John Dinges over at The Huffington Post has written what I think might just be one of the last nails in the coffin of McCain's campaign:
McCain's Private Visit With Chilean Dictator Pinochet Revealed For First Time
Meeting with a bloody dictator, without preconditions?
More below the fold.
[Update#1] DIGG link (courtesy of NWTerriD)
Well, well, well... This is a must read article, but I will try to share the main tidbits...
John McCain, who has harshly criticized the idea of sitting down with dictators without pre-conditions, appears to have done just that. In 1985, McCain traveled to Chile for a friendly meeting with Chile's military ruler, General Augusto Pinochet, one of the world's most notorious violators of human rights credited with killing more than 3,000 civilians and jailing tens of thousands of others.
The private meeting between McCain and dictator Pinochet has gone previously un-reported anywhere.
This was discovered after HuffPo secured a copy of these declassified documents: PDF-1 and PDF-2.
OK, I know what some of you might be thinking. Pinochet was in many accounts tacitly supported by the ([Update#2] Nixon) and Reagan administrations. There were other similar meetings (e.g., Donald Rumsfeld meeting Saddam Hussain).
However, in this particular instance, the US was openly critical of Pinochet at the time, and there were many visits by members of Congress to Chile in order to support the democratic opposition to General Pinochet!
In fact, around the time of this visit, the U.S. Justice Department was trying to extradite two Pinochet operatives for an act of terrorism in Washington DC, the assassination of former ambassador to the US and former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in 1976.
The car bombing on Sheridan Circle in the U.S. capital was widely described at the time as the most egregious act of international terrorism perpetrated on U.S. soil by a foreign power.
Witness the powerful contrast with Senator Kennedy: Exhibit one:
Senator Edward Kennedy arrived only 12 days after McCain in a highly public show of support for democracy. [Pro-Pinochet] [d]emonstrators pelted his entourage with eggs and blocked the road from the airport, so that the Senator had to be transported by helicopter to the city, where he met with Catholic church and human rights leaders and large groups of opposition activists.
McCain's trip to Chele, arranged at the time by Chile's ambassador to the United States, Hernan Felipe Errazuriz who described McCain as "one of the conservative congressmen who is closest to our embassy," included a 30-minute meeting with dictator Pinochet and his foreign minister Jaime Del Valle, followed by a meeting with Admiral Jose Toribio Merino, a member of the country's ruling military junta.
McCain's presence in Chile was apparently kept as quiet as possible. He and his wife Cindy arrived December 27 and traveled immediately to the scenic Puyehue area of southern Chile to spend several days as the guest of a prominent Pinochet backer, Marco Cariola, who later was elected senator for the conservative UDI party.
So what could possibly be so nice about the Pinochet government? Their concern about communism.
Is it me, or is it now clear that communism (and it's distant cousin: socialism) keep coming up these days, in what appears to me to be McCain version of McCarthyism?
Exhibit two: When Pinochet was later defeated in presidential elections,
... [a] healthy list of U.S. congressmen traveled to Chile in support of the transition to democracy, including Republican Senator Richard Lugar. McCain, by then a first term senator, did not return to Chile.
(emphasis added)
Well... "shiver me timbers!"
[Update]Please DIGG it up!. Thanks for the recs everyone!