Kissinger's extradition to Uruguay sought over Operation Condor

[laststeamtrain]

Source: AFP

Kissinger's extradition to Uruguay sought over Operation Condor

Sun Mar 25, 3:00 AM ET

An attorney for a victim of Uruguay's 1973-1985 dictatorship has asked his government to request the extradition of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger over his alleged role in the notorious Operation Condor.

Condor was a secret plan hatched by South American dictators in the 1970s to eliminate leftist political opponents in the region. Details of the plan have emerged over the past years in documents and court testimony.

The Latin American dictatorships of the time "were mere executors" of a "plan of extermination" hatched in the United States by a group led by Kissinger, said attorney Gustavo Salle, who represents the family of Bernardo Arnone.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070325/ts_alt_afp/uruguayusjusticerightscondor&printer=1;_ylt=Av2QCV.D9Owq._p73qHU8cDZa7gF

[CrazyOrangeCat]

1. Surely not our benevolent elder statesman???

I'm shocked!

Shocked, I tell you . . .

[Judi Lynn]

2. You've done a lot of us a favor by posting this information. What is happening finally

is a blessed, long-in-coming cleansing of the record which has been concealed and denied for decades.

Our own right-wing politicians set on a program of oppression, vicious, dishonest, underhanded murder and mayhem no one of them could justify: that's why they had to do it behind everyone's backs.

Latin Americans and Caribbean citizens have known all about it, although we all had our heads completely jammed, due to indifference on the part of right-wingers, chosen and natural ignorance among them, and due to simple inattention by the rest of us to the signs which were actually all around, if we had only been able to see.

From the article:

The extradition request comes as the topic of rights violations during Uruguay's dictatorship is making headlines again, with Salle citing evidence from declassified US State Department documents.

Witnesses are set to testify in April in a case that began in September against eight retired regime officials over rights violations.
(snip)

I CAN'T WAIT to find out more about the coming trial. Thank you very much.

[scarletwoman]

3. If only... That evil bastard has lived too long, dying in prison would be a fitting end for him.

Dreaming of justice...

sw

[femrap]

6. I like your way of thinking....nt

[TomInTib]

4. Off to the page!

I know some of my old SO buddies who were up to their necks in this thing.

It was worse than has ever even been reported.

They were wiping out entire villages down there.

I hope he hangs for this one.

This was an extension of an operation of the same type (same name, even) in SE Asia.

[Canuckistanian]

5. I hope he doesn't like to travel much

Because it seems like time is running out for him.

Pretty soon, he won't be safe to travel anywhere without fear of deportation.

[barb162]

7. Well, he's pretty lucky the US is so large

and there are still a lot of countries who have no problem with him. They have their own Dr. Strangeloves

[Marie26]

8. Typical

I didn't know Kissinger was involved in that, but it just figures. For this he gets a Nobel Peace Prize - ugh.

[Hieronymus]

14. He was involved in the overthrowing and death of Allende too.

[Judi Lynn]

15. Just found a photo of Kissinger and Pinochet you might find interesting.

It hasn't been available in google images until very, very recently:

First, the old one everyone has seen:



The new old one:



It would be horrendous to have to live with the conscience of either man. No doubt they both stayed drunk for years, whenever possible, just to keep from hearing the screams.

[Marie26]

19. As was the CIA

If most Americans knew half of the evil things we've done in Latin America, they'd stop wondering "why do they hate us?"

[L. Coyote]

9. In my Amazon village, US Army Rangers threw leftists from airplanes

according to the locals. This occurred before 1970 in Peru. The villagers reported that leftists were captured and taken away on airplanes, but no leftists were ever aboard where the planes landed.

In Chile, according to an eye witness I interviewed, they lined up the leftists on the bridge edge and shot them in the backs. The dead fell into the river and washed out to sea.

Today, how far left is leftist?

Are the Sandinistas terrorists near the Texas border yet? Remember that lie by President George Bush?

What about solving and prosecuting the murder of Ben Linder in Nicaragua?

What about the La Penca bombing murders?

Has not stopping the past abuses of power and murders of innocents given us the USG we have today?

=======

From: http://www.skepticfiles.org/socialis/christic.htm

On May 30, 1984 a terrorist bomb exploded during a press conference at the
isolated jungle outpost of contra commander Eden Pastora in La Penca,
Nicaragua. Pastora survived the blast, but eight other people--including three
journalists--were killed and two dozen injured.

Among those injured was ABC cameraman Tony Avirgan. Once Avirgan recovered
from his injuries he joined his wife, journalist Martha Honey, who had already
begun an investigation to track down those responsible for the La Penca
bombing.

The two journalists discovered a trail of evidence leading from La Penca to a
secret contra base in Costa Rica, located on a ranch owned by a North American
farmer named John Hull. Eyewitnesses identified the ranch as the staging area
for the La Penca bombing.

Avirgan and Honey learned that Hull was a key figure in the criminal
enterprise of retired military officers, former intelligence officials and
private "soldiers of fortune" who were supplying arms for the contra war
against Nicaragua. They also learned that Hull was allowing Colombian drug
traffickers to use his ranch to smuggle cocaine into the United States. The
profits from the drug operation were used to purchase military supplies for the
contras.

....

- Existence of a lawless "secret government" fighting covert wars worldwide.
The La Penca investigation strongly suggests that elements of the Central
Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council are operating outside the
effective control of Congress and the American people. ..

.....

- Senator John Kerry's subcommittee on terrorism and narcotics found that
contra supporters were using the rebel arms supply network as a cover to
smuggle drugs into the United States......
....more...

=========

From: Necessary Illusions Copyright © 1989 by Noam Chomsky
http://www.zmag.org/CHOMSKY/ni/ni-c10-s27.html

The vast array of daily examples of the relatively subtle means employed to establish the required version of reality should not obscure the more direct contributions, as in the fabrications about Nicaraguan support for Colombian terrorists or the case of Radio Católica, and numerous others. To take merely one additional case, consider Kinzer's report on the attempted assassination of contra leader Edén Pastora at La Penca on May 30, 1984. In his June 1 report of the bombing, Kinzer quoted Pastora as blaming the Sandinistas. Pastora, however, says that he blamed the CIA: "I never said it was the government of Nicaragua. I would feel ashamed if I had said that." .....

[L. Coyote]

10. the "Secret Team" or "Enterprise," a covert, privately-funded, anti-communist

Does any of this sound familiar?

"... all of the principals in the Iran-Contra scandal also worked for the "Secret Team" or "Enterprise," a covert, privately-funded, anti-communist organization made up of present and former U.S. military and CIA officials. According to Christic, members of the Secret Team, "acting both officially and on their own, have waged secret wars, toppled governments, trafficked in drugs, assassinated political enemies, stolen from the U.S. government, and subverted the will of the Constitution, the Congress, and the American people" for the past twenty five years...."

" "These are people who believe that they are above the law, who are perfectly willing to lie to protect their programs, who think that their agenda is so important that our representatives do not matter and neither do we," says Nelson. "We never voted for death squads. We never thought that this is what they were doing in our name. We believed them when they said 'We are spreading democracy. We are fighting for freedom.' But that is not what has been going on."

FROM:
Southern Changes.
Contras in Dixie By Eric Guthey
Vol. 10, No. 3, 1988, pp. 1-6
http://beck.library.emory.edu/southernchanges/article.php?id=sc10-3_010&mdid=sc10-3_001

In 1984 an assassin's bomb intended for Contra leader Eden Pastora killed eight people, including an American journalist, at the Contra outpost of La Penca on the southern front of the U.S.-sponsored war against Nicaragua. ...

.... Honey and Avirgan also uncovered substantial evidence that Hull's ranch was being used as a trans-shipment point for cocaine entering the U.S. and arms coming back to the Contras.

In 1985, after Honey and Avirgan published their findings, Hull sued them for criminal libel in a Costa Rican court. According to a sworn affadavit from Christic Institute general counsel Daniel Sheehan, who defended Honey and Avirgan, several witnesses for the defense were kidnapped and tortured on Hull's ranch. According to a member of the Costa Rican Rural Guard, one of their key witnesses was executed there as well. A Costa Rican judge threw Hull's case out of court.

The allegations by Honey and Avirgan about Hull's drug smuggling and arms dealing activities in support of the Contras have recently received independent confirmation from Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) during hearings on the Contra-drug connection. On Frontline, Hull still denied any wrongdoing but said, "If it were within my power, people like Kennedy and Kerry would be lined up and shot tomorrow."

........

The Scandal of the Eighties

The Iran-Contra Committees brushed aside a horrifying story of state-sponsored terrorism by focusing on the question of whether the president knew what was going on. But as Noam Chomsky writes in his book THE CULTURE OF TERRORISM, Reagan is "largely a creation of the Public Relations Industry," and the question of what he knew retains significance only "in the world of imagery and illusion in which ideologists must labor to maintain the pretense that the public determines policy guidelines by voting for the chief executive." The scores of conflicting and erroneous statements that have come out of Ronald Reagan's mouth about the Iran-Contra scandal serve to confirm his irrelevance to real issues in the real world. Whether or not Reagan knew what went on, it happened--a secret government waged wars, murdered at least one American citizen and many others abroad, flooded the country with drugs, and flouted the will of the American people. A president with any degree of competence would have to be held responsible.

The defense of choice around the White House these days adheres to the revised slogan "Just say I don't know"--a defense in which Administration officials are proud of the fact that they kept themselves uninformed or, better still, that they haven't been indicted yet. George Bush's continued assertions that he stayed "out of the loop" as far as the Iran-Contra affair was concerned illustrate just how far the Reagan gang will go to insult the intelligence of the American people. Recent press reports indicate that Bush may try to manipulate the debates before the election in order to avoid being confronted with his complicity in the Iran-Contra scandal and the operations of the Secret Team. He must not be allowed to do so. And the Democratic candidates must be carefully questioned as well--to make sure that, if elected, they will put an end to such threats to the Constitution and to the people's right to know how their country is being governed.

On May 2, Oliver North addressed the graduating class at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. Falwell likened North's current legal trials to the sufferings of Christ, .....

MORE

[DanWithAngel]

18. US Army Rangers threw leftists from airplanes?

Before you blanket US Army Rangers with this do you have some documentation to back
up such a damning charge against our soldiers? I know many US Army Rangers and none
have a proclivity or history or such a hideous action.

[Mika]

20. For people interested in the "thowing persons from planes" issue..

.. may I suggest that one do some researching on (CIA & Brothers to the Rescue founder) Jose Basulto and his involvement in Op Condor. (Cuban expat Mr Basulto is slime who's been involved in many anti democratic US/CIA activities in the US, Latin Americas, and Caribbean.)

[DanWithAngel]

21. CIA is more believable

those guy don't play well with others.

[rman]

22. Some do, some don't -

much of what we know about the bad things "the CIA" has done, we know from former agents who did quit the CIA and decided to try and blow the whistle.

It is inaccurate to say that "the CIA" does these things, as much as it is inaccurate to say that it is "the government" that does these things (assassinations of foreign leaders, state terrorism etc - besides that there are plenty bad things that result from official government policies, but those are not immediately the issue here).
For the most part it is certain individuals within these and other organizations who commit these crimes - individuals who are part of a network of people; in a sense, a criminal organization. It is quite possible that there were/are such individuals within the Army Rangers.

[L. Coyote]

11. Costa Rica is preparing a murder case. US obstruction is the problem.

Remember La Penca and Ronald Reagan
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/47/460.html

.....

Attorney General Francisco Dall'Anese has blamed US obstruction in the form of blocked access to classified documents. In a Feb. 27, 2004, letter to Costa Rica's Defensor de los Habitantes Jose Manuel Echandi, he enumerated the reasons for the deadlock:

* Exhaustive investigations in Costa Rica have not yielded sufficient results to bring a case to trial.
* Documents in the possession of the Senate of the United States of America have been declared secret by the US government and are therefore inaccessible.
* It has not been possible to identify the material author of the crime, not even through Interpol, and efforts to extradite US citizen John Hull and Miami-based Cuban-American Felipe Vidal have been fruitless.

Of the three reasons, Dall'Anese said in the letter, The second point is the major obstacle to terminating the investigations because the identity of the author of the deeds could be established and linked to Hull, and, without evidence, it is impossible to found an accusation.

Costa Rican authorities have attempted to extradite two alleged CIA collaborators, Hull and Vidal, from the US, but to no avail. Hull operated a ranch on the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border identified by resupply pilots as a transshipment point for military supplies and drugs. In the present Washington climate, authorities have little hope of gaining access either to information or to material witnesses.

But prosecutor Paula Guido, who has had responsibility for the case for the past three years, said she is preparing a case to present in Costa Rica rather than wait years for a declassification of documents that may never come.

.....

Summing the efforts at solving the crime to date, Robert Rivard, Newsweek magazine's Central American bureau chief at the time of the bombing, told The Tico Times, La Penca was an unjustifiable act of terror, and there is blame enough for all the region's players to bear: the Sandinistas and the US intelligence community, each of whom believed their ends justified the means; Eden Pastora, a weekend revolutionary propped up by the Reagan administration, who saw to his own evacuation from the jungle while Linda Frazier was left behind to bleed to death; and even Costa Rica, which turned a blind eye to so much covert activity on its own soil.

Linda Frazier's husband Joe Frazier, an Associated Press correspondent in the region for decades, has suspicions running long and deep. The US Embassy marked the anniversary with a denial of any involvement in La Penca, but Frazier, remembering the Reagan years in Central America, said, I don't think the United States has done anything at all to attempt to find out what happened. Under the administration at the time, it couldn't have cared less.

Frazier said his suspicion of US involvement has grown through the years. He recounted an incident. I was talking to a former ambassador to Honduras, and we were discussing and he asked, 'Do you think we did it?' and I said, 'I think you certainly knew about it, and probably signed off on it,' and he was silent, didn't say a word.

Attorney General Dall'Anese concluded in his letter to Echandi, In this situation, the appropriate thing is to maintain an open investigation awaiting evidence that could come to lessen the uncertainty of the process, because given the gravity of the acts, it is not acceptable to close the investigation at the moment.

The La Penca bombing ranks among the very smallest of incidents of violent death that mark the Reagan legacy in Central America, but along with the thousands who mourn their dead in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, reporters, too, remember their own.

=========

Viva Linda Frasier. Viva Ben Linder. Viva La Verdad!!

[Judi Lynn]

12. Thanks so much for posting this information,these links.Now we have what we need

to read now, get a good look at this, and to use as a starting point to do more research.

This material is extremely important, and it's been well buried, hasn't it? So glad you placed it here.

[Name removed]

13. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[tanyev]

16. Sorry, he's way too busy right now, advising Bush and Cheney.

Can we send all three of them there?

[gratuitous]

17. Check your travel (escape) plans, Chimpy

You don't want to intend to flee to Paraguay and wind up in Uruguay by mistake. Looks like the luster of being a bloodthirsty repressive has sort of been lost in more and more countries.

[rodeodance]

23. "citing evidence from declassified US State Department documents."

Uruguayan prosecutor Mirtha Guianze has received the request and is studying the case, according to news reports.

A leftist activist, Arnone was arrested in October 1976 and flown to Argentina with a group of political prisoners that vanished and were presumably executed.

Kissinger played a dominant role in US foreign policy between 1969 and 1977, and was a strong supporter of right-wing regimes across Latin America.

The extradition request comes as the topic of rights violations during Uruguay's dictatorship is making headlines again, with Salle citing evidence from declassified US State Department documents.

Witnesses are set to testify in April in a case that began in September against eight retired regime officials over rights violations.

[Judi Lynn]

24. A look at Operation Condor for anyone unacquainted with it, from Wikipedia....

Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor, Portuguese: Operação Condor) was a campaign of state terrorism and intelligence operations implemented by right-wing dictatorships that dominated the Southern Cone in Latin America from the 1950s to 1980s, heavily relying on numerous assassinations. The systematic counter-terrorism aimed both to deter democratic influence and ideas disseminated in the region and to control active or potential opposition movements against these governments. This organized counter-terrorism caused an unknown number of deaths, due to the covering up of the different governments involved. According to the "terror archives" discovered in Paraguay in 1992, 50,000 persons were murdered, 30,000 "disappeared" (desaparecidos) and 400,000 incarcerated.<1><2>. There have recently been some attempts of prosecutions against those responsible for this repression, to varied degrees.
(snip)

History

The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and the Argentinean Jorge Rafael Videla, in 1978In February 1974, leaders of the secret police of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met together, with Manuel Contreras, chief of DINA (the Chilean secret police), in Santiago de Chile, officially creating the Plan Condor. However, cooperation between various security services, in the aim of "eliminating Marxist subversion", previously existed before this reunion and Pinochet's coup d'Etat. Thus, during the Xth Conference of American Armies held in Caracas on September 3, 1973, Brazilian General Breno Borges Fortes, head of the Brazilian army, proposed to "extend the exchange of informations" between various services in order to "struggle against subversion".<3> According to French journalist Marie-Monique Robin, author of Escadrons de la mort, l'école française (2004, Death Squads, The French School), the paternity of Operation Condor is to be attributed to General Rivero, intelligence officer of the Argentine Armed Forces and former student of the French <4>.

Operation Condor, which took place in the context of the Cold War, was given at least tacit approval by the United States which feared a Marxist revolution in the region. The targets were officially leftist guerrillas, but in fact included all kinds of political opponents, including their families and others, as reported by the Valech Commission. The "Dirty War" in Argentina for example, which resulted in 30,000 victims, targeted mostly trade-unionists. Chilean MIR members, activists of the Catholic left-wing Peronist group the Montoneros, members of the Argentine MTO (the "All for the Country Movement") or Uruguayan Tupamaros were among those targeted.

It appears that Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations, was closely involved diplomatically with the Southern Cone governments at the time and well-aware of the Condor plan. The first cooperation agreements were signed between the CIA and anti-Castro groups, fascist movements such as the Triple A set up in Argentina by José Lopez Rega, "personal secretary" of Juan Peron and Isabel Peron, and Rodolfo Almiron (arrested in Spain in 2006) <5>.
(snip/...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor

[Judi Lynn]

25. An ex-cop from Gary, Indiana who became a torturer, was sent to Uruguay.

Don't see how Kissinger could have avoided knowing about him:

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 11, 1979 A19

Torture’s Teachers
By A.J. Langguth

~snip~
Mr. Hevia had served the C.I.A. in Uruguay’s police program. In 1970, his duties brought him in contact with Dan Mitrione, the United States policy adviser who was kidnapped by the Tupamaro revolutionaries later that year and shot to death when the Uruguayan Government refused to save him by yielding up politician prisoners.

Mr. Mitrione has become notorious throughout Latin America. But few men ever had the chance to sit with him and discuss his rationale for torture. Mr. Hevia had once.

Now, reading Mr. Hevia’s version, which I believe to be accurate, I see that I too had resisted acknowledging how drastically a man’s career can deform him. I was aware that Mr. Mitrione knew of the tortures and condoned them. That was bad enough. I could not believe even worse of a family man. A Midwesterner. An American.

Thanks to Mr. Hevia, I was finally hearing Mr. Mitrione’s true voice:

"When you receive a subject, the first thing to do is to determine his physical state, his degree of resistance, through a medical examination. A premature death means a failure by the technician.

"Another important thing to know is exactly how far you can go given the political situation and the personality of the prisoner. It is very important to know beforehand whether we have the luxury of letting the subject die…

"Before all else, you must be efficient. You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more. We must control our tempers in any case. You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist…
(snip/...)

Dan Mitrione

Uruguay 1964-1970
Torture - as American as apple pie
excerpted from the book
Killing Hope
by William Blum

~snip~
Otero had been a willing agent of the CIA, a student at their International Police Services school in Washington, a recipient of their cash over the years, but he was not a torturer. What finally drove him to speak out was perhaps the torture of a woman who, while a Tupamaro sympathizer, was also a friend of his. When she told him that Mitrione had watched and assisted in her torture, Otero complained to him, about this particular incident as well as his general methods of extracting information. The only outcome of the encounter was Otero's demotion.
(snip)

"One of the pieces of equipment that was found useful," former New York Times correspondent A. J. Langguth learned, "was a wire so very thin that it could be fitted into the mouth between the teeth and by pressing against the gum increase the electrical charge. it was through the diplomatic pouch that Mitrione got some of the equipment he needed in interrogations, including these fine wires.''

Things got so bad in Mitrione's time that the Uruguayan Senate was compelled undertake an investigation. After a five-month study, the commission concluded unanimously that torture in Uruguay had become a "normal, frequent and habitual occurrence inflicted upon Tupamaros as well as others. Among the types of torture the commission's report made reference to were electric shocks to the genitals, electric needles under the fingernails, burning with cigarettes, the slow compression of the testicles, daily use of psychological torture ... "pregnant women were subjected to various brutalities and inhuman treatment" ... "certain women were imprisoned with their very young infants and subjected to the same treatment."

Eventually the DII came to serve as a cover for the Escuadron de la Muerte (Death Squad), composed, as elsewhere in Latin America, primarily of police officers, who bombed and strafed the homes of suspected Tupamaro sympathizers and engaged in assassination and kidnapping. The Death Squad received some of its special explosive material from the Technical Services Division and, in all likelihood, some of the skills employed by its members were acquired from instruction in the United States. Between 1969 and 1973, at least 16 Uruguayan police officers went through an eight-week course at CIA/OPS schools in Washington and Los Fresnos, Texas in the design, manufacture and employment of bombs and incendiary devices. The official OPS explanation for these courses was that policemen needed such training in order to deal with bombs placed by terrorists. There was, however, no instruction in destroying bombs, only in making them; moreover, on at least one reported occasion, the students were not policemen, but members of a private right-wing organization in Chile. Another part of the curriculum which might also have proven to be of value to the Death Squad was the class on Assassination Weapons-
(snip/...)

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Uruguay_KH.html

[entanglement]

26. It is a shame, but Kissinger will probably never be brought to trial for his crimes

against humanity.