Bill Clinton Forces CIA to Come Clean About Chile
Will Kosovo be Next?
by Tamara Baker
Oct. 24, 2000 -- SAINT PAUL, MN (AmpolNS) -- Every so often, something happens that proves that there is justice in this world, if you work at it:
CIA to Release Chile Documents
by Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 24, 2000; Page A25CIA Director George J. Tenet has reversed course and agreed to release 700 documents next month about CIA covert operations in Chile that undermined socialist President Salvadore Allende and helped set the stage for a 1973 coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power.
Tenet announced a tentative decision in August to withhold those documents in order to safeguard Central Intelligence Agency intelligence methods. But he agreed to one final review, with the White House favoring as much disclosure as possible under a special declassification initiative ordered by President Clinton.
With that review complete, Tenet has agreed to release all but two dozen covert action documents on Nov. 13, the fourth and final release date under Clinton's declassification initiative.
Faithful readers of both Ampol and of Robert Parry's Consortium website will recall how Bill Clinton, in February of 1999, pressured the Bush Family's favorite government agency, the CIA, to release the details of the Nixon-and Kissinger-authorized destablization efforts led by the CIA against Salvador Allende's democratically-elected government in 1973.
Faithful readers will also note that February 1999 was in the midst of NATO's wranglings with Milosevic over Kosovo. As detailed in "War Gets The Monica Treatment", the August 1999 cover story of Brill's Content, the CIA (in addition to telling, one hopes unintentionally, NATO bombers to hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade) fed phony front-page stories to both the New York Times and the Washington Post in the spring of 1999. These stories stated that NATO bombing was stiffening Serbian troop resolve when in fact it was doing the exact opposite.
Why, pray tell, would the agency Dubya's daddy used to run try to influence the media in this way? Was it to encourage Bill Clinton to forego his ultimately sucessful air war in favor of ground troops, or was it an attempt to force him and NATO out of Kosovo entirely?
Consider this other story from the October 24, 2000, Washington Post:
Bush Plan Worries Europeans
Tuesday, October 24, 2000; Page A07
BRUSSELS, Oct. 23 -- A proposal by Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush to remove American troops from peacekeeping missions in the Balkans has provoked a wave of anxiety among the European allies, who fear such a move would split the NATO alliance and damage faith in U.S. leadership.
Remember how Dubya's foreign-policy guru Condolezza Rice (she who has had an oil tanker named for her) stated that, even as Dubya favored increases in spending on military hardware (i.e., steering big defense contracts to the home districts of certain powerful Republican legislators), she was advising her boss to pull out of virtually every global hotspot?
This is what the Euros fear, and rightly so.
…which is something to ponder as you close the curtain behind you on November 7th.