September 11, Day of Infamy
in the United States and Chile
by Roger Burbach

excerpted from the book

September 11 and the U.S. War

Beyond the Curtain of Smoke

Edited by Roger Burbach and Ben Clarke

City Lights Books, 2002

p55

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 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.

There resided Salvador Allende, who had been elected president three years before. He was the first elected socialist leader in the world and ever since his election in September 1970 he was opposed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the U.S. government headed by Richard Nixon and by Henry Kissinger who chaired the National Security Council. The Council orchestrated and coordinated U.S. policies aimed at overthrowing Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity government.

It was on September 11, 1973 that they finally succeeded in getting the Chilean military lead by General Augusto Pinochet to overthrow 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, 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 Moffltt. Letelier, who 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 recently 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.

The Chilean secret police, often with the assistance of other Condor partners, carried out a number of international terrorist operations. On September 30, 1974, retired General Carlos Pratts, who Pinochet replaced as head of the Chilean military shortly before the 1973 coup, was killed by a car bomb while living in exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In Rome in 1975, DINA operatives attacked and seriously maimed Chilean Christian Democratic politician Bernardo Leighton and his wife.

Papers found in Paraguayan archives in the 1990s reveal that Operation Condor was also linked to the assassination of a Brazilian general and two Uruguayan parliamentarians, as well as to scores of lesser-known political activists. 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 E1 Salvador. Argentine units also aided and supervised Honduran military death squads that began operating in the early 1980s with the direct assistance and collaboration of the CIA.

All these terrorist operations of course need to be placed in the context of the Cold War. It is no secret that in its conflict with the Soviet bloc countries, the U.S. government often engaged in unsavory operations, particularly in the third world. But many of these activities have come back to haunt the United States. In another ironic historic twist, on the day before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the family of assassinated General Rene Schneider announced that they intend to press charges in the Chilean courts against Henry Kissinger. Their charges are based on declassified US government documents discussed earlier this month on CBS' "60 Minutes" that were provided by the National Security Archive, an independent research and documentation center based in Washington D.C. These documents indicate that after the election of Salvador Allende in September 1970 Kissinger approved a CIA plot to prevent Allende from being inaugurated. This conspiracy lead to the assassination of Schneider over a month later, when he, as commander in chief of the Chilean army, insisted on upholding the will of Chilean voters and the country's constitution.

There are many parallels between the emergence of the terrorist network in Latin America and events in the Middle East and Asia. Osama bin Laden of Saudi Arabia, who is widely believed to be directing the attacks on the United States, 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 U.S., 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 "American 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 port facilities, 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 U.S. 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, told the TV networks that the controls imposed on U.S. intelligence operations over the years have 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 U.S. 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. What happened in New York and Washington was a massive human tragedy. But unless we acknowledge that the U.S. government has been intricately involved in the creation of international terrorist networks and insist that they abandon that practice once and for all, the cycle of violence and terrorism will only deepen in the months and years to come. The events of September 11 demonstrate that our borders are no longer impregnable in a globalized world. We must behave more responsibly, ending our own role in the globalization of terror, or there will be many more Septembers as history continues to repeat itself.

Judge Baltasar Garrison of Spain, who put out the warrant that lead to the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in England in 1998, has also been the leading judicial figure in the prosecution of terrorists in Spain, particularly from the Basque region. His own life has been threatened by terrorists and he is forced to live surrounded by bodyguards. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, he proclaimed that even this "horrible crime" requires "due process." He called for justice "which should be brought to bear not only on the Taliban for its brutal and oppressive regime but also on the leaders of Western countries, who, irresponsibly and through the media, have generated panic among the Afghan people."

He went on to exclaim: "The response that I seek is not military. It is one based on law, through the immediate approval of an international convention on terrorism. Such a convention should, among other things, include: rules governing co-operation between police and the judiciary rules that enable investigations to take place in tax havens; the urgent ratification of the statute of the International Criminal Court; and the definition of terrorism as a crime against humanity."

To return to my starting point, the CIA-backed coup against Salvador Allende in 1973, I would argue that it is time to try U.S. officials who supported the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. At the head of the list should be Henry Kissinger, the principal living U.S. official who backed the coup while heading up the National Security Council in 1973. If the United States really wants to root out international terrorism and demonstrate that ~t is sincere in this cause, then it has to begin by putting some of its own officials in the docket of international justice.

September 11 and U.S. War

Index of Website

Home Page