The Washington Post is reporting today that top secret
documents confirm the role that the CIA played in Operation Condor, the
international state-sponsored assassination, kidnapping, torture, and murder
ring run by U.S.-supported military dictatorships in South America in the late
1970s. The documents confirm that the CIA’s role in the operation was to
provide communications equipment to the ring, which enabled them to coordinate
cross-border efforts to kidnap, torture, and kill suspected communists, which,
of course, were nothing more than people who believed in socialism or
communism.
Over the years, I have
written about Operation Condor, and FFF has linked to many article detailing
this sordid, dark-side conspiracy. See here.
The Post article
make it clear that the CIA was fully aware of the horrific human-rights abuses
that the Latin America military regimes were engaged in and said and did
nothing to prevent them.
One
of the most laughable parts of the secret documents are ones that imply that
the CIA struggled on whether it should do anything about the abuses.
Why is that laughable?
Because
it is clearly nothing more than a “cover ourselves” protection in the event
that Operation Condor ever was uncovered.
How
do we know that?
Because
the Operation Condor goons were doing precisely what the U.S. national-security
apparatus wanted them to do — eradicate the threat of communism in the
Americas!
The Cold War
Remember:
This was the Cold War, when the U.S. national security establishment was 100
percent convinced that there was a worldwide communist conspiracy to take over
the United States and the rest of the world, a conspiracy that was supposedly
based in Moscow, Russia. (Yes, that Russia!)
The
American people were exhorted to be on the constant lookout for communists.
“Security” was the byword. People were looking for communists in the State
Department, the military, Congress, Hollywood, and lots of other places.
Suspected communists were hauled before Congress and asked whether they had
ever been a member of the Communist Party. Even Republican President Dwight
Eisenhower was suspected in some circles of being a communist agent.
If
you want to get a sense of what life was like in the United States during the
Cold War, take all the national-security hoopla surrounding the “war on
terrorism” and multiply it by about a thousand.
After
World War II, the federal government was converted from a limited-government
republic to a national-security state, a type of totalitarian governmental structure
with omnipotent, dark-side powers, such as the powers to assassinate, kidnap,
and torture suspected communists.
For
example, unbeknownst to the American people at the time, the CIA entered into a
secret conspiracy with the Mafia to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, even
though Cuba had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so.
Former President Lyndon Johnson would later refer to the CIA’s assassination
program as a “damned Murder Inc.”
In
principle, Operation Condor’s assassination program was no different from the
CIA’s assassination program.
The Chilean coup
It
was the national-security state’s obsessive fear of communism that led to the
CIA’s orchestration of the coup in Chile in 1973 that ousted the democratically
elected socialist president of the country, Salvador Allende, and replaced him
with the brutal right-wing unelected military dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Although it appears that Allende ended up committing suicide, no doubt to avoid
being tortured, there is no doubt that at the inception of the coup, the
Chilean national-security establishment was trying to assassinate him with
missiles fired from Chilean fighter planes into Allende’s position in the
national palace, with the full approval of its counterparts in the U.S.
national-security establishment.
Moreover,
we mustn’t forget the CIA’s kidnapping and murder of Gen. Rene Schneider, the
head of Chile’s armed forces. They targeted him because he was opposed to the
U.S.-orchestrated coup. He took the position that his oath to support and
defend the constitution of Chile superseded US. demands for a coup to protect
Chile from Allende’s socialism. Thus, U.S. officials targeted him for removal.
After Pinochet took power, he
instituted a reign of terror in which his national-security henchmen kidnapped,
tortured, raped, disappeared, or murdered tens of thousands of suspected
communists, with the full support of U.S. officials.
Operation Condor
Operation
Condor followed from that reign of terror. To ensure that suspected communists
could not escape to neighboring countries, several other South American
right-wing military dictatorships conspired with the Pinochet military
dictatorship to coordinate efforts to ensure that no suspected communists could
get away. As the secret documents revealed in the Washington
Post article confirm, the CIA’s role in this Cold War operation was to
provide the communications equipment that enabled its Latin American
counterparts to efficiently coordinate their efforts.
Moreover, don’t forget also that the
Pentagon and the CIA had just been defeated by the communists in Vietnam. Given
their mindsets that the communists were winning and that America was now in
greater danger than ever before of being taken over by the Reds, the Operation
Condor brutes were viewed as great heroes for protecting America and the world
from a communist takeover.
The people who paid the price for this
sordid, dark-side paranoia, of course were the tens of thousands of innocent
people who were rounded up, tortured, raped, abused, disappeared, assassinated,
and murdered.
The worst mistake the American people
have ever made was permitting the federal government to be converted from a
limited government republic to a national-security state. That conversion
perverted America’s sense of moral values, conscience, and right conduct.
Operation Condor is further proof of that fact.
Reprinted with permission
from The Future
of Freedom Foundation.
Jacob
Hornberger [send
him mail] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation.
Copyright
© The Future of
Freedom Foundation