[fastpat]

Part one

'It Can't Happen Here'

by Jacob G. Hornberger

In my article “The Pentagon’s Power to Arrest, Torture, and Execute Americans,” I explained that the post–9/11 power to designate Americans as “enemy combatants” in the “war on terror” has revolutionized America’s legal system by enabling the Pentagon to circumvent the rights and guarantees in the Bill of Rights. In my article “The Critical Dilemma Facing Pro-War Libertarians,” I explained that 9/11 has confronted pro-war libertarians with what undoubtedly is one of the biggest moral and philosophical quandaries of their lives – whether to remain committed to a conservative foreign policy, thereby giving up their commitment to a free society, or to embrace libertarian principles in both domestic and foreign affairs.

It might be tempting for people to avoid confronting these critical issues head-on by convincing themselves that there really isn’t any great danger to the American people by this post–9/11 assumption of omnipotent military power over the citizenry. There is no need to overreact to the assumption of such power, people might think. Let’s just wait and see how things develop. If it looks like the power is being abused, we can then do something about it.

There are big problems, however, with that wait-and-see attitude. One problem is that if circumstances present themselves in which the military is rounding up American “terrorists” and torturing and executing them, the environment of crisis and fear will inevitably silence the populace. In other words, it will be too late to protest because it will be too dangerous to protest. Another problem is that by the time any protests proved to be effective, lots of Americans will have already been tortured and executed.

If you don’t believe me, just ask the Chilean people. Several years ago, while I was traveling in Chile, I noticed a reticence among Chilean citizens to talk freely and openly about political matters. I finally asked one of them why this was so, and she explained to me that even though Pinochet had left power a few years before, the fear of talking about political issues had still not disappeared from the psyche of the Chilean people.

Pinochet was a Chilean military general who took power in a coup, ousting the democratically elected socialist-communist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, and instituted a reign of terror through the exercise of the most tyrannical power that any government can ever wield over its citizens – the same post–9/11 power that the Pentagon now wields over the American people – the omnipotent power to arrest, torture, and execute people.

During the severe crisis environment in the weeks and months following the coup, Chilean police and military forces rounded up tens of thousands of Chilean people on suspicion of being communists or communist sympathizers. Like the U.S. government’s war on terrorism, Pinochet’s war on communism entailed no criminal indictments, no defense attorneys, and no trials.

The tens of thousands of victims included both men and women. The victims were subjected to the most horrendous techniques of torture that anyone can imagine, especially with respect to sexual matters. Many of the women were not only tortured but also raped by Chilean police and military officials. Out of an estimated 35,000 people tortured, some 3,000 were executed.

What does this have to do with the omnipotent power now welded by the U.S. military to arrest, torture, and execute American citizens as part of the “war on terror”? After all, what happened in Chile can’t happen here, right? Americans are different, right? They don’t have the dark side that exists in everyone else, right?

There’s at least one big problem with those assertions. U.S. government officials, including those in the CIA and the Pentagon, supported Pinochet, despite the coup’s obvious anti-democratic overtones, because Pinochet, the military strongman, was saving Chile from socialism and communism and bringing “order and stability” to the country. Not only did U.S. officials flood Chile with millions of dollars in foreign aid after Pinochet’s military takeover, roundups, tortures, rapes, and executions, they even signed up many of his officials as paid employees of the CIA or U.S. military. The CIA also assisted Pinochet’s Operation Condor, in which his infamous secret police force, DINA, along with its counterparts in Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay, murdered and “disappeared” tens of thousands of people, including Chilean Orlando Letelier and American Randi Moffet on the streets of Washington, D.C.

It comes as no surprise that U.S. officials are still keeping many of the files on U.S. government involvement in the Pinochet coup and its aftermath secret from the American people. “National security,” they say. One disclosed document, however, does reveal an ominous fact: that during the Chilean “crisis” the CIA played an “unfortunate” role in the extra-judicial execution of Charles Horman, a young American journalist with liberal (that is, leftist) leanings.

There is an important point to note here: No matter how harmful and destructive Allende’s socialist and communist policies were, U.S. officials did not have to lend their support to the Pinochet regime. There is nothing inconsistent about refusing to support both communists and fascists.

Even today, many U.S. officials – indeed, most conservatives – still support the Pinochet coup and the “necessary” steps he took to combat socialism and communism. The gloves had to come off against the communists, they claim, just as U.S. officials had no choice but to “take off the gloves” against the terrorists after 9/11. They also never fail to remind us that Pinochet did some good things in the economic realm by adopting the free-enterprise and sound-money policies of Milton Friedman and the “Chicago Boys.” Why, some conservatives even assert that the actions of Pinochet and his henchmen were necessary and helpful steps to restoring freedom to Chile, a rather ominous assertion to say the least. After all, how would conservatives respond if a free-enterprise-oriented Pentagon general offered his Pinochet-type services to extricate America from an economic and terrorist crisis presided over by a democratically elected socialist president, such as Hillary Clinton?

This response of U.S. officials and American conservatives to the Pinochet regime exemplifies the dangers that Americans face with the U.S. military’s post–9/11 self-assumed power to arrest, torture, and execute Americans as illegal “enemy combatants” in the “war on terror.” After all, given their support of the Chilean military’s arbitrary arrests, torture, and execution of Chilean citizens as part of Pinochet’s “war on communism,” why would they not be just as supportive of the U.S. military’s arbitrary arrests, torture, and execution of American citizens as part of its “war on terror,” especially if America’s “national security” depended on it?

Permit me to digress a moment to emphasize something important here: Nothing, including Allende’s socialist-communist regime that was ousted, can morally or legally justify what Pinochet did to his own people. Not the arbitrary arrests, not the torture, not the rapes, and not the extra-judicial executions. If Pinochet believed that someone had committed a crime, such as blowing up a government building or shooting a government official, there was a legal remedy – secure an arrest warrant, take the person into custody, charge him with the crime, prosecute him in a court of law, and punish him if he is found guilty. Moreover, there is never any moral justification, with or without following judicial processes, for government officials to torture or rape anyone, including someone in custody who is suspected of having committed heinous criminal acts.