Poet's Granddaughter Seeks Killing Probe

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Poet's Granddaughter Seeks Killing Probe
By RAUL GARCES and DANIEL ZADUNAISKY – 50 minutes ago

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP) — The granddaughter of Argentine poet Juan Gelman urged Uruguayan courts to reopen a probe into the 1976 disappearance of her dissident mother on Wednesday, weeks before her grandfather is to receive the Spanish-speaking world's most prestigious literary prize.

Macarena Gelman's mother was pregnant when she was abducted in Buenos Aires in 1976 and sent secretly to Uruguay, where she disappeared under the custody of dictatorship-era security forces, Argentine court officials charge.

Gelman was born in captivity and raised by a military family who adopted her without knowing her true identity, she said.

"I found out in 2000 that I was really the daughter of Maria Claudia" Irureta Goyena, she told a news conference on Wednesday. "If anyone has any information about where the remains of my mother are, please say."



Read more: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i_yGM09gjREwkKGvKaGzk575layAD8V2SOB02

---

Edited to add photos:



Ms. Gelman, her mother, María Claudia García Irureta Goyena, and father, Marcelo Ariel Gelman.

[Judi Lynn]

1. More on the story: Daughter Demands Truth in Uruguay

Daughter Demands Truth in Uruguay

Montevideo, Feb 26 (Prensa Latina) Macarena Gelman will ask Uruguayan justice on Wednesday to reopen the investigation of the disappearance of her mother, Maria Claudia Garcia, a victim of the Condor Operation in 1976.

Ms. Gelman's attorney Jose Luis Gonzalez explained on Tuesday this will be the first time that Macarena herself will request reopening the case; earlier her grandfather, Argentine writer Juan Gelman had done so.

The young woman's parents, Marcelo Gelman and Maria Claudia Garcia, were kidnapped in Buenos Aires, Argentina in August 1976, and confined in the notorious Automotores Orletti detention and torture center.

Gelman's request to the Uruguayan court will be based "on facts originated from investigations into the second flight from Orletti in October 1976," when Maria Claudia was supposed to be transferred from Buenos Aires to Montevideo.

Marcelo was assassinated and thrown to the Tiger Delta in a barrel, while Maria Claudia was transferred to Uruguay and confined in the Information and Defense Service headquarters.

The young woman gave birth to a girl, Macarena, on November 1. The baby was given to the family of a Uruguayan police agent until her grandfather Juan found her in the year 2000, when she was 23.

More:
~~~~ link ~~~~

[Judi Lynn]

2. To refresh your memory on Operation Condor:

March 6, 2001
On March 6, 2001, The New York Times reported the existence of a recently declassified State Department document revealing that the United States facilitated communications among South American intelligence chiefs who were working together to eliminate left-wing opposition groups in their countries as part of a covert program known as Operation Condor.
The document, a 1978 cable from Robert E. White, the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, was discovered by Professor J. Patrice McSherry of Long Island University, who has published several articles on Condor. She called the cable "another piece of increasingly weighty evidence suggesting that U.S. military and intelligence officials supported and collaborated with Condor as a secret partner or sponsor."

In the cable, Ambassador White relates a conversation with General Alejandro Fretes Davalos, chief of staff of Paraguay's armed forces, who told him that the South American intelligence chiefs involved in Condor "keep in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which covers all of Latin America." This installation is "employed to co-ordinate intelligence information among the southern cone countries." White, whose message was sent to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, is concerned that the U.S. connection to Condor might be revealed during the then ongoing investigation into the deaths of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt who were killed by a car bomb in Washington, D.C. "It would seem advisable," he suggests, "to review this arrangement to insure that its continuation is in U.S. interest."

The document was found among 16,000 State, CIA, White House, Defense and Justice Department records released last November on the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and Washington’s role in the violent coup that brought his military regime to power. The release was the fourth and final "tranche" of records released under the Clinton Administration's special Chile Declassification Project.

"This document opens a pandora's box of questions on the U.S. knowledge of, and role in, Operation Condor," said Senior Analyst Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project.

The Archive published a second document - a page from a CIA cable regarding Brazil's role in Operation Condor - that Kornbluh said contained information that could shed light on this issue. The undated page refers to "CondorTel" - the "communications network established by the Condor countries." Kornbluh pointed out that the entire next line has been censored by the CIA.

The National Security Archive called on the U.S. Intelligence Community - NSA, CIA, DIA and other Defense Department bureaus at the U.S. Southern Command - to fully divulge their files on communications assistance to the military regimes in the southern cone.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010306/

[truedelphi]

3. Thank you for posting all this.

Operation Condor and the entire style of South American dictatorship with the many disappearances of the people that they judged to be "dissidents" is a scary facet of recent history.

[Judi Lynn]

7. It seems we are truly the last ones to find out, too, doesn't it?

It has taken DECADES.

If we somehow are allowed to have a Democratic President soon, we can only hope that President will RE-DECLASSIFY the documents which _{George W. Bush} has had RECLASSIFIED, and were available to the U.S. public only a while before he had them all sealed again as soon as he stole the White House.

It's absolutely crazy that we have so many people who haven't taken time to listen, and to think things through, who simply believe people south of the border are hot-headed, unstabled, undisciplined, and unable to govern themselves, thereby requiring our military presence and domination, and perpetual meddling.

You may recall Kissinger's remark that the people of Chile shouldn't be allowed to ""go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." As IF that's any of any other country's business. Sick, isn't it? It's good to know that Kissinger, still beloved of our own right wing is wanted in other countries, and will be for the rest of his life.

The Case Against Henry Kissinger
Part One
The making of a war criminal
by Christopher Hitchens
Harpers magazine, March 2001
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/CaseAgainst1_Hitchens.html

[bluesmail]

4. I also appreciate all your postings, Thank You

Recommend

[Judi Lynn]

8. Very glad you've joined DU and are moving ahead with many of us who are trying to get our own

grasp of what U.S. policy has really been. You've probably already seen how many have refused to allow the facts to be discussed without trying to throw up every possible denial and disruption.

One way or another, those of us who care about these things for unshakable reasons are NOT going to be shouted down by right-wingers attempting to challenge our "patriotism," and values.

You've noticed, I'm hoping, Democrats bring facts, with links, and right-wingers bring only insults and deviant slurs.

It's easy to tell the two kinds of people apart after watching the results.

Thank you, bluesmail. Welcome to D.U. :hi: :hi: :hi: :hi:

[msedano]

5. Novelists cover some of the same ground

Reading these heartbreaking, stomach-turning stories leaves me stunned at the depths of depravity people sink to for their right wing political beliefs. Sometimes the truths can be more effectively conveyed in fiction. You can read them and tell youself, "It's only a novel. It's only a novel."

http://labloga.blogspot.com/2007/06/review-tango-for-torturer-daniel.html

Tango for a Torturer makes an excellent companion to other torture-themed works. I recommend reading Chavarria and two others, Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden and Lawrence Thornton’s Imagining Argentina. In Thornton’s book, a husband goes in search of his disappeared wife, in the process revealing horrors such as sexual torture and child-stealing. Dorfman’s brings a torture victim face to face with her torturer, a guest in her own home.


recommended

[Judi Lynn]

9. I've heard the two last two titles you posted. Will be looking forward to becoming acquainted with

them. I believe both of them also have movie versions (don't know if they do the books justice or not) as well.

A living personality to honor is Jennifer Harbury. I first heard of this woman from DU'er Say_What, and everything I've heard about her through reading since then has been absolutely irreplaceable.

It may be that the only worthwhile work disgraced New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Torricelli did was to work hard to help Ms. Harbury FINALLY learn what had happened to her husband.


From The Nation:

posted April 4, 2002 (April 22, 2002 issue)
Lying in State
Eric Alterman

How cool is Jennifer Harbury? She is currently arguing her own case before the Supreme Court, demanding the right to sue the government because, she maintains, its leaders deliberately misled her about the murder of her husband, a Guatemalan rebel leader named Efrain Bamaca Velasquez who was killed in army custody during the counterinsurgency war in Guatemala in the early 1990s.

Harbury has a case. The State Department has confirmed that Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, who was present during Bamaca's interrogation/murder, was a paid CIA asset. A CIA report alleges that Alpirez did the dirty deed himself. When then-State Department official Richard Nuccio informed Senator Robert Torricelli of that, Nuccio immediately found himself the target of a Justice Department investigation. A federal prosecutor accused him of betraying America by conspiring with Torricelli to blow Alpirez's cover, of destroying CIA officers' careers and of being an agent of the guerrillas. Although the United States offered no official charges or accusations, in a highly unusual move the CIA demanded that the State Department strip Nuccio of his security clearance, thereby depriving him of his livelihood. Harbury endured a thirty-two-day hunger strike to force those officials to come clean. She is now arguing that she could have saved her husband's life through the US court system had she known the truth during the period between his capture in March 1992 and his murder in 1993 or 1994.

A report by the President's Intelligence Oversight Board rejected the charge of deliberate lying by US officials but admitted that if the government had bothered to investigate "when Jennifer Harbury first raised the issue of her husband's fate" in the spring of 1992, the State Department "might have been able at a much earlier date to provide her with useful information." The key word here appears to be "useful."

Warren Christopher, Anthony Lake and the other Clinton Administration officials named by Harbury are probably right when they argue that leveling with her at the time would have made little difference in saving her husband's life. US courts do not have jurisdiction over the Guatemalan military (though US foreign policy officials often do). They also deny that they lied. But for procedural reasons, the ex-officials have to argue that regardless of whether they lied, a US citizen has no legal right to sue a public official who does lie. Solicitor General Theodore Olson filed an amicus brief arguing on behalf of the government's right to lie: "It is an unfortunate reality that the issuance of incomplete information and even misinformation by government may sometimes be perceived as necessary to protect vital interests," he maintains.

This particular case stinks for more reasons than can be precisely counted. In addition to the above, Bamaca was killed by a genocidal government that enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. This is not only my opinion; it is the view of the Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission's 1999 report, which condemns the United States for aiding a "criminal counterinsurgency" against the nation's indigenous Mayan population. America's Guatemala policy was anticommunism gone mad.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020422/alterman

Book:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51BDR61YANL._BO2,204,203,200_PIlitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_OU01_AA240_SH20_.jpg
December 17, 2007
Interrogation or Torture?

by Jennifer Harbury

The issue of water-boarding has become quite the political flashpoint in recent weeks. First there was an uproar when Michael Mukasey, now our Attorney General, stated his uncertainty as to whether or not this “interrogation” technique constituted torture. Shamefully, he is not alone. Many officials in our intelligence community insist that it does not. (Perhaps they should give it a try.) Next, Congressional leaders urged that this and other special CIA methods be banned for good, with predictable protests from the White House. Now we learn that the CIA has destroyed secret videotapes of two high value detainees being subjected to water-boarding. Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who gave the order, is a colleague of Terry Ward, who covered up my husband’s ongoing torture and eventual murder in Guatemala years ago. There are too many historical ironies here.

To begin with, the sanitized and highly deceptive language being used should itself be banned. Duping the American public is hardly the proper solution to international charges of war crimes. Our intelligence leaders tell us that water-boarding consists of placing a cloth over the prisoner’s face, then pouring water over him until he "thinks he is going to drown." This sounds like little more than a scare technique. The description is so benign, in fact, that one wonders how the method could convince any prisoner to talk.

A number of my friends survived water-boarding sessions in Latin America, and they give a rather different description. As my friend "O," a former POW in Guatemala tells me, his army tormentors immersed him in a vat of water. He tried desperately to hold his breath, but finally the water rushed into his head, causing terrible pain. He remembers gagging and choking, and a mounting pressure that made him think his eardrums would burst. He felt himself vomiting and going into convulsions. He awoke on the floor to find his torturers administering CPR. We shared this description with the United Nations Committee Against Torture last year. The Committee members had no difficulty in declaring this technique a form of torture, and banning it outright. Senator John McCain, himself a torture survivor, has long said the same. Water-boarding is a slow and very painful mock execution, in short, "exquisite torture."

Even more disturbing is the fact that many of these Latin American prisoners were tortured with the guidance, payment and even presence of CIA agents. In the case of "O," an American entered his secret cell, observed his shocking condition, questioned him for some time, then simply walked away. Ines Murillo was severely tortured in Honduras by members of Batallion 316. She endured "stress positions”"that permanently damaged her arms and shoulders, and was water boarded until she lost consciousness. She has long reported that an American came by often to ask questions, observe and advise. The CIA brass, reluctantly, has admitted the man was one of their agents. These cases were not rare. They were common.

More:
http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2007/12/interrogation-o.html

[msedano]

12. A Costa-Gavras movie with Jack Lemmon set in Chile, "Missing"

was graphic and good, but I haven't seen the other movies. I saw the Dorfman "Death and the Maiden" on the stage, plus another Dorfman play, available as a novel I haven't read but the play was moving, "Widows". Mothers and wives waiting by the river for another body to float past, retrieve it, identify the person. Grim, powerful stuff. The Chavarria novel credits the School of the Americas for developing the torturing skills of our South American friends. I wonder how much is home grown evil, how much is part of our export balance sheet?

[Judi Lynn]

13. The images you mention appearing in “Widows” immediately reminded me

of this painting of an old man in Santiago, Chile, watching the Mapocho River, where people saw a constant stream of victims floating by during U.S. placed and supported coup dictator and monster, Augusto Pinochet. I added a photo of the river:





I used to read the writing between some people who had lived in Argentina and Chile during those years, and in both countries bodies were seen frequently flowing by in the current right in the middle of towns, political murder victims of the U.S. supported right-wing regimes.

I have a photo which I’ve misplaced, showing people in Santiago standing on the sidewalk, looking over a fence to the water below as the body of a young man flows by in the river. It’s amazing someone took this horrendous experience and has made it real to theater goers for the world ahead to know about. I’m definitely interested in finding out about the play now.

As for home grown evil, apparently it has been around far longer than we had been led to believe. Once you start looking for material on Dan Mitrione, you are going to have a lot ahead to absorb in horror. He was the subject of the almost completely suppressed movie by Costa-Gavras, “State of Siege.” It was WILDLY dissed here, and very, VERY few people ever saw it in the U.S.

Here’s information on Dan Mitrione, a former police chief from Indiana, who originally joined the State Department during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower:

Uruguay 1964-1970
Torture - as American as apple pie
excerpted from the book
Killing Hope
by William Blum


"The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.''

The words of an instructor in the art of torture. The words of Dan Mitrione, the head of the Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission in Montevideo.
Officially, OPS was a division of the Agency for International Development, but the director of OPS in Washington, Byron Engle, was an old CIA hand. His organization maintained a close working relationship with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under OPS cover, although Mitrione was not one of them.
OPS had been operating formally in Uruguay since 1965, supplying the police with the equipment, the arms, and the training it was created to do. Four years later, when Mitrione arrived, the Uruguayans had a special need for OPS services. The country was in the midst of a long-running economic decline, its once-heralded prosperity and democracy sinking fast toward the level of its South American neighbors. Labor strikes, student demonstrations, and militant street violence had become normal events during the past year, and, most worrisome to the Uruguayan authorities, there were the revolutionaries who called themselves Tupamaros. Perhaps the cleverest, most resourceful and most sophisticated urban guerrillas the world has ever seen, the Tupamaros had a deft touch for capturing the public's imagination with outrageous actions, and winning sympathizers with their Robin Hood philosophy. Their members and secret partisans held key positions in the government, banks, universities, and the professions, as well as in the military and police.

"Unlike other Latin-American guerrilla groups," the New York Times stated in 1970 "the Tupamaros normally avoid bloodshed when possible. They try instead to create embarrassment for the Government and general disorder." A favorite tactic was to raid the files of a private corporation to expose corruption and deceit in high places, or kidnap a prominent figure and try him before a "People's Court". It was heady stuff to choose a public villain whose acts went uncensored by the legislature, the courts and the press, subject him to an informed and uncompromising interrogation, and then publicize the results of the intriguing dialogue. Once they ransacked an exclusive high-class nightclub and scrawled the walls perhaps their most memorable slogan: "O Bailan Todos O No Baila Nadie -- Either everyone dances or no one dances."

Dan Mitrione did not introduce the practice of torturing political prisoners to Uruguay It had been perpetrated by the police at times from at least the early 1960s. However, in surprising interview given to a leading Brazilian newspaper in 1970, the former Uruguayan Chief of Police Intelligence, Alejandro Otero, declared that US advisers, and in particular Mitrione, had instituted torture as a more routine measure; to the means of inflicting pain they had added scientific refinement; and to that a psychology to create despair, such as playing a tape in the next room of women and children screaming and telling the prisoners that it was his family being tortured.

More:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Uruguay_KH.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 11, 1979 A1

Mr. Hevia had served the C.I.A. in Uruguay’s police program. In 1970, his duties brought him in contact with Dan Mitrione, the United States policy adviser who was kidnapped by the Tupamaro revolutionaries later that year and shot to death when the Uruguayan Government refused to save him by yielding up politician prisoners.
Mr. Mitrione has become notorious throughout Latin America. But few men ever had the chance to sit with him and discuss his rationale for torture. Mr. Hevia had once.

Now, reading Mr. Hevia’s version, which I believe to be accurate, I see that I too had resisted acknowledging how drastically a man’s career can deform him. I was aware that Mr. Mitrione knew of the tortures and condoned them. That was bad enough. I could not believe even worse of a family man. A Midwesterner. An American.

Thanks to Mr. Hevia, I was finally hearing Mr. Mitrione’s true voice:

"When you receive a subject, the first thing to do is to determine his physical state, his degree of resistance, through a medical examination. A premature death means a failure by the technician.

"Another important thing to know is exactly how far you can go given the political situation and the personality of the prisoner. It is very important to know beforehand whether we have the luxury of letting the subject die…
"Before all else, you must be efficient. You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more. We must control our tempers in any case. You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist…

A few months later, Mr. Mitrione paid with his life for those excesses. Five years late, thanks to the effort of such men as former Senator James Abourezk, the police advisory program was finally abolished.

But few of the accomplices in torture have ever been called to account. Years ago in open hearings, Senator Frank church tried to force some admissions but his witnesses sidestepped his staff’s sketchy allegations. Given the willingness of congress to accept the C.I.A.’s alibis about national security, I don’t think any other public hearings would fare better.

More:
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/langguthleaf.html



Dan Mitrione

It’s important to note that when he was murdered (shot, not tortured) his body was flown home by Richard Nixon who gave him a hero’s funeral, sending his son-in-law, David Eisenhower, and his press secretary to speak at the funeral, while Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis went to his town to do a benefit to raise money for his family of 9 kids, and a wife. Figures, doesn’t it?

[Judi Lynn]

14. Asa post script to the first source, an excerpt to show the cross-over to the drug-war!

~snip~
The film "State of Siege" appeared in 1972. It centered around Mitrione and the Tupamaros and depicted a Uruguayan police officer receiving training at a secret bomb school in the United States, though the film strove more to provide a composite picture of the role played by the US in repression throughout Latin America. A scheduled premier showing of the film at the federally-funded John F. Kennedy Arts Center in Washington was canceled. There was already growing public and congressional criticism of this dark side of American foreign policy without adding to it. During the mid-1970s, however, Congress enacted several pieces of legislation which abolished the entire Public Safety Program. In its time, OPS had provided training for more than one million policemen in the Third World. Ten thousand of them had received advance training in the United States. An estimated $150 million worth of equipment had been shipped to police forces abroad. Now, the "export of repression' was to cease.

That was on paper. The reality appears to be somewhat different.

To a large extent, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) simply picked up where OPS had left off. The drug agency was ideally suited for the task, for its agents were already deployed all over Latin America and elsewhere overseas in routine liaison with foreign police forces. The DEA acknowledged in 1975 that 53 "former" employees of the CIA were now on its staff and that there was a close working relationship between the two agencies. The following year, the General Accounting Office reported that DEA agents were engaging in many of the same activities the OPS had been carrying out.

In addition, some training of foreign policemen was transferred to FBI schools in Washington and Quantico, Virginia; the Defense Department continued to supply police type equipment to military units engaged in internal security operations; and American arms manufacturers were doing a booming business furnishing arms and training to Third World governments. In some countries, contact between these companies and foreign law enforcement officials was facilitated by the US Embassy or military mission. The largest of the arms manufacturers, Smith and Wesson, ran its own Academy in Springfield Massachusetts, which provided American and foreign "public and industrial security forces with expert training in riot control".

Said Argentine Minister Jose Lopez Rega at the signing of a US-Argentina anti-drug treaty in 1974: "We hope to wipe out the drug traffic in Argentina. We have caught guerrillas after attacks who were high on drugs. The guerrillas are the main drug users in Argentina. Therefore, this anti-drug campaign will automatically be an anti-guerrilla campaign as well.

And in 1981, a former Uruguayan intelligence officer declared that US manuals were being used to teach techniques of torture to his country's military. He said that most of the officers who trained him had attended classes run by the United States in Panama. Among other niceties, the manuals listed 35 nerve points where electrodes could be applied.
*****

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Uruguay_KH.html

Real food for thought, isn't it? Shows the process was already spelled out to move from killing only "leftists" to expanding to include EVERYONE who wasn't right-wing, one way or another.

As we know now, in Colombia, both the military and the death squads have been discovered to kill innocent citizens it doesn't want around, then dress them in the clothing of the rebels, and claim they were combatants, no matter how well people know it to be a complete lie. Who's going to challenge THE KILLERS, anyway? People just get up, run away, leave their homes, their farms, and have created what is known elsewhere in the world, and by human rights organizations as the LARGEST HUMAN DISPLACEMENT in the world outside the Sudan. That information is simply not considered any of our business by our corporate media, so they don't bother to publish it.

[msedano]

15. How close I must have come to a SOA scholarship...

When I was being processed into the Army at Ft. Ord in Jan 1969, I tested high in a couple of languages. As a reward, the Army offered to send me to Texas to learn Vietnamese and interrogation. I declined. The officer exploded at me, "Sedano, you just don't want to go to Vietnam!" "No, sir, I don't" I replied. Then I was offered a shot at advanced Spanish and likely a career in South America. i'm sure my chicano accent woulda given me away, but the temptation of the Monterey Language School had me think about the offer overnight. I wonder, are the Mitrione's of the world born, or made?

[Peace Patriot]

16. I think the problem is that they are mostly "made." Indeed, you can't really be

around infants and small children, and interact with them and observe them, and see how responsive they naturally are to love and loving guidance, and believe that ANY infant or small child could grow up to commit the atrocities we've seen by U.S. agents and their trainees in Latin America (and other places), without the intervention of some sadistic agency that traumatizes their vulnerable young psyches. I frankly think that such horrors--and also most murders--are the end-result of early childhood trauma--sadistic treatment, lack of love, lack of understanding, neglect or over-control, and other abuses, that the receptive child-mind is so vulnerable to. An adult, or young adult, who may be enticed into torturing others--by propaganda or rewards--who has NOT been traumatized as a child, will eventually react against it, and bail out, object, consider whistleblowing, etc. The early childhood traumatized person becomes addicted to this awful power over others, and loses his way--his human sensibilities.

But I would say also that we MUST recognize that we are all CAPABLE of heinous acts. That is the beginning of understanding--not to regard those who torture as some kind of "animal" or "subhuman," but as human, like all of us--a human who has been traumatized and has fewer defenses against the allure of power that torture and murder can have. I also think that it is very difficult to judge people, and that society should, of course, act to protect itself and protect innocents, by imprisoning those who torture and murder, but that the thrust of the society's policy should be to heal those persons, or give them the opportunity to heal themselves. They are alienated from the human family, and that is NOT natural.

In terms of judging people, the higher you go, the more real blame and irredeemable moral rottenness you find. Compare, for instance, the culpability of the low level soldiers at Abu Ghraib to the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales and other perpetrators of the torture policy. The low level soldiers were wrong, and had lost their way, perhaps because of trauma they had suffered as children, but they were given leave--encouraged--to inflict sadistic and murderous acts on others. They may have gone their whole lives without seriously harming anyone if the Bush Junta hadn't created a sadistic policy of terrorizing prisoners.

And for the upper levels of culpability, it would be hard to know what to do with Bush, et al, if we, as a society, are ever able to obtain justice with regard to them. My favorite fantasy punishment for them is a lifetime sentence of cleaning bedpans in veterans hospitals' (after they give all the money back). I don't think "an eye for an eye" ever works, and it is morally and spiritually devastating to human culture for people to believe that you "balance" evil with more evil. It's difficult to avoid sometimes, when the evil has been very great. But you simply can't purge evil that way. It will come back--often magnified tenfold. You must find a way to...kill it with love. That's a good way to put what I think. You mustn't kill the person--as we do with capital punishment. You must kill the evil spirit. And the only way I know of to do that is to give the person who has committed great evil the opportunity to understand himself, and to rid himself of his inner demons. And he can't do that dead. And you can't force him to do that with any "eye for an eye" punishment. You have to find a way AROUND the evil. Cleaning bedpans in veterans' hospitals might make Bush, et al, even more ferociously full of hate, but at least it gives them the opportunity to think about things, to go a different way, to redeem themselves.

And of course we'd put computer chips in their heels so we always know where they are.

Har-har. (Sometimes you gotta laugh.)

I'd say that, whatever circumstances (or just your own good sense) got you away from training at the Monterey Language School was a great blessing. None of us knows how we would behave, really, under intense propaganda or coercion. We sometimes just drift along with compromises until we're brought up short, staring evil in the face. And THEN what do you do? Your choices about it become very narrow and dangerous. I shudder to think how many people in our military, or intelligence community, or political establishment, have some up against that horror, recently. Enticed into evil, and then...where's the exit? What do you do, now that you are complicit? Or what do you do when you reach the point that your personal line of honor has been crossed, or is about to be crossed? Thousands, I should think. Tens of thousands. You were spared that. Be grateful. And accept my congratulations and praise for that wise choice. There is heroism in what people will NOT do--a thing we don't hear much about--as well as in what people positively undertake for the good of all. NOT doing evil can be a lot harder, because there are generally no rewards for it. Let me honor you here--and your parents, and your teachers, and all who helped form you--for what you did NOT do in Vietnam, and Latin America. You are a hero in my book. Thank you!

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

6. K & R. Learning all the time.

:kick:

[Judi Lynn]

10. Thank you. Many of us (I hope) are all in this together. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

11. Argentina relives scandal of babies stolen from (tortured & executed) political prisoners

Argentina relives scandal of babies stolen from political prisoners
By Paul Scheltus in Buenos Aires
Thursday, 28 February 2008

The 9-millimetre gun and the letter found next to the lifeless body of Lt-Col Paul Alberto Ravone seemed to indicate suicide. Argentine human rights groups, however, suspect foul play as he is not the first key witness in a baby-theft trial to turn up dead.

In a series of cases gripping Argentina, men and women are on trial for stealing newborn babies from political prisoners during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Couples faithful to the regime illegally adopted the babies, supposedly raising them free of "subversive doctrines". Meanwhile, their mothers were "disappeared," in many cases thrown from planes into the sea, in what was known as the "Dirty War".

Ravone, 65 and retired, was due to testify on 3 March in a case involving the theft of twins born to a political dissident in a military hospital in 1976. Shortly before, the twins' parents had been arrested and joined the ranks of the 30,000 desaparecidos or disappeared.

Although the police suspect suicide, the human rights group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo expressed their doubts after Ravone's body was found on Monday. Estela de Carlotto, the leader of the group searching for their abducted grandchildren, claims that witnesses are being "eliminated."

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/argentina-relives-scandal-of-babies-stolen-from-political-prisoners-788588.html