For the life of me, I don't see any difference in principal between Operation
Condor, the international assassination program being run out of Chile in the
1970s under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and the international assassination program
being run by President Obama, the Pentagon, and the CIA. Indeed, it seems
rather bizarre to me that Argentine and Chilean officials are currently being
indicted and convicted for assassination they carried out under Operation
Condor while President Obama and his national security establishment are
receiving accolades and praises by the U.S. mainstream press for their
assassinations.
It's true that under Operation Condor, they were assassinating suspected
communists while Obama's team is assassinating suspected terrorists. But isn't
that a distinction without a difference? The fact is that both assassination
operations have been based on assassinating people who have never been
convicted in a court of law of the offense for which they are being killed.
President Obama's team has bent over backwards to show how careful they have
been in choosing people to be assassinated. They have a team of
national-security bureaucrats who carefully study the evidence and then make a
decision on whether a person is going to be added to their kill list.
But surely Operation Condor was based on some type of bureaucratic
decision-making as well. For example, when Condor officials decided to
assassinate Orlando Letelier, who had served as foreign minister in the
Allende administration, or Gen. Carlos Prats, who had served as head of the
Chilean Armed Forces under Allende, or Bernard Leighton, who had been vice
president of Chile, or any of the other tens of thousands of assassination
victims, surely they had the same type of bureaucratic team employed by
President Obama to give the okay to the assassinations.
In fact, there is a good chance that the CIA and the Pentagon even modeled
their war on terrorism assassination program on Operation Condor. That's
because the CIA was a secret partner in Operation Condor, the partner that
supplied the technological and communications equipment that was used to
coordinate assassination operations between the respective members of
Operation Condor.
In fact, the man in overall charge of Condor, Manuel Contreras, was not only
also in charge of DINA, the Chilean agency that was in charge of rounding up
Chileans who were suspected of being communists and torturing, raping, or
executing them, he was a ''double-dipper'' in that he was also a salaried
agent of the CIA.
The common element between Operation Condor and Obama's assassination program
is this: There is no due process of law or trial by jury accorded to people
before they are assassinated. Instead, under both operations a team of
national-security state bureaucrats makes the life-or-death determination.
What is due process of law? It's a principle that stretches back to Magna
Carta. It holds that the king (or a president or a general) cannot kill a
person without first giving him notice and opportunity to be heard.
That's what the Fifth Amendment is all about. It prohibits the federal
government from depriving any person (not just American citizens) of life
without due process of law. That means a criminal indictment outlining the
charges, an opportunity to dispute the charges in a court of law, and a right
to have a jury of regular citizens decide whether the charges are true.
Due process of law was ignored by Pinochet, whose brutal dictatorial regime
brought Operation Condor into existence. It's also being ignored by President
Obama in his worldwide war on terrorism. Both Pinochet and Obama have
assassinated thousands of people, all without due process of law and trial by
jury.
Among the most famous assassinations carried out by Condor was that of Orlando
Letelier. He was a communist official in the administration of Salvador
Allende, a communist who the Chilean people had democratically elected to be
their president. After being brutally tortured by DINA officials, Letelier was
released and came to the United States, where he began lobbying Congress to
terminate U.S. foreign aid to the Pinochet regime — aid that was subsidizing
Pinochet's torture, rape, incarceration, and execution operation.
Since he was a committed communist who was threatening the national security
of Chile, Condor officials marked Letelier for assassination. On September 21,
1976, a Condor operation headed by an American man named Michael Townley, who
was working for DINA, exploded a car bomb under Letelier's car, killing him
and his 26-year-old assistant Ronni Moffit, who had just recently gotten
married.
In the eyes of Operation Condor officials, there was nothing wrong with this.
They were waging the war on communism, just as U.S. officials were at that
time, and just as U.S. officials today are waging their war on terrorism.
Letelier was a communist and a threat to national security. Sure, it was
perhaps unfortunate that Moffitt got killed too but bystanders are often
killed in Obama's drone assassination program as well. Anyway, the reasoning
goes, if a person doesn't want to risk losing his life, he shouldn't be
hanging out with communists and terrorists.
Ironically, however, that's not the way that some Justice Department officials
saw the situation. They considered that the Letelier assassination was
outright murder. In other words, they rejected the war on communism mindset
that was guiding the people in Operation Condor. They decided to go after
Townley and his assassination team and in the right way — by providing them
with due process of law and trial by jury. The accused assassins were
indicted, tried, and convicted, but they never had to spend much time in jail
for what amounted to premeditated murder. In fact, in a favorable twist of
fate for Townley, the feds ultimately put him into their Federal Witness
Protection Program. Today, Michael Townley is still being protected by the
feds.
The fact that President Obama's assassination program mirrors the
assassination program carried out by Gen. Pinochet's Operation Condor should
cause every American to pause and reflect on it and, more generally, what old
Cold War-era national security establishment has done — and continues to do —
to our country.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in
economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the
University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He
also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught
law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become
director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has
advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the
country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and
he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show
Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full
Context.
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