By Saul Landau

As our leaders warn countries that harbor terrorists, who will warn our
leaders about harboring terrorists here?

Twenty five years ago, on September 21, 1976, agents of Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet, fatally car bombed Orlando Letelier in Washington DC.
Ronni Moffitt, Letelier's young American colleague at the Institute for
Policy Studies, also died in the bombing. Letelier had served as Chilean
Defense Minister under the government of Dr. Salvador Allende until the
1973 US-backed coup overthrew him.

Pinochet, the FBI discovered, had targeted Letelier as a key enemy. Three
months before his assassins struck, Pinochet had mentioned Letelier's name
twice to Henry Kissinger as the source of his regime's troubles in
Washington. Senator Ted Kennedy had introduced a bill to ban US military
supplies to human rights violators. In this conversation, according to a
State Department "Memcom," Kissinger had reassured the Chilean dictator
that he would help him get some F5 fighters and that we "approved of his
methods." Yet, Kissinger knew that Pinochet's methods reached beyond the
murder and torture of thousands of his political opponents in Chile.
Indeed, in 1974 US intelligence officials had helped Pinochet set up
Operation Condor, a network of Latin American secret police agencies to spy on and
assassinate their enemies in other countries.

A week after the assassination in Washington, FBI Agent Robert Scherer
reported in a cable to the FBI's Washington Field Office that Operation
Condor might have killed Letelier. The CIA had named Pinochet as Condor I, an indication of
his importance in that terrorist network. Tens of
thousands of Condor documents discovered in Paraguay point to a high level of US involvement
in this terrorist ring that operated for more than a
decade in many countries around the world.

The FBI ultimately found the Letelier-Moffitt killers and the Department of
Justice indicted them, including Pinochet's secret police chief. But
Pinochet, the terrorist in chief, eluded indictment. Even the FBI agents
and the Assistant US Attorneys publicly stated that it is "inconceivable"
that the Letelier assassination could have occurred without Pinochet's
authorization. Yet, the indictment of Pinochet today sits unsigned on the
desk of the Washington DC US Attorney. Why? Who is being protected? Who fears that
Pinochet might testify in court and name certain prominent
Americans as his terrorist collaborators?

This year, President Bush's anti-Castro Cuban pals -- to whom W owes a
large debt -- lobbied successfully to free Virgilio Paz and Jose Dionisio
Suarez, two of the Letelier-Moffitt killers who had pled guilty and served
a few years. After the Supreme Court decided that the INS could not hold
aliens indefinitely for deportation, these two terrorists -- their actions
were not limited to killing Letelier and Moffitt -- began walking the
streets along with Michael Townley, the bomber in chief for Pinochet's
secret police. Townley had boasted to the FBI of the multiple ways he knew
to murder people. This terrorist enjoys US protection from extradition for
his other terrorist crimes -- including the 1974 car bombing in Buenos
Aires of exiled Chilean Chief of Staff, General Carlos Prats and his wife
and the 1975 shooting of exiled Chilean politician Bernardo Leighton and
his wife in Rome. Townley has confessed to his key role in both of those
assassination plots. Yet, our tough talking Attorney General harbors him.

Orlando Bosch who boasted about his role in bombing a Cuban commercial
airliner over Barbados with 73 people on board enjoys his Florida
retirement thanks to President Bush the first, who welcomed this terrorist
into our country from Venezuela where he faced charges for his dastardly
deed. Lt. Colonel Oliver North gleefully hired Luis Posada Carriles,
Bosch's cohort in the airplane bombing and subsequently the organizer of
the bombings of Cuba's tourist spots in the 1990s. High US officials like
Eliot Abrams who holds the Latin America portfolio at the National Security
Council, had regular and friendly dealings with people who mined
Nicaragua's harbors and plotted bombings and assassinations. The list runs
long of people who ordered bombings of other countries, assassinations of
individuals and campaigns of terrorist violence against other nations.

The case brought against Pinochet in Spain, as it moved to the House of
Lords for final appeal, established a very important point for those who
talk tough about terrorism but behave opportunistically when the terrorists
are in their administration. There is a clear difference, established in
law and Treaty, between a political and a criminal act. So, as people
remember the horrible September 21, 1975 car bombing in Washington DC, and
the assassinations of countless of Pinochet's victims and of those on board
the downed Cuban airliner, let's also begin to examine the harboring of a
man who might well be labeled as one of the world's most important
terrorists: Henry Kissinger.

For more information on "Pinochet Watch," contact Stacie Jonas, Institute
for Policy Studies, 733 15th St. NW, #1020, Washington, DC 20005. Tel:
202/234-9382, ext. 239. Fax: 202/387-7915. Email: s-jonas@mindspring.com.
For previous issues, go to
http://www.tni.org/campaigns/pinochet/watch/watch.htm.

The Institute for Policy Studies is an independent center for research and
education founded in 1963. IPS has worked to bring Pinochet to justice
since the murders of two IPS colleagues, Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen
Moffitt, at the hands of Pinochet's agents, in 1976.

Copyright 2001 Institute for Policy Studies