Bush Shields Dad on Chile Terrorism

By Robert Parry
September 22, 2006

Chilean investigators say the Bush administration is undercutting their case against former dictator Augusto Pinochet for his alleged role in the terrorist assassination of a political rival on the streets of Washington three decades ago, a crime that then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush appears to have tolerated and then helped cover-up.

Now, George W. Bush has picked up the mantle from his father for protecting the 90-year-old Pinochet from ever facing justice for the murder of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt, who were killed by a car bomb on Sept. 21, 1976, as Letelier drove down Massachusetts Avenue.

Six years ago, near the end of the Clinton administration, an FBI team reviewed new evidence that had become available in the case and recommended the indictment of Pinochet. But the final decision was left to the incoming Bush administration, which has failed to act while also withholding relevant documents from Chilean investigators.

“Every day it is clearer that Pinochet ordered my brother’s death,” human rights lawyer Fabiola Letelier told the New York Times. “But for a proper and complete investigation to take place we need access to the appropriate records and evidence.” [NYT, Sept. 21, 2006]

By frustrating the Chilean investigation, the Bush administration also is protecting former President George H.W. Bush against possibly being implicated in this act of terrorism, conceivably as an accessory after the fact for diverting suspicion away from Pinochet.

The Letelier-Moffitt murder is considered the worst act of state-sponsored terrorism in the history of Washington, D.C. At minimum, George H.W. Bush’s CIA operated with extraordinary incompetence and negligence in failing to act on explicit warnings about the assassination plot. >>>cont

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