New documents link Kissinger, Bush senior to Letelier assassination
CIA, State Department role in Operation Condor
By Patrick Martin
wsws.org, 20 April 2010
Documents released last week by the National Security Archive, which has played a valuable role in uncovering evidence of the crimes of American imperialism in Latin America, provide new details on the role of top US officials in facilitating the assassination of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier.
These documents add to the overwhelming case for the prosecution of then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger, then-CIA director George H. W. Bush and other top officials for their role in these and other murders perpetrated by military juntas allied with and backed by the US government.
The September 21, 1976 murder of Letelier and an American aide, Ronni Moffitt, was the most spectacular act of international terrorism on US soil up to that time. The two were killed, and Moffitt’s husband Michael wounded, when a bomb detonated underneath their car as they rounded Sheridan Circle in northwest Washington D.C., barely a mile from the White House.
Letelier, who had served as foreign minister and then defense minister in the reformist government of Salvador Allende, was arrested and tortured in the September 11, 1973 military coup lead by General Augusto Pinochet. He was eventually sent into exile, but became a thorn in the side of the Chilean junta because of his political activities abroad, exposing the savagery of the junta’s repression and campaigning for an international boycott.
Michael Townley, an American citizen working for DINA, the intelligence service of the Chilean military junta, was identified as the manufacturer of the bomb that killed Letelier and Ronni Moffitt. In April 1978, he was extradited from Chile under an agreement that limited his potential sentence and protected the top Chilean and US government officials, who were responsible for ordering the bombing.
Townley served only five years of a ten-year term, and then was placed in the federal witness protection program. Some 27 years after his release from prison, the admitted terror-bomber still enjoys the protection of the US government—and in its service, he may well continue to employ his bomb-making skills.
A Chilean Army captain, Armando Fernandez Larios, and three anti-Castro Cuban exiles, Alvin Ross Diaz, Guillermo Novo Sampoll and his brother Ignacio Novo Sampoll, were convicted in the same trial. The Cubans had long records of right-wing terrorism, much of it while in the employ of the CIA.
Townley testified at the trial that the assassination was ordered by the head of DINA, Manuel Contreras, who reported only to Pinochet. It was carried out in collaboration with the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), a Cuban exile group headed by Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, who approved the attack and supplied the operatives who actually planted the bomb that Townley built.
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http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/04/lete-a20.html
Thank you, grasswire. Never forget Orlando Bosch.
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