<HTML>EFE News Service November 28, 2002 HEADLINE: CHILE-KISSINGER (SCHEDULED) FOR MANY CHILEANS, KISSINGER'S APPOINTMENT IS A GRUESOME JOKE BYLINE: Alonso de Contreras. BODY:   Santiago, Nov 27 (EFE For many Chileans, the fact that  Henry Kissinger  has been named to head the probe into the events of  Sept. 11,  2001, terrorist attacks is not only an ironic coincidence of dates but a gruesome mockery of the country's 1973 coup and Operation Condor.                                         Prominent rights attorney Juan Bustos told EFE Thursday that Kissinger investigating terrorism "is like letting a cat guard the meat in a butcher shop."   "This is an aberration because Kissinger was the agent and architect of the Sept. 11  (coup) in Chile that heralded the destruction of democracy and the beginning of the reign of state-sponsored terrorism in South America. It's paradoxical that the person who sponsored international terrorism is now in charge of investigating it," the attorney said.   U.S. President George W. Bush named the former secretary of state to two U.S. presidents to lead an independent investigation of last year's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Wednesday.   For Chileans, " Sept. 11"  evokes the day in 1973 when Socialist President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet and which was allegedly clandestinely pushed for by Kissinger, who also served as national security adviser to former President Richard M. Nixon at the time.   For many Chileans, international terrorism does not refer to Al Qaeda, but to Operation Condor in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, where military dictatorships joined forces and shared intelligence to hunt      down and eliminate leftist opponents with the blessing of the U.S. State Department led by Kissinger.   The U.S. government's role in bringing about Chile's military coup and its support for the Southern Cone military dictatorships' Operation Condor in the 1970s is well documented in State Department documents declassified in 1999.   These declassified documents have prompted lawsuits in Chile, Argentina, Spain, France and even the United States against a number of prominent figures for human rights violations. Kissinger has been indicted in several cases and subpoenaed as a witness in others.   In September 1973, shortly after the coup, U.S. freelance journalist Charles Horman was detained by a Chilean military squad and murdered.   According to Horman family attorneys who have filed a suit against Kissinger, the U.S. Embassy in Santiago informed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that the reporter was about to be killed shortly before his summary execution.   Harmon's plight and the family's subsequent relentless search for the truth inspired Greek filmmaker Costa Gavras' movie "Missing."                           The plaintiffs have introduced into evidence receipts dating from 1975 of CIA payments to Col. Manuel Contreras, chief of the now defunct-DINA, the Chilean secret police.   Another document from July 1976 proves that the CIA informed the State Department about Operation Condor, whose first victims were former Chilean army commander Gen. Carlos Prats and his wife who were assassinated in 1974 in Buenos Aires.   Likewise, in September 1976, Allende's former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his American aide, Ronni Moffit were killed in Washington, D.C. in a car bombing carried out by DINA agents.   The Letelier family has filed a lawsuit against Kissinger, who has also been subpoenaed in France for the disappearance of five French nationals during the Chilean coup.   Kissinger has refused to be deposed by Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon, who is looking into allegations that he knew about Operation Condor's plot to eliminate the opposition.                                                                  The German-born former U.S. official alleges that it is not appropriate to revisit these charges, especially in the legal venue, although he acknowledges that mistakes "quite possibly were made."   Kissinger, who, along with North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for the peace accords they reached that year, said Wednesday that the probe "will go where the facts lead us. We are under no restrictions and we will accept no restrictions."   But in Chilean legal circles it is not expected that Kissinger's investigation will take him to Chile or any other nation in the region.        </HTML>