Tag Archives: human rights

New Memo: Kissinger Gave the "Green Light" for Argentina’s Dirty War

by WinifredTrimm Posted on January 14, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Only a few months ago, Henry Kissinger was dancing with Stephen Colbert in a funny bit on the latter’s Comedy Central show. But for years, the former secretary of state has sidestepped judgment for his complicity in horrific human rights abuses abroad, and a new memo has emerged that provides clear evidence that in 1976 Kissinger gave Argentina’s neo-fascist military junta the “green light” for the dirty war it was conducting against civilian and militant leftists that resulted in the disappearance—that is, deaths—of an estimated 30,000 people.

In April 1977, Patt Derian, a onetime civil rights activist whom President Jimmy Carter had recently appointed assistant secretary of state for human rights, met with the US ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert Hill. A memo recording that conversation has been unearthed by Martin Edwin Andersen, who in 1987 first reported that Kissinger had told the Argentine generals to proceed with their terror campaign against leftists (whom the junta routinely referred to as “terrorists”). The memo notes that Hill told Derian about a meeting Kissinger held with Argentine Foreign Minister Cesar Augusto Guzzetti the previous June. What the two men discussed was revealed in 2004 when the National Security Archive obtained and released the secret memorandum of conversation for that get-together. Guzzetti, according to that document, told Kissinger, “our main problem in Argentina is terrorism.” Kissinger replied, “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you must get back quickly to normal procedures.” In other words, go ahead with your killing crusade against the leftists.

The new document shows that Kissinger was even more explicit in encouraging the Argentine junta. The memo recounts Hill describing the Kissinger-Guzzetti discussion this way:

The Argentines were very worried that Kissinger would lecture to them on human rights. Guzzetti and Kissinger had a very long breakfast but the Secretary did not raise the subject. Finally Guzzetti did. Kissinger asked how long will it take you (the Argentines) to clean up the problem. Guzzetti replied that it would be done by the end of the year. Kissinger approved.

In other words, Ambassador Hill explained, Kissinger gave the Argentines the green light.

That’s a damning statement: a US ambassador saying a secretary of state had egged on a repressive regime that was engaged in a killing spree.

In August 1976, according to the new memo, Hill discussed “the matter personally with Kissinger, on the way back to Washington from a Bohemian Grove meeting in San Francisco.” Kissinger, Hill told Derian, confirmed the Guzzetti conversation and informed Hill that he wanted Argentina “to finish its terrorist problem before year end.” Kissinger was concerned about new human rights laws passed by the Congress requiring the White House to certify a government was not violating human rights before providing US aid. He was hoping the Argentine generals could wrap up their murderous eradication of the left before the law took effect.

Hill indicated to Derian, according to the new memo, that he believed that Kissinger’s message to Guzzetti had prompted the Argentine junta to intensify its dirty war. When he returned to Buenos Aires, the memo notes, Hill “saw that the terrorist death toll had climbed steeply.” And the memo reports, “Ambassador Hill said he would tell all of this to the Congress if he were put on the stand under oath. ‘I’m not going to lie,’ the Ambassador declared.”

Hill, who died in 1978, never did testify that Kissinger had urged on the Argentine generals, and the Carter administration reversed policy and made human rights a priority in its relations with Argentina and other nations. As for Kissinger, he skated—and he has been skating ever since, dodging responsibility for dirty deeds in Chile, Bangladesh, East Timor, Cambodia, and elsewhere. Kissinger watchers have known for years that he at least implicitly (though privately) endorsed the Argentine dirty war, but this new memo makes clear he was an enabler for an endeavor that entailed the torture, disappearance, and murder of tens of thousands of people. Next time you see him dancing on television, don’t laugh.

This article is from:  

New Memo: Kissinger Gave the "Green Light" for Argentina’s Dirty War

Posted in FF, GE, Green Light, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on New Memo: Kissinger Gave the "Green Light" for Argentina’s Dirty War

Dear Apple: Don’t Work With Russian Company Whose Creative Director Advocates "Burning Gays in Ovens"

by billytalley1169 Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Sunday, a coalition of over 15 Russian LGBT organizations encouraged Apple to avoid business dealings with Euroset, the largest phone retailer in Russia, whose creative director gained recent notoriety for wanting to shove all gay people “alive into an oven.”

Ivan Okhlobystin, who stars on the Russian version of Scrubs in addition to working for Euroset, also compared homosexuality to fascism and declared it an “overt sign of mental abnormality” at a “spiritual talk” in Novosibirsk last month. He later confirmed his comments on Twitter, suggesting his anti-gay stance would draw customers to Euroset stores for a “good mood.”

In an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook dated January 5, the LGBT rights coalition emphasized the dangerous potential of hate speech in an already volatile environment: “Okhlobystin’s statements have been enthusiastically published by the Kremlin’s propaganda press and distributed across entire Russia just adding additional fuel to the rampant homophobic campaign that already resulted in at least 26 murders and countless hate crimes against Russian LGBT population sic.”

The letter calls on Cook to “set Apple as an example of a corporate citizen who supports basic human rights.”

Activists are turning to Western suppliers like Apple after getting little response from Okhlobystin’s employer. Six LGBT rights organizations wrote to Euroset President Alexander Malis on December 26, asking him to “clarify how Okhlobystin’s views are aligned with the values and principals of Euroset company, and to make a statement on inadmissibility of bullying and violence based on prejudice.”

Malis told Russian newspaper Izvestia that “Ivan expressed his personal opinion, and we will not fire him for that. Of course, we are against burning anyone in furnaces.”

The coalition plans to reach out to other Western mobile phone companies doing business with Euroset. Current suppliers for the company include Google and Samsung.

Apple has not yet responded to a request for comment on its relationship with Euroset or its plans for addressing the letter’s concerns. In September, the two companies were negotiating iPhone sales, and in late October, Euroset began selling iPhones in some of its Russian stores.

Read the coalition’s full letter below:

Read more – 

Dear Apple: Don’t Work With Russian Company Whose Creative Director Advocates "Burning Gays in Ovens"

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, oven, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Dear Apple: Don’t Work With Russian Company Whose Creative Director Advocates "Burning Gays in Ovens"

Why Our Debate About Surveillance Doesn’t Go Far Enough

by SadyePereira Posted on January 6, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In a 1950s civics textbook of mine, I can remember a Martian landing on Main Street, USA., to be instructed in the glories of our political system. You know, our tripartite government, checks and balances, miraculous set of rights, and vibrant democracy. There was, Americans then thought, much to be proud of, and so for that generation of children, many Martians were instructed in the American way of life. These days, I suspect, not so many.

Still, I wondered just what lessons might be offered to such a Martian crash-landing in Washington as 2014 begins. Certainly checks, balances, rights, and democracy wouldn’t top any New Year’s list. Since my childhood, in fact, that tripartite government has grown a fourth part, a national security state that is remarkably unchecked and unbalanced. In recent times, that labyrinthine structure of intelligence agencies morphing into war-fighting outfits, the US military (with its own secret military, the special operations forces, gestating inside it), and the Department of Homeland Security, a monster conglomeration of agencies that is an actual “defense department,” as well as a vast contingent of weapons makers, contractors, and profiteers bolstered by an army of lobbyists, has never stopped growing. It has won the undying fealty of Congress, embraced the power of the presidency, made itself into a jobs program for the American people, and been largely free to do as it pleased with almost unlimited taxpayer dollars.

The expansion of Washington’s national security state—let’s call it the NSS—to gargantuan proportions has historically met little opposition. In the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, however, some resistance has arisen, especially when it comes to the “right” of one part of the NSS to turn the world into a listening post and gather, in particular, American communications of every sort. The debate about this—invariably framed within the boundaries of whether or not we should have more security or more privacy and how exactly to balance the two—has been reasonably vigorous. The problem is: it doesn’t begin to get at the real nature of the NSS or the problems it poses.

Continue Reading »

Read article here: 

Why Our Debate About Surveillance Doesn’t Go Far Enough

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Our Debate About Surveillance Doesn’t Go Far Enough

Dot Earth Blog: Reflections on the Killing of Chico Mendes 25 Years Ago

by Myrna Posted on December 22, 2013

Twenty five years after the assassination of Chico Mendes, a campaigner for forests and the people who live in them, his legacy continues to shape conservation efforts on dangerous resource frontiers. View the original here – Dot Earth Blog: Reflections on the Killing of Chico Mendes 25 Years Ago Related Articles Reflections on the Killing of Chico Mendes 25 Years Ago Dot Earth Blog: A Gift That Keeps on Giving – to Strumming Musicians Dot Earth Blog: Climate Scientists, Then and Now, Espousing ‘Responsible Advocacy’

Visit link: 

Dot Earth Blog: Reflections on the Killing of Chico Mendes 25 Years Ago

Posted in alo, Citadel, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Dot Earth Blog: Reflections on the Killing of Chico Mendes 25 Years Ago

Remembering Nelson Mandela and His Fight for Climate Justice

by SeleneTierney Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the Grist website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Nelson Mandela, who died last week, is best known for his fight against South African apartheid. But his long walk to freedom also included steps toward solving this mammoth problem called climate change. He envisioned a world where all people are able to live a fully dignified life, with clean air to breathe and clean water to drink—and where poor countries are not left with the repercussions of rich nation’s dirty ways.

Six years ago, Mandela founded The Elders, a cross-cultural group of leaders from across the globe, including former President Jimmy Carter and former United Nations Chief Kofi Annan, to forge human rights-based solutions to worldwide problems. One of the group’s top priorities is climate justice, which is not only about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also about ensuring the protection of those people and regions most vulnerable to the worst of climate change’s impacts.

Continue Reading »

See original article here: 

Remembering Nelson Mandela and His Fight for Climate Justice

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Remembering Nelson Mandela and His Fight for Climate Justice

How Online Mapmakers Are Helping the Red Cross Save Lives in the Philippines

by kx93z6g Posted on November 12, 2013

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared on the Atlantic website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It will be months before we know the true damage brought about by super typhoon Haiyan. The largest death tolls now associated with the storm are only estimates. Aid workers from across the world are now flying to the island nation, or they just recently arrived there. They—and Filipinos—will support survivors and start to rebuild.

But they will be helped by an incredible piece of technology, a worldwide, crowd-sourced humanitarian collaboration made possible by the Internet.

What is it? It’s a highly detailed map of the areas affected by super typhoon Haiyan, and it mostly didn’t exist three days ago, when the storm made landfall.

Since Saturday, more than 400 volunteers have made nearly three quarters of a million additions to a free, online map of areas in and around the Philippines. Those additions reflect the land before the storm, but they will help Red Cross workers and volunteers make critical decisions after it about where to send food, water, and supplies.

These things are easy to hyperbolize, but in the Philippines, now, it is highly likely that free mapping data and software—and the community that support them—will save lives.

The Wikipedia of maps

The changes were made to OpenStreetMap (OSM), a sort of Wikipedia of maps. OSM aims to be a complete map of the world, free to use and editable by all. Created in 2004, it now has over a million users.

I spoke to Dale Kunce, senior geospatial engineer at the American Red Cross, about how volunteer mapping helps improve the situation in the Philippines.

The Red Cross, internationally, recently began to use open source software and data in all of its projects, he said. Free software reduces or eliminates project “leave behind” costs, or the amount of money required to keep something running after the Red Cross leaves. Any software or data compiled by the Red Cross are now released under an open-source or share-alike license.

While Open Street Map has been used in humanitarian crises before, the super typhoon Haiyan is the first time the Red Cross has coordinated its use and the volunteer effort around it.

How the changes were made

The 410 volunteers who have edited OSM in the past three days aren’t all mapmaking professionals. Organized by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team on Twitter, calls went out for the areas of the Philippines in the path of the storm to be mapped.

What does that mapping look like? Mostly, it involves “tracing” roads into OSM using satellite data. The OSM has a friendly editor which underlays satellite imagery—on which infrastructure like roads are clearly visible—beneath the image of the world as captured by OSM. Volunteers can then trace the path of a road, as they do in this GIF, created by the DC-based start-up, Mapbox:

Mapbox

Volunteers can also trace buildings in Mapbox using the same visual editor. Since Haiyan made landfall, volunteers have traced some 30,000 buildings.

Maps, on the ground

How does that mapping data help workers on the ground in the Philippines? First, it lets workers there print paper maps using OSM data which can be distributed to workers in the field. The American Red Cross has dispatched four of its staff members to the Philippines, and one of them—Helen Welch, an information management specialist—brought with her more than 50 paper maps depicting the city of Tacloban and other badly hit areas.

The red line shows the path of super typhoon Haiyan and the colored patches show where volunteers made additions to OpenStreetMap this weekend. Notice the extent of the edits in Tacloban, a city of more than 220,000 that bore the brunt of the storm. (American Red Cross)

Those maps were printed out on Saturday, before volunteers made most of the changes to the affected area in OSM. When those, newer data are printed out on the ground, they will include almost all of the traced buildings, and rescuers will have a better sense of where “ghost” buildings should be standing. They’ll also be on paper, so workers can write, draw, and stick pins to them.

Welch landed 12 hours ago, and Kunce said they “had already pushed three to four more maps to her.”

A part of the city of Tacloban before and after it was mapped by the Humanitarian OSM Team. Roads, buildings, and bodies of water were missing before volunteers added them. (@RBanick)

The Red Cross began to investigate using geospatial data after the massive earthquake in Haiti in 2010. Using pre-existing satellite data, volunteers mapped almost the entirety of Port-au-Prince in OSM, creating data which became the backbone for software that helped organize aid and manage search-and-rescue operations.

That massive volunteer effort convinced leaders at the American Red Cross to increase the staff focusing on their digital maps, or geographic information systems (GIS). They’ve seen a huge increase in both the quality and quantity of maps since then.

But that’s not all maps can do.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), operated by the US Department of Defense, has already captured satellite imagery of the Philippines. That agency has decided where the very worst damage is, and has sent the coordinates of those areas to the Red Cross. But, as of 7 p.m. Monday, the Red Cross doesn’t have that actual imagery of those sites yet.

The goal of the Red Cross geospatial team, said Kunce, was to help workers “make decisions based on evidence, not intuition.” The team “puts as much data in the hands of responders as possible.”What does that mean? Thanks to volunteers, the Red Cross knows where roads and buildings should be. But until it gets the second set of data, describing the land after the storm, it doesn’t know where roads and buildings actually are. Until it gets the new data, its volunteers can’t decide which of, say, three roads to use to send food and water to an isolated village.

Right now, they can’t make those decisions.

Kunce said the US State Department was negotiating with the NGA for that imagery to be released to the Red Cross. But, as of publishing, it’s not there yet.

When open data advocates discuss data licenses, they rarely discuss them in terms of life-and-death. But, every hour that the Red Cross does not receive this imagery, better decisions cannot be made about where to send supplies or where to conduct rescues.

And after that imagery does arrive, OSM volunteers around the world can compare it to the pre-storm structures, marking each of the 30,000 buildings as unharmed, damaged, or destroyed. That phase, which hasn’t yet begun, will help rescuers prioritize their efforts.

OSM isn’t the only organization using online volunteers to help the Philippines: MicroMappers, run by a veteran of OSM efforts in Haiti, used volunteer-sorted tweets to determine areas which most required relief. Talking to me, Kunce said the digital “commodification of maps” generally had contributed to a flourishing in their quantity and quality across many different aid organizations.

“If you put a map in the hands of somebody, they’re going to ask for another map,” said Kunce. Let’s hope the government can put better maps in the hands of the Red Cross—and the workers on the ground—soon.

Read this article:

How Online Mapmakers Are Helping the Red Cross Save Lives in the Philippines

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Pines, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Online Mapmakers Are Helping the Red Cross Save Lives in the Philippines

Saudi Comic’s "No Woman, No Drive" Video Goes Viral, But He’s "Not a Social Activist"

by Aale Harry Posted on October 28, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The video has racked up over 3.5 million views since it was posted to YouTube on Saturday. It has received positive attention from everybody from CNN to Twitchy. And it’s drawing even more attention to the latest efforts of women in the immensely conservative Kingdom of Saudi Arabia who are protesting the country’s prohibition on women drivers. On Saturday, dozens of Saudi women defied the ban, many of them posting web videos of themselves sitting in the driver’s seat. This type of protest has happened before, but this is reportedly the largest of its kind to occur in the Kingdom.

“No Woman, No Drive” is an obvious parody of “No Woman, No Cry,” the popular reggae song by Bob Marley and the Wailers. The song is a satirical a cappella performance, with lyrics such as, “your feet is your only carriage, but only inside the house—and when I say it I mean it.”

The video was shot at the C3 Films/Telfaz11 studios in Riyadh, and was created by Hisham Fageeh, Fahad Albutairi, and Alaa Wardi, who belong to the Saudi entertainment collective Telfaz11. The group has been on the front lines of Saudi Arabia’s recent YouTube-abetted “comedic revolution,” and supports the successful Saudi YouTube sketch series La Yekthar.

“We just wanted to do something relevant and funny,” Fageeh, the 26-year-old, Riyadh-based comedian/actor, tells Mother Jones. “The lyrics happened a while back in New York City while I was taking a shower, just playing on words. And the real, materialized idea came while shooting Telfaz11 projects in London and perusing Twitter hashtags in Saudi Arabia. I had discussed the idea with Alaa Wardi a long time ago, and he was all about it. So Fahad Albutairi and I stayed up and wrote it in our London hotel room.”

Fageeh, who studied religion and the Middle East at Florida State University and worked in educational development in Rwanda, started doing stand-up comedy while living and working in Washington, DC. Fageeh then attended Columbia University, which allowed him to try out his act in New York. He lists Louis C.K., Dave Chappelle, Andy Kaufman, Zach Galifianakis, Eric Andre, and Hannibal Buress as some of his top comic influences. And for all the attention his new video is receiving as a piece of social commentary and satire, Fageeh insists that this project was not politically motivated.

“I’m not an artist or social activist, I’m a comedian,” he says. At the start of “No Woman, No Drive,” Fageeh identifies himself as a “social activist” who doesn’t “really listen to music,” which led to many news outlets referring to him as such after the video posted online. Fageeh, however, clarifies that that was just a “character bit” he was doing. “It was satirizing the valorization of titles that happen in media (and general human) interactions,” he says. When I ask Fageeh if he is passionate about issues of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, he simply responds, “I’m passionate about comedy.”

Continue Reading »

Credit:

Saudi Comic’s "No Woman, No Drive" Video Goes Viral, But He’s "Not a Social Activist"

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Saudi Comic’s "No Woman, No Drive" Video Goes Viral, But He’s "Not a Social Activist"

Court Orders Release of Dying Prisoner After 41 Years in Solitary, But Louisiana Plans to Appeal

by vserko45 Posted on October 1, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Earlier today, the chief judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana overturned the murder conviction of the dying prisoner Herman Wallace, ordering that the state “immediately release Mr. Wallace from custody.” But the state is appealing the decision.

Wallace is one of two members of the so-called Angola 3 who, along with Albert Woodfox, has been held in solitary confinement for more than 41 years. This summer, Wallace was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. He was taken off chemotherapy in September, and currently resides in a prison medical facility. The state’s reluctance to set free an aging and gravely ill prisoner highlights some of the issues covered by James Ridgeway in his award-winning story “The Other Death Sentence,” an article that chronicles the graying of America’s prison population, and the associated costs, both moral and financial.


Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons.


Interactive: Inside a Solitary Cell


What Extreme Isolation Does to Your Mind


Documents: 7 Surprising Items That Get Prisoners Thrown Into Solitary


Maps: Solitary Confinement, State by State


VIDEO: Shane Bauer Goes Back Behind Bars at Pelican Bay

See more MoJo coverage of solitary confinement.

Here’s some background on the Angola 3, from Ridgeway’s own extensive coverage of their saga.

Convicted of armed robbery, the men were sent to Angola in 1971. Wallace and Woodfox were Black Panthers, and they began organizing to improve conditions at the prison, which did not win them points with the prison administration. In 1972 they were prosecuted and convicted for the murder of a prison guard named Brent Miller. They have been fighting the conviction ever since, pointing out (PDF) that one of the eyewitnesses was legally blind and the other was a known prison snitch who was rewarded for his testimony.

After the murder, the two—along with a third inmate named Robert King—were put in solitary, where they have remained ever since. (King was released in 2001, after 29 years in solitary, when his conviction in a separate prison murder was overturned.) Several years ago, Wallace and Woodfox were transferred to separate prisons, but they are still held in solitary.

The Times Picayune reports that Baton Rouge District Attorney’s office is now in the process of filing an appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court, and will also be asking for a stay of Herman’s release. Maria Hinds, a personal advocate who’s been closely involved in Wallace’s case since 2008, says that for now, the warden at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Facility, where Wallace is being held, has refused to release him, and that Wallace’s lawyers have filed a motion for contempt of court against the warden for violating a court order.

Source:  

Court Orders Release of Dying Prisoner After 41 Years in Solitary, But Louisiana Plans to Appeal

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Court Orders Release of Dying Prisoner After 41 Years in Solitary, But Louisiana Plans to Appeal

Did US Intelligence Help Pinochet’s Junta Murder My Brother?

by JoanSanderz Posted on September 21, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On September 21, 1973, a 24-year-old U.S. citizen named Frank Teruggi Jr. was executed in the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, one of the first of thousands of victims of General Augusto Pinochet’s murderous 17-year military dictatorship. In the wake of the U.S.-backed coup that cost Frank, and so many others, their lives, I lost my older brother. Forty years after his death, my family is still seeking a modicum of truth and justice for his murder.

The story of Frank’s experience in Chile is not well-known. He was an anti-Vietnam war activist from Chicago—as a student at CalTech, he started an SDS chapter there—who enrolled in the University of Chile in early 1972, drawn by the promise of Salvador Allende’s “peaceful road to socialism.” Along with a group of North American expats that included Charles Horman, the other U.S. citizen killed in the stadium, Frank worked at a small newsletter called FIN (Fuente de Informacion Norteamericano) translating and distributing articles on the activities of the U.S. government and corporations in Chile.

During the last 20 months of his life, he sent letters home every two weeks keeping us up-to-date on his activities, as well as the increasingly dangerous political situation. When some of his letters didn’t arrive, he wrote, presciently: “Perhaps the FBI is intercepting my mail.” In another letter he cautioned, “When you get calls from people wanting my address, tell them you don’t have it. This is just a reasonable precaution in case some agency starts checking up on people in Chile. From what we read in papers down here about Watergate, Nixon’s not above doing anything or spying on anyone.”

Frank actually planned on returning home in the early summer of 1973. But a failed coup attempt in late June set off public demonstrations in support of Allende. During one march, Frank suffered a bullet wound to his ankle that required time for healing. He then decided to stay in Santiago a little longer to help establish an anti-imperialism research center at the University of Chile.

In August, his final letters arrived describing the escalating political instability in Chile. “If we all woke up tomorrow to another attempted coup, few people would be surprised. You get used to the tension, but it makes it very hard to plan my return,” he explained. “It depends on events totally beyond my control (and perhaps imagination).”

But he expressed confidence that being a U.S. citizen would somehow protect him. As he wrote in one of his last letters: “My personal position here is one of relative safety…as a foreigner, I should have little trouble leaving the country if the situation should ever get so bad that it be necessary.”

** ** **

On September 20th, 9 days after a military junta had seized power, police raided Frank’s group house on Hernan Cortes street and detained him and his American roommate, David Hathaway. They were then taken to the stadium, which Pinochet’s military had transformed into a massive detention, torture, and death camp.

For reasons that remain unclear, David was released the next day; Frank was not. Two days later my brother’s body was delivered to the city morgue bearing signs of torture and gunshot wounds. Among hundreds of other bloodied bodies, he lay there for two weeks while my family frantically contacted the U.S. Embassy to find out where he was and what had happened to him. On October 2, we received the terrible news in a phone call from a friend of Frank’s who had identified his body at the morgue.

Since that day, a 40-year-long pursuit of truth and justice for Frank has taken a dogged route. My father, Frank Sr., then a retired typesetter, was thrust into a role that he was not prepared for, but humbly embraced: to discover the truth about his son’s death. He kept Frank’s cause alive in the press, and, until his own death in 1995, pursued a 22-year-long letter writing campaign seeking answers and accountability.

In February 1974, my father flew to Santiago to find out why his son had been murdered and who had murdered him. He was accompanied by 11 prominent citizens from the Chicago area—including church leaders, politicians, union officials and lawyers. We had hoped his mission to Santiago would bring some clarity, but neither U.S. nor Chilean officials showed any interest in advancing the truth, let alone holding anyone accountable. “

“In all honesty I cannot be very optimistic about getting a fuller story at this date and after this lapse of time,” the U.S. Ambassador, David Popper, told the delegation. My father noted that the U.S. government did not seem to be making any major effort to find the truth about Frank: “It is difficult for my family to understand how the U.S. Government can be helping the Government of Chile when they don’t even answer our questions” about a murdered American.

Without any help from the Embassy, at the end of his stay in Chile my father did obtain signed testimony from a fellow prisoner that Frank had been badly tortured and killed at the National Stadium. A Belgian man imprisoned at the stadium, Andre Van Lancker, subsequently came forward to tell us that Frank had been executed by a Chilean officer who used the codename “Alfa-1 or Sigma-1” and that the military had sought to cover up Frank’s presence at the Stadium so as not to have “troubles with the government of the U.S.A.”

The Pinochet regime need not have worried. Although Ambassador Popper promised my father that they would try to “determine the facts” in Frank’s death, the Embassy soon advised the State Department, according to a declassified memorandum, that “they believe further pressure in this regard will be of no avail and merely further exacerbate bilateral relations for no benefit.”

In the name of good relations with the Pinochet regime, the U.S. government assisted a coverup of the circumstances of my brother’s death. A Chilean diplomatic note claimed, falsely, that Frank had been detained for curfew violations on September 20th and released for “lack of merit” the next day. A Chilean intelligence officer informed one U.S. official that he believed “Teruggi was picked up by his leftist friends and ultimately disposed of.” The Chilean military officially transmitted to the U.S. government their conclusion that Frank had been associated with “extreme leftist movements” in Chile and involved with some unidentified “organization” that had carried out “a campaign to discredit the Junta del Gobierno.”

My family always wondered how the Chilean military had arrived at this conclusion. NEven U.S. State Department officials later asserted that this statement “may have been based on information provided by U.S. intelligence.”

The issue of what role, if any, U.S. intelligence officials who collaborated in the coup might have played in both Frank and Charles Horman’s death remains the key mystery of this tragedy. The Academy Award-winning 1982 movie Missing, postulated that Charles had been killed because he had stumbled across information of a covert U.S. role in the coup. Among thousands of U.S. documents on Chile declassified by the Clinton administration in 1999 there is an August 1976 State Department document stating that there was “circumstantial evidence to suggest U.S. intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman’s death”—a conclusion that pertained to Frank’s case as well.

The Clinton administration also declassified a series of FBI reports which revealed that, in fact, the U.S. intelligence community had been monitoring Frank’s mail, and, as he feared, had obtained his address in Chile. In 1972, West German intelligence agents intercepted a letter Frank had sent from Chile to an anti-war dissident living in Heidelberg who was under surveillance; the Germans passed the letter and Frank’s address to the CIA and to a U.S. Army intelligence unit in Munich. The CIA subsequently provided Frank’s address in Santiago to the FBI. The FBI opened a file with documents titled, “Frank Teruggi—Subversive,” on my brother and ordered its Chicago office to begin investigating him. Whether the information they gathered was ever passed to U.S. officials in Chile, and from them to the Chilean military, remains the outstanding question in my brother’s case.

Continue Reading »

Follow this link: 

Did US Intelligence Help Pinochet’s Junta Murder My Brother?

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Did US Intelligence Help Pinochet’s Junta Murder My Brother?

"Prisoners": The Strongest Anti-Torture Argument That Has Come Out of The Movies in Years

by Charlie Smith Posted on September 20, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Prisoners
Warner Bros. Pictures
153 minutes

Prisoners is one of the year’s finest films. It’s a riveting and superbly acted two-and-a-half hours, carefully and smartly crafted by director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski.

The film focuses on the Thanksgiving kidnapping of two daughters, one from the Dover family and one from the Birches. Hugh Jackman commands the screen as Keller Dover, a father who abducts and terrorizes Alex Jones (played by Paul Dano), a mentally impaired young man who Keller is convinced took the girls and knows where they’re being held. The police investigation is led by the ultra-dedicated Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal). The movie scores high marks as a gripping mystery, and as a terrifying human drama. It’s also the best argument against torture that has emerged from the film industry in a long time.

Last year, a lengthy debate began regarding Zero Dark Thirty‘s depiction of the United States’ use of torture during the Bush administration. Some anti-torture commentators were rather generous. “It is an exposure of torture,” Andrew Sullivan wrote. “It removes any doubt that war criminals ran this country for seven years and remain at large, while they scapegoated the grunts at Abu Ghraib who were, yes, merely following their superior’s own orders.” This point, made by Sullivan and many others at the time, is (to put it politely) excessively generous, given that ZDT offers a severe mangling of recent history that gives the viewer the impression that torture was crucial in tracking down Osama bin Laden. (It simply wasn’t.) With Prisoners, however, there is no hedging on the matter. The film has nothing to do with politics or the abuses of the War on Terror, but it does depict the prolonged, illegal, and sloppy interrogation of someone for vital information.

Very quickly, Keller (Jackman) looks more like a villain than a determined and sympathetic family man. Alex’s face is swollen and bloodied beyond recognition. Shards of glass protrude from his flesh. He’s been drenched in streams of scalding water. There are serious doubts about whether Alex had anything to do with the abduction, and Keller’s “hurt him until he talks” policy grows increasingly unsuccessful and problematic.

It is an ugly, frightening, and self-defeating act that is committed out of love and desperation. And it’s a punishing depiction handled responsibly and masterfully by Villeneuve, and his cast and crew. It addresses a question we’ve heard many times before. For instance, in a 2006 episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the panel discussed the issue of Bush-era torture and “enhanced interrogation.” Actor Jason Alexander stated that if a prisoner had information on the location of his kidnapped child, he would without hesitation go “Quentin Tarantino” on him. That seems like something many parents would say, and it’s not hard to understand why. But Prisoners intelligently explores the failings of that logic. What if you have the wrong person? Is this undermining effective police work? What do you lose of yourself if you go down this road? Prisoners strips any hint of heroism or romanticism from the notion of doing “whatever it takes” to save your family. Take that, Jack Bauer.

Here’s a trailer for the powerful film:

Prisoners gets a release on Friday, September 20. The film is rated R for disturbing violent content including torture, and language throughout. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more TV and film coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

Link: 

"Prisoners": The Strongest Anti-Torture Argument That Has Come Out of The Movies in Years

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on "Prisoners": The Strongest Anti-Torture Argument That Has Come Out of The Movies in Years