I've got a question you folks can maybe answer. I was looking at the front page of the local newspaper today; there was an article titled "For Pinochet victims, closure far from certain". "Closure," I think they meant, that's where the victim says, "it's OK now, I guess I'm not mad anymore." The article mentioned one Sheila Cassidy, a nurse in Chile, who bandaged up a gun-shot victim in the early days of the coup. In order to make her tell where her patient was hiding, so they could go finish him off, Pinochet's boys stuck an electric shock probe into her vagina.
Closure, sure. She did make it out alive. "Although she later testified to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva on her jail experience in Chile, as well as gruesome accounts of torture she heard from other prisoners, her case was never properly investigated. If she gets the chance now, Cassidy says, she is prepared to testify."
"Pinochet's boys," what am I saying? Everyone in the world, including even some of the U.S. TV-watching public, has to know that Pinochet would never have amounted to any more than an absurd gold-braid General in a comic opera army if not for Nixon, Kissinger and associates. (The paper published a photo of the old butcher in full Ruritanian regalia. No one so evil should look so silly.)
Pinochet was not Chilean, he was really American, a good old boy outa Virginia, Langley to be exact. And here now Washington's hand-picked son-of-a-bitch has been nabbed off the London street, almost like he were just a common criminal, rather than an uncommon one backed by the White House. Not one, but two European nations in concert, arrested an agent of the C.I.A. on a mass-murder charge! That's surely unprecedented, isn't it?
What I would like to know, particularly from Chris in Britain or anyone else in Europe, is: doesn't anyone consider the Pinochet arrest as a deliberate, blatant European slap-in-the-face directed against the U.S.A.? No U.S. "pundit" I've read sees it that way, but that's how I read it; maybe I'm just imagining things, due to probably unjustified optimism resulting from the news of Pinochet's arrest.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net