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The Assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, Part 3

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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 In July 1976 the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, George Landau, received a request from a high Paraguayan official to expedite visa applications from two Chilean officials who wished to travel to the United States. The passports that were submitted as part of the application contained the names and photographs of the two men. Landau issued the visas but then something unexpected happened. In his book The Condor Years, John Dinges pointed out that a Paraguayan official, seeking to curry favor with Landau, disclosed that the two men were actually Chilean government agents on their way to the United States to undertake a secret intelligence mission. By this time — 1976 — many people were well aware of the horrors of the Pinochet regime. Having taken power in the U.S.-inspired coup in 1973, Pinochet had carried out a reign of terror that included kidnapping, secret arrests, indefinite detention, concentration camps, torture ...

The Assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, Part 2

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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Immediately after the bombing that killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, Michael Moffitt began screaming, “DINA!” “Assassins!” The Washington, D.C., police who had arrived on the scene were mystified. Who the heck is Dina? they wondered. Moffitt was referring to the National Intelligence Directorate, an internal military-intelligence force within the Chilean government that was established soon after Gen. Augusto Pinochet took power in the 1973 coup that ousted Salvador Allende, an avowed socialist-communist who had been democratically elected by the people of Chile in 1970. Known as DINA, and headed by an army colonel named Manuel Contreras, the organization had all the powers of the military, the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, all wrapped into one. DINA agents wielded and exercised the omnipotent authority to kidnap people off the streets and cart them off to secret facilities, where they would torture, rape, or kill them. Tens of thousands of ...

The La La Land of Conservatives

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One of the fascinating characteristics of conservatives is how they are able to live in an alternative universe within their own minds, one that can easily be called la-la land. A good example of this phenomenon is conservative icon Max Boot, one of America’s most ardent interventionists and promoters of the U.S. national-security state’s domestic and foreign military empire. Lamenting the possibility that President Trump is going to initiate a “radical reorientation of America’s foreign policy,” Boot makes a remarkable statement in an op-ed appearing in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, one that perfectly demonstrates the la la land in which he lives: For more than 70 years, the United States has been the world’s leading champion of free trade, democracy, and international institutions, particularly in Europe and East Asia. Is he for real? Does he really believe that? Yes, and the reason he believes it is that he, like so many ...

The U.S. Government’s Power to Assassinate

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Throughout the presidential campaign, including the presidential debates, among the issues that have not been raised or discussed is the federal government’s power to assassinate. The power to assassinate is now consider an accepted power of the federal government. In fact, most people, especially mainstream reporters and pundits, treat federal assassinations with blasé and nonchalance. Most people undoubtedly believe that ...

Should America Pardon the U.S. National Security State?

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Several weeks ago, contemporaneously with the release of Oliver Stone’s excellent movie Snowden, friends and admirers of Edward Snowden launched a campaign to have President Obama pardon him for disclosing the NSA’s super-secret illegal surveillance scheme to the American people and the world. The reasons for the pardon request were excellently summarized in an op-ed that appeared in the ...

What’s Wrong with an Independent Prosecutor for Clinton?

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Hillary Clinton supporters, including the mainstream press, are outraged that if elected president, Donald Trump intends to appoint a special prosecutor to look into Clinton’s email scandal. They’re saying that that would be akin to converting America into a “banana republic.” But why is that? In a banana republic a new ruler simply jails or kills his political opponents, without ...

The Assassinations of John Kennedy and Orlando Letelier

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This week the Washington Post carried a fascinating front-page article entitled “This Is Not an Accident. This Was a Bomb” about the assassination of Orlando Letelier, the former official in the Allende administration who, along with his 25-year-old assistant Ronni Moffitt, was murdered on the streets of Washington, D.C., in 1976. The article includes several interesting photographs, including of ...