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Operation Condor
Files Show CIA Terror, Torture in Argentina
By Telesur
December 14,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "teleSur"
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The administration
of Barack Obama released Monday a CIA report on
Operation Condor, the 1970s covert efforts to rid
U.S.-backed dictatorships of progressive opponents or to
topple progressive governments outright in South
America.
According to a
press release announcing the documents, the National
Security Archive — an independent non-governmental
research institute and library in Washington, D.C. —
said the CIA disclosures are among 500
pages on repression in Argentina during the military
dictatorship in that country beginning in 1976.
According to
the archive, “Another proposal under study included the
collection of material on the membership, location, and
political activities of human rights groups in order to
identify and expose their socialist and Marxist
connections. Similar data reportedly are to be collected
on church and third-world groups,” the documents state.
Amnesty International was one of the groups named in the
documents.
One of the
documents highlighted by the archive was a National
Security Council summary of the torture of Argentina’s
Alfredo Bravo, president of the Permanent Assembly for
Human Rights. President Jimmy Carter’s National Security
Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski received the report from
his top aide for Latin America, Robert Pastor, detailing
the torture by the military of Bravo.
In the 1978
document, Pastor recounted that Bravo was “subjected to
a bucket treatment where his feet were held in a bucket
of ice water until thoroughly chilled and then shoved
into a bucket of boiling water.” He also admitted that
Bravo had been given electric shock treatments and
“subjected to ‘the submarine’ — repeatedly being held
under water until almost drowned.”
According to
the archive, Brzezinski reportedly hand-wrote on the
document’s margin: “a compelling, powerful report.”
The State
Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research
reported that “six Southern Cone nations” which were
“participants in a counterterrorist network codenamed
‘Condor’” have agreed “to undertake the liquidation of
Latin American” targets “living in France,” noted the
archive in its statement. Dispatching teams to London
was also under consideration.
The first round
of declassified documents was released in August 2016,
followed by today’s drop by the Department of National
Intelligence on their website. According to the archive,
more files will be released as they are declassified
even after Obama leaves office.
Carlos Osorio,
director of the Southern Cone documentation project at
the National Security Archive said, “With the release of
this revealing documentation, President Obama has
advanced the cause of human rights in Argentina and
elsewhere.
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
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