PALLING AROUND WITH PINOCHET.

My old professor John Dinges, who has done extensive reporting on Chile and South America, reports that John McCain seemed quite comfortable meeting with a dictator without preconditions when that dictator was General Augusto Pinochet. In fact, when the two met in 1985, the meeting was apparently quite friendly:

The private meeting between McCain and dictator Pinochet has gone previously un-reported anywhere. 

According to a declassified U.S. Embassy cable about the meeting secured by The Huffington Post, McCain described the meeting with Pinochet "as friendly and at times warm, but noted that Pinochet does seem obsessed with the threat of communism." McCain, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the time, made no public or private statements critical of the dictatorship, nor did he meet with members of the democratic opposition, as far as could be determined from a thorough check of U.S. and Chilean newspaper records and interviews with top opposition leaders.

Pinochet was a ruthless dictator who killed over 3000 people, and tortured and imprisoned thousands more. Pinochet also orchestrated a high profile assassination attempt of former ambassador to the US and former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Washington DC, which according to Dinges, was for a long time regarded as the most egregious act of foreign terrorism on U.S. soil. Dinges adds that at the time of McCain's meeting with Pinochet, the U.S. was seeking the extradition of the assassins who planted the car bomb that killed Letelier, something that neither dissuaded McCain from meeting with Pinochet nor drove him to make statements critical of the regime.

Pinochet was responsible for the kind of violence and repression that under other circumstances would have neoconservatives clamoring for regime change. That is, if Pinochet had been a communist rather than a fan of Milton Friedman.

However, the circumstances were that the CIA assisted Pinochet and other right-wing dictators in many of these abuses, during Operation Condor, a campaign of political repression designed to prevent leftists from gaining political power in Latin America.

McCain claims that brutal dictators aren't to be negotiated with, and that the minimal relationship between Ayers and Obama says something sinister about Obama's beliefs. But on the other hand, McCain thinks just fine to meet, and even be "friendly"  and "warm" with people who murder, torture, and set off bombs on U.S. soil, as long as he's the one doing it.  Without preconditions even. If McCain were being held to his own standard, he would have to admit to being at the very least, "dangerously naive," and he would have to consider what his association with Pinochet says about his judgment.

--A. Serwer