Italian Case Reveals More About Condor & Harry W. Shlaudeman

Add the name of Harry W. Shlaudeman to the fascist criminals deployed by the empire-

(IPS) – The intelligence services of Peru and Argentina kept Washington informed in real time about a 1980 joint clandestine operation in which four alleged members of Argentina’s Montoneros guerrilla movement were “disappeared,” according to documents declassified in the United States.

The incident forms part of the case opened in December by Italian Judge Luisianna Figliola, who issued arrest warrants for those responsible for this and other actions carried out in the framework of Operation Condor, a coordinated plan among the military governments that ruled Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, aimed at tracking down, capturing, torturing and eliminating left-wing opponents.

The documents show that the U.S. government was fully aware of what was happening, at the time it was occurring, and that it knew ahead of time that the alleged Montoneros would be killed.

The capture in Lima and forced disappearance of Noemí Gianetti de Molfino, a member of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Argentine human rights group, María Inés Raverta and Julio César Ramírez was planned by Batallón 601 after the seizure in Argentina of Federico Frías, who was going to take part in Lima in a meeting with high-level members of the Montoneros, the armed branch of the leftist wing of Argentina’s Peronist party.

After he was brutally tortured, Frías was taken by his captors to Peru, where he had agreed to tell them the names and addresses of supposed guerrillas, according to the testimony of a former Peruvian agent who took part in the operation…

…the murdered body of Gianetti de Molfino, one of the women kidnapped in Lima, was found in a hotel in Madrid. Nothing was ever heard of again about Raverta, Ramírez or Frías.

The path followed by Shlaudeman’s career is particularly interesting. He was U.S. State Department Deputy Chief of Mission in Chile from 1969 to 1973, during which time the coup d’etat that overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende (1970-1973), ushering in a 17-year dictatorship, was being planned.

He then served as State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, from 1973 to 1975, under President Richard Nixon; in 1977 he was appointed ambassador to Peru; and in 1980 he became ambassador to Argentina, a post he held until 1983, when democracy was restored in that country.

In 1992, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George Bush, the current U.S. president’s father.  

Human Rights Act(ing Up)

So the Ministry of Justice (cue establishing shot of imposing leviathan structure, ominous music and title crawl) has kept a survey from 2004 about the Human Rights Act (HRA)under wraps and now releases it with zero publicity. Hmm –

The poll of 2,000 people featured in a report which found there was widespread support for a law on human rights.

A spokesman said: “The overwhelming conclusion shows 84% of the general public agree it is important to have a law which deals with human rights in Britain.

“Since this research was undertaken, the government has undertaken a campaign to promote better understanding of the Act and to ensure that public authorities are more aware of their duties to the public under the Act.”

Except that is not the way the story is spun, that is from a few papragraphs down, the way the report is being spun is ‘ Them damn furrners are scamming our kindly human rights laws’-

It says 57% agree that too many people, mostly asylum seekers and other “foreigners”, take advantage of the Human Rights Act, while 40% agreed that the Act has caused more problems than it has solved. One in 10 people believe criminals and lawyers are taking advantage of the Act.

Now is drawing attention to this and leading the story saying most people think them damn furrners are scamming the law a good thing, is it going to make people think about their ignorance of the act and their bigoted assumptions? Or is this framing an example of that? Can you guess?
The good news is most people agree with having human rights law enshrined in our national laws and the government claims to want to further ‘educate’ people on the law and alleviate misconceptions. Yet the report is sensationally lead with just such a misconception. And why was this report sat on? Was the ministry trying to avoid inflaming bigotry at a sensitive time? Or was it emabarrassed that most people support the law they were breaking domestically and via cooperation with America all over the world? Or is it this growing prejudice that no one wants to talk about?

The report presents the findings from the Human Rights Insight Project, which set out to establish whether human rights could be used empirically as a tool to improve the public’s experience of public services and if so, how we in government could encourage and facilitate this. 

So it sounds like they are more concerned with a consumer level of interaction, of ‘experience’ of their dealings with the government (summary). All of which pales into ironic insignificance when you realise this a government that has committed the ultimate war crime of choosing a war of aggression all the while lying to its people. No wonder we are to be treated as consumers, not citizen’s, or equals. And the attitude to ‘the other’ displayed in people is only a smaller version of the callous disregard for the people we’ve killed abroad. Murderous imperialism is fuelled in part by a certain level of domestic support (a third to a half) that is in turn created simply by capitalism, where compettiton removes empathy, where life is hard already and slowly the sickness of ‘do it to them before they do it to you’ takes hold. That is the bad news in the survey, a sizeable proportion of people are resentful of outsiders & minorities and they appear proud of that and feel aggrieved more is not done against the unfavoured groups who ‘take advantage’ of the act. The abused becoming the abuser. The ‘flexible’ workforce does learn fast.

The ‘war on terror’ and continuing freemaket conservative polices will only increase this prejudice, more pressure, more ‘competitiveness’ more killing for profit. More oppressive regimes supported for the efficient sweatshops they run making more people trying to escape that misery, who will find refuge in the countries most benefiting from the economic inequality (while professing ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’) has turned to hatred. And the media profiting from that global market will not be the ones to inform people this racism is wrong, that the global exploitation inherent in capitalism creates migrants and asylum seekers, that governments and corporations should be held to account for denying us our rights. It’s simple divide and rule, toss the the more idiotic people through their idiotic media some misleading titbits about asylum seekers and companies being sued for a slippery floor and bingo they reduce thought about human rights to a non-elite-threatening level. Like those who attack the Iraqi’s for not building a working super conservative free market corporate friendly ‘stable’ state, we are attacking people, reduced to symptoms (which we then deny) of our own wrongdoing- Of our restless, aggressively acquisitive ruling elite’s crimes against humans and their rights everywhere.

A Town Called Malice: Oh Yeah, Jena Ain’t Racist

A white supremacist group will be allowed to hold a rally here on Martin Luther King Day without posting a $10,000 bond after a federal judge questioned the constitutionality of the law requiring the bond, officials said Friday. The Nationalist Movement, based in Learned, Miss., wants to protest a march held last September to support the Jena 6…

The group challenged the ordinance in federal court and a judge indicated during pre-trial conferences that the city ordinance was constitutionally “faulty,” Mayor Murphy R. McMillin said.

Town counsel Walter E. Dorroh Jr. said the ordinance “puts an undue burden on the First Amendment Rights of indigent persons, and indigent organizations, such as the Nationalist Movement.”

Oh yeah, boo-hoo-hoo the poor nazi retards. The Mayor, Town counsel, on MLK day? Oh yeah absolutely nothing institutionally fucked up here. The Jena 6 have become the means by which this towns festering sickness has been revealed. What a godforsaken shithole, the Mayor can use that if he likes if they want a town slogan.