Two 9/11s, one story

To understand better what happened in New York in 2001, go back to Chile in 1973

The Guardian
September 11, 2003
By Roger Burbach

On the morning of September 11 I watched aircraft flying overhead. Minutes later I heard explosions and saw fireballs of smoke fill the sky. As a result of these attacks thousands died, including two good friends.

I am not writing about September 11 2001 in New York City. I am writing about another September 11 - an equally horrible one - in 1973. The planes I saw were warplanes and their target was the presidential palace in Santiago, Chile. These two September 11s are related in many ways, and both help us understand why George Bush has led the US 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 victory in September 1970, the CIA and the US government, headed by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, were determined to oust Allende and his Popular Unity coalition.

It was on September 11 1973 that they succeeded. Led by General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean military overthrew Allende, who died in the presidential palace. More than 3,000 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-led terrorist action in Washington had been carried out by a team of operatives sent by the Pinochet regime. On September 21 1976, agents of the Chilean secret police organisation, 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.

These assassinations were linked to the first international terrorist network in the west, Operation Condor. Begun in 1974 at the instigation of the Chilean secret police, it was made up by 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 recognised that the CIA knew about these international terrorist activities and may have abetted them.

After the murders of Letelier and Moffitt, the CIA concluded that Condor was a rogue operation and may have tried to contain its activities. However, the network 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 Honduran military death squads that began operating in the early 80s with the direct assistance and collaboration of the CIA.

Similarities abound between the emergence of terrorist networks in Latin America and events leading to the rise of al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden first became involved in militant Islamist activities when he went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight with the Mujahideen against the Soviet-backed regime that had taken power. Even in the 1980s it was recognised that many of those fighting against the Soviets and the Afghan government were religious fanatics who had no loyalty to their US sponsors. Ronald Reagan likened them to America's "founding fathers".

In Central America, Reagan called thousands of former soldiers of Somoza's national guard "freedom fighters" as they fought the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. And when the Sandinistas went to the world court to press charges against the US for sending special operatives to bomb its port in Corinto, Reagan withdrew from the court, refusing to acknowledge the rule of international law.

In the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, former US government officials and conservative pundits attempted to rewrite this sordid history. Instead of acknowledging that past CIA operations had gone awry, they insisted that Bin Laden's network had flourished because earlier US collaboration with terrorists had been curtailed. Kissinger said the controls imposed on US intelligence operations over the years had 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 criticised the covert operations approved by Kissinger and led 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 Bill Clinton for allegedly undermining foreign intelligence operations. They argued against his 1995 order prohibiting the CIA from paying and retaining foreign operatives involved in torture and death squads. Today, we see the consequences of the Bush administration's refusal to learn from the past. Instead of ending transgressions against other nations, the US has spread carnage and war, violating civil liberties and human rights.

Like many advocates of a world based on law rather than violence, the Spanish 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 US to bring stability to Iraq and Afghanistan, along with stepped up terrorist activities around the world, demonstrates that the US war against terror is a failure.

But even in the midst of this war, judges, lawyers and human rights activists remain determined to see that international justice is carried out. Using the principle of "universal jurisdiction", 19 citizens of Iraq filed a suit in Belgium courts in May against Tommy Franks, the commander of the US invasion. They charged that his troops stood by as hospitals in Baghdad were looted, while other US soldiers fired on ambulances that were carrying civilians. The Bush administration threatened Belgium with "diplomatic consequences" if it allowed the case to go forward. Eventually, Belgium kowtowed to US demands and altered its laws relating to universal jurisdiction. But as we achieve some distance from the war, perhaps charges will yet be brought against the US invaders of Iraq.

The struggle is joined. The years to come will focus on the great divide that has emerged out of the two September 11s. On the one side stands an arrogant unilateralist clique in the US 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 utilisation of law, extradition treaties and limited policing activities. It is fundamentally a struggle over where globalisation will take us, whether the powerful economic and political interests of the world headed up by reactionary US 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.

ˇ Roger Burbach is the author of The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice, which has just been published by Zed Books

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Nieuwe Oorlog 2003 | Ander Nieuws week 38