Bush and Pinochet: Blood Brothers?

[chefmike]

So many parallels...

For starters check out the documentary on Pinochet's Operation Condor- 'Condor: The First War on Terror'

more...

Will Bush the Beheader use Terrorism to Become America's Pinochet?
by Harvey Wasserman 5/28/04

Will George W. Bush use terrorism to become America's Pinochet?

Attorney-General John Ashcroft is priming the public for a terrorist attack, which can only mean Bush is sharpening his blades to behead the Constitution.

Augusto Pinochet seized absolute power in Chile on September 11, 1973. The US national security apparatus, including George H.W. Bush, used terrorism as an excuse to help Pinochet destroy what had been a constitutional democracy.

So is Shrub a president? Or is he a Pinochet?

By a 4:1 margin American historians have already rated W. "a failure." More than one in ten surveyed in the recent George Mason University History News Network Poll also rate Bush as "the worst president ever."

But ultimately, this Bush has no peer among US presidents. Let's look at three likely matches.

Richard Nixon trained Dick Cheney and Karl Rove as Dirty Tricksters. Nixon is Bush's role model for corruption, cynicism and personal psychosis. But Nixon was also a skilled, literate global diplomat who opened doors to China and the former Soviet Union and supported environmental protection. Bush has trashed all that.

Herbert Hoover callously presided over the beginnings of America's worst economic depression. Bush is right there. But Hoover was also a skilled, literate bureaucrat, and a Quaker-raised foe of war. Not exactly Bush.

Warren G. Harding was astonishingly corrupt. Bush, Halliburton and Enron have more than matched him. But Harding also hated repression and brought the anti-war socialist Eugene V. Debs straight from a federal prison cell to meet him in the Oval Office. Bush might well have had Debs executed.

Ultimately, Bush's real peers are not US presidents but Third World dictators, like Pinochet, many of whom his father also put in office. Their coda is clear:


Use of "terror" as an excuse for totalitarian control;
Official secrecy for its own sake;
Seizure of power in contempt of free elections;
Totalitarian militarism;
Abuse of human rights and liberties;
Love of the death penalty;
Hatred of a free press;
Imprisonment without legal recourse;
Widespread torture;
Brazen theft of public billions;
"Free market" smokescreens for corporate domination;
Taxing the poor to benefit the rich;
Hatred of labor unions;
Decimation of the natural environment;
Assaulting elected leaders anywhere, anytime;
Contempt for international treaties;
Reactionary alliance with right wing church groups;
Contempt for women's rights;
Manipulating divisions of race and class.

The one American actually offered a dictatorship, George Washington, turned it down, shaping the nature of the Presidency for more than two centuries....until now.

Meanwhile Bush has beheaded the American economy, replacing First World surpluses with Third World debt.

Reminiscent of Joe Stalin, foreign intelligence, economic assessment and even basic science must not contradict Rovian spin or fundamentalist prophecy.

American education, once the envy of the world, is in shambles, with global students now turning away for the first time. America's moral prestige, never higher than after September 11, 2001, has been trashed. No US president has ever been so personally hated.

And never has a would-be Third World dictator stood more ready to shred our Constitution.

Stalin once quipped that power resides not with those who cast the votes, but with those that count them.

Bush may try to follow Stalin's (and brother Jeb's) lead by stealing the 2004 election, as in 2000. Or he may try to seize power like Pinochet did on 9/11/73 in a repressive crusade against convenient terrorism.

But one thing is certain: if Shrub's hyped-up power play succeeds, the beheading of America will be complete.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0528-13.htm

more...

Amnesty Compares Bush to Pinochet
The Associated Press

Wednesday 24 May 2006

Amnesty International says President George Bush's tactics in his fight against terrorists have made the United States comparable to Augusto Pinochet's Chile and Hafez Assad's Syria in its acceptance of torture and disregard of legal restraints.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052406D.shtml

one more(of many) articles concerning the plethora of parallels...

U.S. Leaders are Using Pinochet's Playbook
(Pinochet's Condor vs. Bush's Rendition)
by Peter Kornbluh
Baltimore Sun, December 9, 2005

It has been 30 years since the Chilean military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet convened a "strictly secret" convention of officers from the repressive neighboring military regimes to create a Latin American "Interpol" dedicated to fighting leftist subversion and terrorism. By the end of their clandestine three-day gathering, the delegates proposed to honor their hosts in Santiago by naming this new cross-border consortium after Chile's national bird, the Andean condor.
Operation Condor soon became one of the most sinister transnational forces in the world.
During the mid- and late 1970s, the secret police agencies of the Southern Cone - Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia - as well as Peru and Brazil, actively consorted in the surveillance, kidnapping, secret detention, torture and elimination of dozens of militant and civilian opponents of their regimes.
With General Pinochet and his officers now being prosecuted for these atrocities, three decades later, the crimes of Condor remain relevant to the international uproar that the Bush administration is facing over the methods of "rendition" and torture that the CIA is using in today's war on terrorism.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Pinochet_Bush_Rendition.html

[chefmike]

And then there was one...

Chile's Pinochet dies at 91: doctor


SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) - Ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile from 1973-1990 and spent his old age fighting human rights, fraud and corruption charges, died on Sunday, a week after suffering a heart attack, a military doctor said.

"He died surrounded by his family," Dr. Juan Ignacio Vergara told reporters outside the hospital.

"Later this afternoon, we will give more details," he said.

Pinochet, 91, who was diabetic and had been in frail health for years, underwent bypass surgery after the December 3 heart attack. He was given Roman Catholic last rites and his son said the surgery had brought him back from the brink of death.

Pinochet was under house arrest at the time of his recent heart attack, accused in the deaths of two bodyguards of former Chilean President Salvador Allende, who he ousted in a coup.

The charges were the latest in a series against Pinochet, who issued a statement last month on his 91st birthday suggesting he realized his death could be near.

"Today, close to the end of my days, I want to make clear that I hold no rancor toward anybody, that I love my country above all else," he said in a statement read by his wife on his 91st birthday last month.

In the statement, he accepted "political responsibility" for acts committed during his rule.

Pinochet grabbed power in a coup and went on to become the best known of the South American dictators of the 1970s and 1980s. Under his regime more than 3,000 people died in political violence, many at the hands of repressive secret police.

He was accused of dozens of human rights violations but a lengthy effort to bring him to trial in Chile failed as his defense lawyers successfully argued that he was too ill to face charges.

Despite Pinochet's human rights record, many Chileans loved him and said he saved Chile from Marxism.

But even many loyal supporters abandoned him after it came out in 2004 that he had stashed some $27 million in secret off-shore bank accounts that were under investigation at the time of his death.

[chefmike]

Last Rites For Pinochet-on Human RIGHTS Day...

Whoever said that irony was dead?

Today is Human Rights Day. And this year the cruel dictator who stole human rights from the Chilean people was finally read his last "rites"

That's a cause for celebration. Shame it took so long to come.

He should have had his Last Rites 33 years ago. Immediately after he denied so many thousands of Chileans THEIR Last Rites - and before the 17 years that he denied MILLIONS of Chileans their HUMAN Rights.

He was an evil despot.

His death reminds me of the crimes against humanity committed by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in their clandestine support of the overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Chile in 1973.

I remember the death of President Salvador Allende.

I remember the death of the folk hero Victor Jara (the Chilean equivalent of Bob Dylan).

(Victor Jara was tortured and his hands - that played the guitar so eloquently for the people - were intentionally smashed by Pinochet's henchmen as a symbolic crushing of his spirit and musical gifts. And then he was murdered in cold blood. Oh how they feared and hated the power of his music...)

I remember the death of thousands of innocent Chileans. Innocent of any crime but believing that they were entitled to their democratically-elected government - regardless of the opinions of Richard Milhous Nixon and his literal partner-in-crime Henry Kissinger.

As Tom Lehrer put it:

For might makes right
Until they see the light
Got to be protected
All their rights respected
Till somebody we like
Can be elected...

It also reminds me of the comfort and succor provided to Pinochet by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

So today I celebrate the death of the Dictator Who Stole Human Rights From Chile...

May he rot in his grave...

I have no charity in my heart for this evil man.

Ultimately he failed though. And he failed because eventually the spirit of the people will always rise above scum like Pinochet - and their cynical supporters like Nixon, Kissinger, Reagan and Thatcher.

The British musician Billy Bragg summed up that indomitable human spirit in his tribute song to the late Phil Ochs:

They smeared you with their lies
Says he: "But they could never kill
What they could not compromise.
i never compromised..."

That's a good lesson for us to take away on this Human Rights Day.

Viva La Revolucion!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-lewis/last-rites-for-pinochet-_b_35989.html

(An album cover symbolizing the hands of the great Chilean musician Victor Jara - just one of the thousands of Chileans brutally tortured and murdered by the regime of Augusto Pinochet. Jara's hands were intentionally and symbolically smashed by Pinochet's henchmen immediately prior to his brutal murder in 1973. )

[Coroner]

Bush is just in the footsteps of his grand wizard-masters like Reagan or his father. Chile (Allende), Brazil (Kubicek), Nicaragua (sandinists) and Bolivia (Che Guvera) are just the ultimate US-operations you can count on one hand. This bastard Pinochet died at age 91. He never payed for what he has done to his own people and what for? For the fucking power, money, authority etc.....

... I´ll never forget one of my favourite magazine covers: it´s the cover of a german satire-magazine called "Titanic" with Reagan on it and above him written "The asshole is finally dead" :)

[North_of_60]

Gen. Augusto Pinochet's death on Dec. 10 means the Bush Family can breathe a little bit easier, knowing that criminal proceedings against Chile's notorious dictator can no longer implicate his longtime friend and protector, former President George H.W. Bush.

http://www.informationliberation.com/index.php?id=18735

[guyone]

GO COMMUNISTS!

Remember Uncle Joe.

[Coroner]

guyone, your avatar is really familiar to you. the question is: are you exactly leaving in a matrix or are you just hypnotized by your "we are the truth"-media??

you again with your stalin-pic..... what do you know about stalin? he was a monster, not a communist. If Bush is the personification od democracy, I wish I was in a matrix....

[White_Male_Canada]

Alright CM, it seems that you are indeed a marxist in your support for Allende.

Yes or NO, are you an Allende Marxist ?

You sock puppet revisionism is a joke.

The facts are thus:

- Two thirds of Chileans voted against Allende in the 1970 election. The 3 way tie was decided by the Chilean Congress in favor of Allende.

- Allende then encouraged hyperinflation in order to nationalize Chilean industry. "Our objective is total, scientific, Marxist socialism," as Allende put it. "As for the bourgeois State at the present moment (1971), we are seeking to overcome it. To overthrow it!"

- Throughout 1972, the opposition stiffened its resistance by impeaching and removing government officials, judiciary protests, cutting production, sending capital out of the country, courting the military, and a massive strike in October.

- By 1973, Chileans were demonstrating in the streets against shortages, inflation and unemployment brought about by Allende’s failed socialist policies. Hyperinflation reached 323% by September and 508% by the end of the year.

- Allende secretly prepared a “self-coup,” with the help of Fidel Castro, who surreptitiously sent large quantities of weapons to arm Allende’s minority of supporters.

- Allende was receiving payments from the KGB
Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin, chief archivist for the FCD, the foreign-intelligence arm of the KGB.

- The opposition feared extermination at the hands of Allende and pleaded for the military intervention and authorized it by Congressional and Supreme Court declarations that Allende was acting unconstitutionally.

- When Pinochet briefly relaxed its repression in the early 1980s, the Soviet-backed FPMR launched a campaign of terror against anyone it deemed complicit with the government. A campaign run by Commie thugs like Frente Patriotico Manuel Rodriguez.

- Pinochet who after stabilizing Chile and steering it towards a free market economy, obeyed his own electorate by stepping down from power after he lost a national referendum.

Stalin is responsible for about 27 to 30 million deaths. 70 million Chinese perished under Mao’s boot,and much more than 3,000 under Castro for certain combined with the fact Castro has a personal fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at $900 million and not one single howl of outrage by the socialist/neo-marxist/marxist left.


Pinochet was no angel,it was either a Marxist State where tens of thousands or millions would die or a period of a military junta, all thanks to Allende.

In the end what pisses off socialists/neo-marxists and marxists so much is the fact that Pinochet first defeated Marxism and then disproved it.

[White_Male_Canada]

Gen. Augusto Pinochet's death ...

Think the people of Cuba will ever be able to breathe?

[North_of_60]

Rather than undermining the socialist nature of the Cuban system, the embargo actually helped Castro. Since the fall of the USSR, it has been a shame and a source of unanimous international criticism.

I guess the Bush brothers had to find their ways…

http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=2493