June 08, 2002
BASED on past experience, this column will provoke neo-McCarthyite complaints to the editor, the Human Rights Commission, the Press Council, the UN, the Lodge, Buckingham Palace and the White House. So be it. But the hypocrisies, humbuggeries, pieties and cant surrounding President Shrub's "war on terror" are intolerable.
On September 11, 2001, two jets ploughed into the World Trade Center towers in New York. Another hit the Pentagon in Washington. And if the passengers hadn't tackled the hijackers of a fourth jet, it might have destroyed the White House.
On September 11, 1973, two US-built jets attacked the official residence of another head of state, in Santiago, Chile. As the presidential palace went up in flames, so did a century of Chilean democracy. This terrorist attack led to the death of the country's democratically elected leader. The military junta that took over killed 3100 people, almost exactly the number that perished in the barbarities of last September 11.
As Marc Cooper, an American who worked as a translator for Salvador Allende, says: "Like the perpetrators of the World Trade Center attack, the coup-makers from 1973 also had a network of international support. But their patron's operational headquarters were not in Kabul, but rather in the corridors of power in Washington, DC."
For Pinochet's coup was enthusiastically supported – indeed, facilitated – by the US, operating under the direct orders and control of Henry Kissinger. For full details read Christopher Hitchens's The Trial of Henry Kissinger. These days, because of his endorsement of Bush's crusade, Hitchens is the darling of the Right. But in this book, published just months earlier, Hitchens used the coup and the subsequent sufferings of the Chilean people as just one of many reasons for demanding that Nixon's sidekick be tried as a war criminal.
One of the first to die at Pinochet's hands was an American film-maker, Charles Horman. Horman was investigating the assassination of the head of the Chilean army, Rene Schneider, and in a letter to his parents wrote of the enormous number of people who "knew about it ahead of time, including the president, his ministers, the CIA, the American ambassador, and several senators . . . I got interested and started reading court reports and police statements and talking to people. The whole thing is like a novel; like Z." Z, as you may recall, is a fine film from Costa-Gavras, who also directed L'Aveu, about the communist show trials in Prague. Little did Horman know that he was about to meet the same fate as Schneider, murdered by the CIA-backed Chilean military. And that, within the decade, Costa-Gavras would make a film about his death, called Missing.
I talked to Joyce Horman a few days ago. Her story will remind Australians of Shirley Shackleton, whose husband Greg was gunned down by the Indonesian military in Balibo. The two women have spent most of their lives trying to end the cover-ups – both killings producing decades of lies and obfuscation by more than one government.
I asked Horman to consider the symbolism of the two September 11s. One has led to "a war against terror", to escalating rhetoric about "rogue states", "state-sponsored terrorism" and "axes of evil". While what happened in Chile reminds us that the US has a long record of sponsoring terrorism on an awesome scale. Hence its backing of such charmers as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden – strategies that have come back to haunt them.
"Pinochet's henchmen actually killed someone with a car bomb on the streets of Washington – Orlando Letelier," Horman reminded me. "They killed General Carlos Prats and his wife in Argentina with a car bomb. So that is the definition of state-sponsored terrorism. And our government was backing the Pinochet regime. It is the most incredible contradiction for our government to be so fiercely going after terrorism now when it so fiercely looked away from terrorism in the case of the Pinochet regime."
Ever since the arrest of Pinochet in London, Kissinger has been travelling in fear. He's concerned that he, like Pinochet, will be charged or that he'll be forced to appear as a witness in the Chilean court of Judge Juan Guzman and reveal the depth of his complicity in the killing of Allende and in the torture and slaughter that followed. Guzman is filing for Kissinger's extradition.
I asked Cooper to recall the Chile of September 1973, which he described as a nation already in "a dizzying dance of blood and chaos". He remembers Allende's reforms gaining pace – how he'd nationalised the US copper mines and the telephone company and campaigned to hand large rural estates over to the sharecroppers. Cooper described the wealthy of Chile, outraged by escalating tax bills, welcoming US help and joining with the military. And he remembers the final broadcast of Allende, just hours before his death. "This is surely the last opportunity I will have to address you. The air force has bombed the towers of Radio Portales and Corporacion . . . with my life I will pay for defending the principles dear to our nation . . . these are my last words." The tapes and documents that condemn Nixon over Watergate are every bit as devastating when it comes to Chile. Read Hitchens.
Charles Horman was arrested and "disappeared" six days after the coup. His bullet-ridden body was found in a morgue a month later. US embassy officials in Chile lied to his widow and his father – taking the line that he'd been shot by "left-wing guerrillas". For a vivid account of the official cover-up, hire the Missing video. The film is now 20 years old but the image it presents of a US government desperately concealing the truth didn't stop then.
Again and again, Joyce Horman was on the edge of giving up. Then the arrest of Pinochet changed everything. She knew that his trial for war crimes would be an immense embarrassment to Washington and hoped that, among the incriminating documents, she'd find the smoking gun.
Thanks to the war against terror, Washington is back in bed with any thug who'll sign up. Regimes as bad as and worse than Pinochet's are fine as long as they proclaim their opposition to "terrorism". Thus Washington is arm in arm with Musharraf, with Malaysia's Mahathir, with the odious Karimov in Uzbekistan. And can't say boo to Sharon. Nor should we forget Washington's ongoing backing of the appalling Saudi royal family – the whole 30,000 of them – a regime as nasty as any. And whose citizens provided 15 of the 19 hijackers for September 11.
As Hitchens reminds us, when it comes to US foreign policy, little has changed.
by this Phillip Adams from the Australian Newspaper - printed 8 June 02
