Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts, compares Bush and Pinochet, and finds Bush lacking.
In December 2004, a Chilean appeals court ruled that Pinochet could be put on trial for murders resulting from Operation Condor. An agreement by six South American governments in the 1970s, Condor was a "coalition of the willing" organized to hunt down and kill the terrorists who were attempting to destabilize their societies.
How does Operation Condor differ from the actions of the US and Israeli governments to hunt down and kill terrorists? Both George Bush and Ariel Sharon have used precision missiles, snipers, and special forces hit teams to "take out" suspected terrorists, often with collateral damage. Why can Bush and Sharon conduct a war on terror, but not Pinochet?
Given what we know about the "collateral damage" that often accompanies the "taking out" of terrorists and about the large number of innocent detainees mistaken for terrorists and held in America’s gulag of detention centers, it is more than likely that Pinochet’s war on terror had collateral damage of its own. However, there is no question whatsoever that Chilean terrorists committed bombings, assassinations, robberies and other crimes. The Chilean press of the time is full of reports of such acts of terrorism.
Unlike the US, Chile faced many and continuous acts of domestic terrorism, including a professionally planned ambush of Pinochet himself. Pinochet did not create the terrorism by invading another country on false pretenses or by supporting an ally’s genocidal ethnic policies.
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