31 October 2016
By Jacob G. Hornberger
Throughout the presidential campaign, including the presidential debates,
among the issues that have not been raised or discussed is the federal
government's power to assassinate. The power to assassinate is now consider an
accepted power of the federal government. In fact, most people, especially
mainstream reporters and pundits, treat federal assassinations with blasé and
nonchalance.
Most people undoubtedly believe that the federal government's power of
assassination was acquired only after the 9/11 attacks and as part of its
''war on terrorism.''
But that's simply not true. The federal government's power to assassinate
people stretches all the way back to the decision to convert the federal
government into a national-security state in the latter half of the 1940s. It
didn't take the CIA, one of the principal components of the national-security
establishment, long before it adopted and exercised this extraordinary power
in its effort to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War and to protect the
United States from going communist.
Let's go back to 1954. The CIA had decided that the people of Guatemala had
made a mistake in electing a man named Jacobo Arbenz as their president.
Arbenz was a socialist. He was also a person who believed that everyone,
including communists, had the right to participate in the political process.
When Arbenz began seizing land belong the giant U.S. corporation United Fruit,
which was the largest landowner in Guatemala and had connections to members of
Congress and members of the national-security establishment, and distributing
it to the poor, the CIA targeted him for a regime-change operation. In the
eyes of the CIA, Arbenz's land-reform plan confirmed that he was operating
under the direction of an international communist conspiracy based in Moscow.
As part of that operation, the CIA prepared a kill list for the man who would
replace Arbenz, a brutal army colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas. The CIA's
kill list consisted of suspected socialists. The idea was that there would be
nothing wrong with assassinating or executing people who believed in socialism
or communism.
Fortunately for Arbenz, he decided to leave the country before the CIA's
handpicked replacement was able to kill him.
In the 1960s, the CIA entered into a partnership with the Mafia to assassinate
Fidel Castro. What had Castro done to deserve being assassinated? He had
certainly never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. Like
Arbenz, his ''crime'' was that he was a socialist or a communist. That's all
the justification the CIA needed to murder him.
In the 1970s, the CIA participated in the assassination of a man named Rene
Schneider. Who was Schneider? He was the commanding general of Chile's armed
forces. He also had a wife and children.
More important, he was an insurmountable obstacle to U.S. hopes for a military
coup that would prevent Chile's democratically elected socialist president,
Salvador Allende, from taking office. Schneider's position was that he had
taken an oath to support and defend the constitution of Chile, which, like the
U.S. Constitution, did not provide for a military coup as a way of replacing a
democratically elected president.
Since President Richard Nixon and the CIA wanted the coup, the CIA targeted
Schneider for a violent kidnapping that would remove him from the scene. When
the kidnapping attempt took place, Schneider, who was armed, fought back and
was shot dead by the kidnappers.
When the CIA's role in the kidnapping-murder came to light years later, the
CIA maintained that it only wanted Schneider kidnapped, not killed. The CIA's
claim, however, was disingenuous. After all, what did the CIA think the
kidnappers would do with Schneider after he was kidnapped? Since the reason he
was being violently removed from the scene was so that he could no longer
obstruct a U.S.-orchestrated military coup, there was no possibility that he
would ever be returned alive. Assassination/execution had to be part and
parcel of the original kidnapping scheme, something that Schneider himself
undoubtedly recognized, which had to be the reason he fought back rather than
letting himself be taken captive.
Of course, under the legal concept of felony-murder, the CIA was as
responsible for the murder of Rene Schneider as the people who shot him dead.
That concept holds that when a person is killed during the commission of the
felony, all the participants to the felony are legally responsible for the
murder as well as the felony.
Consider the execution/assassination of two young American men during the
Chilean coup — Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi. Many years after the coup, a
top-secret State Department investigative report stated that U.S. intelligence
had played a role in their murders and recommended deeper investigation.
Of course, no further investigation took place and no one, needless to say,
was ever indicted here in the United States for the murders of those two men.
By the 1970s, the CIA had simply become too powerful for any U.S. official to
suggest that it be held to account for the murder of two innocent men.
Why did U.S. intelligence agents want Horman and Teruggi killed? They were
socialists. They had supported Salvador Allende, Chile's democratically
elected socialist president. They also opposed the Vietnam War. As
journalists, they were also exposing the deep U.S. involvement in Chile's
democratic affairs. Moreover, Horman had inadvertently discovered U.S.
complicity in the coup itself, which he planned to write about. Of course,
U.S. officials were equally determined to keep their role in the coup top
secret.
Several weeks ago, the U.S. mainstream press commemorated the 40th anniversary
of the assassination on the streets of Washington, D.C., of former Allende
administration official Orlando Letelier and his 25-year-old assistant Ronni
Moffitt. The assassination was carried out as part of Augusto Pinochet's
top-secret international assassination program known as Operation Condor, an
operation that the CIA not only partnered in but also most likely planned and
orchestrated as part of its post-coup relationship with Pinochet.
Why did Pinochet target Orlando Letelier for assassination? For the same
reason that the CIA, which helped install Pinochet into power, targeted Arbenz,
Castro, Horman, and Teruggi for assassination: Letelier was a socialist, as
was Ronni Moffitt.
Ironically, while still condemning Pinochet for assassinating Letelier and
Moffitt, the U.S. mainsatream press remains silent., blasé, or even supportive
of the U.S. national-security state's assassinations or assassination attempts
against Jacobo Arbenz, Fidel Castro, Rene Schneider, Charles Horman, and Frank
Teruggi.
But let's face it: when they assassinated Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt
the U.S.-installed and U.S-supported dictator Augusto Pinochet and his
national-security establishment were simply exercising the same power of
assassination that the U.S. national-security establishment has been
exercising since its inception in the 1940s and, equally important, that it
continues to exercise today.
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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