christian tradition and because it understands the purpose of theology to be that of reflecting on and guiding Christian praxis. But most important of all, Latin American liberation theology is, in its own wager, a response to a God who is with the poor and whose presence is made visible by the witness and service of the church.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The people of Latin America are hungry. Two-thirds of the population is "undernourished" to the point of starvation; in some areas of the continent, people chew cocoa leaves and eat mud to dull the hunger pains. Children in the rural areas survive on clay when the scanty supplies of rice and beans are depleted; children in the cities scavenge through garbage on the streets. Five percent of the population holds 80 percent of the wealth. The masses of Latin America are landless. Two-thirds of the usable land is in the hands of a few Latin Americans and foreign multinational corporations. The corporations that own the land reap the profits from the land.3

The people of Latin America are poor. High rates of unemployment are due to the ownership of the land by multinational corporations and to the unstable political situations. Those who are fortunate enough to work do so for almost nothing. According to Arthur McGovern, "Brazilian sugar cane workers make about two dollars a day. Near Recife in Brazil a father picks corn and cotton for rich landowners to support his family on 65 cents a day. In Caracas, Venezuela, slum dwellers spend six hours a day commuting to work."4 The people from Latin America are deprived of education and medical attention. One-half of the people suffer from disease; in some countries, as many as three-fourths of the people are illiterate. Latin America lives in a constant state of war and siege. Governments use torture, mass media, and the suspension of basic rights to stifle movements of dissent or reform.

This is the concrete situation with which Latin American liberation theology begins its theological reflection. But this concrete situation exists in a history of continued dominance and repression; the history of the people of Latin America is a history of the "other," a history of the "underside." Latin American liberation theology attempts to speak for a people whose lives have been determined by a centuries-old system of structural oppression, a system that has used Christianity time and time again to secure the dominance of the few over the masses. In recalling this history, Latin American liberation theology finds the resources to criticize the origin, the function, and the nature of the oppression of the poor. It finds, as well, symbols, stories, and memories that reveal a new identity and vision of the human subject in history.

Christianity came to Latin America as part of the Spanish mission to conquer the New World for the honor of Spain and the glory of God. The first period of Latin American history is marked by the Spanish colonization of the sixteenth century. Spain's "temporal messianism" combined the conquest of foreign lands with the religious project of converting heathens and pagans. Indeed, before the first explorer ever set foot on American soil the early destiny of Latin America was settled through the promulgation of the patronage system by the Holy See, which established the fundamental principle of conquest and Christianization.5 Through the patronage system, the church was responsible to the Spanish crown, and the crown had the power to appoint bishops, replace clerics, and seize part of the tithes collected by the church as reimbursement for the heavy costs of the "Christian" conquest. When the conquistadors arrived in Latin America, they brought with them the semi-feudal social structures of Spain -- a country where, as Miguez Bonino observes, "obedience to the great king of Spain and submission to the King of Heaven were demanded as one single act."6

The Spanish system of "conquering" territories consisted of subduing local residents, establishing towns on the model of Spain's cities, and allocating Indians (nonpersons) as serfs to the conquerors. Spain established its fiefdom by virtually destroying Indian civilization, including the impressive Inca, Aztec, and Mayan cultures.7 The Cortez conquest exemplifies the destructiveness of Spanish conquistador practices. In 1519 Cortez set out to conquer Mexico -- a land rumored to be overflowing with jewels and gold.8 Natives were bewildered and terrified when the conquistador landed with armor, guns, and horses. Montezuma II, the Aztec emperor, sent Cortez gifts but also demanded the invader and his men return to their boats and leave immediately. Cortez responded by burning his boats, establishing the city of Veracruz, and marching his men to Tenochtitlan, the center of the Aztec empire. Cortez seized Montezuma and demanded gold, silver, and jewels. After several battles in which the Aztecs were nearly victorious, the Spanish warrior succeeded in leveling Tenochtitlan to the ground and forcing the new Indian slaves to build a city in the Spanish rectangular form. Cortez rewarded his men with gifts of repartimientos -- groups of Indians as pay for the officer's services. As with Cortez in Mexico, so with Pizarro in Peru, and with Valdivia in Chile: thus Spain subdued the New World.

CONTINUED...

http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=1935&C=1719

These traitors have nowhere to go.

The world is on to their evil machinations.

[Joshua N]

40. Have you noticed MSM's recent attempt to use the Rev. Wright controversy to

throw liberation theology under the bus? It is frightening, but not surprising.

[formercia]

51. The right-wing reactionaries are fearful of the masses

Especially in Latin America where the traditional social structure and exploitation of the poor has led to violent revolution in the past.
The 'Church" is a powerful voice in that culture and has been used by the wealthy to control dissent. When the 'Church' gets on the side of the oppressed, the force that helped control them suddenly becomes a means of empowerment.

[Judi Lynn]

12. God only knows just what the hell happened in Paraguay during the 35 years of Stroessner and what

on earth was the plan he had for that HUGE air strip, so large it can handle the largest US cargo planes, the Mariscal Estigarribia base, placed right out in the true middle of nowhere, right in the JUNGLE! As anyone knows, there wouldn't be a whole lot of commercial air traffic to Paraguay, which has the fewest number of paved miles of road in all of Latin America.



So strange _Bush arranged for immunity for American soldiers in Paraguay as soon as possible once he had stolen the Presidency, and no extradition.

Peace Patriot has mentioned in writing that only very recently were these items rescinded, after the flow toward a leftist, UNIFIED for progress (not for political repression, as it was during the years of the juntas and coups under U.S. direction) South America became evident.

[Octafish]

37. Paraguay’s archive of terror - Documents chronicle the workings of Stroessner’s agents

That airstrip is amazing. It looks like it can accomodate every thing flying and then some.



As for what Stroessner was up to, it was no good CONDOR business.

Paraguay’s archive of terror

Documents chronicle the workings of Stroessner’s agents

By Mike Ceaser in Paraguay
BBC
Monday, 11 March, 2002, 14:24 GMT

The nightmare of Ana de Mancuello’s life began on 25 November 1974.

That was the day plainclothes police officers invaded her Asuncion home and took away her husband Mario and her 20-year-old son Hugo.

Unknown to her, her oldest son Jose, 22, an engineering student in Argentina, was also in an Asuncion prison with his pregnant wife and infant daughter, the three having been arrested days before.

SNIP...

‘Archives of terror’

However, when later that same year thousands of documents chronicling the workings of Alfredo Stroessner’s secret police were discovered in an Asuncion police station, the defendants’ case collapsed.

They were confronted with transcripts of the prisoners’ interrogations, signed by the defendants.

“Everything was there,” Mrs Mancuello says. “The names of the torturers, which hours they were tortured, who was there.”

During the past decade, those thousands of documents have become known as the “Archives of Terror”.

The materials, now collected and organised in their own room on the eighth floor of Asuncion’s Palace of Justice, have served as resources for thousands of victims, their relatives, human rights activists and academics researching the repression of opponents real and imagined in South America’s military regimes.

The documents, bound into red and grey volumes, include reports from police informers, interrogations of arrestees and, most sinisterly, records of transfers of arrestees to police forces of friendly neighbouring regimes such as Argentina and Chile.

Those last possess perhaps the greatest historical significance, since they represent proof of Operation Condor, the infamous co-operative of South American regimes to repress, torture and kill opponents.

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/world/americas/27paraguay.html?fta=y

America is catching up to you, Judi Lynn. They've figured out the Bush Crime Family and how they serve their Satanic masters.

[otherlander]

14. I wish we had a presidential candidate like that.

Even FoxNews can't call Obama or Hillary a leftist fanatic.

[Octafish]

52. Operation Condor: Deciphering the U.S. Role

I understand and appreciate your perspective, otherlander. Both still better than what now squats in Oval Office.



Yet, both have demonstrated to me a very disturbing lack of deep historical understanding in their public utterances. Perhaps we can work with whomever is our candidate to bring Justice -- legal, political and economic -- to our nation. If we don't, it may likely be "Good bye, America!"

This might make a good place to start:

Operation Condor: Deciphering the U.S. Role

by J. Patrice McSherry

According to recently de-classified files, the U.S. aided and facilitated Condor operations as a matter of secret but routine policy.

In mid-April, 2001, Argentine judge Rodolfo Canicoba issued path-breaking international arrest warrants for two former high-ranking functionaries of the military regimes of Chile and Paraguay. These two, along with an Argentine general also summoned by the court, are accused of crimes committed within the framework of Operation Condor. Judge Canicoba presides over one of several cases worldwide investigating abductions and murders linked to Condor, a shadowy Latin American military network created in the 1970s whose key members were Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil, later joined by Peru
and Ecuador. Condor was a covert intelligence and operations system that enabled the Latin American military states to hunt down, seize, and execute political opponents across borders. Refugees fleeing military coups and repression in their own countries were "disappeared" in combined transnational operations. The militaries defied international law and traditions of political sanctuary to carry out their ferocious anticommunist crusade.

The judge's request for the detention and extradition of Manuel Contreras of Chile, former chief of the gestapo-like Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), and former dictator Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, along with his summons for ex-junta leader Jorge Videla of Argentina, represents another example of the rapid advances occurring in international law and justice since the arrest of General Pinochet in 1998. In effect, the struggle against impunity is being "globalized."

As human rights organizations, families of victims, lawyers, and judges press for disclosure and accountability regarding human rights crimes committed during the Cold War, inevitable questions arise as to the role of the foremost leader of the anticommunist alliance, the United States. This article explores recent evidence linking the U.S. national security apparatus with Operation Condor. Condor took place within the broader context of inter-American counterinsurgency coordination and operations led and sponsored by the Pentagon and the CIA. U.S. training, doctrine, organizational models, technology transfers, weapons sales, and ideological attitudes profoundly shaped security forces in the region.

Recently declassified documents add weight to the thesis that U.S. forces secretly aided and facilitated Condor operations. The U.S. government considered the Latin American militaries to be allies in the Cold War, worked closely with their intelligence organizations, and promoted coordinated action and modernization of their capabilities. As shown here, U.S. executive agencies at least condoned, and sometimes actively assisted, some Condor "countersubversive" operations.

What was Operation Condor?

In the 1960s and 1970s, populist, nationalist, and socialist movements emerged throughout the class-stratified nations of Latin America, challenging the entrenched privileges of local oligarchies as well as U.S. political and economic interests. In this context, U.S. national security strategists (who feared "another Cuba") and their Latin American counterparts began to regard large sectors of these societies as potentially or actually subversive. Cold War NationalSecurity Doctrine--a politicized doctrine of internal war and counterrevolution that targeted "internal enemies"--incorporated U.S. and French counterinsurgency concepts and anticommunist ideology. The doctrine gave the militaries a messianic mission: to remake their states and societies and eliminate "subversion." Political and social conflict was viewed through the lens of countersubversive war; the counterinsurgents believed that world communism had infiltrated their societies. During these years, militaries in country after country ousted civilian governments in a series of coups--even in such long-standing democracies as Chile and Uruguay--and installed repressive regimes. The "anticommunist crusade" became a crusade against the principles and institutions of democracy and against progressive and liberal as well as revolutionary forces, and the national security states institutionalized state terrorism.

Operation Condor allowed the Latin American militaries to put into practice a key strategic concept of national security doctrine: hemispheric defense defined by ideological frontiers. The more limited concept of territorial defense was superseded. To the U.S. national security apparatus--which fostered the new continent-wide security doctrine in its training centers, such as the Army School of the Americas in Panama--and most of the Latin American militaries, the Cold War represented World War III, the war of ideologies. Security forces in Latin America classified and targeted persons on the basis of their political ideas rather than illegal acts. The regimes hunted down dissidents and leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests and nuns, intellectuals, students and teachers--not only guerrillas (who, under international law, are also entitled to due process).

CONTINUED...

http://www.crimesofwar.org/special/condor.html

Gee. Rendition. No due process. No respect for human rights. That is a scary way to run a democracy.

[murray hill farm]

16. Thank you so much for putting this together...

for all of us. Thank you so much.

[Octafish]

53. US supports these dictators for MONEY. That's why * phoned Argentina's prez on behalf of ENRON.

You are most welcome, mexicoxpat!
Dr. Johnson said: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
Well, some things are more important than payment...
Here's an interesting example from history:

Don’t Cry for Bush, Argentina

George W. may not recall the names of world leaders, but when it comes to foreign affairs, he knows the value of his own family's name.

Louis Dubose and Carmen Coiro
March/April 2000 Issue

Texans watched with interest last winter as Governor George W. Bush was home-schooled on international affairs by former Secretary of State George Shultz and other veterans of his father's foreign-policy team. Even Carl Bildt, the former prime minister of Sweden, was brought in for a tutorial at the governor's mansion, in the hope that his recent U.N. experience in the Balkans could help Bush understand that Kosovars are not "Kosavarians" and that Greeks are not "Grecians."

But no one had to prepare a prompt card to remind him who stepped down as president of Argentina in December. Shortly before Bush announced his own campaign for president, he had received a visit from Carlos Saul Menem, the right-wing leader of Argentina for the past decade. The two men retired to an Austin country club, where they were joined by Bush's father. Governor Bush had the flu, so he contented himself with riding along as the former president and Menem played a round of golf.

The capitol press corps trailed along, dutifully recording the governor's cordial relationship with a visiting head of state. Unknown to the assembled reporters, however, was the story of how Bush and his family became immersed in Argentine politics. The little-known tale begins with George W. making a phone call to secure a $300-million deal for a U.S. pipeline company -- a deal that provoked a political firestorm in Argentina, drawing scrutiny from legislators and a special prosecutor. The episode marked one of George W.'s first ventures into foreign affairs, demonstrating the fundamental rule by which the Texas governor and his family conduct business: Always know that the Bush name is a marketable commodity.

Bush first made his presence felt in Argentina in 1988, shortly after his father was elected president. At the time, the junior Bush's political career was just beginning -- and the political career of Raúl Alfonsín, who was approaching the end of his term as president of Argentina, was ending. Alfonsín had returned his country to civilian rule, prosecuted those responsible for human rights abuses during Argentina's rule by a military junta, and struggled to manage an economy that seemed to defy management. Determined to complete one major private-sector industrial program, he pushed for the development of a "gasoducto" that would connect Argentine gas fields with domestic and foreign markets. And he appointed his minister of public works, Rodolfo Terragno, to oversee the pipeline project.

Unlike Bush, Terragno achieved political prominence the old-fashioned way: through a life dedicated to public service. A noted journalist and public official, he was forced into exile for 10 years after the military seized power in Argentina in 1976. Only after Alfonsín restored civilian rule did Terragno return to his homeland, where he went on to serve as minister of public works, a member of congress, and most recently as cabinet chief to the newly elected president, Fernando de la Rua.

In 1988, Terragno was considering two proposals for the $300-million pipeline, one from an Italian firm called Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi and the other from Pérez Companc, an Argentine company working in partnership with Dow Chemical. After a year of consideration, the minister was close to making a decision when Enron, the largest pipeline company in the United States, suddenly entered the bidding.

CONTINUED...

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/03/argentina.html

Gee. A fellah from the energy bidniss cashes in on his family name in 1988 is now acting as pretzeldent. That deserves more coverage on ABCNNBCBSFauxNoiseNutwork.

[earth mom]

20. * is not happy about Lugo. He doesn't like Catholics in the first place.

Not to mention any kind of socialism. That the pope blew off * for dinner last week only shows that the pope knows that Catholic is a dirty word to *.

Remember how * & Laura kissed at the Popes funeral? I searched google and couldn't find the photo to post it here, looks like it's been scrubbed. Anyone have a photo of it? It was so strange and disrespectful.

[Octafish]

55. Smirko showed Pickles some of his love that day.

Yeah. That must have been some very romantic moment.



And the sick pic is near-impossible to find on the Google.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=1720853

Remember how they had a big laugh to end September 11 on a high note?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1528134&mesg_id=1547396

[mod mom]

21. GuaranI aquifer, the largest resource of fresh drinking water in the world-The Water Wars

Besides oil, BFEE wants to control the water.


Thanks Octafish-you really do an excellent job providing information to us. I wish this could be recommended twice!

[Octafish]

56. Bushco wants to do to the price of water what they did to the price of oil.

http://www.natureserve.org/latinamerica/guaraniAquifer.jsp

Going Backwards

U.S. Faces Day of Reckoning

Even traditionally wet areas run out of water as sprawl, global warming take toll

by Timothy Egan
Published on Sunday, August 12, 2001 in the Toronto Star

EXCERPT...

Last December, federal researchers said a gradually warming climate could reduce levels in the Great Lakes by five feet at the end of the century, but they also noted that the lake levels fluctuate, regardless of climate changes. And a strict agreement signed by the governors of all the states surrounding the Great Lakes and two Canadian provinces has made it unlikely any new communities can tap into the big basin of fresh water.

Sprawl is coming in for its share of blame as well. In the Chicago area, hydrologists say land that would normally soak in water and replenish aquifers has been paved over, effectively blocking water needed to refill the underground basins.

In past shortages, people tapped into Lake Michigan. When Chicago was coming of age, it reversed the flow of the Chicago River, draining water out of Lake Michigan instead of into it. Now, the so-called collar counties around Chicago, which are expected to add 1.3 million people over the next 18 years, find that the lake is off limits and supplies below ground are not being adequately replenished.

It was the prospect of these growing national water scarcities, combined with a global problem in which nearly a billion people do not have access to clean drinking water, that prompted Enron, the Houston-based energy conglomerate, to enter the water business.

CONTINUED....

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0812-04.htm

These are not mere gangsters. The word "devil" comes close.

[malaise]

23. Great post Octafish

Bookmarked
K & R

[Octafish]

57. General Pinochet at the Bookstore

From "The Republic of Poetry" by Martín Espada:

Gen Pinochet at the Bookstore

Santiago, Chile, July 2004

The general’s limo parked at the corner of San Diego street
and his bodyguard escorted him to the bookstore
called La Oportunidad, so he could browse
for rare works of history.

There were no bloody fingerprints left on the pages.
No books turned to ash at his touch.
He did not track the soil of mass graves on his shoes,
nor did his eyes glow red with a demon’s heat.

Worse: His hands were scrubbed, and his eyes were blue,
and the dementia that raged in his head like a demon,
making the general’s trial impossible, had disappeared.

Desaparecido: like thousands dead but not dead,
as the crowd reminded the general,
gathered outside the bookstore to jeer
when he scurried away with his bodyguards,
so much smaller in person.

-- Martín Espada

Thank you, malaise. I very much appreciate that you give a damn about what is happening.

[bunkerbuster1]

24. K & R'd

Too important to miss, folks.

[Octafish]

58. Poppy Bush & the Condor Mystery

Ronni Moffitt and Orlando Letelier, murdered by DINA assassins in Washington D.C. in 1976.

Poppy Bush headed CIA at the time. Going by the family record of stupidity, I guess it is plausible he didn't know of any connection between DINA and CONDOR.

ConsortiumNews has pegged these international gangsters to the wall:

Bush & the Condor Mystery

By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews
October 5, 1999

Newly released U.S. government documents reveal that George Bush's CIA knew more about Chile's role in an international assassination ring, code-named Condor, than Bush and the agency disclosed to FBI agents investigating a Condor terrorist bombing in Washington, D.C., in 1976.

On June 30, the Clinton administration released several documents about Operation Condor in response to demands from American researchers and requests from Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, who is seeking to extradite Chile's former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and put him on trial for crimes against humanity.

The new documents suggest that the CIA and its then-director, George Bush, withheld information that could have helped the FBI in its investigation of a terrorist car-bombing in Washington that killed Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt on Sept. 21, 1976.

The records show U.S. intelligence was well aware that Pinochet's government in Chile had organized seven South American military dictatorships into Operation Condor, a cross-border assassination ring to hunt down leftists. But instead of sharing that information with federal criminal investigators, Bush's CIA withheld it -- and even diverted suspicion away from Pinochet's junta.

According to the new documents, the CIA was aware that the seven Condor nations were plotting international assassinations in the weeks before the Letelier-Moffitt car-bombing. The CIA issued a series of internal reports about Condor activities and cited the possibility of "government planned and directed assassinations within and outside the territory of Condor members."

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/1999/100599b.html

Hey, America! Wake up and smell the sulfur: Know your BFEE: Los Amigos de Bush

Thank you, bunkerbuster1! Really appreciate you giving a damn about what's going on.

[Karenina]

25. Thank you!

:loveya:

[Octafish]

59. Rendition in the Southern Cone - CONDOR Documents Revealed from 'Paraguayan Archive of Terror'

Letelier meets Kissinger.

OPERATION CONDOR DOCUMENTS

REVEALED FROM PARAGUAYAN

‘ARCHIVE OF TERROR’

Paraguayan Archive continues to yield Evidence of Coordinated Repression among Military Regimes of the Southern Cone

Documents being used by courts from Paraguay, Chile and Argentina, to Europe and the United States

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 239— Part II

(English Version)

Edited by Carlos Osorio and Mariana Enamoneta

Posted – December 21, 2007

Washington D.C., December 21, 2007 – On the fifteenth anniversary of the discovery of the Archive of Terror in Paraguay, the National Security Archive posted Spanish-language documents that reveal new details of how the Southern Cone military regimes collaborated in hunting down, interrogating, and disappearing hundreds of Latin Americans during the 1970s and 1980s.

The collaboration, which became officially known as “Operation Condor,” drew on cross-border kidnapping, secret detention centers, torture, and disappearance of prisoners—rendition, interrogation and detention techniques that some human rights advocates are comparing to those used today in the Bush administration’s counterterrorism campaign.

The selection of documents posted today included uncensored records relating to the pivotal case of Chilean Jorge Isaac Fuentes Alarcón and Argentine Amílcar Santucho, who were detained in Paraguay in May 1975, and whose interrogation under torture led to the decision by Chilean secret police chief Manual Contreras to formalize coordination against the left among the Southern Cone military states. One document posted today for the first time is the list of questions created by Argentine intelligence agent José Osvaldo Ribeiro to be used in the interrogation of Santucho and Fuentes Alarcón in Paraguay. Chilean agents subsequently rendered Fuentes Alarcón to a secret detention camp in Santiago from where he was disappeared.

The Archive also posted a “thank you” note to the Paraguayan secret police from Col. Contreras for the handling of Fuentes Alarcón, as well as Contreras’s invitation to, and supplementary documents for, the first Condor meeting in November 1975—documents found several years ago in the Paraguayan Archive that have been widely used in books about Operation Condor. The posting includes communications between “Condor 1” (Chile) and “Condor 4” (Paraguay), records of meetings between the D-2 of the Paraguayan intelligence service, and officials from SIDE (the State Intelligence Service) in Argentina, and SID (the Defense Intelligence Service) in Uruguay, and documents related to the coordinated efforts to capture Montoneros in Asunción in 1980—among other facets of the Condor coordination during the era of military dictatorships in the Southern Cone.

"These documents provide a historic passkey into the horror chambers of the Southern Cone military regimes," said Carlos Osorio, who directs the Southern Cone Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. "The atrocities they record from the past remain relevant to the debate over the conduct of counterterrorism operations today and in the future."

Since its discovery in December 1992, the Archive of Terror has become a leading source of evidence for international human rights proceedings in courts across the world, as Paraguayan researchers such as Alfredo Boccia Paz, Rosa Palau and Miriam Gonzalez have worked tirelessly to locate and provide documents to lawyers and judges in countries such as Spain, Italy, France, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Their book, Es mi informe: los archivos secretos de la policía de Stroessner (This is my Report: the Secret Archives of Stroessner’s Police), first identified some of the most significant documents from this unique collection.

Since 1998, the National Security Archive has worked with the Paraguayan Center on Documentation and Archive for the Defense of Human Rights (CDyA) that oversees the Archive of Terror. The National Security Archive has collaborated with the Center to create a fully digitalized collection of more than 300,000 records—the Digital Archive of Terror (ATD). This unique data base, now being posted in sections on the world wide Web, is designed to facilitate ongoing research on human rights crimes, and the discovery of new evidence on the history of state-sponsored terrorism in the Southern Cone.

SOURCE:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB239d/index.htm

You're welcome, Karenina. If it weren't for love, my mind couldn't stomach all the garbage put in it following this gangsterism, criminality, warmongering and treason.

[eleny]

29. Ex-bishop wins Paraguay presidential vote: exit poll

That's the latest news doing a Google search.

"ASUNCION (AFP) — Former bishop Fernando Lugo won Paraguay's presidential election on Sunday, according to an exit poll giving him 43 percent of the vote compared to 37 percent for ruling Colorado Party candidate Blanca Ovelar.

Lino Oviedo, 64, a retired army chief who helped stage a coup, was in third place with 16 percent of the vote, according to the poll by ABC/Nanduti radio.

There is no runoff vote in Paraguay.

Victory for the leftist-leaning Lugo ends the conservative Colorado Party's 61-year domination of the presidency."
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hL-uFf-4fkRqLVv2lRQCSaMpJXuA

[Octafish]

60. Great News!

Thank you, eleny!

Adios, Colorados.

Ex-bishop wins Paraguayan election; 6-decade rulers dumped

By BILL CORMIER – 1 hour ago

ASUNCION, Paraguay (AP) — The world's longest-ruling political party lost its six-decade grasp on power in Paraguay with the presidential victory of a former Roman Catholic bishop.

Political newcomer Fernando Lugo, a charismatic 56-year-old who resigned from the church to run for president, put an end to the Colorado Party's 61-year reign in Sunday's election, rallying voters against political corruption and economic disarray.

Emerging from a 1947 civil war, the Colorado Party was marked by the right-wing dictatorship of the late Gen. Alfredo Stroessner until his ouster in 1989.

Its candidate in Sunday's election, Blanca Ovelar, a protege of President Nicanor Duarte, had sought to become Paraguay's first woman president but conceded defeat on Sunday.

Lugo said Monday that his first priority would be to help Indians mired in poverty and to seek more revenues from Brazil from a dam on a river border between the two nations.

Interviewed by The Associated Press, Lugo also issued a personal apology to the pope for his incursion into politics and said he hoped to return to his post as bishop once his presidency ends.

CONTINUED...

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gAtkI6svsGoIegUVETkVwCJ9QYUgD906COFG0

"Presidente Lugo" sounds like greatness.

[roamer65]

31. I bet President Lugo would send the war criminal Bush to the Hague.

:evilgrin:

[Octafish]

62. Paraguay - Paradise with Serpents

I've only visited Paraguay in my imagination, but here's a bit on Paraguay from someone who's been there:

Paraguay Paradise with Serpents Robert Carver Travel Book The Word of Someone Whos Been There

Robert Carver's Paradise with Serpents is an eye-opening account of travels around the South American state, says Robert Carver.

Travel books: Paraguay's lost world
The Telegraph (UK)
Last updated: 6:15 PM BST 05/10/2007

In the 19th century, Robert Carver's great-great-grand-uncle Charlie set off into the jungles of Paraguay in search of a lost city of gold, and was killed by the natives, leaving only a watch with his name engraved on it.

As a boy, Robert Carver was shown Charlie's watch, and as a grown-up he followed his kinsman to "one of the most remote countries in the world, about which almost no one knew anything, which almost no one went to and almost no one came from - or indeed ever came back from".

In Asunción, the decrepit capital, in the badlands on the borders with Brazil, and in the wilds of the Chaco, he finds a country that is lawless, dangerous and perversely nostalgic for the regime of "Alfie" Stroessner, the dictator who made the place a haven for Nazis.

Historically, white people have gone to Paraguay in search of wealth, like Uncle Charlie, or freedom from the restraints of the Old World, to establish ideal communities. The latter group has included Jesuits, German nationalists, Australian communists, Mennonites and Moonies, and all have failed, because the serpents in their paradises have been human ones. Their descendants subsist, with the benighted "Indians", in a swamp of indolence and squalor, while the country's wealth is siphoned off to banks in Switzerland and the Caymans.

The national railway is emblematic of the general hopelessness. Built by the British, it used to run over a distance of 15 miles, but it packed up a couple of years ago. The Ministry of Railways, though, still employs 25,000 people, who cannot be sacked, and have nothing to do but draw their salaries - if they were paid, which they aren't. Nor are any of the huge number of people employed by what is evidently a failed state, all of whom are obliged to subsist on bribery.

CONTINUED...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/artsandculture/738474/Travel-books-Paraguay's-lost-world.html

PS: That's a great idea, yours, roamer65. Hope President Obama or President Clinton would, too.

The admitted torturer-in-chief also is guilty of illegally attacking and invading a country that was no threat to the United States. The guy's a traitor, too, for, among many other things, lying America into war.

[slipslidingaway]

33. Thank you! K&R n/t

[Octafish]

64. The idea that my country could be ALLIED with such NAZI SCUM INFURIATES ME.

To do something about it:

Ask Kissinger about Pinochet’s Regime

by Amy Goodman
Published on Thursday, December 14, 2006 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Washington)

As the world marked International Human Rights Day, one of the century's most notorious dictators, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, died under house arrest in Chile at the age of 91. His 17-year reign left a deep scar on Chilean society. Yet Pinochet's legacy includes an ironic upside: His regime and the U.S. support for it galvanized the modern-day international human rights movement.

On Sept. 11, 2001, as the planes hit the towers of the World Trade Center, on our daily broadcast of "Democracy Now!," we were looking at the connection between terrorism and Sept. 11, 1973. It was on that day that the democratically elected government of Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a violent coup, and the forces of Pinochet rose to power. The coup was supported by the U.S. government. Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and U.S. secretary of state, summed up the policy this way:

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

As Pinochet seized power, first among the dead was the president himself, Allende. Then there were the thousands rounded up. Among them was Victor Jara, the legendary Chilean folk singer. Jara was beaten, tortured, then executed. His body was dumped on a Santiago street and found by his wife in the morgue.

Charles Horman was a U.S. journalist working in Chile. He, too, disappeared in those days following the coup. His body was found buried in a cement wall. His story was immortalized in the Academy Award-winning Constantin Costa-Gavras film "Missing." His widow, Joyce Horman, sued not only Pinochet for the death of her husband but also Kissinger and others at the U.S. State Department.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1214-33.htm

You're welcome, slipslidingaway! And thank you! I really appreciate that you understand what's happening.

[slipslidingaway]

68. Well I did not always understand, but there is no turning back

now. You're welcome, but the real thanks go to you and others here who take the time to connect the dots for people to see. Even I do not reply I'm usually reading and recommending.

:)

[Kurovski]

34. K&R. (nt)

[Octafish]

65. Today, Henry the K is advising George the Monkey.

"Lookit Henny! Thassa commie. I mean librull."

Cheney Cursed at Woodward re Kissinger.

Woodward: Cheney Cursed At Me About ‘State of Denial,’ Then Hung Up The Phone
Today on Meet the Press, Bob Woodward described how Vice President Dick Cheney called him 10 days ago about Woodward’s new book State of Denial. Woodward says Cheney cursed at him (”he said what I was saying was bull-something”) and then hung up the phone.

Woodward called Cheney’s behavior a “metaphor for what’s going on. Hang up when somebody has a different point of view or information you don’t want to deal with.” Watch it:

Digg It!

Full transcript:

MR. RUSSERT: Have you spoken to the president or the vice president since this book came out?

MR. WOODWARD: The vice president called me I guess as it was coming out 10 days ago.

MR. RUSSERT: And?

MR. WOODWARD: Well, he called to complain that I was quoting him about the meetings with Henry Kissinger that he and the president had. I had interviewed Vice President Cheney last year a couple of times at length about material I’m gathering on the Ford administration, on-the-record interviews, but he volunteered, he said, “Oh, by the way, Henry Kissinger comes in” and he, Dick Cheney, sits down with him once a month and the president every two or three months. And Cheney was upset I was quoting him. And I said, “Look, this–on-the-record doesn’t have anything to do with Ford, you volunteered that.” He then used a word which I can’t repeat on the air. And I said, “Look, on the record is on the record,” and he hung up on me.

MR. RUSSERT: What, what do you mean, he swore at you?

MR. WOODWARD: He, he said what I was saying was bull-something. No, but he, but he hung up. Now, look, I can, I can see, I went back and looked at the transcript that he can–ever had a disagreement about ground rules with someone. Have you?

MR. RUSSERT: Well, he thought he was talking, he thought he was talking to you for one project and you used it in another project.

MR. WOODWARD: Well, exactly. But it had nothing to do with it, and it’s clearly spelled out that it’s an on-the-record interview. And so–now, what does he do instead of saying, “Well, OK, I look at it this way, you look at it that way.” It’s a metaphor for what’s going on. Hang up when somebody has a different point of view or information you don’t want to deal with.


http://thinkprogress.org/2006/10/08/woodward-cheney/

Thanks, Kurovski. You're a real pal!

[Kurovski]

67. "...I mean librull."

Good caption. :rofl:

I really, really dislike those fuckers.

[madfloridian]

35. Another great Octafish post. Recommended.

:hi:

[Octafish]

66. Kissinger’s Crimes - How Dr. Henry Kissinger orchestrated global repression

Innocent American citizens were murdered to aid Kissinger and War Inc.



Some details from Covert Action Quarterly, Harper's and the pre-conservative Christopher Hitchens:

Kissinger’s Crimes

How Dr. Henry Kissinger orchestrated global repression

by Nora King
CovertAction Quarterly, April / June 2001

Some stones tossed in the pond make an amazing splash. Weight, not luster, causes the best splashes, and so it is with Christopher Hitchens' slim new volume, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, whose weight is in the gravity of the human loss it documents.

Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and East Timor stand out for the sheer casualty numbers, Chile and Cyprus for the conniving and intrigue.

EXCERPT...

What about Horman v. Kissinger? Joyce Horman sued Henry Kissinger for $4.9 million and information on the murder in Chile of her husband, American journalist Charles Horman.

Joyce Horman's case against Henry Kissinger was filed in 1977 after four years searching for answers about her husband's brutal murder in 1973.

Over time, bits and pieces have come out and the picture emerged of an ugly conspiracy to silence her husband for his knowledge of U.S. involvement in the ambush killing of Constitutionalist General Rene Schneider. The Schneider assassination is the focus of the Chile section in Trial.

As told in the 1980 film "Missing," Charles Horman had only recently completed his research into the U.S. role in Schneider's killing when he was kidnapped off the street in front of neighbors on September 17, 1973. He had been on a story in Valparaiso when the coup began, and the Americans around him were a bit too forthcoming about the U.S. role, not knowing at first who Charles was.

Chile hadn't seen a political killing in a hundred years, but Charles had been a civil rights activist and an anti-war activist before his 1972 foray into Chile. He had seen the evil of the stolen vote, the abused soldier, the sinister gunman before and recognized it, with his filmmaker's nose for a story. Charles was an idealist, like many others who died that year.
Horman v. Kissinger names a number of other U.S. officials, including Nathaniel Davis, who was Kissinger's man at the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, and who was promoted after the coup to become an undersecretary of state. He was rewarded for being a coup team player, well able to come in to keep his own spoon in the pot on the old cable traffic before it might reach the inquiring mind of a congressperson.

When the D.C. District Court judge ruled in Horman v. Kissinger to dismiss without prejudice in 1980, this meant that Kissinger et al and their lawyers failed to refute the Horman family claim that the U.S. knew of the coup at least 18 hours in advance. While Joyce Horman is still seeking declassification of many of the documents from the government which are still classified almost 30 years later, the ones now declassified seem to bear out her claim.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/Kissingers_Crimes.html

Hiya, madfloridian! Thank you for understanding the situation.

[balantz]

36. Great post! Great Information!

Thank you.

I tried to post something on the Bush property in the news story thread yesterday about this Paraguaian presidential hopeful and my post got deleted!

Thank you for the education. More people need to be aware of what's happening in our neighborhood.

[Octafish]

70. Ford Motor charged as accomplice in Argentina’s ''dirty war''

There's a reason corporations aren't democratic. They aren't.

Ford Motor charged as accomplice in Argentina’s "dirty war"

By Bill Van Auken
25 February 2006

Ford Motor Company has been charged in an Argentine court with playing a direct part in the illegal detention, torture and “disappearances” of its own workers under the dictatorship that ruled the South American country from 1976 to 1983.

The US automaker is accused in both a criminal and a civil lawsuit filed this week of carrying out “management terrorism” under the military regime in order to suppress worker militancy at its Argentine production plants.

The lead plaintiff in the case, Pedro Norberto Troiani, was a union delegate at the automaker’s plant in General Pachecho, outside Buenos Aires, in 1976, when the Argentine military seized power in a US-backed coup. He is suing on behalf of more than two dozen of union committee members and other workers who were seized at gunpoint by security forces, many of them as they worked on Ford’s assembly lines, others at their homes.

“Some of us were kidnapped by the security forces inside the factory and transferred to a makeshift clandestine detention center set up at a sports area of the factory,” Troiani, now 64 years old, recalled. “There, they hooded us and beat us; we suffered mock executions and were tortured,” he said, adding that their captors shocked them with an electric probe.

The case, which was initiated three years ago, has gathered documentary evidence as well as testimony establishing that Ford management collaborated intimately with the dictatorship in identifying militants and providing direct assistance in their abduction and torture.

“After evaluating all of the material, we reached the conclusion that the company wanted to get rid of the delegates who were bothering it,” explained Tomas Ojea Urquiza, the lawyer in the case.

Witnesses testified that their kidnappers had received detailed files from the company’s personnel office and used company identification card photographs to identify them. In a number of cases, the workers were paraded through the plant surrounded by military personnel in a clear attempt to intimidate the rest of the workforce.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/feb2006/ford-f25.shtml

They're not even republican.

You're welcome, balantz! Thank you for understanding the situation and working to get the word out.

[ekwhite]

39. Fernando Lugo's election could be bad news for the Bush Crime Family

I do believe they were looking forward to a extradition-free retirement in Paraguay. A left-wing government might be more willing to surrender them to the Hague.

[Octafish]

71. The Hague would be great!

Shoot. I wouldn't mind them just getting back to the good ol' U.S.A. for a sit-down with a Grand Jury.

There'd be enough on any one of them -- perhaps excepting the virgin Marvin -- to, at the very least, put away for life at hard labor.

If the United States helps Lugo, Paraguay has a chance of ridding itself of corruption and becoming a modern state. First things first, though. Before we can can help Paraguay, we must remake America into a nation of laws. And that calls for imprisoning all the traitors who have aided and abetted Bush and his Base.

[Radical Activist]

41. What's going on with the picture of the bomber?

Where did it come from? Is that supposed to be someone being dropped out of it? Could you provide some context?

[DCKit]

42. Part of Operation Condor: They flew out over the ocean and threw people out.

I don't know if the pic is real, but it was SOP for far too long.

[Octafish]

72. That photo's fake - part or a work of art. The rest is real, though.

http://weblogs.clarin.com/itinerarte/archives/2007/12/pensar_la_contemporaneidadla_verdad_nos_hara_libres_1.html

Here's more on what horrors CONDOR (with the full knowledge and control of the United States) waged upon innocent people:

Operation Condor: Deciphering the U.S. Role

by J. Patrice McSherry

According to recently de-classified files, the U.S. aided and facilitated Condor operations as a matter of secret but routine policy.

SNIP...

Known Cases of U.S. Collaboration with Condor

A key case illuminating U.S. involvement in Condor countersubversive operations was that of Chilean Jorge Isaac Fuentes Alarc=F3n, who was seized by Paraguayan police as he crossed the border from Argentina to Paraguay in May 1975. Fuentes, a sociologist, was suspected of being a courier for a Chilean leftist organization. Chile's Truth and Reconciliation Commission later learned that the capture of Fuentes was a cooperative effort by Argentine intelligence services, personnel of the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, and Paraguayan police. Fuentes was transferred to Chilean police, who brought him to Villa Grimaldi, a notorious DINA detention center in Santiago. He was last seen there, savagely tortured.

Recently declassified U.S. documents include a letter from the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires (written by FBI official Robert Scherrer) informing the Chilean military that Fuentes had been captured. Additionally, Scherrer provided the names and addresses of three individuals residing in the United States whom Fuentes named during his interrogation, and told his counterparts in the Pinochet regime that the FBI was conducting investigations of the three. This letter, among others, confirms that U.S. officials and agencies were cooperating with the military dictatorships and acting as a link in the Condor chain. Perhaps most striking is that this coordination was routine (if secret), standard operating procedure within U.S. policy.

Two of the most explosive discoveries about U.S. links to Condor have emerged in the past few months. First is a 1978 Roger Channel cable from Robert White, then Ambassador to Paraguay, to the Secretary of State, discovered by this researcher in February 2001. This declassified State Department document links Operation Condor to the former U.S. military headquarters in the Panama Canal Zone.

In the cable, White reported a meeting with Paraguayan armed forces chief General Alejandro Fretes Davalos. Fretes identified the Panama Canal Zone base of the U.S. military as the site of a secure transnational communications center for Condor. According to Fretes Davalos, intelligence chiefs from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay used "an encrypted system within the U.S. telecommunications net," which covered all of Latin America, to "coordinate intelligence information." In the cable, White drew the connection to Operation Condor and questioned whether the arrangement was in the U.S. interest--but he never received a response.

CONTINUED...

http://www.crimesofwar.org/special/condor.html

The Truth set Chile free.
The Truth set Argentina free.
The Truth set Brazil free.
The Truth set Paraguay free.

Truth be told:
It may be the United States has a chance after all.

[New Dawn]

43. K&R

[arikara]

44. K&R

Thanks for all your work on this!

[Duppers]

46. there's layers upon layers to take in

Good job, OF, as per usual.

here's a couple of older background posts:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=1450222#1451893

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2941785#2943427

and be sure to scroll to Cell Whitman's post there.

[leveymg]

47. Dulles Bros. and Angletons (father&son) ran the rat-lines that funneled Nazis to S America

The Nazi survivors would never have made it to South America without the help of their American comrades, the Fascist Fifth Column that included the original financiers of the Fascist movement, Henry Ford, Brown Bros Harriman (which employed Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker), and members of the Morgan banking family. After the outbreak of World War Two, this circle took over U.S. intelligence, which was dominated by key Wall Street bankers, lawyers with deep ties to Germany and Italy such as John Foster and Allen Dulles (OSS, Sullivan & Cromwell), Hugh Angleton Sr. (CIC, NCR-Olivetti) and his son, James Jesus (had founded the Fascist literary society at Harvard), and a group of young OSS/OPC officers working with the Gehlen Organization, including Richard Helms and Frank Wisner (OPC), and a native-German speaking Harvard grad student, Henry Kissinger.

Those Nazi officers whose war crimes had been committed in Western Europe were too notorious to go directly to the US, and were resettled with Vatican assistance in South America.

Nazi War Criminals Rauff and Barbie Advised Operation Condor

The two key Nazi war criminals who played a direct role in Operation Condor were Walter Rauff and Klaus Barbie. After the Pinochet coup in 1973, Rauff became one of the key advisors to Pinochet's DINA. During World War II Rauff was the SS officer responsible for overseeing the development of mobile gas vans, which were used to execute as many as 250,000 Jews. Rauff was the head of the Milan Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the elite intelligence service, which made him the chief SS security officer for all of northwest Italy. In that position he assisted SS Gen. Karl Wolff in the Operation Sunrise separate peace negotiations with Allen Dulles, who was the station chief of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Bern, Switzerland.

When the German Army in Italy surrendered on April 29, 1945, Rauff was released, despite his involvement in war crimes, to the custody of "S Force Verona," an OSS unit working with the British-American "Special Counter Intelligence" team in Italy (SCI-Z), headed by James Angleton, who was a protégé of Allen Dulles. This was done over the objections of the U.S. Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), who called him "an unrepentant Nazi" and recommended lifetime imprisonment, if not execution.

In 1943, Rauff had become a close friend of Bishop Alois Hudal, an Austrian, who was the key person within corrupt circles in the Catholic Church involved in organizing the Dulles-Angleton Nazi rat-lines after the war. After his release to "S Force Verona," Rauff was sheltered in the convents of the Holy See by Msgr. Don Giuseppe Biccierai, secretary to the Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Ildebrando Schuster, who had actively supported the Mussolini regime.

In 1948, Rauff was moved to Damascus, Syria where he had the position as a technical advisor to the secret police and chief bodyguard of the President. In 1949, the rat-lines arranged his transfer to Ecuador, after which he settled in Chile. In 1962, the West German government requested his extradition, but the Supreme Court of Chile ruled that since his crimes were "essentially political in nature," he could not be extradited. The ruling was upheld in 1973, just before the coup against Allende.

The other major Nazi war criminal who participated in Operation Condor was Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon." Barbie was protected by and worked for the Dulles faction of U.S. intelligence in Germany until 1951, when he was smuggled via the Nazi rat-lines to South America, where he played a critical role in Operation Condor.

Barbie joined the Hitler youth movement on April 2, 1933. In 1935, he joined Himmler's SS and shortly thereafter became a member of the elite SD security service, where was trained as an investigator and interrogator—i.e., torturer. In 1937, he joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP, the Nazi Party). In 1940, he went to Amsterdam where he served in the Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration, rounding up the city's Jewish population for deportation. In 1943, he was deployed to Lyon, France to eradicate the French Resistance. There he was chief of Section VI, Intelligence and Section IV, the Gestapo. He was responsible for the torture and death of more than 26,000 people. For the arrest, torture, and death of French Resistance leader Jean Moulin, he was awarded the "First Class Iron Cross With Swords" by Hitler himself.

After the war, Barbie fled from France back to Germany, where he worked for the British until April 1947, when he was recruited by the Dulles-controlled faction of the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). He was described by Robert S. Taylor, the CIC officer who recruited him, as "an honest man, both intellectually and personally, absolutely without nerves or fear. He is strongly anti-Communist and a Nazi idealist, who believes that he and his beliefs were betrayed by the Nazis in power."

On March 22, 1951, Barbie was smuggled from Germany through Austria to Genoa by the CIC, from which point he was shipped to Argentina and finally to Bolivia.

In 1952, and again in 1954, the Military Tribunal of Lyon, France sentenced him to death in absentia. But the Dulles faction of the U.S. intelligence community, which had smuggled him out of Germany, continued to protect him from the French. In 1957 Barbie obtained citizenship in Bolivia, under the alias Klaus Altmann.

In 1964, when Bolivian dictator Víctor Paz Estensoro was replaced in a coup organized by Gen. René Barrientos Ortuno, Barrientos placed Barbie in charge of the Bolivian internal security forces, which planned and carried out counterinsurgency operations.

Barbie started the Estrella Company, which sold bark, coca paste, and assault weapons to former SS officer Friedrich Schwendt<4> in Lima, Peru, who in turn worked closely with Walter Rauff in Chile. Schwendt and Barbie formed Transmaritania, a shipping company that also generated millions of dollars in profits from the cocaine business. They purchased their weapons via Hitler's commando, Col. Otto Skorzeny, whose former subordinate Maj. Gerhard G. Mertins had started the Merex weapons business in Bonn, West Germany in 1963.

In 1970, Hugo Banzer Suárez organized another coup in Bolivia to replace Gen. Juan José Torres. Barbie stayed on with the new dictatorship and was paid $2,000 a month for consulting services. In 1971, he was positively identified, but the Bolivian government under Banzer refused to extradite him on the grounds that he was a Bolivian citizen.

Then in 1980 yet another coup took place in Bolivia, this time organized by Gen. Luis Arce Gómez. He hired the services of Italian fascist and Operation Condor operative Stefano Delle Chiaie, who along with Barbie, sent their hooded troops through Bolivian cities. The next day General García-Meza was picked as the new Bolivian dictator. He selected Barbie as head of the country's internal security division, and Delle Chiaie was picked to secure support for the regime from Argentina, Chile, South Africa, and El Salvador.

Delle Chiaie was the protégé of Italian fascist Prince Valerio Borghese<5>, and is known to have been an operative of Manuel Contreras, who headed up Operation Condor under Pinochet. As a youth, Delle Chiaie was a member of the Italian fascist organization MSI. In 1957, he left the MSI to join the New Order. Then in 1960 he formed the National Vanguard. In 1969, Delle Chiaie was convicted for the Piazza Fontana Italian terrorist bombing which was part of an attempted coup d'état by the Propaganda Two freemasonic lodge. Following the 1980 Bologna train station bombing in which over 80 people were killed, Delle Chiaie fled to Bolivia, one of the original six Ibero-American nations which participated in Operation Condor from 1975-83. There, his immediate superior was Klaus Barbie.

In 1983, Barbie was finally deported to France where he was tried in 1987 and sentenced to life imprisonment for his crimes against humanity. He died of cancer in prison in 1991.

[seafan]

48. Your posts are pure gold, Octafish. The truth will set us free.

You will never know how many people learn from your work, but it is a guarantee that it's in the millions.


Thank you.

[cyberpj]

49. Remember when we had reporters who would tell this stuff -- and a citizenry who cared? Thank YOU

for continuing to expose the stories. Your posts are incredible and well confirmed.

[paparush]

50. I hope this guy wins...then seizes the Bush** compound and turns it into

cooperative agriculture or deems it a national park.

ROFLMAO!!

Fuck you Bushitler!

[ensho]

54. kicking for justice - arrest the neo cons now

nt

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

61. I'd reeeally like to know the "sponsors" of CONDOR (renamed and re-equipped, of course).

Bush and Moonie are just two components of that terrorist web.

[scarletwoman]

63. I rec'd this yesterday -- but it needs a kick today! Lugo won!!!!

:woohoo:

We MUST pay attention! It is only by paying attention that we can protect the revolution in South America. And we MUST protect it!

sw

[Kurovski]

69. Kick!

:-)

[Swamp Rat]

73. Brazil

Tudo bem rapaz? :hi:



¿Todo bien vato? :D

[Karenina]

74. Hi Swampers!

:hi::loveya::hi:

[Swamp Rat]

75. Liebling!!

:hi::hug::loveya:

Check your PM.

[KoKo]

76. K&R!