Bush as Bad as Pinochet

Paul Craig Roberts makes a good case.

General Augusto Pinochet, approaching his 90th year, has survived many years of legal harassments resulting from alleged human rights violations during the period of the Chilean military government's war on terrorism. On the basis of a U.S. Senate staff report, Pinochet is now going to be investigated for stashing $13 million in U.S. banks.

What is interesting about the Pinochet case is that everything the former president of Chile is accused of, George W. Bush and his cronies are guilty of. Indeed, why are Senate staff wasting their time on 30-year-old alleged crimes of an elderly Chilean when the president of the United States ought to be in the dock? The prosecutor's brief – the Downing Street Memo – is already written.

In December 2004, a Chilean appeals court ruled that Pinochet could be put on trial for murders resulting from Operation Condor. An agreement by six South American governments in the 1970s, Condor was a "coalition of the willing" organized to hunt down and kill the terrorists who were attempting to destabilize their societies.

How does Operation Condor differ from the actions of the U.S. and Israeli governments to hunt down and kill terrorists? Both George Bush and Ariel Sharon have used precision missiles, snipers, and special forces hit teams to "take out" suspected terrorists, often with collateral damage. Why can Bush and Sharon conduct a war on terror, but not Pinochet?

Given what we know about the "collateral damage" that often accompanies the "taking out" of terrorists and about the large number of innocent detainees mistaken for terrorists and held in America's gulag of detention centers, it is more than likely that Pinochet's war on terror had collateral damage of its own.