From: "Janet M Eaton" <•••@••.•••>
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 10:50:15 +0000
Subject: A Day of Infamy - Roger Burbach
Dear All:
The following analysis is by Roger Burbach is director of CENSA's
Global Alternatives, and author of Globalization and Postmodern
Politics: The Zapatistas and High Tech Robber Barons, Pluto Press,
2001. He is currently working on a book on Pinochet's terrorist
activities and on the global human rights movement that opposed his
regime.
Burbach says that following piece is an attempt to show how
past US policies in Chile and Latin America have helped feed the
sickness of internationalism terrorism.
He concludes that unless we acknowledge that the U.S. government
has been intricately involved in the creation of international
terrorist networks and abandon that practice once and for all, the
cycle of violence and terrorism will only deepen in the months and
years to come. The events of September 11 demonstrate that our
borders are no longer impregnable in a globalized world. We must
behave more responsibly, ending our own role in the globalization of
terror, or there will be many more Septembers as history continues to
repeat itself.
fyi-janet
=================================
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
To: •••@••.•••
From: Susan Hunt <•••@••.•••>
Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 12:33:16 -0400
Subject: [toeslist] A Voice of Sanity
FYI, a voice of sanity. Roger Burbach was at TOES in Denver. -- Susan Hunt
From: Roger Burbach <•••@••.•••
Organization: censa
To: "September 11" <•••@••.•••
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 17:46:27 -0700
Subject: A Day of Infamy
The terrorist attacks on September 11 were horrific. They have
changed the United States and its peoples forever. Tragically, the
Bush administration in its rush to build up the military and the
national security state seems intent on extending the blood and
carnage suffered at home to other peoples of the world. Dubya
refuses to recognize that past US policies, including those of his
father, have contributed deeply to what happened in New York and
Washington D.C. I am dumbfounded by the article on September 13 in
the New York Times on Pentagon planning for a long drawn out war
with incalculable causalities. A quote cited in the Times from a
booklet by Donald Rumsfeld, "if a problem cannot be solved, enlarge
it," reflects the backward thinking of a man who should not hold any
public office, especially that of Defense Secretary.
The following piece is an attempt to show how past US policies in
Chile and Latin America have helped feed the sickness of
internationalism terrorism.
Roger Burbach
Roger Burbach is director of CENSA's Global Alternatives, and author
of Globalization and Postmodern Politics: The Zapatistas and High
Tech Robber Barons, Pluto Press, 2001. He is currently working on a
book on Pinochet's terrorist activities and on the global human
rights movement that opposed his regime.
September 11:
A Day That Will Live in Infamy in the US and Chile
By Roger Burbach*
It is an uncanny historic coincidence that the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred exactly twenty-eight
years after General Augusto Pinochet toppled the elected government
of Socialist President Salvador Allende in Chile. The bloody coup in
Santiago on September 11, 1973, which I lived through, is widely
believed to have had the backing of the U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency. It marked the advent of a regime that systematically
employed terror at home and abroad to remain in power for almost
seventeen years.
Prior to the attack on the Pentagon, the most sensational
foreign-lead terrorist action in the capitol had been carried out by
a team of operatives sent by the Pinochet regime. On September 21,
1976, agents of the Chilean secret police organization, DINA,
detonated a car bomb just blocks from the White House, killing a
leading opponent of Pinochet's, Orlando Letelier, and his assistant
Ronni Moffitt. Letelier, who I spoke to at the Institute for Policy
Studies in Washington D.C. before his death, was a man deeply
committed to democracy and a more humane world who had served at the
highest levels of the Allende government.
These assassinations were linked to the first international
terrorist network in the Western Hemisphere, known as Operation
Condor. Begun in 1974 at the instigation of the Chilean secret
police, Operation Condor was a sinister cabal comprised of the
intelligence services of at least six South American countries that
collaborated in tracking, kidnapping and assassinating political
opponents. Based on documents recently divulged under the Chile
Declassification Project of the Clinton administration, it is now
recognized that the CIA knew about these international terrorist
activities and may have even abetted them.
The Chilean secret police, often with the assistance of other
Condor partners, carried out a number of international terrorist
operations. On September 30, 1974, retired General Carlos Pratts,
who Pinochet replaced as head of the Chilean military shortly before
the 1973 coup, was killed by a car bomb while living in exile in
Buenos Aires, Argentina. In Rome in 1975, DINA operatives attacked
and seriously maimed Chilean Christian Democratic politician
Bernardo Leighton and his wife.
Papers found in Paraguayan archives in the 1990s reveal that
Operation Condor was also linked to the assassination of a Brazilian
general and two Uruguayan parliamentarians, as well as to scores of
lesser-known political activists. After the murders of
Letelier-Moffitt in Washington D.C., the CIA appears to have
concluded that Condor was a rogue operation and may have tried to
contain its activities. However, the network of Southern Cone
military and intelligence operations continued to act throughout
Latin America at least until the early 1980s. Chilean and Argentine
military units assisted the dictator Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua
and helped set up death squads in El Salvador. Argentine units also
aided and supervised Honduran military death squads that began
operating in the early 1980s with the direct assistance and
collaboration [of] the CIA.
All these terrorist operations of course need to be placed in the
context of the Cold War. It is no secret that the US government in
its conflict with the Soviet bloc countries often engaged in
unsavory operations, particularly in the third world. But many of
these activities have come back to haunt the US. In another ironic
historic twist, on the day before the attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, the family of assassinated General Rene
Schneider announced that they intend to press charges in the Chilean
courts against Henry Kissinger. Their charges are based on
declassified US government documents discussed earlier this month on
CBS' Sixty Minutes that were provided by the National Security
Archive, an independent research and documentation center based in
Washington D.C. These documents indicate that after the election of
Salvador Allende in September 1970 Kissinger approved a CIA plot to
prevent Allende from being inaugurated. This conspiracy lead to the
assassination of Schneider over a month later, who as commander in
chief of the Chilean army insisted on upholding the will of Chilean
voters and the country's constitution.
There are many parallels between the emergence of the terrorist
network in Latin America and events in the Middle East and Asia.
Osama bin Laden of Saudi Arabia, who is widely believed to be
directing the attacks on the United States, first became involved in
militant Islamic activities when he went to Afghanistan in the 1980s
to fight with the Mujahidin against the Soviet-backed regime that
had taken power in the country. According to the CIA 2000 Fact
Book, the Mujahidin were "supplied and trained by the US, Saudi
Arabia, Pakistan, and others." Even in the 1980s it was widely
recognized that many of those fighting against the Soviets and the
Afghan government were religious fanatics who had no loyalty to
their U.S. sponsors, let alone to "American values" like democracy,
religious tolerance and gender equality.
As we now know the most radical and fundamentalist sector of
the Mujahidin, the Taliban, gained control of most of the country by
the late 1990s. Some Taliban leaders openly acknowledge that they
allow Osama bin Laden to operate in their country because they are
indebted to a man who supported and assisted their rise to power.
What is now disconcerting is that in the aftermath of the attack
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon former US government
officials and conservative pundits are arguing that bin Laden's
international terrorist network has flourished because earlier U.S.
collaboration with terrorists were constrained or curtailed. Henry
Kissinger who was in Germany on September 11, told the TV networks
that the controls imposed on US intelligence operations over the
years have facilitated the rise of international terrorism. He
alluded to the hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in
1975 headed by Senator Frank Church, which strongly criticized the
covert operations approved by Kissinger when he headed up the
National Security Council. The Church hearings lead to the first
legal restrictions on CIA activities, including the prohibition of
US assassinations of foreign leaders.
Other Republicans, including George Bush Sr. who was director
of the CIA when the agency worked with many of these terrorist
networks, are pointing the finger at the Clinton administration for
allegedly undermining foreign intelligence operations. They argue
vehemently against the 1995 presidential order prohibiting the CIA
from paying and retaining foreign operatives involved in torture and
death squads. These foreign policy hawks are standing historic
reality on its head. What happened in New York and Washington is a
massive human tragedy. But unless we acknowledge that the U.S.
government has been intricately involved in the creation of
international terrorist networks and abandon that practice once and
for all, the cycle of violence and terrorism will only deepen in the
months and years to come. The events of September 11 demonstrate
that our borders are no longer impregnable in a globalized world. We
must behave more responsibly, ending our own role in the
globalization of terror, or there will be many more Septembers as
history continues to repeat itself.
*Roger Burbach is director of CENSA's Global Alternatives, and author
of Globalization and Postmodern Politics: The Zapatistas and High
Tech Robber Barons, Pluto Press, 2001. He is currently working on a
book on Pinochet's terrorist activities and on the global human
rights movement that opposed his regime.
