Word: pinochets
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...AUGUSTO PINOCHET UGARTE Looks like he picked the wrong hospital. Brits decide torture isn't something covered by immunity...
WASHINGTON: Like a family's dirty little secret, General Augusto Pinochet is haunting Washington's corridors of power. "The U.S. government is deeply divided over what policy to pursue in response to Pinochet's arrest," says TIME correspondent Adam Zagorin. "Right now that policy is in flux." On Monday State Department spokesman James Rubin promised the U.S. would "declassify and make public as much information as possible" over human rights abuses in Chile under Pinochet; then on Wednesday he said that meant only that the U.S. would "review" the those documents. Rubin's shuffling is reflective of a fierce debate...
...those counseling caution range from avoiding a precedent of cross-border political extradition to fear of destabilizing Chile. Then there's the case of the 1976 car bomb in Washington, D.C., that killed Chilean exile Orlando Letelier and American citizen Roni Moffit. "There's already strong circumstantial evidence that Pinochet ordered that attack, and there may be even more precise information in the classified documents," says Zagorin. "The U.S. government hasn't pursued Pinochet's involvement as aggressively as they might have." So, even if the former dictator is sent home by Britain next week, it may be some time...
There is a good argument to be made that Pinochet's extradition has been less than fair, and in a recent Wall Street Journal article, former British foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind claims exactly that. Pinochet's arrest would give international weight to the rulings of a single Spanish judge; his arrest, if demanded by unitary actors as it is now, would be clearly biased and unfair: "The proper courts of law for international criminals," Rifkind claims, "are international courts...
...Pinochet may not end up being the precedentsetter that human rights advocates have dreamed of. Chances are good that by the deadline of December 11, the British will decide that his arrest isn't worth damaging their diplomatic relations with Chile and will set him free. But there are plenty of other dictators out there, and most of them aren't that hard to find. They are in hotels in Paris and resorts around the free world, ordering pina coladas while we watch them on TV. They may not know it, but they are testing us, determining whether we really...