Italian judge seeks trial of 140 over Operation Condor

[American Dream]

http://wsws.org/articles/2008/jan2008/cond-j15.shtml

Italian judge seeks trial of 140 over Operation Condor repression
By Bill Van Auken
15 January 2008


An Italian judge has issued orders for the preventive arrest pending deportation of at least 140 former officials of military dictatorships that ruled seven Latin American countries between the 1960s and 1980s. They are charged with responsibility for the deaths of 25 Italian citizens, who were among the tens of thousands of opponents of these regimes murdered, tortured and illegally imprisoned under a US-backed campaign of repression known as Operation Condor.

During the 1970s and 1980s, dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Peru, with the aid of the US CIA, developed Operation Condor as a program of coordinated continental repression, pooling their police-military resources in order to hunt down exiles and send them back to their deaths, while allowing secret police death squads to freely cross borders.

Among those the Italian judge, Luisanna Figliola, has asked be arrested are former Argentine dictator Jorge Videla, his fellow junta member and navy chief Emilio Eduardo Massera, and Jorge Maria Bordaberry, who headed Uruguay’s dictatorship between 1973 and 1976, as well as Francisco Morales Bermúdez, who was Peru’s dictator between 1975 and 1980, and Pedro Richter, another Peruvian ex-general who served as Peru’s prime minister.

Others charged are military officers and secret policemen, including 61 from Argentina, 32 from Uruguay, 22 Chileans and 13 Brazilians. Also accused are former Bolivian and Paraguayan officials

The Italian government has one of the accused in custody—Nestor Jorge Fernandez Troccoli, a former member of FUSNA, Uruguayan naval intelligence. Troccoli, who recently became an Italian citizen, was arrested in Salerno in southern Italy on Christmas Eve. He also faces charges in Uruguay in a case in which Gregorio Alvarez, the Uruguay’s last de facto president under the dictatorship that ruled that country from 1973 and 1985, has been jailed on charges related to the abduction and disappearance of political prisoners who were sent back to Argentina to be killed.

According to court documents, Troccoli was a regular visitor to the Argentine navy’s infamous Escuela Superior de Mecánica, which served as a torture and execution center under that country’s dictatorship, which murdered an estimated 30,000 workers, students and other perceived enemies of the regime in the 1970s.

During this period, drugged prisoners were thrown out of helicopters into the sea, headless and handless corpses washed up on the beaches of the Rio de la Plata and tens of thousands were subjected to hideous forms of torture in clandestine prisons throughout Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and other countries.

Whether any of the other defendants will join Troccoli in the prisoner’s dock in Italy is far from certain. Previous attempts by European governments to bring charges related to the “dirty wars” in Latin America—most notably Spain’s 1998 bid to have Chile’s ex-dictator extradited from Britain to stand trial—have been frustrated. Initial reaction from several Latin American governments has been largely hostile to the Italian case.

Peruvian President Alan Garcia called the charges “a judicial exaggeration” and denied that Peru had even participated in Operation Condor. Of Morales Bermudez, who seized power in a 1975 coup, he said, “We will give him all the help necessary. He is a respectable personality and we owe him respect and honor.”

In Brazil, Paulo Vannuchi, secretary for human rights, said he welcomed the Italian charges and called for the government to repeal a so-called amnesty law enacted in 1979, which granted members of the dictatorship full immunity from charges related to the murders, torture and disappearances carried out during two decades of military rule. The act was typical of the so-called “laws of impunity” enacted during the period of “transition to democracy” that began in Latin America during the late 1970s. It has prevented the prosecution of any of Brazil’s repressors and largely blocked any official investigation into their crimes. Vannuchi stressed that the law stood in contradiction to a number of international treaties and represented a potential impediment to Brazil’s campaign to secure a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Other officials in the Workers Party (PT) government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva made it clear, however, that there is no intention of complying with any Italian extradition request. “Brazilian law doesn’t permit extradition,” said Justice Minister Tarso Genro. He suggested that the government could investigate the case of two Italians abducted in 1980 and sent to their deaths in Argentina—no mention of the thousands of Brazilians who suffered similar fates—but indicated that no one could be punished.

And Defense Minister Nelson Jobim insisted that the government could take no action to reopen any case stemming from the dictatorship’s repression. “This is not a matter for the Ministry of Justice, nor is it a theme for the executive branch,” he said.

Jobim learned his lesson last August when he and Lula participated in a conference organized by the National Congress in which relatives of the dictatorship’s victims participated. The head of a government-formed Special Commission on the Death and Disappearance of Political Prisoners used the event to call for changes in the amnesty law.

The comment provoked an emergency meeting and an angry declaration from the joint chiefs of staff of the Brazilian military, who threatened that any attempt to amend the law would represent a “step backwards for national peace and harmony.” The commanders solidarized themselves with the dictatorship, stressing that throughout Brazilian history “we have been the same army of Caxias [the nineteenth century Brazilian military leader],” and that “historical facts have different interpretations, depending upon viewpoint of their protagonists.”

Lula and Jobim quickly capitulated to the military’s threat.

Meanwhile, one of those wanted by the Italian courts boasted to the Brazilian media about his role. Agnaldo del Nero, a former section chief in Brazilian army intelligence, told the daily O Estado de Sao Paulo: “We didn’t kill. We arrested people and handed them over. There’s no crime in that.” He cynically claimed that Brazil’s role in Operation Condor was limited to sharing information with and training the agents of other Latin American secret police agencies and “monitoring subversives.”

However, recent reports in the Brazilian press—including a January 13 article in the daily Folha de Sao Paulo—have exposed the close collaboration between Brazilian military intelligence and its counterparts in Chile and Argentina in the abduction and murder of opponents of the military regimes, even before Operation Condor was formally launched in 1975.

While all the cases in the Italian indictments involve Italian citizens, many of them holding dual citizenship in Argentina and Uruguay, they are representative of the thousands of victims of Operation Condor.

Refugees abducted in Lima

For example, in Peru, the case against Morales Bermudez and Richter stems from the June 1980 abduction in Lima of two Argentines and one Italian woman who were leftist refugees from the dictatorship in Argentina.

This state crime, carried out in the waning day of Morales Bermudez’s military regime, began with the arrest of Maria Ines Riverta, an Argentine, in front of the Church of Miraflores in Lima. She was then subjected to prolonged electric shock torture to force her to reveal the whereabouts of the two others, Julio Cesar Ramirez and Noemi Gianotti de Molfino. They too were soon picked up.

The Italian, Gianotti de Molfino, 55, had reached Lima with her youngest child at the beginning of 1980 after her husband had been murdered by the Argentine dictatorship, her oldest son imprisoned, her two grandchildren disappeared and her daughter exiled to France.

One month after her abduction in Lima, her body was discovered in a hotel room in Madrid. Her two comrades were sent back to Argentina and disappeared.

Italian prosecutor Giancarlo Capaldo has been investigating the crimes of the Latin American dictatorships since 1999 in response to charges brought by relatives of Italian victims of repression. Under Italian law, magistrates are empowered to investigate and prosecute the murder of Italians overseas.

According to the UPI news agency, Capaldo’s position is that “the United States was aware of Operation Condor but did not participate in it.”

There is ample evidence however, that the CIA and the US government had a direct hand in the repression. Capaldo’s position likely represents either a political decision not to directly antagonize Washington or a tactical calculation based on the recognition that no US official would ever be extradited to stand trial on matters of international law.

The Italian judge’s arrest orders came just weeks after one of the key figures in the reign of terror inflicted upon the people of Chile following the CIA-backed coup of September 11, 1973, gave fresh testimony on the intimate involvement of the CIA in the crimes committed under Operation Condor.

In a December 2 televised interview, Manuel Contreras, the former head of Chile’s notorious secret police, the Directorate of National Intelligence, or DINA, said that two assassinations carried out against the Chilean dictatorship’s opponents had been approved by and jointly organized with the CIA.

The first was that of Gen. Carlos Prats, the ex-chief of the Chilean army, who had opposed the US-backed coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Prats and his wife were murdered in a car bombing in Buenos Aires, where they had gone into exile.

The second was that of Orlando Letelier, the former foreign minister in the overthrown government of Salvador Allende and a key figure in the international opposition to Pinochet. He was also killed in a car bombing together with his aide, Ronni Moffitt, in the streets of Washington, D.C. At the time, the bombing was considered the worst act of foreign terrorism ever to have occurred in the US capital.

“Pinochet along with [US CIA deputy director Vernon] Walters were in agreement about all of the problems that existed with respect to international activities,” Contreras said in the interview with the Chilean television channel TVN.

Contreras said that the decision to kill Letelier had been reached during meetings between Pinochet and Walters in 1976.

Documents released by the US government in 2000 confirmed that Contreras himself was a paid “asset” of the CIA, while the leading figure convicted in the Letelier assassination was US-born Michael Townley, an operative of DINA, whom Contreras has said was also employed by the CIA. Townley, who has since also confessed to the assassination of Prats and his wife as well as other opponents of the Pinochet dictatorship, was tried in the US for the Letelier murder and sent into the FBI’s witness protection program after just five years in jail.

In Uruguay, one of the attorneys for the victim’s families in the case now unfolding over Operation Condor has demanded that the government seek the extradition of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for his role in the state terror and repression during that period.

The dictatorships in Latin America “were mere executors” of a “plan of extermination” worked out in Washington by leading US officials, including Kissinger—a firm defender of the military regimes—the lawyer, Gustavo Salle said.

Nor is it just Kissinger, a leading advisor to the Bush administration, who should be called to account for these crimes. While Walters is dead, at the time of his reported meetings with Contreras, the CIA’s director was George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father. Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s ex-defense secretary, meanwhile, held the same post at the Pentagon between 1975 and 1977, overseeing US backing for the Latin American military as it carried out repression throughout the continent. And Vice President Dick Cheney worked as White House chief of staff.

In the midst of its relentless propaganda campaign about a US global war on terror, Washington continues to protect professional terrorists like Townley and the CIA-trained anti-Castro Cuban airline bomber and assassin Luis Posada Carriles. Moreover, the political establishment itself counts among its leading figures men who are deeply implicated in the wave of state terror and repression that claimed the lives of tens of thousands in Latin America 30 years ago.

[American Dream]

From 2001:

...Two of the most explosive discoveries about U.S. links to Condor have emerged in the past few months. First is a 1978 Roger Channel cable from Robert White, then Ambassador to Paraguay, to the Secretary of State, discovered by this researcher in February 2001. This declassified State Department document links Operation Condor to the former U.S. military headquarters in the Panama Canal Zone.


In the cable, White reported a meeting with Paraguayan armed forces chief General Alejandro Fretes Davalos. Fretes identified the Panama Canal Zone base of the U.S. military as the site of a secure transnational communications center for Condor. According to Fretes Davalos, intelligence chiefs from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay used "an encrypted system within the U.S. telecommunications net[work]," which covered all of Latin America, to "coordinate intelligence information." In the cable, White drew the connection to Operation Condor and questioned whether the arrangement was in the U.S. interest--but he never received a response.


The Panama base housed the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), the U.S. Special Forces, and the Army School of the Americas (SOA), among other facilities, during most of the Cold War. Tens of thousands of Latin American officers were trained at the SOA, which used the infamous torture manuals released by the Pentagon and the CIA in the mid-1990s. Latin American officers trained in Panama have confirmed that the base was the center of the hemispheric anticommunist alliance. One military graduate of
the School said, "The school was always a front for other special operations, covert operations." Another officer, an Argentine navy man whose unit was organized into kidnap commandos ("task forces") in 1972, said the repression was part of "a plan that responded to the Doctrine of National Security that had as a base the School of the Americas, directed by the Pentagon in Panama." A Uruguayan officer who worked with the CIA in the 1970s, said that the CIA not
only knew of Condor operations, but also supervised them.


The second astonishing piece of recently-released information is the admission by the CIA itself in September 2000 that DINA chief Manuel Contreras was a CIA asset between 1974 and 1977, and that he received an unspecified payment for his services. During these same years Contreras was known as "Condor One," the leading organizer and proponent of Operation Condor. The CIA never divulged this information in 1978, when a Federal Grand Jury indicted Contreras for his role in the Letelier-Moffitt assassinations. Contreras was sentenced to a prison term in Chile for this crime, and convicted in absentia in Italy for the Leighton attack. The CIA claims that it did not ask Contreras about Condor until after the assassinations of Letelier and Moffitt in September 1976. This assertion is hardly credible, less so when one considers that the CIA was privy to earlier assassination plans by Condor. Moreover, the CIA helped organize and train the DINA in 1974, and retained Contreras as an asset for a year after the Letelier/Moffitt assassinations. The CIA destroyed its file on Contreras in 1991.


Michael Townley's relationship to the CIA is also murky. Townley turned state's evidence in the Letelier/Moffitt assassination trial, served a short sentence, and then entered the Witness Protection Program. In Chile, Townley had said that he was a CIA operative, and so did the attorney who defended the accused Cuban exiles in the Letelier/Moffitt assassination trial in the United States. In fact, declassified documents show that Townley was interviewed by CIA recruiters in November 1970 and was judged to be "of operational interest as a possible [phrase excised] of the Directorate of Operations in 1971." The memo carefully states, however, that the "Office of Security file does not reflect that Mr. Townley was ever actually used by the Agency." A separate affidavit states that "in February 1971, the Directorate of Operations requested preliminary security approval to use Mr. Townley in an operational capacity." Townley had close ties to the U.S. Embassy and to high-ranking Foreign Service officers, who knew of his ties to the fascist anti-Allende paramilitary group Patria y Libertad. The question that must be asked is whether Townley and Contreras were acting independently, or as CIA agents in Condor planning and operations...

Excerpted from:

www.crimesofwar.org/special/condor.html

Operation Condor: Deciphering the U.S. Role
by J. Patrice McSherry

[StarmanSkye]

--quote--

The dictatorships in Latin America “were mere executors” of a “plan of extermination” worked out in Washington by leading US officials, including Kissinger—a firm defender of the military regimes—the lawyer, Gustavo Salle said.

Nor is it just Kissinger, a leading advisor to the Bush administration, who should be called to account for these crimes. While Walters is dead, at the time of his reported meetings with Contreras, the CIA’s director was George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father. Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s ex-defense secretary, meanwhile, held the same post at the Pentagon between 1975 and 1977, overseeing US backing for the Latin American military as it carried out repression throughout the continent. And Vice President Dick Cheney worked as White House chief of staff.

In the midst of its relentless propaganda campaign about a US global war on terror, Washington continues to protect professional terrorists like Townley and the CIA-trained anti-Castro Cuban airline bomber and assassin Luis Posada Carriles. Moreover, the political establishment itself counts among its leading figures men who are deeply implicated in the wave of state terror and repression that claimed the lives of tens of thousands in Latin America 30 years ago.

--unquote--

The victims deserve, their memory demands justice for the unconscionable crimes that were committed. Because US policy has been largely unacknowledged, unquestioned, the arrogant contempt that drives US foreign interference continues, no longer even competantly justified as in the case of Iraq, to an appalling cost and effect. The crime of 911 had its origins in Central American Death Squads -- with many of the same actors playing a supporting if not primary role.

Ain't that the kicker.

And 911 is just a footnote to far larger future crimes. So it goes when assumptions aren't examined -- like the presumption of moral entitlement by powerful elites that pays lip service to democracy while pre-empting the will and best interests of a majority.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Operation Condor was originally hijacked into the movie 'Three Days of the Condor' and then into Disney's pathetic 'Condor Man.'

A friendly version of Operation Condor just showed up in two media designed for children in an attempt to counter the horror of that US-backed terrorism program-

1) Viacom/Nickelodeon's 'Dora the Explorer' books.
2) The latest pregnancy movie called 'Juno.'

Military recruiting propaganda for American children is an old genre that Disney has been leading since 1939.

Now that the previous anchor demographic of the economic draft, African Americans, isn't signing up to wear camo anymore, the Pentagon's eye has turned to the largest poor minority, Latin American immigrants.



1) Viacom owns Nickelodeon which has been targeting hispanic children for military recruiting with a book series for boys called 'Go Diego Go' showing how much fun 'foreign adventures' are using the justification of 'rescuing' animals.
And Operation Condor gets a sugar sprinkling from Viacom, naturally.

One of these 'Go Diego Go' books for brown-skinned boys actually shows on the front and back covers Diego happily sitting in...a pentagon.

Why yes. That certainly IS subliminal associational conditioning for children to get future military recruits.
"Pentagon = fun world adventures."
(Study how children's attitudes are formed to see how simple devices like this are worth the effort.)



The books for girls are based on the character called 'Dora the Explorer' with the same theme, 'foreign adventures to rescue animals.'
("Dora" was also the name of the concentration camp feeding Wernher von Braun slave labor which is why this keyword hijacking is in high gear before the 2009 40th anniversary of the first moon walk, a major psy-ops device to support nationalist identity and 'American Exceptionalism,' also a major military recruiting theme.)

In one of the Dora books called 'Meet Diego' the story finishes with Dora and Diego each riding a condor to rescue a cute baby animal with the big happy ending showing helpful smiling condors captioned-
"Hooray! We caught him!"

"Hooray! We caught him!" was obviously a line hijacked from Kissinger's and Pinochet's intelligence chiefs.

Keyword hijacking + meme-reversal = counterpropaganda against the history of Operation Condor for access to the minds of America's potential Latin American military recruits.

Next. 'Juno.'



2) Research has found that young men consider joining the military at two ages, 16 (start of high school) and 22 (end of college),
Therefore, it is advantageous to discourage hormonal young men from becoming attached to young women and children though pregnancy and marriage.
Hence the spate of recent movies showing pregnancy as the main theme like 'Knocked Up' and 'Waitress' and... 'Juno.' Youth are being reminded of the potential consequences of sex and the threat to their independent lifestyles.

The movie poster of 'Juno' shows a young man wearing a team sports shirt for the
"Dancing Elk Condors" and a pregnant young girl wearing Gitmo orange candy stripe.
Plenty of enticing and discouraging symbolism there.

A silhouette of a boys running team at the bottom of the poster suggests that sticking with The Gang of Buddies will keep you free of female entrapment...maybe also free for recruiting, pal.

So the sports team 'Condor' is used as a subliminal symbol for freedom and autonomy.
Keyword hijacking + meme-reversal = counterpropaganda against the history of Operation Condor for access to the minds of America's potential Latin American military recruits.

The title of this movie, 'Juno,' is a homonym for the raised eyebrow-warning "you know" said in a heavy stereotypical hispanic comic Ricky Ricardo or Cheech and Chong accent and is probably meant to start a catch phrase that can be used to discourage hispanic young men from starting families too early for the Pentagon to get ahold of them.
"Don't get candy stuck on you. You know."

Efforts to reassociate the keyword "Condor" will be carried out for a long time as the Pentagon looks to Latin Americans to fill its boots.


Dora the Explorer and Boots the monkey

[IanEye]

el Condor Pasa -

Oh mighty Condor, owner of the skies,
take me home, up into the Andes, oh mighty Condor.
I want to go back to my native place to be
with my Inca brothers,
that's what I miss the most, oh mighty Condor.

Wait for me in Qosqo, in the main plaza,
so we can take a walk in Machu Pikchu and Wayna Pikchu.

el Condor Pasa (Simon & Garfunkel version)

I'd rather be a sparrow than a snail
Yes i would, if i could, i surely would
I'd rather be a hammer than a nail
Yes i would, if i only could, i surely would

Away, i'd rather sail away
Like a swan that's here and gone
A man gets tied up to the ground
He gives the world its saddest sound
Its saddest sound

I'd rather be a forest than a street
Yes i would, if i could, i surely would
I'd rather feel the earth beneath my feet
Yes i would, if i only could, i surely would

yeah, no chance that Dora and Diego ride condors because of Andean folklore right Hugh?

and the monkey thing is a direct rip off of the Wonder Twins from the Super Friends:



"form of, an idiot"
"shape of, a lame theory"

- - - -



"I'm proud as an Argentine to repudiate the presence of this
human trash, George Bush" - Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona

also, those Hollywood movies encourage the young women to bring the fetus to term and show the young man staying involved with the woman as a popular, positive thing to do. they are tailor made for Huckabee America.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

yeah, no chance that Dora and Diego ride condors because of Andean folklore right Hugh?

Ignoring the most damning association of the keyword 'Condor' in today's context? Why?
Operation Condor is one of the most damning things in recent US history second only to the US-Nazi connection....and those happen to also overlap - I didn't even mention Klaus Barbie. Don't forget Wernher von Braun and Camp Dora.

"Benign folkore"...sheesh.
Obviously, the benign folklore is being evoked. That's the obvious available cover-up tactic and the use of animals for anthropomorphic training has been used for eons.
Disney specializes in this.

and the monkey thing is a direct rip off of the Wonder Twins from the Super Friends:

"Boots." Was I not clear enough about "filling the Pentagon's boots?" I tried.
The monkey is used to link 'fun' to 'boots,' just like the entire 'adventure' series.
This is associational psychology 101.

Remember the target audience and context-
Here. Now. Recruiting. Preventing "Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism."

There's a lot of American atrocity against Latin Americans to coax into the memory hole with cutey-pie kids and monkeys and baby animals...

Plus the USG is very concerned about the cultural solidarity of Latin Americans, many of whom do know that the USG has helped dictators destroy their countries sending them to the US as refugees. What if they got mad and active the way the Black Panthers did in the 1960s? That led to a version of Operation Condor in the US as Operation CHAOS and COINTELPRO. People were murdered and framed up for jail as political prisoners.
The FALCON raid system is all primed to be used in case 'the sixties' come back.
The resistance movement, should it create "too much" social instability, will be once again decapitated as FEMA's REX84 plans were designed to do under Reagan's lead narcoterrorist, Oliver North.

Think the USG isn't going to try and prevent that from coming to a head as the hispanic population of the US drastically increases? The 'urban swamps' full of poor African Americans were drained by funneling many of them into the Pentagon as a jobs program.
Same thing is being done to hispanics.
"You'll love our boots and adventures rescuing oil regions."

"I'm proud as an Argentine to repudiate the presence of this
human trash, George Bush" - Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona

Cool quote. And awesome photo. Thanks for that!

But a more dangerous 'Diego' would be Diego Garcia where the US military tortures people called "ghost detainees." How's that for an ultra-latin name?

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2005/050702-island-torture.htm
The Toronto Star July 2, 2005
Island paradise or torture chamber?
CIA under fire for secret detentions

Indian Ocean atoll alleged abuse site


By Lynda Hurst

From satellite pictures, Diego Garcia looks like paradise.

The small, secluded atoll in the Indian Ocean, with its coral beaches, turquoise waters and vast lagoon in the centre, is 1,600 kilometres from land in any direction.

A perfect hideaway. But no one is allowed to set foot on it.

The little-known British possession, leased to the United States in 1970, was a major military staging post in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It continues to be, in effect, a floating aircraft carrier, housing 1,700 personnel who call it Camp Justice.

But intelligence analysts say Diego Garcia's geographic isolation is now being exploited for other, darker purposes.
.....
Analysts say there are at least a score of unacknowledged facilities around the world. Among them, several in Afghanistan (one known as "the pit") and Iraq, in Pakistan, Jordan, in a restricted unit at Guantanamo, and one, they suspect, on Diego Garcia, where two navy prison ships ferry prisoners in and out.

also, those Hollywood movies encourage the young women to bring the fetus to term and show the young man staying involved with the woman as a popular, positive thing to do. they are tailor made for Huckabee America.

Few go see any movie.
The poster image and advertising is the main psy-ops message because most people do see it. Especially children.
'Juno' poster = "Look out boys. Nookie could trap you. Stay free and available."
(I've spelled this out umpteen times but RIers insist on missing the forest for the trees and failing to judge a book by its cover which is how they are designed.)

I'll never see "condor" without seeing the torture.
But children can be prebiased and inoculated with cute benign memories.

[IanEye]

Few go see a movie. The poster is the main psy-ops message.
I've spelled this out umpteen times but RIers insist on missing the forest for the trees and failing to judge a book by its cover which is how they are designed.

my, how rigorous, how intuitive.

(Willie Dixon) 1962

You can't judge an apple by looking at a tree,
You can't judge honey by looking at the bee,
You can't judge a daughter by looking at the mother,
You can't judge a book by looking at the cover.

Oh can't you see,
Oh you misjudge me,
I look like a farmer,
But I'm a lover,
You can't judge a book by looking at the cover.

Oh come on in closer baby,
Hear what else I gotta say!
You got your radio turned down too low,
Turn it up!

You can't judge sugar by looking at the cane,
You can't judge a woman by looking at her man,
You can't judge a sister by looking at her brother,
You can't judge a book by looking at the cover.

Oh can't you see,
Oh you misjudge me,
I look like a farmer,
But I'm a Lover,
You can't judge a book by looking at the cover.

You can't judge a fish by lookin' in the pond,
You can't judge right from looking at the wrong,
You can't judge one by looking at the other,
You can't judge a book by looking at the cover.

Oh can't you see,
Oh you misjudge me,
I look like a farmer,
But I'm a lover,
You can't judge a book by looking at the cover.

I'll never see "condor" without seeing the torture. But children can be prebiased and inoculated with cute benign memories.

yes, and children can be prebiased and inoculated with their parent's idiotic prejudice and paranoia as well. God forbid a child would first associate a condor with centuries old folklore before they think of muderous thugs from a few decades ago. Why let the CIA win any more ground? There is a difference between educating a child and traumatizing one.

Am I not supposed to serve my family artichokes just because some CIA operation was named artichoke once? Fuck off.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

.....
yes, and children can be prebiased and inoculated with their parent's idiotic prejudice and paranoia as well. God forbid a child would first associate a condor with centuries old folklore before they think of muderous thugs from a few decades ago.

"A few decades ago?" This is CURRENT history, not a dusty archive.

Why let the CIA win any more ground? There is a difference between educating a child and traumatizing one.

Raising kids to know history includes the good and the bad and I agree that the goal is not to disable them but to empower them with realism.

Peace and justice movements rely on committed people who don't lose sight of fascism's victims and people's attitudes are formed when they are young.

Am I not supposed to serve my family artichokes just because some CIA operation was named artichoke once? Fuck off.

You have a track record of telling me to fuck off. Why?

I think it is true that the CIA hopes that showing skeletons in the history closet will chill people to get more social control out of past crimes for a hangover effect but history is what it is. I don't point at it to chill people but to show them what is being hidden and must not be hidden.

I'm pointing at US spooks using Viacom's Nickelodeon to recruit Latin Americans into the US military by covering up the US torture of Latin Americans.

What's your problem with that? Not fun enough for you and your kids? Tough.
Go right ahead and enjoy your artichokes.

Those FALCON raids are meant to chill.
Those camps are meant to chill.
The use of torture is meant to chill.

But that doesn't mean that they should not be mentioned to prevent "giving more power to the CIA." That's just denial.

I agree that it can be a fine line between being informed and being overwhelmed and pushed into learned helplessness.

So let me join you in you saying FUCK THAT to learned helplessness.

And I say FUCK THAT to recruting poor Latin Americans, many of whom are in the US because the US attacked their countries with dicatorships and torture.

[IanEye]

"A few decades ago?" This is CURRENT history, not a dusty archive.

During the 1970s and 1980s, dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Peru, with the aid of the US CIA, developed Operation Condor as a program of coordinated continental repression, pooling their police-military resources in order to hunt down exiles and send them back to their deaths, while allowing secret police death squads to freely cross borders.

Sound familiar? It is the second paragraph from the article that started this thread. '70s '80s - decades ago.

You have a track record of telling me to fuck off. Why?

Because people with lazy intellects deserve nothing but derision and scorn.

You've wasted my time
I'd like to see you try and give it back
I'm working
But I'm not working for you!
Slack Motherfucker! - Superchunk

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

"A few decades ago?" This is CURRENT history, not a dusty archive.

During the 1970s and 1980s, dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Peru, with the aid of the US CIA, developed Operation Condor as a program of coordinated continental repression, pooling their police-military resources in order to hunt down exiles and send them back to their deaths, while allowing secret police death squads to freely cross borders.

Sound familiar? It is the second paragraph from the article that started this thread. '70s '80s - decades ago.

A whistleblower against the military dirty war in a Condor country was only just recently murdered for having documented the crimes. (Can't remember which country.)

Some of these countries have had very uneasy 'truces' between the murderous juntas and the people and not all the people want this 'truce.' Many want justice and the criminals to be tried and jailed, not allowed to sit in comfort with blood on their hands.

The American criminals, like Henry Kissinger and CIA people, who carried out these crimes are still in power. That's in the article you just rubbed in my face-

Nor is it just Kissinger, a leading advisor to the Bush administration, who should be called to account for these crimes. While Walters is dead, at the time of his reported meetings with Contreras, the CIA’s director was George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father. Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s ex-defense secretary, meanwhile, held the same post at the Pentagon between 1975 and 1977, overseeing US backing for the Latin American military as it carried out repression throughout the continent. And Vice President Dick Cheney worked as White House chief of staff.

In the midst of its relentless propaganda campaign about a US global war on terror, Washington continues to protect professional terrorists like Townley and the CIA-trained anti-Castro Cuban airline bomber and assassin Luis Posada Carriles. Moreover, the political establishment itself counts among its leading figures men who are deeply implicated in the wave of state terror and repression that claimed the lives of tens of thousands in Latin America 30 years ago.

The same people who ran death squads during the Reagan wars against Central Americans, like Col. Steele, are over in Iraq carrying out 'the El Salvador option.'

Enabler of Honduran death squads, John Negroponte, was very recently the American Intelligence Uberfuhrer.

There's still a dirty war in Mexico.

The US is still attacking Hugo Chavez.

The US is still killing people in Haiti where it keeps staging coups.

And then there's Plan Columbia where the US dumps billions in military funding to carry out what is still...Operation Condor.

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/791/61/

A Dirtier War: Colombia's Fake "Peace Process" and US Policy
Written by Jake Hess
Wednesday, 27 June 2007
.....
During the Clinton administration, Colombia became, outside of Israel and Egypt, the leading recipient of US military aid in the world. Since 2000, under Plan Colombia, Washington has funded Bogotá to the tune of some $5 billion, (3) about 80% of which has been military aid. (4) Overall, in the past decade, 2/3rds of all US military and police aid to Latin America has been devoted to Colombia. (5) This militarized approach to Colombia's conflict has rightly elicited constant protest from human rights organizations from across the world.
.....
Democrats claim to be especially concerned about labor rights; yet, the President they're prepared to hand some $600 million to has presided over the assassination of some 400 trade unionists, almost all of which have been carried out with impunity. As in the past, the majority of these killings are blamed on deathsquads allied with the Colombian state and, as has become clear recently, Uribe's political network in the government.
.....
In a testimony to a recent conference on human rights in Colombia, Amnesty International points out that "[we] have stressed over and over again that the necessary conditions simply do not exist to ensure that US military aid does not contribute towards the committing of human rights abuses. It is clear that the human rights certification process…has proved totally inadequate in that respect." Indeed, Amnesty USA has called for an end to US military aid to Bogotá since 1994.
.....
In a recent Miami Herald op-ed in which he argues for continued military aid to Bogotá, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte credits the Uribe government with "restor[ing] the integrity of the [Colombian] state."

http://international-human-rights.suite101.com/article.cfm/ghosts_of_the_past

Otto Pérez Molina's Campaign
Dirty War General Runs for President of Guatemala

by Melanie S. Pinkert

Jun 3, 2007

The campaign website for Guatemalan presidential candidate Otto Pérez Molina mentioned his decorated military service and his signature on the 1996 peace accords. The site glossed over the fact that he served during a bloody, 36-year-long civil war in which an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared and more than one million Guatemalans were displaced.
Responsibility for the Atrocities

The United Nations and the Human Rights Office of the Guatemalan Archbishop have attributed the vast majority of the massacres, assassinations, tortures, and disappearances to the Guatemalan military. General Pérez Molina was a commander in the Guatemalan intelligence agency (known as D-2 or G-2) and the head of a covert branch of the Presidential General Staff known as the EMP.
G-2 and EMP

Both the G-2 and the EMP have been implicated in some of the worst human rights abuses perpetrated during the war, a fact well documented by human rights organizations around the world. Pérez Molina has been linked to several massacres and assassinations – including those of journalist and politician Jorge Carpio Nicolle, Judge Edgar Ramiro Elías Ogaldez, and guerrilla leader Efraín Bámaca.

http://www.csrp.org/rw/rw813.htm

July 2, 1995 * No. 813
Peru: Dictators Pardon Their Death Squads

On June 15 the head of Peru's death-squad government, Alberto Fujimori, signed an amnesty law pardoning all military and police officers jailed since the start of the Maoist people's war. The Communist Party of Peru (PCP, known as the Shining Path or Sendero Luminoso in the press) launched the people's war in May 1980. In the 15 years since then, the government and its military forces have carried out many massacres, death-squad "disappearances," and rapes in the course of their counter-revolutionary war. Only a very few soldiers and officers of the government's Armed Forces and police have ever been jailed for these crimes against the people. Now, even these few are being set free.

The amnesty is a crude and shameful attempt by Peru's U.S.-backed rulers to wipe their hands clean of the blood of the tens of thousands of peasants, workers and middle class people that they have murdered and tortured. But this move only makes the ugly nature of Peru's dictators even more clear for the world to see.

And the renamed School of the Americas continues to train police-state operatives in suppression.

http://soaw.mahost.org/new/newswire_detail.php?id=1347

Colombia Army Chief Linked to Outlaw Militias

Sunday, March 25th 2007

WASHINGTON — The CIA has obtained new intelligence alleging that the head of Colombia's U.S.-backed army collaborated extensively with right-wing militias that Washington considers terrorist organizations, including a militia headed by one of the country's leading drug traffickers.
.....
In addition to his close cooperation with U.S. officials on Plan Colombia, Montoya has served as an instructor at the U.S.-sponsored military training center formerly called the School of the Americas. The Colombian general was praised by U.S. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when Pace directed the regional military command for Latin America, and Montoya has been organizing a new Colombian counter-narcotics task force with U.S. funds.

Operation Condor is a method, not just an era. They live.

You have a track record of telling me to fuck off. Why?

Because people with lazy intellects deserve nothing but derision and scorn.

You've wasted my time
I'd like to see you try and give it back
I'm working
But I'm not working for you!
Slack Motherfucker! - Superchunk

"...deserve nothing but derision and scorn."
Man, you are vulgar and hostile to the wrong people.
But now I know your pattern.

I don't know what your agenda is.
Mine is clear: History will not be forgotten.
The swastika is not what it was before Hitler and his Wall Street backers and neither is the Condor.

http://www.cubaheadlines.com/2008/01/08/8240/testimony_of_the_sole_cuban_survivor_of_guernica.html

Testimony of the Sole Cuban Survivor of Guernica
.....
On April 26, 1937, planes from the German Condor Legion, with the approval of dictator Francisco Franco, leveled the defenseless Basque town of Guernica after several hours of bombing with more than 3,000 incendiary missiles and 550-pound bombs.
.....

[AlicetheKurious]

Hugh said:

The American criminals, like Henry Kissinger and CIA people, who carried out these crimes are still in power. That's in the article you just rubbed in my face-

Nor is it just Kissinger, a leading advisor to the Bush administration, who should be called to account for these crimes. While Walters is dead, at the time of his reported meetings with Contreras, the CIA’s director was George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father. Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s ex-defense secretary, meanwhile, held the same post at the Pentagon between 1975 and 1977, overseeing US backing for the Latin American military as it carried out repression throughout the continent. And Vice President Dick Cheney worked as White House chief of staff.

In the midst of its relentless propaganda campaign about a US global war on terror, Washington continues to protect professional terrorists like Townley and the CIA-trained anti-Castro Cuban airline bomber and assassin Luis Posada Carriles. Moreover, the political establishment itself counts among its leading figures men who are deeply implicated in the wave of state terror and repression that claimed the lives of tens of thousands in Latin America 30 years ago.


The same people who ran death squads during the Reagan wars against Central Americans, like Col. Steele, are over in Iraq carrying out 'the El Salvador option.'

Enabler of Honduran death squads, John Negroponte, was very recently the American Intelligence Uberfuhrer.

There's still a dirty war in Mexico.

The US is still attacking Hugo Chavez.

The US is still killing people in Haiti where it keeps staging coups.

And then there's Plan Columbia where the US dumps billions in military funding to carry out what is still...Operation Condor.
...
And the renamed School of the Americas continues to train police-state operatives in suppression.
...
Operation Condor is a method, not just an era. They live.

They do indeed. And like they breathe, they do damage, for fun and profit, to innocent human beings.

They must be exposed, over and over, so that wherever they go, their face is rubbed in what they are, and what they've done, and what they continue to do.

If this wonderful, heroic judge is unsuccessful in Italy, more and more prosecutions need to be launched, so that these monsters, these murderers, these vampires become afraid to travel, afraid to leave their homes, never knowing when they will be arrested.

They should be heckled, picketed, their crimes written about, their "speaking engagements" boycotted. Their victims should receive justice, at the very least, through recognition of the crimes that have been committed against them. This recognition needs to come from ordinary people, if legal prosecution ends up being sabotaged by the criminals themselves, or their accomplices.

How about a deck of cards a la "Operation Enduring Freedom", with each criminal's photograph on one side, a summary of his crimes on the other?

One deck for Latin America, one for the Middle East, one for Africa, one for Southeast Asia, etc., etc. (I guess Kissinger would be in all of them...come to think of it, there would be a lot of overlap, save on printing costs).

Now THAT would be educational! I'd get it for MY kids -- they already know all about fictional villains, and fictional vampires, etc., knowledge that is a total waste of their minds. At least this "infotainment" for the kiddies would serve a useful purpose, as well as providing hours of thrills, chills and a valuable education as well.

Ok, I'm getting carried away, but... Maybe those cards could be red, you know, for the blood they've spilled, and maybe other decks could be golden, for heroes who have stood up to them and fought back on behalf of their victims...

I think this would be a great idea, for an educational game, sort of like "Trivial Pursuit", only not at all trivial.

[IanEye]

How about a deck of cards a la "Operation Enduring Freedom", with each criminal's photograph on one side, a summary of his crimes on the other?

One deck for Latin America, one for the Middle East, one for Africa, one for Southeast Asia, etc., etc. (I guess Kissinger would be in all of them...come to think of it, there would be a lot of overlap, save on printing costs).

Maybe those cards could be red, you know, for the blood they've spilled, and maybe other decks could be golden, for heroes who have stood up to them and fought back on behalf of their victims...

I think this would be a great idea, for an educational game, sort of like "Trivial Pursuit", only not at all trivial.

GENERAL JORGE RAFAEL VIDELA
President of Argentina
Soon after the coup that brought him to power in 1976, General Jorge Rafael Videla began Argentina's dirty war. All political and union activities were suspended, wages were reduced by 60%, and dissidents were tortured by Nazi and U.S. trained military and police. Survivors say the torture rooms contained swastikas and pictures of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. One year after Videla's coup, Amnesty International estimated 15,000 people had disappeared and many were in secret detention camps, but although the U.S. press admitted human rights abuses occurred in Argentina, Videla was often described as a "moderate" who revitalized his nation's troubled economy. Videla had a good public relations firm in the U.S., Deaver and Hannalord, the same firm used by Ronad Reagan, Taiwan, and Guatemala. Not surprisingly, his Economics Minister, Jose Martinez do Hoz, spoke, at Deaver's request, on one of President Reagan's national broadcasts in order to upgrade Argentina's reputation.
Videla also received aid from WACL, the World Anti-Communist League (see card 17), through its affiliale, CAL (Confederation Anticomunista Latinoamericana). CAL sent millions of dollars to Argentina from sources such as the Italo-Argentine Masonic Lodge P-2, an outgrowth of old U.S. anti-communist alliances with the Italian drug malia. As part of its WACL affiliation, Argentina trained Nicaraguan contras for the U.S. Videla left office in 1981, and aftar the Falklands Crisis of 1982 he and his cohorts were tried for human rights abuses by the new government.

- - -

GENERAL AUGUSTO PINOCHET
President of Chile
On July 2, 1986, 18 year old Carmen Gloria Quintana was walking through a Santiago slum when she and photographer Rodrigo Rojas were confronted by government security forces. According to eyewitnesses, the two were set ablaze by soldiers and beaten while they burned. Their bodies were then wrapped in blankets and dumped in a ditch miles away. Witnesses who spoke out about what they saw were beaten and arrested. Such events are not unusual since "Captain General" Augusto Pinochet seized power from democratically elected President Salvador Allende in 1973, and buried Chile's 150 year old democracy. "Democracy is the breeding ground of communism," says Pinochet.
The bloody coup, in which Allende was assassinated, was carefully managed by the CIA and ITT, according to the Church Committee report. Tens of thousands of Chileans have been tortured, killed, and exiled since then, according to Amnesty Intemational. A U.S. congressional delegation was told by inmates at San Miguel Prison that they had been tortured by "the application of electric shock, simultaneous blows to the ears, cigarette burns, and simulated executions by firing squads." Despite Chile's bad human rights record, the U.S. government continued to support Pinochet with international loans. Even the state-sponsored car-bomb assassination of Chile's former Ambassador to the U.S., Orlando Letelier, did not convince the U.S. to break with Pinochet. Chileans called for his removal in a 1988 election, but he clung to the presidency until 1990, and remains the commander of Chile's army.

link: http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/fdtcards/Cards_Index.html

[AlicetheKurious]

Wowza.

From the home page at your link:

Eclipse Enterprises:

Eclipse Enterprises was founded in 1977 by brothers Jan and Dean Mullaney and originally run out of a converted garage at their home in Forestville, California. The company quickly gained a reputation for producing comics that dealt with issues that the major publishers avoided.

Journalist Catherine Yronwode joined Eclipse as an editor in 1981 and, with writer Joyce Brabner, persuaded the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors to fund Eclipse's anti-war comic "Real War Stories". A Georgia court injunction preventing the CCCO from distributing the comic for free at a high school career day was overturned by the Georgia State Supreme Court.

Eclipse went on to publish "Brought to Light", a comic book series featuring factual accounts of CIA covert operations in Central America. These reality-based comics led to a series of trading card sets on similar political and non-mainstream themes: "Drug Wars", "The Iran Contra Scandal", "Serial Killers", "Rotten to the Core - New York Political Scandal" and "Friendly Dictators".

Much of the above information comes from Douglas Rushkoff's 1994 book "Media Virus", as does the following quote:

“[The Trading Cards were] ... an even more ingenious conduit for activist ideologies than comics. "Trading cards, sports cards, were already nonfiction," [Yronwode] explains. "It's the most effective bait and switch because the person thinks, 'Oh, I'm gonna get a bunch of little fact cards here about famous people.' And they do. But they find out that the Premier of some Latin American country was a convicted rapist. That the CIA supported him until he assassinated some dude in Africa.

It's all right there in your face. And they don't know how to turn it off because it's on a trading card and a trading card is true." ... Unlike a comic book, which has a linear order, a trading card is a tiny unit by itself and can be arranged in any manner.

Yronwode says this feature is not coincidental: "Our trading cards are designed so they read like Hypercard stacks. Each cross-references to other cards ... They all connect, and you can rearrange them in chains of interconnectivity. Or chronologically. You can find out who someone's boss was, how different people moved around, that this guy was in Vietnam at the same time as this guy, and then that they were both in Nicaragua at the same time, too." ... In this absurdly simplistic context [of trading cards], the complexities of behind-the-scenes government corruption are reduced to blatant and clear-cut violations of the public trust. Meanwhile the viral shell of "trading" cards promotes the idea that kids should be passing these memes around.”

In 1997, Eclipse had another legal success when a U.S. federal appeals court struck down a Nassau County, New York law banning the sale of trading cards depicting "any heinous crime". The court found for Eclipse who had challenged the law on First Amendment grounds - cf: Eclipse Enterprises, Inc. v. Gulotta (U.S. Federal Court of Appeal, 2nd Circuit, December 1997).

The expense of this court case seems to have bankrupted them - at any rate, for whatever reason, Eclipse appears to have folded. There are no web entries for the company, no listing in any of the Publishing Indexes I've been able to find, and all its products are out of print, as far as the big web booksellers are concerned. So who knows - maybe, they just found something else to do with their time. If they are still around and don't want me messing with their stuff, they have only to ask and I'll take the site down. Unless and until that happens, please enjoy...


It was a brilliant idea before its time; now, when more and more people have fallen down the rabbit hole, it could be HUGE. There's an eternity of difference between 1997 and 2008...

[JackRiddler]

Damn it, I had all of these trading cards (dictators, Iran-Contra and New York politician mob) and now I don't know where they ended up in my various stored possessions. They were spectacular! Ah well.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Clarification:

Once upon a time I mistook IanEye's enigmatic posting style for personal attacks and a period of enmity ensued.
Eventually, we straightened out this cyber-stylized misunderstanding and found out we were mostly on the same page.

Update on Condor-

The body of Salvador Allende was recently exhumed to determine if he was murdered by the CIA's coup-meisters or committed suicide per The Cover Story.
Operation Condor is a hot topic in a USA becoming more and more populated by the brown people from 'south of the border' that the CIA has repressed for many decades.

Consider the 'necessary' psyops to contain the history of CIA Naziism in South and Central America to prevent resistance from functionally outraged immigrants.
See 'Black Panthers/COINTELPRO' to the umpteenth degree.

"DCI Richard Helms with [CIA-Hollywood asset] Robert Redford on the set of the film Three Days of a Condor "(1975)