Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
Recent
Stories
September 9, 2003
William A. Cook
Eating
Humble Pie
Robert Jensen / Rahul
Mahajan
Bush
Speech: a Shell Game on the American Electorate
Bill Glahn
A Kinder, Gentler RIAA?
Janet Kauffman
A Dirty River Runs Beneath It
Chris Floyd
Strange Attractors: White House Bawds Breed New Terror
Bridget Gibson
A Helping of Crow with Those Fries?
Robert Fisk
Thugs
in Business Suit: Meet the New Iraqi Strongman
Website of the Day
Pot TV International
September 8, 2003
David Lindorff
The
Bush Speech: Spinning a Fiasco
Robert Jensen
Through the Eyes of Foreigners: the US Political Crisis
Gila Svirsky
Of
Dialogue and Assassination: Off Their Heads
Bob Fitrakis
Demostration Democracy
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Echo Chamber: Globalizing the Whirlwind
Sean Carter
Thou Shalt Not Campaign from the Bench
Uri Avnery
Betrayal
at Camp David
Website of the Day
Rabbis v. the Patriot Act
September 6 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
September 5, 2003
Brian Cloughley
Bush's
Stacked Deck: Why Doesn't the Commander-in-Chief Visit the Wounded?
Col. Dan Smith
Iraq
as Black Hole
Phyllis Bennis
A Return
to the UN?
Dr. Susan Block
Exxxtreme Ashcroft
Dave Lindorff
Courage and the Democrats
Abe Bonowitz
Reflections on the "Matyrdom" of Paul Hill
Robert Fisk
We Were
Warned About This Chaos
Website of the Day
New York Comic Book Museum
September 4, 2003
Stan Goff
The Bush
Folly: Between Iraq and a Hard Place
John Ross
Mexico's
Hopes for Democracy Hit Dead-End
Harvey Wasserman
Bush to New Yorkers: Drop Dead
Adam Federman
McCain's
Grim Vision: Waging a War That's Already Been Lost
Aluf Benn
Sharon Saved from Threat of Peace
W. John Green
Colombia's Dirty War
Joanne Mariner
Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation in Latin America
Website of the Day
Califoracle
September 3, 2003
Virginia Tilley
Hyperpower
in a Sinkhole
Davey D
A Hip
Hop Perspective on the Cali Recall
Emrah Göker
Conscripting Turkey: Imperial Mercenaries Wanted
John Stanton
The US is a Power, But Not Super
Brian Cloughley
The
Pentagon's Bungled PsyOps Plan
Dan Bacher
Another Big Salmon Kill
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors Weep' Ninth Circuit Overturns 127 Death Sentences
Uri Avnery
First
of All This Wall Must Fall
Website of the Day
Art Attack!
September 2, 2003
Robert Fisk
Bush's
Occupational Fantasies Lead Iraq Toward Civil War
Kurt Nimmo
Rouind Up the Usual Suspects: the Iman Ali Mosque Bombing
Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan
Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style
Elaine Cassel
Innocent But Guilty: When Prosecutors are Dead Wrong
Jason Leopold
Ghosts
in the Machines: the Business of Counting Votes
Dave Lindorff
Dems in 2004: Perfect Storm or Same Old Doldrums?
Paul de Rooij
Predictable
Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation
Website of the Day
Laughing Squid
August 30 / Sept. 1,
2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Brian Cloughley
When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off
Alice Slater
Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity
David Krieger
What Victory?
Marjorie Cohn
The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International
Law
Richard Glen Boire
Saying Yes to Drugs!
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
Website of the Day
DirtyBush
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Chilean
Coup Memorial Edition
September 11, 2003
The
Great Divide
State
Terrorism and September 11, 1973 & 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, whom 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 Mujahideen against the Soviet-backed
regime that had taken power in the country. According to the
CIA 2000 Fact Book, the Mujahideen 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 Garzon, 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,"
Zed Books, 2003.
Copyright © 2003 R Burbach.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 1 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
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