McCain's Private Visit With Chilean Dictator Pinochet Revealed For First Time

[Newsjock]

Source: Huffington Post

John McCain, who has harshly criticized the idea of sitting down with dictators without pre-conditions, appears to have done just that. In 1985, McCain traveled to Chile for a friendly meeting with Chile's military ruler, General Augusto Pinochet, one of the world's most notorious violators of human rights credited with killing more than 3,000 civilians and jailing tens of thousands of others.

The private meeting between McCain and dictator Pinochet has gone previously un-reported anywhere.

According to a declassified U.S. Embassy cable about the meeting secured by The Huffington Post, McCain described the meeting with Pinochet "as friendly and at times warm, but noted that Pinochet does seem obsessed with the threat of communism." McCain, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the time, made no public or private statements critical of the dictatorship, nor did he meet with members of the democratic opposition, as far as could be determined from a thorough check of U.S. and Chilean newspaper records and interviews with top opposition leaders.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-dinges/mccain-meets-...

[gratuitous]

1. Sarah? Sarah? Any response?

{Crickets}

[Buenaventura]

17. darn ... can't see chile from the porch

... hmm ... pinochet ... does that go with fish or red meat? ... just wonderin'

[mikelgb]

31. Peenoshay? Oh no, we make moose chili in Alaska!

[SpiralHawk]

2. Fascists of a feather are flocking together. Occultly. Tres republicon.

Republicons do like to sneak around and keep a lot of skanky secrets, don't they...

[Billy Burnett]

38. Indeed. Fits the pattern.

[darkstar]

3. That's just a "youthful indescretion" n/t

[a la izquierda]

4. Oh snap!

I can't believe this.

I mean, I can believe it, but you know what I'm saying.

[Tanuki]

5. McShame on him. Kicking...everyone should know about this n/t

[DBoon]

6. Pinochet is a hero to these guys

A private meeting with Pinochet is likely a prerequisite to being a leader in the republican party.

Jonah Goldberg loves Pinochet so much he wants Iraq to have one:

http://www.nowpublic.com/national_review_writer_calls_f...

[anakie]

34. Margaret Thatcher was quite keen on him too

Pinochet that is.


Peace

[LynneSin]

7. How many Chileans were murdered or still 'missing' thanks to Pinochet

[heliarc]

25. The number hovers around

5000 missing or confirmed dead... 80,000 imprisoned and tortured...

[dhpgetsit]

8. Hmm... sounds like any other rw idealogoe ... Palin for example?

McCain described the meeting with Pinochet "as friendly and at times warm, but noted that Pinochet does seem obsessed with the threat of communism."Text

[Democat]

9. How many people did Pinochet kill compared to Ayers?

Let's get this into the media right away!

[shotten99]

10. For the love of God

Someone should start kicking that old man's ass with this shit.

[UTUSN]

11. Kickaree, kickaroo!1 n/t

[change_notfinetuning]

12. You're missing the point. Pinochet was OUR dictator. n/t

[yellowcanine]

14. Yes and Milton Friedman was palling around with Pinochet as well. So nothing to see here. Move

along folks.

[bread_and_roses]

19. exactly (n/t)

[varun]

24. Just like Musharraf

he was the darling of the media a few years ago.

I bet McSame had a meeting with that one.

[whoneedstickets]

13. Back in the 80's McLame would cavort with anyone...

...Fascist generals, Financial Frauds, you name it. but that was then, nowadays he's much more discerning.

[progressoid]

15. DOH!

[mcollier]

18. Projection is so poetically ironic

[MountainLaurel]

16. A friendly meeting with Pinochet

There are no words.

[starroute]

20. That was in his US Council for World Freedom period

It would be interesting to know if they arranged the meeting. If not -- McCain may have some other interesting connections we're not aware of.

[lonestarnot]

21. ewwweeee another ember just lit!

[bulloney]

22. Maybe he was hitting Pinochet for a campaign contribution.

[Solly Mack]

23. ...

...

[tekisui]

26. Palling around with terrorists....

[chelsea0011]

27. McCain was just "testing him"

[Boo Boo]

28. Pinochet is the Bushies idea of good government.

That's Dick Cheney's model for the executive branch.

I'm quite serious.

[DrDebug]

29. Funny, I mentioned Pinochet in a post about 12 hours ago

It's worth reposting here, because it might explain the fascinating of the GOP with Pinochet.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

"The model for Iraq is Pinochet's Chile"
- Grover Norquist

Birth Pangs
excerpted from the book
The Shock Doctrine
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
by Naomi Klein

p96
For the first year and a half, Pinochet faithfully followed the Chicago rules: he privatized some, though not all, state-owned companies (including several banks); he allowed cutting-edge new forms of speculative finance; he flung open the borders to foreign imports, tearing down the barriers that had long protected Chilean manufacturers; and he cut government spending by 10 percent-except the military, which received a significant increase. He also eliminated price controls -a radical move in a country that had been regulating the cost of necessities such as bread and cooking oil for decades.

The Chicago Boys had confidently assured Pinochet that if he suddenly withdrew government involvement from these areas all at once, the "natural" laws of economics would rediscover their equilibrium, and inflation-which they viewed as a kind of economic fever indicating the presence of unhealthy organisms in the market would magically go down. They were mistaken. In 1974, inflation reached 375 percent-the highest rate in the world and almost twice the top level under Allende. The cost of basics such as bread went through the roof. At the same time, Chileans were being thrown out of work because Pinochet's experiment with "free trade" was flooding the country with cheap imports. Local businesses were closing, unable to compete, unemployment hit record levels and hunger became rampant. The Chicago School's first laboratory was a debacle.

Sergio de Castro and the other Chicago Boys argued (in true Chicago fashion) that the problem didn't lie with their theory but with the fact that it wasn't being applied with sufficient strictness. The economy had failed to correct itself and return to harmonious balance because there were still "distortions" left over from nearly half a century of government interference. For the experiment to work, Pinochet had to strip these distortions away-more cuts, more privatization, more speed.

... Pinochet and de Castro got to work stripping away the welfare state to arrive at their pure capitalist utopia. In 1975, they cut public spending by 27 percent in one blow-and they kept cutting until, by 1980, it was half of what it had been under Allende. Health and education took the heaviest hits. Even The Economist, a free-market cheerleader, called it "an orgy of self-mutilation .1128 De Castro privatized almost five hundred state-owned companies and banks, practically giving many of them away, since the point was to get them as quickly as possible into their rightful place in the economic order. He took no pity on local companies and removed even more trade barriers; the result was the loss of 177,000 industrial jobs between 1973 and 1983.° By the mid-eighties, manufacturing as a percentage of the economy dropped to levels last seen during the Second World War.

p104
Pinochet held power for seventeen years, and during that time he changed political direction several times. The country's period of steady growth that is held up as proof of its miraculous success did not begin until the mid-eighties-a full decade after the Chicago Boys implemented shock therapy and well after Pinochet was forced to make a radical course correction. That's because in 1982, despite its strict adherence to Chicago doctrine, Chile's economy crashed: its debt exploded, it faced hyperinflation once again and unemployment hit 30 percent-ten times higher than it was under Allende. The main cause was that the piranhas, the Enron-style financial houses that the Chicago Boys had freed from all regulation, had bought up the country's assets on borrowed money and run up an enormous debt of $14 billion.

(...)

http://thirdworldtraveler.com/Naomi_Klein/Birth_Pangs_S...

So if you want to know what the result of George W. Bush's rule will be and want a continuation by McCain will imply, you can just check the results of Pinochet's Chile. Except that the debt is over $10 trillion... because Bush wants to be #1.

[Judi Lynn]

35. Excellent link. So good to see it. n/t

[Just-plain-Kathy]

30. Under another thread there was s discussion about McCain denying he "changed" over the years.

This is just another way McCain changed. Once he was a "Maverick" now he's Bush/Cheney.

[Dervish]

32. is there anything

that john mccain HASN'T flip flopped on? I actually admired the centrist Mccain of years past, but this senile fool can't make up his mind on anything.

[cui bono]

33. He only chose to go to Chile because he had better chances to get laid.

[Judi Lynn]

36. Hope he took time to pay tribute to Pinochet's main torturer, Osvaldo Romo.

From Romo's very own Wiki:

~snip~
Osvaldo Romo made himself known in working classes' neighborhoods before Pinochet's coup in 1973 as a leftist activist, member of the Partido Socialista Popular and sympathizant of the MIR <1>. Following the coup, he reappeared in these neighborhoods with a military uniform, arresting his friends and contacts. Left-wing circles still debate to know if he suddenly changed political orientation or if he always was a mole for the security services <1>.

Known as Guatón Romo ("Fatso Romo") or Comandante Raúl, he was one of DINA's most important torturers, operating among others centers in Villa Grimaldi <1>. On April 11, 1995, in an interview televised by Univisión, he commented in great detail, and evidently without remorse, on the techniques that had been used. These included the application of electricity to women's nipples and genitals, the use of dogs, and the insertion of rats into women's vaginas <1>.

—Would you do it again? Would you do it the same way?
—Sure, I'd do the same and more. I wouldn't leave anybody alive (...) That was one of DINA's mistakes. I was always arguing with my general: don't leave that person alive, don't let that person go free. There are consequences.
—As for throwing the corpses of the prisoners into the sea...
—I think it could have happened. (...) Throwing them into the crater of a volcano would be better... (...) Who'd go looking for them in a volcano? Nobody.
—On the day you die... what would your epitaph say? "Here lies the hangman, the torturer, the murderer..."
—Logical, logical. I accept that. But for me it was a positive thing. (...) I am at peace with my conscience and my beliefs.

In 1977, Romo was sent to Brazil by his superiors, where he may have participated in death squads according to human rights NGO <1>. During Chile's transition to democracy, Romo, as one of the most important figures of the Pinochet regime, was pursued by prosecutors and localized in Sao Paulo, living with his wife and his five children in June 1992 <1>. Arrested by the Brazilian police, he was extradited to Chile in November 1992 <1>. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for the kidnapping of MIR member Manuel Cortez Joo and five years and a day for the kidnapping of Ofelio Lazo, who was "disappeared" in July of 1974.

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

~~~~~~~~~~
It's important people won't forget the US journalists who were tortured and killed by Pinochet: Charles Horman, Frank Terrugi

Charles Horman
Charles Horman (May 15, 1942 – September 20, 1973), an American journalist, was one of the victims of the coup d'etat led by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile on September 11, 1973. Pinochet rose against the democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and plunged Chile into a brutal military dictatorship which lasted seventeen years.
Horman was born and raised in New York City. He graduated from Harvard University in 1964 and worked for a number of years in the US media. In 1972, he settled temporarily in Chile to work as a freelance writer.

Imprisonment and death
On September 17, 1973, six days after the US-backed military takeover, Horman was seized by Chilean soldiers and taken to the National Stadium in Santiago, which had been turned by the military into an ad hoc concentration camp, where prisoners were interrogated, tortured and executed. One month later, Horman's body turned up in a morgue in the Chilean capital. A second American journalist, Frank Terrugi, met with the same fate.

At the time of the military uprising, Horman was in the resort town of Viña del Mar, near the port of Valparaíso, which was a key base for both the Chilean coup plotters and US military and intelligence personnel who were supporting them. While there, he spoke with several US operatives and took notes documenting the role of the United States in overthrowing the Allende government. This discovery led to his secret arrest and and US-sanctioned execution. Efforts by his family to determine his fate were met with resistance and duplicity by US embassy officials in Santiago, who knew he was dead and why he had been killed.

More:
http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/Charles_Ho... /

~I believe I have read that Horman, while in Chile, sent articles to The Nation.~



Also, a U.S. citizen, and Russian emigre math professor, Boris Weisfeiler, was beaten to death by Pinochet's military.

Regarding Terrugi:

~snip~
The most interesting new document on Teruggi--who was arrested nine days after the coup, then tortured and murdered--is an FBI record showing he had come
under surveillance when he attended a 1971 Colorado conference of the Committee of Returned Volunteers. The FBI said the CRV was composed primarily of
former Peace Corps volunteers "who espouse support of Cuba and all Third World revolutionaries."

The newly released CIA records on Teruggi deal largely with the agency's refusal to provide his father with a document mentioning the 24-year-old's name. The CIA
said its release would identify the foreign intelligence service that furnished the information.

Teruggi had arrived in Chile in January 1972 and was a student at the University of Chile in Santiago. According to his father, he was arrested in his house during a
curfew on Sept. 20, 1973, and killed two days later, his throat slashed and his machine-gunned body riddled with 17 bullet wounds. A fellow prisoner at the Chile
stadium said in an affidavit that he was told Teruggi had been beaten so badly that he had to be shot.

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/chile/horman.htm

[Canuckistanian]

37. Kind of puts "palling around with terrorists" in perspective, doesn't it?

Pinochet was personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths of innocent people.

Disgusting.