Upside Down World, September 11, 2008
Torture. Murder. Kidnappings. Secret Prisons. Concentration Camps. War. Impunity.
This is the legacy of human rights abuses September 11th sadly leaves us–a legacy first executed by former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and, more recently renewed by an equally culpable President George W. Bush.
The 35th anniversary of the September 11th, 1973 Washington-backed coup which saw Pinochet overthrow the democratically elected administration of Salvador Allende, and the General’s subsequent “War on Terrorism” targeting so-called communists (which included anyone who opposed his bloody regime), offers a standard to measure President Bush’s “War on Terrorism,” the U.S. Commander-in-Chief’s legacy of human rights abuses, as well as how he might one day face justice.
The parallels between the two regime’s crimes are frighteningly similar, though it shouldn’t be lost that Pinochet carried out many of his crimes with financial, intellectual and political support from Washington. The Washington Post wrote in 2004 that, “The news that serving U.S. officials have officially endorsed principles once advanced by Augusto Pinochet brings shame on American democracy.” Two years later Amnesty International echoed The Post’s observation when it accused President Bush of taking pages out of Pinochet’s playbook in his “acceptance of torture and disregard of legal restraints.”
Flight of the Condor and the Eagle
“The first September 11 was a day in which everything changed in Latin America…It was the beginning of a total war justified as a ‘war on terrorism’,” wrote John Dinges, a former Latin American correspondent for The Washington Post and Time, in his book The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents.
Dinges’s book unearths the horrors behind Pinochet’s primary weapon in his “Long War”, a secretive security network created with the region’s military dictatorships formed to capture, murder, torture and disappear perceived “enemies”, wherever they may be. What came to be called “Operation Condor”, unleashed an era “when mass arrests, secret prisons, concentration camps, even the use of extermination methods and crematoriums are comparable only with the worst practices of the Nazi era.”
While Washington’s aiding and abetting of Pinochet’s crimes emerged from a “deluded belief that the Cold War left Washington no other choice,” the Bush Administration’s similar delusions regarding the “War on Terror” has allowed it to justify the use of identical criminal and inhumane methods.
In Iraq, which President Bush repeatedly has described as “the central front on the war on terror”, even though the 9/11 Commission concluded that there is “no evidence connecting Iraq” to Al Qaeda or the September 11th attacks, the death toll may be upwards of 200 times what Pinochet is responsible for. In addition, mass arrests of so-called “terror suspects” in Iraq has led to overcrowding of prisons with innocent people. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, between “70% and 90% of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq have been arrested by mistake.” The Red Cross also alleged that the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was not as President Bush suggested “the wrongdoing of a few,” but rather policy.
Guantanamo Bay, another prison where the Bush Administration sanctioned torture in its “total war,” has been described by Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild, as “concentration camp”. This might explain why President Bush blocked UN human rights experts from visiting the prison in 2005, just as Pinochet’s government canceled a similar UN investigation 30 years ago. And like Pinochet, the CIA under Bush’s direction have used secret prisons, also referred to as “black sites”, which The Washington Post has described as a “hidden global internment network [that] is a central element in the CIA’s unconventional war on terrorism.” And as for torture, one method both Bush and Pinochet legally justified and used is waterboarding.
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El general Carlos Prats y su esposa Sofía Cuthbert, el día de su matrimonio el 19 de enero de 1944 en Iquique.