The Foreign Service Journal, September 2003

hended and transported to a stadium where suspected leftists were de- tained by Chile’s military. “U.S. intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman’s death,” the document said. At best, it said, the U.S. intelligence communi- ty’s role “was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his murder by the govern- ment of Chile. At worst, it said, U.S. intelligence was aware the govern- ment of Chile saw Horman in a rather serious light and American officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of the government of Chile’s paranoia.” A CIA spokesman main- tained that the agency had no role in Horman’s death. Going to Court The bloodshed that followed Allende’s ouster triggered a complaint last November that was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., by 11 residents of Chile. The suit names Kissinger, the U.S. government and Michael Townley, an American-born former Chilean intelligence officer. “This action seeks relief for the harm suffered by Chilean victims and their families following the coup that brought Pinochet to power in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973,” the complaint says. “The defendants knowingly provided practical assistance and encourage- ment to the Chilean repressive regime with reckless disregard for the lives and well-being of the plaintiffs and their families.” It adds that the declassified U.S. government documents and congres- sional reports “show that with the practical assistance and encourage- ment of the United States and the offi- cial ... acts of Henry Kissinger, the Chilean terror apparatus conducted systematic torture, cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, false imprison- ment, arbitrary detention, wrongful death, summary execution, assault and battery, false disappearance, and crimes against humanity,” among other violations. The plaintiffs are seeking compensatory and punitive damages in excess of $33 million. William Rogers, the Kissinger aide, believes it is almost certain the com- plaint will be thrown out because of sov- ereign immunity. “It is a first principle of international and U.S. law that nations are immune from suit in their own courts,” he says. He also believes that Kissinger has nothing to worry about because theUnited States is auto- matically substituted as the defendant in place of any individual official named, under the theory that the official was not acting on his own but rather as an agent of government policy. Still, Rogers says, the conse- quences would be mind-boggling if the plaintiffs in the case were to suc- ceed in overriding the principle of sov- ereign immunity and recover a judg- ment against the United States. If that happens, he says, a host of other plain- tiffs will quickly come forward to chal- lenge the international legality of Washington’s foreign interventions in recent years, which are “considerably more robust and forceful than any- thing the United States did in Chile a third of a century ago.” As of this writing, no suits have been filed in the U.S. against President Bush and other architects of the Iraq war. But in Belgium, seven S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 71 The death toll of Chile’s own Sept. 11, 30 years ago, was about 3,000 — nearly identical to America’s tally two years ago. www.stayatresidenceinn.com/ embassyevacuees