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From The Guardian (London)
State Terrorism and September 11, 1973
and 2001
By Roger Burbach
On the morning of September 11 I watched aircraft flying overhead. Minutes later I heard
explosive sounds and saw fireballs of smoke fill the sky. As a result of these attacks
thousands died, including two good friends of mine.
I am not writing about September 11 2001 in New York City. On that date I was thousands of
miles away in Berkeley, California. I am writing about another September 11, equally
horrible, that occurred in 1973 when I was living in Santiago, Chile. On that date I
indeed saw planes flying overhead. They were warplanes and their target was the
presidential palace in Santiago. Remarkably, these two September 11’s are related in
a number of ways, and both dates help us understand why George W. Bush has lead the United
States into a quagmire in Iraq.
On September 11, 1973 Salvador Allende resided in the Chilean presidential palace. He was
the first freely elected socialist leader in the world and ever since his electoral
victory in September 1970, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US government
headed by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger who chaired the National Security Council were
determined to overthrow Allende and his Popular Unity coalition.
It was on September 11, 1973 that they finally succeeded. Lead by General Augusto
Pinochet, the Chilean military overthrew Allende who died in the presidential palace. Over
three thousand people perished in the bloody repression that followed under
Pinochet’s rule, including two American friends of mine, Charles Horman and Frank
Terrugi.
Prior to the attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 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 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.
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 the CIA.
Similarities abound between the emergence of terrorist networks in Latin America and
events leading to the rise of al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden 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 United States, 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 “western values” like
democracy, religious tolerance and gender equality.
Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s, when the CIA was backing the Mujahideen warriors in
Afghanistan, likened them to our “founding fathers.” Then in Central America,
Reagan called thousands of former soldiers of Somoza’s National Guard “freedom
fighters” as they were sent to fight against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
And when the Sandinistas went to the World Court to press charges against the United
States for sending special operatives to bomb its major port facility in Corinto, the
Reagan administration withdrew from the Court, refusing to acknowledge the rule of
international law.
In the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, former US
government officials and conservative pundits attempted to completely rewrite this sordid
history. Instead of acknowledging that past CIA operations had gone awry, they insisted
that bin Laden’s international terrorist network had flourished because earlier U.S.
collaboration with terrorists had been constrained or curtailed. Henry Kissinger who was
in Germany on September 11, 2001, told the TV networks that the controls imposed on US
intelligence operations over the years 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, pointed the finger at the Clinton
administration for allegedly undermining foreign intelligence operations. They argued
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 were standing historic reality on its head.
Today, two years later we see the consequences of the refusal of the administration of
George W. Bush to learn the proper lessons of the past. Instead of ending US
transgressions of the borders and sovereign rights of other nations, the United States has
spread carnage and war, violating fundamental civil liberties and human rights at home and
abroad.
Like many advocates of a world based on law rather than violence, Judge Baltesar Garzón,
who issued the warrant for the arrest of Pinochet in London in 1998, proclaimed on the eve
of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001: “Lasting peace and freedom can be achieved
only with legality, justice, respect for diversity, defense of human rights and measured
and fair responses.” The failure of the United States to bring stability to Iraq and
Afghanistan, along with stepped up terrorist activities around the world, demonstrate that
the US war against terror is a failure.
But even in the midst of this war, judges, lawyers and human rights activists around the
world remain determined to see that international justice is carried out. Using the
principle of “universal jurisdiction” employed by Judge Garzon to pursue
Pinochet, nineteen citizens of Iraq filed suit in Belgium courts in May against Tommy
Franks, the commander of the US invasion. They charged that troops under his command stood
idly by as hospitals in Baghdad were looted, while other US soldiers fired on ambulances
that were carrying wounded civilians. The Bush administration reacted angrily, threatening
the Belgium government with “diplomatic consequences” if it allowed the case to
go forward.
Then when US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld attended a meeting at NATO headquarters
in Brussels in June 2003, he threatened to end US financing for new NATO facilities and to
move the headquarters to another country if the Belgium government would not intervene to
suspend the court cases. Kowtowing to his demands, the Belgium parliament altered its laws
relating to universal jurisdiction. But as we achieve some distance from the war, and
perhaps a ‘regime change’ in the United States, investigations and charges will
be brought against the US invaders of Iraq in other countries for their human rights
abuses and lies about the war, perhaps even in US courts.
The struggle is joined. The years to come will focus on the great divide that has emerged
out of the two September elevens of 1973 and 2001. On the one side stands an arrogant
unilateralist clique in the United States that engages in state terrorism and human rights
abuses while tearing up international treaties. On the other is a global movement that is
determined to advance a broad conception of human rights and human dignity through the
utilization of human rights law, extradition treaties and limited policing activities. It
is fundamentally a struggle over where globalization will take us, whether the powerful
economic and political interests of the world headed up by reactionary U.S. leaders will
create a new world order that relies on intervention and state terrorism, or whether a
globalist perspective from below based on a more just and egalitarian conception of the
world will gain ascendancy.
Special thanks to Hank Frundt and Jim Tarbell for editorial assistance.
Roger Burbach is the author of “The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global
Justice,” which has just been released by Zed Books.
11 September 2003 |
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Proyecto para el Primer Siglo Popular:
Noticias
Proyecto para el Nuevo Siglo Estadounidense
Prontuario del imperialismo yanqui
Estrategias para transitar hacia el Primer Siglo
Popular
-
La invasión de Iraq
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Terrorismo de Estado estadounidense
Lecturas de Apoyo
Campañas
Historia Actual On-line
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ATTAC
Chile
Foro Social Mundial
Los manuales de tortura del ejército de los Estados Unidos
Cuba
Venezuela
-
Prontuarios:
Ronald Reagan
Los crímenes del ejército imperial de Estados Unidos
-
La columna de Max Lesnik
-
PPSP
publica artículos y ensayos de estudio crítico de los efectos políticos, económicos,
ideológicos, sociales y ambientales que la política exterior de los Estados Unidos
produce en el mundo, particularmente en Africa, América Latina y Asia. La política
exterior de los Estados Unidos sigue ahora los principios establecidos en el documento "Reconstruyendo
las defensas de Estados Unidos. Estrategia, Fuerzas y Recursos para el Nuevo Siglo ",
publicado en el año 2000. Sus autores ocupan puestos ejecutivos en el Pentágono, el
Departamento de Estado, y en algunas universidades en Estados Unidos y el Reino Unido.
Esta política intenta implementar lo que ellos llaman "Proyecto para un Nuevo
Siglo Estadounidense" que busca la dominación mundial. PPSP
fue creado con el propósito de generar opinión pública universal que sirva como sostén
social de un amplio frente unido para oponerse a la dominación por parte de Estados
Unidos y para preservar el derecho a la autoderminación de los pueblos, como un primer
paso en la construcción de un mundo mejor. PPSP
acoge ensayos y artículos sobre los problemas creados por la actitud desenfrenada del
imperialismo estadounidense, el cual está amenazando la libertad de toda la población
mundial, incluyendo la sociedad civil de Estados Unidos
(Dr. Róbinson Rojas,
1ro. de mayo, 2003) |
Banco
de Datos RRojas:
La economía política del desarrollo
Creado y dirigido por Dr. Róbinson Rojas, este
sitio académico promueve excelencia en la enseñanza y la investigación de la economía
y del desarrollo, y en los procesos de descripción, comprensión, explicación y
teorización.
-
--Globalización----Pobreza
Desarrollo sustentable
Desarrollo
Termodinámica-Sociodinámica
Africa--Asia--América Latina China
Economia básica----
Imperialismo
Hegemonía estadounidense
Notas para la acción
-
Los crímenes de los generales chilenos
Chile----
Estos mataron a Allende
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Artículos--Libros- Notas de curso
Estadísticas 1--
Estadísticas 2--
Calculadora
Búsqueda - Glosarios - Diccionarios-- Nosotros
-
Noticias-- Informes--Tópicos
-
DEDICATORIA:
BANCO DE DATOS RROJAS está dedicado a la
memoria de Salvador Allende, José Tohá, Victor Jara, Orlando Letelier, Carlos Prats, y
miles de otros ciudadanos chilenos y extranjeros asesinados por orden de Pinochet, Merino,
Leigh y Mendoza, los cuatro bandidos que atormentaron al pueblo chileno por casi veinte
años, en complicidad con las compañías transnacionales de Estados Unidos y terroristas
estatales como Henry Kissinger para servir las necesidades económicas y políticas de la
clase capitalista internacional.
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