Regime change, torture and murder

Jacob G Hornberger

President Bush's recent trip to South America provides a valuable 
foreign-policy lesson for Americans. The President was greeted in 
Santiago, Chile, by some 30,000 angry demonstrators. But it was 
not only Bush's invasion and war of aggression against Iraq that 
Chileans were angry about.

Unlike so many Americans, the Chilean people have not fallen for 
the "We invaded Iraq to spread democracy" line that US officials 
moved up to rationale number one after failing to find those 
infamous weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The reason? Chileans have not forgotten — and are still angry 
about — the US Government's role in bringing about "regime 
change" in Chile in 1973 (just as the Iranian people have not 
forgotten the US Government's "regime change" in Iran in 1953).

Chileans still remember that in the 1973 "regime change" in their 
country, the US Government played an active role in ousting their 
democratically elected President, Salvador Allende, because he 
was a left-wing socialist, and replacing him with a brutal 
military dictator, Augusto Pinochet, who ended up ruling Chile 
for almost two decades until 1990. Yes, you read that correctly -
- the US Government, the paragon of democracy around the world, 
helped to oust a man who had been democratically elected by the 
people of Chile and helped replace him with an unelected, 
military brute.

What mattered to US officials was not democracy in Chile but 
rather the same thing that matters to them today in Iraq — the 
installation of a ruler, brutal or benevolent, democratically 
elected or not, who was friendly to the US Government. If that 
meant supporting a cruel and brutal military dictator whose 
forces killed, tortured, or disappeared his own people, so be it.

It is even likely that Chileans are much angrier than Americans 
over the US Government's role in the murder of an American 
journalist, Charles Horman, during that Chilean "regime change".

In fact, despite the fact that a movie, entitled Missing was 
produced about Horman's execution, I'll bet most Americans are 
not even aware of that execution or that the CIA played a role in 
it. (Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the CIA refuses to open 
all its files on US government involvement in the Pinochet coup, 
the Horman murder, and the succeeding years of torture, 
executions, disappearances, and other human rights abuses under 
the Pinochet military regime. In the name of "national security", 
of course.)

Chileans remember the decades of military rule in their country, 
characterised by middle-of-the-night arrests, obliterations of 
civil liberties, torture, executions, disappearances, and other 
human-rights abuses that eerily bring to mind the US military's 
"war on terrorism" policies in Iraq, Cuba, Afghanistan, and in 
the United States itself.

As their counterparts in the US military are doing today, Chilean 
military officials long avoided responsibility for the wrong 
doing by claiming that the human-rights abuses were committed by 
a few lowly soldiers. However, today's Chilean army officials are 
finally taking responsibility for the institutional framework 
that permitted and encouraged the abuses to take place.

Obviously, we're still a long way from that in the United States. 
After all, don't forget that the next US Attorney General is 
likely to be the very man who provided the President with the 
"Geneva Convention is quaint and obsolete" memo that not only 
opened the door to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the Pentagon's 
suspension of habeas corpus and due process but also conveniently 
provided the President and other US high officials with "legal 
cover" when the US Army's human-rights abuses came to light. 
Let's also not forget the ongoing deception and cover-up in the 
Abu Ghraib scandal.

Just as bad, if not worse, has been the supine position that has 
been adopted by Congress in the face of the US military's 
torture, sex abuse, rape, murder, denial of habeas corpus and due 
process, and massive violations of civil liberties of prisoners.

For all practical purposes, Congress's silence has been no 
different from the silence adopted by the Chilean parliament 
under the Pinochet regime. Come to think of it, the "We're here 
to support you and not ask questions" attitude of Congress toward 
the President and the Pentagon in the US Government's "war on 
terrorism" is no different than it was when the US Government was 
"regime changing" and participating in the murder of an American 
journalist during the dark days of Chile's "war on terrorism".

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Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of
The Future of Freedom Foundation.