Another Criminal Dies

Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in 1985

by Gaius Publius

George H.W. Bush's life is a testament to the notion that public service is a noble, joyous calling. And he did tremendous good along the journey.
     —Former president Barack Obama

Rosalynn and I are deeply saddened by the death of former President George H.W. Bush. His administration was marked by grace, civility, and social conscience.
     —Former president Jimmy Carter

Scouring the Web for comments on the death of George H.W. Bush turns up quite a bit of praise from luminaries as widely disparate as the Dalai Lama, Ellen DeGeneres and CIA director Gina Haspel. Mohammed bin Salman paid a visit to Bush senior and was welcomed warmly, spawning this tweet from the former president:

Delighted to join the 43rd President and Jim Baker in welcoming the Saudi Crown Prince His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman and His Royal Highness Prince Khalid bin Salman to Texas. A wonderful chance to celebrate the long-standing friendship between our two nations. pic.twitter.com/282LAJqWpO

— George Bush (@GeorgeHWBush) April 7, 2018

From lesser lights to greater, from murderers to comedians, the praise continues. 

As usual, the network of those who run the world we merely inhabit have nothing but respect for each other. And why not? They may pick each other off from time to time (both Saddam Hussein and Moamar Khaddafi, were once in high favor), but over the long haul, keeping each member of the ruling circle in a reverential spotlight keeps them all — keeps the circle itself — in reverence as well. Since they operate as a system, the system is honored each time its members, no matter how deadly, are honored as well. And the system sees that the system is always honored.

That's why Bernie Sanders and his new progressive colleagues in the House are so hated. They want to take that system apart. It's why Nancy Pelosi surrendered to the No Labels-financed "Problem Solvers" caucus rather than to those same new progressives and their agenda. The tiny system of people that run the world supports the tiny system of people that run the world, and always will.

For a truer perspective on who those people are and what they do, let's look not to the system's predictable, fawning self-praise, but at less propagandistic comments on the passing of one of its members, former CIA director, former vice president, and former president George H.W. Bush, a man who stood at the center of American power for most of his long adult life.

Again, this is just a sample of those comments on a sample of that life. A true deep dive into his sordid history would take a book.

George H.W. Bush, the CIA and a Case of State-Sponsored Terrorism

To pick just a single incident, this is from the late Robert Parry, writing in 2000 at Consortium News:

In early fall of 1976, after a Chilean government assassin had killed a Chilean dissident and an American woman with a car bomb in Washington, D.C., George H.W. Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s military dictatorship and pointing the FBI in the wrong direction.

The bogus CIA assessment, spread through Newsweek magazine and other U.S. media outlets, was planted despite CIA’s now admitted awareness at the time that Chile was participating in Operation Condor, a cross-border campaign targeting political dissidents, and the CIA’s own suspicions that the Chilean junta was behind the terrorist bombing in Washington.

In a 21-page report to Congress on Sept. 18, 2000, the CIA officially acknowledged for the first time that the mastermind of the terrorist attack, Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras, was a paid asset of the CIA.

The CIA report was issued almost 24 years to the day after the murders of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt, who died on Sept. 21, 1976, when a remote-controlled bomb ripped apart Letelier’s car as they drove down Massachusetts Avenue, a stately section of Washington known as Embassy Row.

A foreign diplomat and a U.S. citizen are murdered in DC on Embassy Row. The deed is planned by Manuel Contreras, a CIA asset who was also simultaneously intelligence chief for the Pinochet government of Chile. And George H.W. Bush, as head of the CIA, performs the cover-up, going so far as to plant false stories among media assets (sorry, CIA-friendly journalists) in places like Newsweek, and going so far as to mislead the FBI in its own investigation.

This is the man Jimmy Carter praised for "grace, civility, and social conscience." Saying a man complicit in murder is gracious is like saying a mafia don is good to his family and kind to old people and animals. Bill Clinton's praise of Bush, "From the moment I met him ... I was struck by the kindness he showed to Chelsea, by his innate and genuine decency, and by his devotion to Barbara, his children, and their growing brood," strikes just this note.

In the same article the word "assessment" appears, a word so enamored of the anti-Trump forces these days. Parry writes:

[T]he CIA – then under CIA Director George H.W. Bush – leaked for public consumption an assessment clearing the Chilean government’s feared intelligence service, DINA, which was then run by Contreras.

Bush "leaked for public consumption" an "assessment" knowingly filled with lies. The CIA has leaked many lying, secret "assessments" for public consumption; it's what they do. If we weren't so desperate to get rid of Donald Trump — and believe me, security-state people like George H.W. Bush are eagerly on board with that effort — we'd be nervous about what a leaked CIA assessment that immediately cast a shadow on an elected president, within a month of his election no less, might augur.

Does the concept of an American Praetorian Guard concern you? It does me.

George H.W. Bush and the Theft of the 1980 Election

The big enchilada in the George H.W. Bush story is the theft of the 1980 election and its aftermath, the Iran-Contra payoff and cover-up. The bones of the story, the original "October Surprise," go like this.

In 1980, when the Iranian hostage crisis was raging and Reagan and Bush were running against incumbent Jimmy Carter for the Oval Office, former CIA director Bush, future CIA director William Casey and others met at least three times with Iranian officials, including a meeting in Paris on October 19, and struck a deal with the Iranian government to extend the holding of 52 American hostages until after the election, thus denying Carter a diplomatic victory (and by the way, extending the suffering of those hostages).

In exchange, Bush and Casey promised that the Reagan administration would secretly sell arms to Iran through a cutout, Israel. Iran had just become involved in a major war with Iraq at the time and was desperate for arms.

Of course, because the arms sales were secret, the Reagan administration had money on its hands it had not gotten from Congress, and it decided to spend that money propping up the Contras, a brutal right-wing resistance army fighting the socialist (of course) Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

It's the secret support of the Contras (a name taken from the Spanish for counter-revolution), which was expressly forbidden by Congress in 1985 under the third Boland Amendment, that caused the story to unravel. The contra money was found, the Iranian arms sales were found, and the 1980 Reagan-Iran hostage deal was both widely suspected and widely feared.

Why feared? If a U.S. president had committed what many would call treason to gain office, what would the effect on the American people be? Would they ever trust elections — or worse, their leaders — again? Proof of Reagan and Bush's act was potentially destabilizing as, say, proof that elements of the CIA had murdered John Kennedy would have been.

Nixon and Treason

The U.S. had in fact faced this problem before — proof that a candidate had committed treason with a foreign government — when outgoing president Lyndon Johnson uncovered similar deeds ("treason" to use Johnson's word) by Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign, and declined to act on it, save to tell Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen to tell Richard Nixon to "cut it out," or words to that effect.

Proof of Nixon's treason didn't emerge until 2008, when the tape of the phone call itself was released and the accusation was later confirmed by conservative writer George Will. By then, of course, the whole affair was old news, something from the last generation's history, and could be reliably assumed to be ignored.

So here. Proof of every part of the October Surprise–Iran-Contra story emerged, though proof of the meeting between Bush, Casey and the Iranians in Paris was predictably contravened by a "secret alibi," yet that story is now widely and predictably ignored by all who praise him. 

Robert Parry and the October Surprise

Robert Parry was the primary reporter investigating the October Surprise connection to the breaking Iran-Contra story (emphasis added):

Though there were early rumors about a secret Republican deal with Iran, the October Surprise mystery didn’t gain much traction until the exposure of secret Iran-Contra arms shipments approved by Reagan to Iran in 1985-86. Suddenly, the notion that Reagan and his Vice President George H.W. Bush would lie about covert dealings with Iran didn’t seem so preposterous.

Essentially, the October Surprise question was whether Reagan’s secret contacts with Iran dated back to Campaign 1980, as a growing number of witnesses — from inside the governments of Iran, Israel, France and the United States — were alleging.

However, when Congress finally agreed to look into the October Surprise case in 1991-92, Republicans were determined to circle the wagons around the then-sitting President George H.W. Bush, who was facing a tough reelection fight against Democrat Bill Clinton.

Rather than welcome any truth-seeking, the Republicans and their media allies went on the attack claiming that the October Surprise case was a baseless “conspiracy theory.”

Elites "circling the wagons" to protect elites, even treasonous ones, is the theme of this piece. Eventually, Democrats and the media shied away from the story, leaving Parry essentially alone with his investigation (links in original):

Parry ... received the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984 for his work with the Associated Press on Iran-Contra, where he broke the story that the Central Intelligence Agency had provided an assassination manual to the Nicaraguan Contras (Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare). In mid-1985 he wrote the first article on Oliver North's involvement in the affair, and, together with Brian Barger, in late 1985 he broke the CIA and Contras cocaine trafficking in the US scandal, helping to spark Senator John Kerry's interest in investigating Iran-Contra. The Associated Press had refused to publish the drug trafficking story, and only relented when its Spanish-language newswire service accidentally published a translation. Barger and Parry continued to press their investigation of North even as most of the media declined to follow it up, eventually publishing a story in mid-1986, based on 24 sources, which led to a Congressional committee asking questions of North. After North denied the allegations, Barger was pushed out of the Associated Press, and Parry was unable to publish any further follow-ups to the story until after Eugene Hasenfus' plane (Corporate Air Services HPF821) was shot down in Nicaragua in October 1986. After finding out that his boss had been "conferring with [Oliver] North on a regular basis", Parry left AP in 1987 to join Newsweek, which he left in 1990.

In August 1990, PBS' Frontline asked Parry to work on the October Surprise conspiracy theory, leading to Parry making several documentaries for the program, broadcast in 1991 and 1992. He continued to pursue it after a Congressional investigation had concluded the story was untrue, turning his Frontline research into a book published in 1993, and in 1994 he unearthed "a treasure-trove of government documents" supporting the theory, "showing that the [Congressional] task force suppressed incriminating CIA testimony and excluded evidence of big-money links between wealthy Republicans and Carter's Iranian intermediary, Cyrus Hashemi". In 1996, Salon wrote about his work on the theory, saying that "his continuing quest to unearth the facts of the alleged October Surprise has made him persona non grata among those who worship at the altar of conventional wisdom."

But this is not a piece about Robert Parry. It's a piece about George H.W. Bush.

Was George Bush in Paris in October 1980?

Evidence points to the presence of the future vice-president in Paris for the October meeting. Among others, the pilot of the plane that conveyed the participants places him there:

Russbacher [the pilot] states that Bush, while in Paris, met with Hashemi Rafsanjani, the second in command to the Ayatollah and now the president of Iran, and Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian businessman who was extremely powerful. Arrangements were apparently made to pay Iran $40 million to delay the release of hostages in order to thwart President Jimmy Carter's re-election bid. The $40 million was the beginning of terms that created the Iran-Contra scandal that is now being reopened by Congress.

Russbacher is concerned for his life, but feels that the other pilots will now come forward in a new Congressional investigation.

From the article, Russbacher was also "a member of the Office of Naval Intelligence and worked with the Central Intelligence Agency." Now note this:

[Russbacher] indicates that there is a growing division within the Central Intelligence Agency. "There is no one higher than the CIA, but there are groups within the company (term used by insiders for the CIA) that are very, very strong. And the group or clique that I belonged to, in my opinion, was probably the strongest but there are other factions that are at war with themselves," Russbacher states."You have these groups that are answerable to no one. Well, they are answerable to one man, on top, and he doesn't seem to care how the problems are resolved, just as long as they are taken care of." The man Russbacher is referring to is President Bush.

The only contrary evidence that Bush was not in Paris on October 19, the date in question, was a "secret alibi witness" whose name wasn't released until 2011, after the witness was safely dead. Secret witnesses, of course, can't be interviewed and their evidence tested by the press. 

In 1992, when the story was raging, Bush publicly and angrily demanded that he be cleared. "Bowing to those pressures ... Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, chairman of the House investigative task force, agreed to a curious bargain in which he and a few senior investigators were shown the destination of Bush’s supposed afternoon trip on Oct. 19, 1980, but with the proviso that they never interview anyone who was there or disclose any names. So, without verifying Bush’s alibi, the House task force cleared Bush of going to Paris."

Note the role of a Democrat in covering for Bush.

The "secret alibi witness" was, of course, a Bush family friend who had worked many times with Bush and had in fact been saved by Bush when the Watergate scandal threatened to take him down. More on this part of the story can be found here: "Taking a Bush Secret to the Grave".

So whom do you trust? Ex-CIA chief George H.W. Bush and the witness whose name he worked for decades to keep secret, or the rest of the evidence to the contrary? Elites assert the former in public statements, whatever they privately believe. The rest of us move on with our lives. Thus does the system that rules us retain its power.

Bush's Sins Are Many

Bush's sins are many and great. As head of the CIA in the late 1970s, he "actively supported Operation Condor operations and right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America." This means he was an accomplice to a great many murders. In the 1980 election campaign, he committed treason against the U.S. constitution by treating with an enemy and interfering with the negotiations of the elected president.

As president, he betrayed the trust of Mikhail Gorbachev, promising that after the unification of Germany, NATO would not move "one inch forward." NATO has since moved several inches forward...

...so much so that Trump's questioning of NATO during the 2016 campaign counts as one of his own great sins. War with Russia is the course we're on today, and this is one of the causes, that U.S. leaders have wanted this conflict to continue since the Soviet Union fell. Elites protecting elites.

In 1990, the Bush administration led Saddam Hussein, a U.S. ally, to believe that it wouldn't interfere if Iraq punished Kuwait for "slant-drilling" and other offenses by invading Kuwait. Before the Iraqi invasion, April Glaspie, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told Saddam Hussein, "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." Saddam invaded Kuwait. Then the U.S. invaded Iraq.

The strongest impetus for signing the NAFTA treaty prior to 1992 was George H.W. Bush, after which Bill Clinton campaigned for, and ultimately passed the treaty as well. 

In 1992, outgoing President Bush pardoned those in his inner circle who were convicted of crimes in the Iran-Contra scandal. All this with no mention of the vile Willie Horton campaign ads, or the vile elevation of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court.

For all this he is much honored. And every honor he is accorded as a public figure honors the criminals and murderers who hold power over a globalized establishment. Keep this in mind the next time your own favorite elected says of a similar person, "Too bad he died. He was a good man."

GP
 

Kissinger: Even Worse Than Cheney

Constantin Costa-Gavras' 1982 film, Missing, had some pretty big stars-- including Jack Lemmon, Charles Cioffi and Sissy Spacek-- and won some pretty big awards-- including the Palme d'Or at Cannes for best male actor and the Academy Award for best writing-- and had a hugely acclaimed score by Vangelis, but there's a good chance you never saw it-- nor read the Tom Hauser book it was based on, The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice. That's because Henry Kissinger didn't want anyone to see that film or read that book. He got it banned. Really… in America. [It was banned in Chile too.] Earlier this morning we looked at the tragedy of war criminals being given a pass, making it inevitable for the destructive work of future war criminals. It was Dick Cheney and King Leopold we were looking at. In between them, though, was, chronologically speaking, Henry Kissinger, who's still alive, still unpunished, still welcomed into polite company, at least in some circles.

So the movie is about an American journalist, Charles Horman, who was as excited as I was when Allende was elected president of Chile. Luckily for me, I was driving a VW van around Asia at the time. Harmon and his wife drove their VW van down to Chile-- right into a bloody coup engineered by Nixon, Kissinger and Chilean fascist Agusto Pinochet. A very bloody coup. The CIA murdered Harmon. The movie is about his dad and his wife looking for him. This week a Chilean court finally admitted what happened, as if anyone whip know anything about the case-- other than Republicans and fascists-- ever suspected anything else.

A Chilean court said U.S. military intelligence played a key role that led to the 1973 killings of two Americans, whose story inspired the 1982 Oscar-winning film Missing. The court said former U.S. Navy Capt. Ray E. Davis gave Chilean officials information about journalist Charles Horman, 31, and student Frank Teruggi, 24, that led to their arrest and execution. This took place days after the 1973 coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. The movie Missing was about the search for Horman by his wife and father. The case was practically ignored in Chile until 2000, when Horman's widow Joyce filed a lawsuit against Pinochet. Courts in Chile thought Davis was living in Florida and had sought extradition, but he was secretly living in Chile and died there last year. "Judge Zepeda's ruling both implicates and incriminates U.S. intelligence personnel as playing a dark role in the murder of my husband," said Horman's widow Joyce. "My hope is that the record of evidence compiled by the court sheds further light on how and why Charles was targeted."

Former U.S. Ambassador Nathaniel Davis and two other Kissinger stooges sued Costa-Garvas, Hauser, Universal Pictures and MCA for defamation of character in a successful attempt to keep the movie and book from being widely seen in the U.S. The U.S. State Department-- which still publicly displays a picture of Henry Kissinger--half-heartedly persists in denying any involvement in the kidnapping and murder of Horman, half-heartedly because in 1999 a declassified 1976 State Department memo admitted, "U.S. intelligence may have played an unfortunate part."

So do I think, Kissinger should be dragged out of his home and shot like a dog today? I admit that I do but I also believe in due process of law and I would regret if Kissinger (and Cheney) were shot without trials. But unless there are trials and accountability there will be more Kissingers, more Cheney and, alas, more murdered Charles Hormans.

Mrs. Thatcher as a champion of "freedom and liberty"? Jon Lee Anderson doesn't think so

In March 1999, while General Pinochet -- finally, after all those years, being called to account for some of his crimes -- was under house arrest in London, his bosom buddy the former British PM paid him a much-publicized visit.

"Britain regarded Pinochet's killing spree as unseemly, and sanctioned his regime by refusing to supply it with weapons -- that is, until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister."

-- from Jon Lee Anderson's newyorker.com "Daily
Comment" post, "Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady"

by Ken

Where would the Right be if it didn't exercise so freely its right to abuse and sabotage language. At the moment I'm thinking of the hostage-taking of the word freedom, by which right-wing liars and nitwits understand something close to the exact opposite: the compulsion to behave in strictly prescribed orthodox, but socially sanctioned, ways. At the moment large swaths of right-wing insanity and coercion are being advanced under the banner of what they call "freedom."

The point comes up rather starkly in the case of Britain's Iron Bitch, the late former prime minsiter Margaret Thatcher. As Jon Lee Anderson points out in a newyorker.com post, "Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady," President Obama tramped right into this linguistic minefield:

In a tribute Monday, President Barack Obama said she had been "one of the great champions of freedom and liberty." Actually, she hadn't.

As with most right-wingers, the Iron Bitch's idea of freedom and liberty was the freedom to think exactly the way I do and the liberty to do exactly as I do.

Thatcher was a fierce Cold Warrior, and when it came to Chile never mustered quite the appropriate amount of compassion for the people Pinochet killed in the name of anti-Communism. She preferred talking about his much-vaunted "Chilean economic miracle."

And kill he did. Pinochet's soldiers rounded up thousands at the country's national stadium and, then and there, suspects were marched into the locker rooms and corridors and bleachers and tortured and shot dead. Hundreds died in the stadium alone. One was the revered Chilean singer Víctor Jara, who was beaten, his hands and ribs broken, and then machine-gunned, his body dumped like trash on a back street of the capital -- along with many others. The killing went on even after Pinochet and his military had a firm hold on power; it was just carried out with greater secrecy, in military barracks, in police buildings, and in the countryside. Critics and opponents of the new regime were murdered in other countries, too. In 1976, Pinochet's intelligence agency planned and carried out a car bombing in Washington, D.C., that murdered Allende's exiled former Ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier, as well as Ronni Moffitt, his American aide. Britain regarded Pinochet's killing spree as unseemly, and sanctioned his regime by refusing to supply it with weapons -- that is, until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister.

In 1980, the year after Thatcher took office, she lifted the arms embargo against Pinochet; he was soon buying armaments from the United Kingdom. In 1982, during Britain's Falklands War against Argentina, Pinochet helped Thatcher's government with intelligence on Argentina. Thereafter, the relationship became downright cozy, so much so that the Pinochets and his family began making an annual private pilgrimage to London. During those visits, they and the Thatchers got together for meals and drams of whiskey. In 1998, when I was writing a Profile of Pinochet for The New Yorker, Pinochet's daughter Lucia described Mrs. Thatcher in reverential terms, but confided that the Prime Minister's husband, Dennis Thatcher, was something of an embarrassment, and habitually got drunk at their get-togethers. The last time I met with Pinochet himself in London, in October, 1998, he told me he was about to call "La Señora" Thatcher in the hopes she could find time to meet him for tea. A couple of weeks later, Pinochet, still in London, found himself under arrest, on the orders of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón. During Pinochet's prolonged quasi-detention thereafter, in a comfortable home in the London suburb of Virginia Water, Thatcher showed her solidarity by visiting him. There, and in front of the television cameras, she expressed her sense of Britain's debt to his regime: "I know how much we owe to you" -- for "your help during the Falklands campaign." She also said, "It was you who brought democracy to Chile."

This, of course, was a misstatement of such gargantuan proportions that it cannot be dismissed as the overzealousness of a loyal friend.

You'll have noticed that Anderson's post is titled "Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady." It's the Neruda connection he starts out with.

It's curious, historically speaking, that Margaret Thatcher died on the same day that forensic specialists, in Chile, exhumed the remains of the late, great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The author of the epic "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair" and the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature, Neruda died at the age of sixty-nine, supposedly of prostate cancer, just twelve days after the violent September 11, 1973, military coup launched by army chief Augusto Pinochet against the country's elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende. Warplanes had strafed the Presidential palace, and Allende had bravely held out, but committed suicide with a rifle given to him by Cuba's President Fidel Castro as Pinochet's goons stormed into the Presidential palace. Neruda was a close friend and supporter of Allende's; he was ill, but in the midst of planning to leave the country for Mexico, where he had been invited to go into exile. When he was on his deathbed in a clinic, his home had been broken into by soldiers and trashed.

At his funeral, a large crowd of mourners marched through the streets of Santiago -- a grim city that was otherwise empty except for military vehicles. At his gravesite, in one of the only known acts of public defiance in the wake of the coup, the mourners sang the "Internationale" and saluted Neruda and also Allende. As they did, the regime's men were going around the city, burning the books of authors it didn't like, while hunting down those it could find to torture or kill.

A couple of years ago, Neruda's former driver came forth to express his suspicion that Neruda had been poisoned, saying that he'd heard from the poet that doctors gave him an injection and that, immediately afterward, Neruda's condition had worsened drastically. There are other tidbits of evidence that bolster his theory, but nothing conclusive. Forensic science, in the end, may provide the answer to a nagging historic question.

The president probably thought he was saying something safely noncontroversial when he saluted Mrs. Thatcher's freedom-and-liberty credentials. Which is the problem with these famous-person memorializings. It's considered unseemly, even rude, to tell the truth about the deceased. But that's no excuse for outright lies.

#

Finally... Justice For Víctor Jara-- But War Criminal Henry Kissinger Is Still On The Loose

The song above, "Plegaria a un Labrador" ("Prayer to a Worker") is one of Víctor Jara's classic songs. You need to know who this guy was. On September 11, 1973, Nixon, Kissinger and the CIA gave the go-ahead for a violent fascist coup against Chile's democratically elected government. The presidential palace was bombed and shelled and Chile's beloved president, Salvator Allende, was murdered. But that was just the beginning. Within hours of Allende's murder thousands of his supporters were rounded up (eventually 80,000) and herded into a stadium and many were tortured (40,000) and murdered (3,000) to help the fascists make way for a Chicago School/Ayn Rand-inspired dictatorship. Labor unions were put under fascist control and Social Security, for example, was privatized according to the same directives by the same people who have worked out the same plans for the GOP here in America.

One of the people herded into the stadium that day was Chile's Bob Dylan, Víctor Jara. He was tortured; his fingers were broken; a soldier played Russian roulette until a bullet wounded him in the head. He was then machine-gunned and 44 bullets were found in his body, which was dumped on the street of a local slum. The following year Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie did a memorial concert for Jara in New York City. The stadium where he was murdered was renamed the Estadio Víctor Jara in 2003. I first heard about Jara in 1980 when the Clash included a song, "Washington Bullets" on their iconic album Sandinista! (video below). 16 years later Chuck Brodsky wrote and recorded a tribute, "The Hands of Victor Jara."

The blood of Victor Jara
Will never wash away
It just keeps on turning
A little redder every day
As anger turns to hatred
And hatred turns to guns
Children lose their fathers
And mothers lose their sons

Before Pinochet finally died-- hundreds of criminal indictments pending against him-- he had stolen between 20 and 30 million dollars. He managed to evade justice, just as Nixon did and as Kissinger still is. But Jara's direct murders are finally being brought to justice, 8 retired army officers charged on Friday.

Judge Miguel Vásquez charged two of the former officers, Pedro Barrientos and Hugo Sánchez, with committing the murder and six others as accomplices. Mr. Sánchez, a lieutenant colonel, was second in command at the stadium. Mr. Barrientos, a lieutenant from a Tejas Verdes army unit, currently lives in Deltona, a city southwest of Daytona Beach, Fla., and was interrogated by the F.B.I. earlier this year at the request of a Chilean court. Attempts to reach Mr. Barrientos for comment were unsuccessful; his two listed telephone numbers had been disconnected.

Judge Vásquez issued an international arrest warrant against Mr. Barrientos through Interpol Santiago and ordered the arrest of the other seven, who were in Chile. Those charged as accomplices are Roberto Souper, Raúl Jofré, Edwin Dimter, Nelson Hasse, Luis Bethke and Jorge Smith.

...Judge Vásquez established that Mr. Jara was recognized by military officers, separated from the rest of the detainees and taken to the basement dressing rooms, which were being used to question prisoners. There, he was interrogated, beaten and tortured by several officers, according to the court.

On Sept. 16, 1973, when the stadium was evacuated and the prisoners transferred to the larger, open-air National Stadium in the capital, Víctor Jara and a former prison service director, Littré Quiroga, who was also detained there, were taken to the basement and killed. The bodies of both men and three other victims were later found dumped near a railroad track outside a cemetery; one of the victims remains unidentified. According to the autopsy report, Mr. Jara was badly beaten and was shot 44 times.

Let's Hope The CIA Doesn't Have A Libyan Augusto Pinochet Waiting In The Wings

If you're getting sick of me harping on CIA atrocities (like in Iran and Guatemala) and comparing them to what's going down in Libya... just skip right over this admittedly disturbing post and go back to reading about what a psychopath Rick Perry is.

I'm getting sick of reading all the self-congratulatory tweets and posts about how we took out the dictator in Libya. You can leave me out of that "we," if you don't mind. When "we" were making the world safe from godless Communism in southeast Asia, I decided to leave the country rather than be part of that murderous "we." Sorry, but I'm not convinced-- at least not yet-- that this is that much different. Big country stomping on little country to get it's way-- and, in this case, its oil. Let's talk about Chile and what the U.S. did down there to protect "us." By now everyone knows how the arch war-criminals Nixon and Kissinger engineered the overthrow and execution of the President of Chile and the transformation of that country's robust democracy into a horrifying fascist dictatorship. But it didn't start with Nixon and Kissinger. Presidents and Secretaries of State come and go... the CIA and a foreign policy establishment is forever-- or has been since a fascist takeover in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Turning to Glen Yeadon's Nazi Hydra in America for some background...

The CIA began covert operations in Chile following the 1958 presidential election, in which Allende came within 3 percent of winning. The next presidential election was scheduled in 1964, and Washington was determined that an avowed socialist like Allende not win.

In 1961, the Kennedy administration set up an electoral committee composed of more than 100 top-level officials from the State Department, the CIA and the White House. A parallel committee was set up in the U.S. embassy in Chile. Committee operatives laid the groundwork for the election by establishing relationships with key political figures. After channeling funds to right-wing groups, the committee decided to back a centrist, Eduardo Frei of the Christian Democratic Party. The CIA underwrote more than half of the party's expenses in the 1964 election, spending an estimated $20 million. The amount is about equal to the money spent by John F. Kennedy ($9.7 million) and Richard Nixon ($10.1 million) together in the 1964 election. The CIA took the Chilean election seriously.

The CIA spent the money on a scare campaign, with images of Russian tanks and Cuban firing squads, with extra attention on women and religion because, traditionally, women in Chile are more religious. The CIA produced massive volumes of propaganda to fill the airwaves and the press. Besides buying the press piecemeal, the agency subsidized wire services, magazines and right-wing newspapers from 1953-70.

One of the assets the CIA employed in the 1964 election was Roger Vekemans, a Belgian Jesuit who founded a network of social action organizations. Vekemans admits to receiving $5 million from the CIA, as well as a like amount of aid. The results of the 1964 election were gratifying for the CIA. Frei won the election with a commanding margin of victory. The continued operations of the CIA network kept Allende and the socialists at bay throughout the 1960s. However, no amount of propaganda can cover the lack of needed reforms and social progress.

By 1970 Allende's popularity was high and his chances in the upcoming presidential election were good. His rising popularity did not go unnoticed by the Nixon White House, which increased anti-Allende spending by $300,000. The CIA continued to use its networks in Chile against Allende. Despite all efforts by the CIA and the Nixon White House, Allende won the Sept. 4 election.

On October 24, the Chilean Congress was due to confirm the winner, assuring Allende of the presidential office. This left the Nixon White House and the CIA with seven weeks to prevent him from taking office. Nixon met with Kissinger, CIA Director Richard Helms and Attorney General John Mitchell. The Committee of 40 received authorized funds to bribe Chilean congressmen to vote against Allende, but soon abandoned the effort as unfeasible. The Nixon administration concentrated on fermenting a military coup, which would cancel the congressional vote. The White House also made it clear that an assassination was not unwelcome.

The CIA and the Nixon administration launched a new propaganda campaign to impress on the military the danger of Allende taking office. Privately, military officers were threatened with a cut in aid if Allende were seated. During this seven-week period the CIA produced more than 700 articles, broadcasts and editorials in Europe and Latin America. Journalists in the pay of the CIA from at least 10 countries traveled to Chile for on-the-spot coverage. The propaganda came with the usual communist scare tactics-- fabricated stories that Allende would nationalize everything down to the small shops. The campaign was so intense that it affected the Chilean economy negatively, inducing a financial panic...

Meanwhile, the CIA was consulting actively with several military officers receptive to a coup. It was difficult due to apolitical attitudes and support for the constitution. The prime obstacle to a military coup was the Commander and Chief of the Chilean Army, Rene Schneider, who insisted on following the constitution. The coup attempt was a direct result of a plea for action by Donald Kendall, chairman of PepsiCo, in two phone calls to the company's former lawyer, President Richard Nixon.

With time running out before Allende was seated, the CIA distributed sterilized machine guns and ammunition to some of the conspirators on the morning of October 22. That same day, Schneider was mortally wounded in an attempted kidnapping. The CIA station in Santiago cabled headquarters that Schneider had been killed with CIA weapons. The assassination did not result in a coup; instead, military officers rallied around the flag and the constitution. Two days later, Allende was seated as president. The Nixon administration responded by cutting aid to Chile, including loans from the Export-Import Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank... In addition, holding what amounted to a veto, the United States denied all loans to Chile from the World Bank during 1971-73. The following U.S. banks [almost all fascist run outfits that had been ardent Hitler supporters very recently] canceled credit to Chile: Chase Manhattan, Chemical, First National City, Manufacturers Hanover and Morgan Guaranty. The CIA provided financial support to prolong strikes, and caused panic buying to further compound shortages. The CIA and the Nixon administration were determined to bring about a complete economic collapse and widespread public unrest to defeat the Allende government and prove socialism cannot work in the Western Hemisphere...

Large U.S. corporations also helped destabilize Chile in support of a coup to remove Allende. International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) offered $1 million to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Officials denied the offer was accepted. However, former U.S. Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry has stated in recent interviews the offer was made by former CIA Director John McCone. McCone was a member of ITT's board at the time. The Nixon White House was well aware at the time that ITT was illegally channeling money to the Republican Party. Korry also stated that Anaconda Copper and other multinationals, under the aegis of David Rockefeller's Business Group for Latin America, gave $350,000 to the CIA to bribe members of Congress.

...On Sept 11. 1973. Allende's Administration ended in a violent coup. Allende was killed after an assault on the presidential palace, where he and a group of dedicated followers made a last stand. Within twelve hours, most of the people with Allende who had survived the military assault were executed.

...The Nixon administration immediately recognized the new regime and granted it $24 million in credit for wheat previously denied the Allende government. The resulting fascist regime of Augusto Pinochet was brutally repressive. Only 19 days after the coup, a briefing paper for Kissinger showed the death toll was 1,500, including 320 summarily executed. By mid-November, U.S. intelligence estimated 13,500 people had been arrested. Others were executed, disappeared or tortured, including two Americans killed in the mass executions at the national stadium... An estimated 50,000 died at the hands of Pinochet.

But the right wingers and the CIA hail Pinochet's rule of Chile as an economic miracle. For once in power he installed the boys from Chicago, a group of Chileans educated in economics at the University of Chicago. It may have been an economic miracle for the American corporations but it certainly wasn't for the average Chilean worker. As the Boys from Chicago promptly set about dismantling all social programs and destroying unions. The statistics of this so-called economic miracle are indeed bleak, as the GNP per capita fell from 1972 to 1982 by 6.4 percent. Presently Pinochet faces charges of murder in Spain if England will extradite him. But once again we see the model repeated, a legally elected reform minded government is overthrown to be replaced by a brutal right wing dictator, corporate America gets rich at the expense of the native population. In just Guatemala and Chile the body count from the CIA and their puppet regimes total over a quarter million... Does the reader have anymore questions over the fascist nature of our foreign policy as executed by the CIA?

And about that Libyan oil, which has NOTHING-- DO YOU HEAR ME? N.O.T.H.I.N.G.-- to do with the overthrown of the Qaddafi regime in the glorious name of democracy, the New York Times had a few salient facts that slipped through yesterday.

The fighting is not yet over in Tripoli, but the scramble to secure access to Libya’s oil wealth has already begun.

...Western nations-- especially the NATO countries that provided crucial air support to the rebels-- want to make sure their companies are in prime position to pump the Libyan crude.

...Colonel Qaddafi proved to be a problematic partner for international oil companies, frequently raising fees and taxes and making other demands. A new government with close ties to NATO may be an easier partner for Western nations to deal with. Some experts say that given a free hand, oil companies could find considerably more oil in Libya than they were able to locate under the restrictions placed by the Qaddafi government.

But, of course... to the victors, the spoils. Like everywhere in all ages. “We don’t have a problem with Western countries like Italians, French and U.K. companies,” Abdeljalil Mayouf, a spokesman for the Libyan rebel oil company Agoco, was quoted by Reuters as saying. “But we may have some political issues with Russia, China and Brazil.”

The rescue: the week after

A rescuer in the mine in Yuzhou, China, where -- with 30 miners already known dead -- hope was all but abandoned for the still-missing seven.

by Ken

When I wrote last week, bleary-eyed from my overnight glued-to-the-tube vigil, about the still-ongoing Chilean mine rescue, I noted in closing:

There will be plenty of time to talk about the cost of this whole operation, and where it fits into the grand scheme of the socioeconomic order. For now, I'm as dumbfounded as anybody.

Fortunately, The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik has covered a good deal of that still-to-be-covered territory in a "Talk of the Town Piece, "A Way Out" (under the heading "Story of the Week"), in the new issue (Oct. 25).

I'm pleased to see that Gopnik's basic take isn't much different from mine.

Chilean miner madness: it has been the condition of the past week in New York City, despite the fact that it is, in essence, a small story involving a country that no one has paid much attention to, and with no obvious ripples affecting us here in the United States. . . . [W]ho wouldn't be moved by hearing the Chilean national anthem, sung by proud Chileans as the miners rose to the surface. Chilean exceptionalism! it's a beautiful thing.

The truth is that this was an honest-to-God human-interest story, whose appeal is the eternal appeal of all child-down-a-well sstories; it is a story of something bad that turned out fine in the end. In the repetitive ribbon of stories that enwrap our existence, there are too few tales of this kind. . . . Only in a handful of stories, curiously set in places very high or very low -- astronauts lost in space, mountaineers marooned on summits, and these trapped miners -- is there hope of a true happy ending, in which losses are restored and sorrows cease.

Gopnik suggests some of the ways in which the rescue might be Hollywoodified, including "relocat[ion] to West Virginia, where the men can be blonder and speak English." He notes, however:

The real heroes are hard to dramatize -- the rescue workers who went down into the mine to show the miners how the rescue would work, and then stayed there till the end. True courage is mostly choices, not gestures -- difficult to make dramatic.

And then he gets into some of that stuff I left for some later time.

In the midst of it all, three significant facts got lost: what was being mined (copper and gold); how much a Chilean miner typically earns (sixteen hundred dollars a month); and how many Chilean miners have died in accidents in the past decade (about three hundred and forty).

At the end of the week, after every miner was up,. safe and sound, it was odd to see how eager the TV anchors were to insist that the worst lay ahead for them -- and not just for the miner whose mistress showed up in place of his wife. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a real thing, but let's not underestimate the power of post-traumatic stress delight: thierty-three men can now say, for the rest of their lives, "At least I'm not trapped down at the bottom of a mine." Certainly, veterans of war suffer, but how many also shine with the quiet feeling that, from now on, life can never get quiet enough. People are trapped by circumstances; other people help them. There is a way out. Since this is the fable that every life hopes to trace, maybe the madness isn't so mad at all.

In addition to the endless coverage, as Gopnik notes, of the prophesied gloom and doom for the rescued 33, already we're seeing stories about splits among them (cf. "Rescued Miners' Secrecy Pact Erodes in Spotlight"), including breeches of supposed "unity" pacts on post-rescue activities and cooperative profiteering. I don't care. I don't propose to pay any attention.

If there are guys who think they can make a killing on what they've been through, I don't begrudge them. If there are guys willing to sell themselves for a pittance, I feel bad for them. I will just note that nobody's going to make as much as a nickel off my interest.

I'm saddened to see reports that the death toll has reached 30 and hope was fading for the still-missing seven miners in Henan province, China ("Hopes Fade for China Miners After Deadly Leak"). Of course hopes for the 33 Chilean miners had also been all but written off. The Chinese outcome, however, is overwhelmingly the more usual one.

The CNN correspondent in Hong Kong who was monitoring online response to the rescue doings overnight noted a wave of bitterness from Chinese commenters who paid tribute to the Chilean government's resolve to rescue its miners, in contrast to their own government's record of relative insouciance. As Gopnik notes, one of the factors in the Chilean government's determination was its own poor record with the mine disasters that are apparently a regular occurrence in mining the subterranean riches of Chile's desolate northern Atacama desert.

Certainly I'm hoping some attention will rub off onto the dreadful U.S. record of mine safety, and safety with respect to resource extraction generally, in the Glorious Era of Deregulation, in which finally we succeeded in getting that damned gummint off our backs. The Bush regime's unapologetic contempt for the very idea of enforcing even the laws and regulations on the books could only be read as acceptance that the human toll -- in deaths, incapacitations, and just plain physical deterioration, without even getting into the vast realm of environmental spoilage -- is "the price we pay" for obtaining those resources, an attitude that appeared to have been carried over intact into the Obama administration version of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, helping lay the groundwork for the Gulf oil-spill disaster.

Without in any way diminishing the uplift of the worldwide outpouring of interest and concern evidenced during the Chilean rescue, which understandably was the primary concern until the trapped miners were safely above ground, we can see, I think, that longer-term what should concern us is the exceptional nature of that outcome.

Yesterday the Scranton Times-Tribune published this editorial:

Make more happy endings

People around the world watched joyfully last week as, one by one, 33 Chilean miners who had been trapped a half mile underground for six weeks emerged into the arms of their loved ones.

The event had special resonance for Northeast Pennsylvania, where most older residents easily can recall the shock, tension and, most often, despair rather than joy resulting from deep-mine accidents.

It's worth noting that the successful rescue was at least partly due to American engineering expertise, from the involvement of NASA engineers who designed the rescue capsule, to American drilling experts who responded to the scene from as far away as Afghanistan.

And it's a reminder as well that mine safety in the United States itself remains a work in progress - the most recent evidence of which was the explosion in April that killed 29 miners at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia.

The technology used to extricate the Chilean miners is marvelous. But the objective in the United States should be to ensure that safety regulation and enforcement preclude the need to use that technology.

"A work in progress" seems an awfully kindly characterization, especially with reference to the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, which was presided over by Massey Energy's career-criminal CEO Don Blankenship, whose business is essentially built on spitting at mining laws and regulations, and who by now should surely be serving a host of concurrent life sentences for the murders of his miners (presuming he's tried by a judge he hasn't bought) rather than proclaiming government efforts to regulate mine safety "as silly as global warming."

Every day a thug like Blankenship goes unindicted is another day of mockery of any pretense to concern for either the people he employs or the land he befouls.

#

What If Rand Paul Had Been In Charge In Chile?

Last week Ken tackled humanity's fascination with the rescue of the Chilean mine workers. Americans were far more engrossed-- joyfully so-- in this than they were in the 1973 Kissinger/CIA-directed overthrow and murder of Chilean President Salvador Allende and the installation of brutal fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet, who systematically murdered thousands... while pleasing his American backers by, among other things, privatizing Social Security! Last week, though, we were all Chleans, all rooting for "our team."

Lucky for the miners Don Blankenship wasn't in charge. And lucky for the miners, neither was Kentucky self-certified eye doctor Rand Paul, currently running for the open Kentucky Senate seat, after making it clear to Kentucky miners and their families that all he knows about the lives of miners is what he's gathered from right-wing ideological screeds. He loves repeating them but were they in play in Chile over the last 68 days, there would, no doubt, have been a far less happy ending to the story there.

Yesterday we looked at author Thom Hartmann's explanation of the commons-- something radical right Republicans like the spoiled elitist Rand Paul define as socialism. In his book Threshold-- The Crisis of Western Culture, Hartmann uses the example of how he started his first business. Is it socialistic? Capitalistic? If rightists like Paul manage to seize power in their country, whatever it is, it's over:

The electricity that was delivered to us passed through public streets maintained by the City of East Lansing. My customers drove to us on public streets. Most were students attending a largely publicly financed "land grant" university. My employees were literate because they'd attended public schools that were operated by the government. I could accept and cash checks and know that the bank wouldn't run off with my money because of federal and state banking regulators. My contracts with suppliers were enforced with a government-operated court system, making it possible for me to safely predict that people would keep their word to deliver goods after I'd paid for them. If they failed to do so, there as a government-operated police and jail system that could be used to induce them to behave honestly.

My employees would reliably show up for work because their food supply was safe because of government stands and inspections, and because the air and water were clean enough to breathe without causing asthma attacks or disabling diseases. They didn't demand a pension plan from me because we were all-- they and I-- paying into Social Security. We were able to offer an inexpensive health insurance policy-- as I recall, it cost us around thirty dollars a month per employee-- because at that time Blue Cross/Blue Shield was required by the State of Michigan to be a not-for-profit corporation whose sole purpose was to provide health insurance, and at that time our hospitals were all similarly nonprofits that delivered high-quality, inexpensive care.

Paul's nihilism is mistrusted by sensible Kentucky voters and, in a state where McCain bested Obama 58-41% in 2008 and where Obama is highly unpopular today, progressive Democrat Jack Conway is on the verge on turning a deep red seat blue. Blue America's partners at the Americans For America PAC have come up with a novel way of communicating the danger of a Rand Paul victory to mining communities in Kentucky. Please consider helping them keep this ad on radio stations in eastern Kentucky counties from McCreary to Greenup and Pike to Laurel. We're getting reports that Ashland and Middlesboro voters have taken note and are discussing the ad and, more important, what's behind it:



Blue America has endorsed Attorney General Jack Conway as the best candidate for the Kentucky Senate seat-- and we hope you'll avail yourself of the opportunity to contribute to his campaign at the link that starts this sentence. Today the Herald Leader, which had endorsed Rand Paul over Trey Grayson in the Republican primary, came out for Jack Conway as the better choice for Kentucky.

Since riding the Tea Party wave to victory in the Republican primary as a relatively unvetted candidate, Paul has spent the summer and early fall revealing himself to be quite the ideologue who's long on simplistic slogans but short on understanding the drastic consequences of adhering to those slogans.

What came across as refreshingly candid in the spring proved to be distressingly extremist when Paul was pressed on issues ranging from civil rights and the Americans with Disabilities Act to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

As a senator, his mission would be a chain-saw massacre of federal government that lays waste to farm subsidies, education spending, mine-safety regulations, federal aid in fighting the scourge of drugs and numerous other programs of significant benefit to Kentuckians.

Which brings us to another disappointing post-primary revelation about Paul. As far as Kentucky is concerned, he is a drive-by candidate-- a transplant who, despite living here for the better part of two decades, never stopped to smell the bluegrass and learn about his adopted state's history, culture, problems or needs.

The sole focus of his campaign involves his antipathy for federal government. If he mentions Kentucky at all, it is almost as an afterthought.

So, the stark choice for Kentucky voters is this: a moderate Democrat who understands Kentucky's problems and needs and has a plan for creating jobs versus an ideologue Republican/Tea Partier with no record, no understanding of the state and a chain saw for a plan.

By far, Jack Conway stands as the better prepared candidate to serve the best interests of Kentucky in the U.S. Senate.

The rescue, as of 3pm ET (updated to 3:35pm)

Florencio Avalos greets his family after emerging from the Fenix 2 capsule in which each of the rescued miners has ascended the near half-mile from the mine in which they were trapped.

"We made a promise to never surrender, and we kept it."

-- Chilean President Sebastián Piñera

by Ken

I don't know about you, but apart from whatever occasional dozing may have occurred, I had about 45 minutes till my alarm clock would go off at the time I finally packed it in and stopped watching the Chilean mine rescue -- until, er, "morning." I don't know what exactly I was watching, or why, but I couldn't tear myself away.

I don't mean that I literally didn't know what I was watching. Of course I did. It was the long, methodically, and gruelingly planned start of the extraction of the miners after their 68-day captivity nearly half a mile below ground. What I mean, though, is what the hell was there to watch?

Maybe once every 50 minutes or so, the Fenix 2 capsule -- or cage, as the rescue people seemed always to refer to it -- emerged from the painstakingly excavated and steel-reinforced hole that leads to the mine nearly a half-mile below, and in due time, voilà!, another miner emerges from his 15 minute-or-so ascent in the 21-inch-wide container, barely enough to contain a man. (As we were reminded constantly, some of the men had had to slim down -- during the long preparation period made necessary by the time needed to dig the evacuation tunnel -- to be assured of fitting in the thing.) Among the orange-jumpsuited crewpeople was none other than President Sebastián Piñera, smiling and hugging everyone within hugging range for as long as he held out. I didn't notice when he finally gave out and disappeared, but he was there a long time.

President Piñera with budding superstar "Super Mario" Sepulveda

By the time each miner emerges, we know not only who it is but quite a lot about him and what kind of physical and mental shape he's in, thanks to the extensive contact between the trapped miners and the outside world while they were waiting for the rescue tunnel to be dug. In most cases, in fact, we've seen the newly emerged miner down in the mine clambering into the cage, because there's a camera down there providing a constant video feed, which has been one of the wonders of the whole thing: watching live, as it happens, a rescue operation for which no one seems able to think of an equal precedent.

The video feed has been provided entirely by the Chilean government, which has done an outstanding job, more focused and coherent than I would have expected from a network TV director. But still, it's not as if there's much to watch. Oh, CNN tried to tart it up with a steady stream of yammering -- some of it actually interesting, much of it embarrassing.

It's all worked out so well that it's easy to forget just how dangerous this escape plan, through a tunnel that's far from straight and has virtually no extra clearance for the escape "cage," seemed going in. No one could be sure it would even work! A key factor in determining the order of evacuation was uncertainty as to what the first few passengers would encounter on the corkscrew-style journey up. Even though, as we were told repeatedly, inside the capsule the passenger has his vitals monitored and is in constant contact with the topside, in order to ensure that the early travelers would be physically up to, well, whatever they might need to be up to, it was decided that Nos. 1-5 would be drawn from the fittest of the group, followed then by the group with the most serious health concerns. In the event, the operation has proceeded so smoothly that it soon came to seem routine! Amazing!

And I'm not the only one who was amazed by the condition of the men as they emerged from Fenix 2. (Among the many extreme precautions taken was the manufacture of not one but two capsules. Fenix 1 is on standby, and will remain so as long as Fenix 2, on which extensive maintenance is performed, continues to be operable. I assume the logic is that once they press the backup into service, they no longer have a backup.) The men look unbelievably fit and well. (The men requested shampoo and shaving equipment to prepare themselves for their return to the outside world.) Each is soon laid on a gurney to proceed to the lengthy process of medical observation planned for all the returnees.

I don't take anything for granted, and I don't want to jinx it. As I write, 19 of the 33 miners have been brought up, which still leaves a long way to go. But it's actually running ahead of schedule! The minister of mining estimated in a press conference earlier this afternoon that the operation may be completed today, well ahead of schedule. He explained that the crews manning the upper and lower ends of the shuttle have become steadily more proficient at their tasks -- though without sacrificing safety, which apparently has been a paramount concern. Built into the schedule, for example, was ample time for regular maintenance of the capsule. One of the fascinations of watching has been seeing how this incredibly complex plan, making use of technology and knowhow from all around the world, has come together. Col. Hannibal Smith would have approved.

Even though, as I say, 19 miners have been rescued as of the time of writing (shortly before 3pm ET), we're not even halfway through the operation, proceeding slowly and methodically. There would be no way to speed it up significantly anyhow, but you have to admire the time taken to the ticking cnn.com clock shows 14 "underground" and 19 "rescued," which is only technically correct, by virtue of the fact that the display is headed "Chilean Miner Rescue." Which is --

ONE THING THAT MAKES ME CRAZY . . .

Yes, there were 33 trapped miners to be brought up, but the total number of men to be extracted isn't 33 but, ultimately, 39, counting the rescue workers sent down to handle the bottom end of the shuttle operation. As of the minister of mining's press conference, c1:15pm ET, there were five, with a sixth scheduled to be sent down later, to provide the mine crew with more opportunity for rest. Hey, these guys have to be brought up too. The minister made clear that that last man down will be the last man up -- and it occurs to you that he's going to have to load himself into the capsule and get himself hooked up and make sure the thing is oriented correctly to ascend properly into the tunnel (not to mention turning off the lights, or doing whatever the protocol calls for the last man out to do), all without assistance.

All of the crew people have performed heroically, but perhaps none as much so as the ones who allowed themselves to be shuttled down into that cave where the 33 miners were imprisoned those 68 days. I don't know, maybe it's just me -- possibly a hypersensitivity hangover from the memory of 9/11 and all those NYC firefighters rushing into the World Trade Center towers. Some of the TV people are careful to remember that there are more than 33 men who have to be gotten out. (Now we know the total is going to be 39.) That's appreciated. What the hell is wrong with the other dopes?

There will be plenty of time to talk about the cost of this whole operation, and where it fits into the grand scheme of the socioeconomic order. For now, I'm as dumbfounded as anybody.


RESCUE UPDATE: UP TO 21 AS OF 3:35PM ET

With Johnny Barrios safely returned, it's on to No. 22, Samuel Avalos, who I believe is the brother of Florencio (pictured above). I know one of the already-rescued miners had a brother still down below.

#

It May Not Matter In A GOP Primary But Can Far Right Icon Marco Rubio Really Run Against Social Security In A General Election... In Florida?

Right-wing extremist Marco Rubio roiled Florida politics yesterday by grabbing hold of a political third rail: the Republican mania to dismantle Social Security. Ignore the GOP-oriented headline about "experts" agreeing that Social Security has to be destroyed; right-wing "experts" have been screeching that at the top of their lungs since before it was ever enacted into law. Some Bush advisor saying Social Security needs to be cut-- even if corporately-funded reactionary "think tanks" back him up-- doesn't give Rubio the kind of cover he'd need to get away with that approach, especially not in Florida and especially not in a general election.

From as far back as Barry Goldwater in 1964, political candidates have risked backlash in Florida for suggesting changes to Social Security. So it was remarkable to see Marco Rubio in a national TV debate with Gov. Charlie Crist call for raising the retirement age.

Blogs and Facebook groups instantly lit up. The consensus was Rubio committed a serious gaffe. Older Americans are among the most reliable voters, and in Florida, 2.4 million of them receive Social Security... "Any expert from any political spectrum will tell you that Rubio was right," said Andrew Biggs, former No. 2 at the Social Security Administration and now with the conservative American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

Biggs is a fringe right-wing ideologue and, like his tribe tends to be, full of shit. Because the neo-fascist American Enterprise Institute and its paid hacks say something is so, it doesn't make it so. In fact, it makes it very suspect. Earlier today my friend Alex Lawson from Social Security Works (an actual expert) pointed out that "100% of Wall Street agrees that folks on Social Security need to tighten their belts to pay for the economic calamity Wall Street created. The only people who want to cut Social Security are Wall Street and their bought and paid for acolytes in DC. The author could have asked almost any expert at random from the National Academy of Social Insurance and he would have heard that most experts are not agreed that raising the retirement age is necessary." Alex is eager for more Republicans to embrace Rubio's position for their campaigns, pointing to a recent Quinnipiac poll (2 weeks ago) which asked "Do you think cutting the growth of spending on Social Security benefits should or should not be a main part of any government approach to the deficit?"

77 percent of all Americans oppose
84 percent of Democrats oppose
73 percent of Republicans oppose
57 percent of those with annual household incomes of more than $250,000 oppose

Rubio, the American Enterprise Institute, the Ayn Rand kooks and Hate Talk Radio hosts are out there alone on this one. That said, this is hardly something that hasn't been tried before. Four decades ago, in fact, there was a little experiment... in Chile. I'm not saying Nixon or even Kissinger had the elected president of Chile assassinated so they could dismantle Social Security, but it sure worked out that way. Thom Hartmann touched on it in his latest book, Threshold and mentions that the CIA plot to replace Social Democrat Salvatore Allende with full-on fascist dictator and corporate shill Augusto Pinoche was abetted by several U.S. corporations who stood to make a great deal of money from the "transition."

Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte ruled the country with an iron fist until 1990. Advised by economists from Friedman's Chicago School, he implemented "free market reforms," including the privatization of Chile's social security system. The result was a huge success for a small class of bankers and businessmen, and the economy grew, particularly in the large corporate sector. But poverty dramatically grew as well, the middle class began to evaporate, and those living on social security were devastated. Throughout the 1990s, people saw the value of their private social security accounts actually decline, in part because of the fees that bankers were skimming off the top, in part because the country's economic growth had been unspectacular.

Rubio is going to count on fear and scare and confusion to stampede ignorant, nervous voters into doing themselves in. It's worked before. And they have Fox and Hate Talk Radio to help. Wrecking Social Security may be a jewel in the right-wing crown but it isn't the whole game by any stretch of the imagination. Neither Crist nor Rubio supports-- or has ever supported-- the legitimate aspirations of American working families. They're both anti-union zealots, especially Rubio. And, back to Hartmann, once the Chicago School experimenters failed so dismally in Chile, they moved right on to the U.S. with their warped ideological "economic" theories.

Reagan and Thatcher undertook aggressive movements to destroy organized labor, with Reagan busting the powerful professional air traffic controllers' union, PATCO, while Thatcher busted the coal miners' union, that nation's most powerful. Both turned the labor-protective apparatus of government from a labor department designed to protect organized labor into bureaucracies that would assist corporations in busting unions. Additionally, both "freed" markets by starting the process of dropping tariffs and reducing regulations on business.

The result in both cases was, in retrospect, disastrous. Industry fled both countries, in the new "flat" world, to where labor was cheapest (at the moment it's China), labor unions were destroyed, and the middle class was squeezed. Well-paying jobs were replaced with "Do you want fries with that?" and social mobility dropped to levels not seen since the robber baron era a hundred years earlier.

Rubio said he agrees with Paul Ryan's widely-panned roadmap which plans to raise the age for benefits to 70. Needless to say, neither Ryan nor Rubio favors the kind of serious reform that would end the taxable income ceiling, allowing the wealthy to avoid the payroll taxes on anything over $106,800. If that were fixed, Social Security would be instantly solvent out into the direction of eternity. Ryan and Rubio are creatures of corporate power. They're not interested in finding equitable solutions; they're interested in helping their rich, powerful paymasters avoid paying their fair share of taxes.