PART 3 ______________________________ ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN News * Analysis * Research * Action ______________________________ - AFIB No. 257, July 2, 2000 - ***** ____________________________________________________________________ F.B.I. WATCHED AN AMERICAN WHO WAS KILLED IN CHILE COUP ____________________________________________________________________ THE NEW YORK TIMES International News Saturday, July 1, 2000 http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/americas/070100chile-fbi.html By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO WASHINGTON, June 30 -- The Federal Bureau of Investigation collected intelligence on an American student living in Chile who was killed soon after Gen. Augusto Pinochet's takeover of Chile in 1973, according to newly declassified documents made public today. In a December 1972 report from one informant, the F.B.I. said that the student, Frank R. Teruggi Jr., had attended a "Conference on Anti-Imperialist Strategy and Action" held by former Peace Corps volunteers who, the F.B.I. said, "espouse support of Cuba and all third world revolutionaries." Though Chilean authorities have never confirmed that Mr. Teruggi was executed, he was arrested at his apartment days after the coup and tortured at the National Stadium, witnesses said. His body was discovered in the morgue 10 days later, riddled with bullet holes. The document was one of several hundred released today as part of a major declassification project -- ordered by President Clinton last year -- on rights abuses under General Pinochet's 1973-90 dictatorship. But today's release, which represented the final government disclosures on three Americans killed in Chile during the dictatorship, disappointed family members and human rights activists. While the documents offered some details, they broke no new ground as to the circumstances under which the Americans died. In addition to Mr. Teruggi, they were Charles Horman, an American journalist whose plight was portrayed in the 1982 movie "Missing," and Boris Weisfeiler, a mathematics professor who disappeared in 1985. The Central Intelligence Agency released only six documents concerning Mr. Horman's death. It released a dozen or so more on the death of Mr. Teruggi, all concerning the attempts of the dead man's father to see a document the agency refused to release 24 years ago. The intelligence agency continued to withhold that document today, arguing that its information was provided by a foreign intelligence service. Joyce Horman, whose husband was killed at age 31, held up documents no more than an inch thick, many with chunks of black lines keeping whole paragraphs secret. "Either they're withholding documents," she said, "or they really didn't do anything to protect an American citizen or to investigate his detention in Chile at that time." The only new insight Ms. Horman gleaned came from an informant who approached the United States Embassy in 1987 to say that Mr. Horman had been killed in the National Stadium the night of Sept. 19, 1973, for being a "foreign extremist." On learning that the man they had killed was an American citizen, stadium officials panicked and had his body dumped on the streets, he said. But American Embassy officials had doubts about the informant's credibility, and lost contact with him. About half of the documents released today involved Mr. Weisfeiler, 44, who apparently was picked up by the military while hitchhiking in Chile. His body was never recovered. At her home in Newton, Mass., Mr. Weisfeiler's sister, Olga, spent the day combing through the documents, and they confirmed what she had gradually come to suspect since a Chilean lawyer reopened her brother's case this year: that her brother had been tortured and killed at a secretive concentration camp. The F.B.I. report, though covering events in 1971, was written the following year, after Mr. Terruggi took up residence in Chile and before the 1973 coup. In addition to noting his attendance at the Peace Corps conference, the report said a Chicago-area group, whose goals it described as furthering the "Socialist revolution," had sent Mr. Terruggi to Chile. Though the documents released today do not indicate that the F.B.I. shared its information with Chilean authorities, the insinuations reappeared in the Chilean military's references to him after he was killed. The F.B.I. report did not allege any illegality in Mr. Teruggi's actions, and he traveled to Chile to support the elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende. But after his killing, Chilean military officers portrayed him as a revolutionary in Chile to "discredit the governing junta," an unfounded charge because the junta did not exist until a few days before his death. A spokeswoman, Tracy Silberling, said there would be no comment on the bureau's report on Mr. Teruggi. Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company ***** ____________________________________________________________________ 700 MARCH IN ROME AGAINST GAY FESTIVAL ____________________________________________________________________ REUTERS Sunday, July 2, 2000 08:10 EDT ROME, July 1 -- About 700 jackbooted right-wing demonstrators marched through central Rome today in protest against the 2000 World Gay Pride festival only hours before it was to start. Giving the Nazi salute and wielding banners saying, "Stop the gay pride," the supporters of the far-right group Forza Nuova chanted slogans in defense of what they called "traditional family values." "Italy needs children, not homosexuals," the leader of Forza Nuova, Roberto Fiore, said. The World Gay Pride festival, which organizers expect to draw some 300,000 people from around the world, also met protests from the Catholic Church, which said the festival should not have taken place in Rome during the yearlong celebrations of the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ. Copyright 2000 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. ***** ____________________________________________________________________ Germany: THE NAZI PAST UNDERLYING POLITICS TODAY ____________________________________________________________________ LOS ANGELES TIMES Commentary Sunday, June 25, 2000 http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20000625/t000060061.html By MARTIN A. LEE SAN FRANCISCO--Americans like to recount the story about how George Washington, father of their country, would not tell a lie about chopping down his cherry tree as a child. Many Germans were similarly enamored of Helmut Kohl and the legend of the two pens he kept on his desk while serving as chancellor for 16 years. Deified as the father of German unification in 1990, Kohl was said to be so meticulously honest that he used a government-supplied pen only for official business and switched to another pen he had purchased himself for his private correspondence. But today, less than two years after Kohl left office, the man once hailed as the greatest German statesman since Otto von Bismarck is the principal protagonist in a major political scandal involving secret slush funds and influence peddling by big business. Likened to Watergate, the scandal has resulted in the political destruction of Kohl and several other leaders of the Christian Democratic Union, currently the main opposition party in Berlin. This tale of crooks and cronies has all the makings of a pulp-fiction thriller: suitcases filled with dirty cash, funny-money bank accounts, falsified and missing documents, phone taps, kickbacks, shady arms dealers and influential German industrialists with unsavory ties to the Third Reich. Facing the possibility of several years' imprisonment on various charges related to money laundering, embezzlement and illicit campaign financing, Kohl is expected to testify this week at a parliamentary inquiry into his party's web of corruption. He has already admitted that the CDU violated the law by accepting secret contributions worth several million dollars in return for granting political favors to donors Kohl refuses to name. They are respectable businessmen who prefer anonymity, the former chancellor asserted, adding: "I did not steal or buy elections. I have not personally profited." But the truth is, Kohl seems to have profited throughout his political career by soliciting the support of big business--which he always received. The seeds of the current scandal were planted during Kohl's early years as a CDU official, when he forged a close relationship with the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. In 1966, Kohl became regional party chairman of the CDU in what was then the West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. But he needed additional sources of income to further his career. Enter Fritz Ries, a wealthy German industrialist who took Kohl under his wing and introduced him to a charmed circle of chief executives, business heavyweights, and high-powered lobbyists. With Ries as his mentor, Kohl became the advisor to the Assn. of Chemical Industries of Rhineland-Palatinate-Saar. It's not clear if Ries, now dead, was one of the secret donors who illegally pumped funds into the CDU's coffers, but this much is certain: He had a great deal of influence over Kohl. "Even if I call him at three o'clock in the morning, he has to jump," Ries once boasted. But who was Ries, and where did he get his money? During the Third Reich, Ries made a fortune from expropriating "Aryanized" Jewish property and from slave labor in factories near the Auschwitz concentration camp. Not only was Ries never condemned for his Nazi-era crimes, he went on to become the patron of several conservative West German politicians, including Kohl, who was elected chancellor in 1982. As a token of his gratitude, Kohl awarded Ries West Germany's highest civil decoration, the Bundesverdienstkreuz or "Federal Cross of Merit." It gets worse: Ries retained as his legal advisor and chief of staff Eberhard Taubert, another compromised Third Reich veteran. During World War II, Taubert served as a judge on the People's Tribunal, which handed down death sentences for such "crimes" as telling an anti-Hitler joke or sleeping with a Jew. Taubert was also employed by Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry. In this capacity, he wrote scripts for several horrendous Third Reich propaganda films, including "Der ewige Jude" ("The Eternal Jew"), which depicts Jews as rats and vermin. "Wherever rats turn up, they bring destruction with them. They destroy goods and foodstuffs and they spread disease . . . . Among animals, they represent an element of treacherous, subterranean destruction, just as Jews do among men," the film's narrator explained. Like Ries and so many other Nazis, Taubert eluded punishment after the war. Instead, he found favor with the West German government and worked for the army's Division of Psychological Defense. In addition, he was recruited by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to serve as an espionage asset during the Cold War. "It was a visceral business of using any bastard as long as he was anti-communist," explained Harry A. Rositzke, former head of the CIA's Soviet desk. "The eagerness to enlist collaborators meant that you didn't look at their credentials too closely." Taubert plied his cloak-and-dagger skills for the "Gehlen Org," a CIA-sponsored spy network, based near Munich, that was run by Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, formerly Adolf Hitler's chief anti-Soviet spymaster. Staffed by several thousand Gestapo, Wehrmacht and SS veterans, the Gehlen organization functioned as the CIA's eyes and ears in Central Europe, according to American University Professor Christopher Simpson, a member of the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group established by President Bill Clinton to review U.S. government documents related to Nazi activity. By 1955, the Org had evolved into the Bundesnachtrichtendienst (BND), West Germany's main foreign intelligence service. Gehlen's appointment as the BND's first director was emblematic of the wholesale restoration of Third Reich veterans to positions of power in West German society. Intent on turning West Germany into a strong, prosperous bulwark against Soviet-bloc communism, U.S. policymakers sanctioned the lenient treatment given to dubious characters like Ries and Taubert. As part of the bulwark strategy, a privileged status was accorded the Christian Democrat Union, West Germany's dominant political party, which enjoyed the support of Washington. It appears that German conservatives were spoiled by the Cold War climate that made their presence in government so reassuring to U.S. officials, fixated on containing Moscow. In the interest of fighting communism, the United States turned a blind eye to political corruption in West Germany for years. Undoubtedly, this encouraged Kohl, who ran the CDU as his personal fiefdom for a quarter-century, to do whatever he thought was necessary to maintain his party's grip on power, even if it meant breaking the law. While we may never know the full extent of the current slush-fund scandal, it should serve as a reminder of how closely the Nazi era lies beneath German politics. Another example came to light last week when the Deutschland Foundation, closely tied to the CDU, gave its prestigious Konrad Adenauer Prize to Ernst Nolte, a controversial historian who has sought to justify Hitler's anti-Semitism and downplay Nazi war crimes. Honoring Nolte in such a manner shows the extent to which extremist thinking has penetrated the mainstream, metastasizing like a cancerous tumor in German ruling circles. It also underscores the dangerous possibility that the far right, energized by a growing intellectually based radicalism, could join forces with a nationalist, right-wing faction of the CDU at a time when many Germans are deeply disillusioned with the political status quo. The CDU has long been almost a catch basin for an assortment of right-wing interest groups, including fascist elements that cling to the memory of the Third Reich. Paradoxically, this has both thwarted the success of Germany's ultra-right-wing parties (flourishing in Austria and other European countries), while also perpetuating a political culture that has incubated the extreme right. But Kohl will not acknowledge the ugly "brown streak" that exists in his own party and in mainstream German society. Martin A. Lee Is the Author of "The Beast Reawakens," a Book on Neo-fascism. Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times ** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, material appearing in Antifa Info-Bulletin is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for research and educational purposes. 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