Human bones found in Argentine detention center; 10,000 fragments confirming torture deaths

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Chicago Tribune/Associated Press

Updated: 42 minutes ago

Human bones found in Argentine detention center; 10,000 fragments confirming torture deaths
By JEANNETTE NEUMANN | Associated Press Writer
4:45 PM CST, December 9, 2008

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Inside a once-secret detention center where political dissidents were tortured and killed during Argentina's dictatorship 25 years ago, forensic anthropologists have discovered a pit containing 10,000 bone fragments.

The first discovery of human remains inside a detention center confirms the testimonies of hundreds of survivors who have said for years that authorities tortured, killed and burned the bodies of political opponents, they said Tuesday.

"This scientifically confirms the testimonies of the detained," said Luis Fondebrider, a forensic anthropologist who helped uncover the remains inside the former detention center in La Plata known as Arana.

The 10,000 bone fragments were unearthed between February and September, and on Tuesday Fondebrider and his team announced that the remains were human. Now months of laboratory work is needed to determine even the minimum number of bodies that were destroyed in the pit.


Read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-lt-argentina-dirty-war,0,3822288.story

[Judi Lynn]

1. STATE DEPARTMENT OPENS FILES ON ARGENTINA'S DIRTY WAR:New Documents Describe Key Death Squad Under F

STATE DEPARTMENT OPENS FILES ON ARGENTINA'S DIRTY WAR

New Documents Describe Key Death Squad Under Former Army Chief Galtieri

First Bush Administration Declassification Praised by Human Rights Monitors

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 73 - Part I
Edited by Carlos Osorio

Assisted by

Kathleen Costar, research and editorial assistance
Florence Segura, research assistance
of the National Security Archive

Natalia Federman, research assistance and Spanish translation
of CELS

~snip~
"The State Department under Secretary Powell - and previously under Secretary Albright - deserves real credit for this historic human rights declassification," remarked Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive. "The foreign service officers who documented human rights abuses at the time, often to the discomfort of their bosses, and the retirees and staff who did the work to make these documents public, all deserve our thanks." Victor Abramovich, director of CELS, said that the recent human rights charges from the "dirty war" period against Galtieri made the State Department declassification even more urgent: "The documents will help clarify this case of great public importance, as well as the whole period of military rule."

"This release proves once again that long secret U.S. documents constitute a powerful historical and judicial tool to redress the atrocities of the past in Latin America," said Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh. He and Osorio called on the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and other national security agencies to follow the State Department lead on declassifying their records relating to human rights abuses.

Since 1999, dozens of victims and relatives, human rights organizations, judges and US congress people have asked the U.S. for documents on violations in the Southern Cone during the decade from 1975-85. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ordered the collection, review and declassification of U.S. records on Argentina following an August 16, 2000 meeting in Buenos Aires with leaders of the Grandmothers and Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, and with the Argentine human rights organization, the Centro de Estudios Sociales y Legales (CELS).

In November 2000, the Department of State announced the declassification effort on documents pertaining to "Operation Condor; disappearances and child kidnapping in Argentina from 1976-83." State Department officials asked the CIA and Pentagon to participate by releasing documents from their agency archives, but they declined to do so. The review process was largely completed and 35 volumes of 500 pages each were ready to be published by September 2001. The September 11th tragedy and the fiscal and political crisis in December in Argentina held up the release of the documents until now.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB73/index.htm

[UpInArms]

2. Project Disappeared

http://www.desaparecidos.org/arg/victimas/eng.html

About 30,000 people were "disappeared" in Argentina during the "dirty war". They were thirty thousand individual human beings, each one with his/her own story, dreams and hopes, with friends, parents and children who love them, remember them and clamor for the truth and justice they deserve. Thirty thousand people to whom all Argentinians owe the minimal homage of memory.

This online memorial to the Disappeared hopes to do exactly that: remember them as human beings. We are presenting homepages for some of them, about 600 so far, with pictures and other information about them. It's a slow process, but we promise, it will be constant. Memory will succeed.

You can visit the pages of the disappeared in several ways. Visit the Wall of Memory to see all their pictures together. That takes time, but we think it's the best way to envision the extension of the horror of the disappearances. Also, by looking at their pictures you may recognize a friend or a neighbor.

You can also look for friends or acquaintances by their names (no images) or by their professions or place of disappearance.

[formercia]

5. I've met some of the killers

Argentine commandos that I worked with. I always wondered how they could live with themselves.

[UpInArms]

7. ...

:hug:

[formercia]

16. That was before the Falklands War

Things were much simpler then. Everything was black and white. It was us against them, good against evil.

Before I went to work at the CIA, I didn't believe the things 'they' said about what was really going on. It didn't take me long to realize that the bad things were true. We weren't the 'good guys' and I began to see the shades of grey.

The Soviets and Cuban communists weren't good guys either. They were even bigger assholes.

[formercia]

18. Now the US has the dubiuos distinction

of being the biggest assholes in the solar system.

[ngant17]

9. that's a pretty foreboding site

and it reminds me of the Nazi butchery in the concentration camps.

That there were US government officials involved in this, directly or indirectly, is all the more appaling.

To exterminate that many innocent people in such a short time, it is all the more urgent to bring as many of these war criminals to justice as soon as possible. To do something on that scale, it required the political machinery of hundreds and thousands of despicable criminals, working in tandem with each other. That was more aptly to be named Operation Vulture, it was an insult to life and nature itself, to associate the lofty S. American condor with such horrible monstrosities.

Those war criminals should be imprisoned forever and never see the light of day again.

[Judi Lynn]

19. Just took my first look at your wonderful link. Had to save it for future reference immediately.

This is a valuable site. Thank you very much.

[Barrett808]

3. But what's a US-sponsored dictatorship without mass torture...

...and extrajudicial executions?

It's about standards.

[Octafish]

4. General Pinochet at the Bookstore

General Pinochet at the Bookstore

Santiago, Chile, July 2004

The general's limo parked at the corner of San Diego street
and his bodyguards escorted him to the bookstore
called La Oportunidad, so he could browse
for rare works of history.

There were no bloody fingerprints left on the pages.
No books turned to ash at his touch.
He did not track the soil of mass graves on his shoes,
nor did his eyes glow red with a demon's heat.

Worse: His hands were scrubbed, and his eyes were blue,
and the dementia that raged in his head like a demon,
making the general's trial impossible, had disappeared.

Desaparecido: like thousands dead but not dead,
as the crowd reminded the general,
gathered outside the bookstore to jeer
when he scurried away with his bodyguards,
so much smaller in person.

from The Republic of Poetry by Martin Espada

Thank you for the article, Judi Lynn. I, too, hate what these people have done.

[Peace Patriot]

6. The lack of prosecution of OUR government officials who were complicit in the horrors

in Latin America during that period--especially Reagan and his thugs--led straight to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and secret US prisons around the globe, by Bush and his thugs. Reagan was complicit in the slaughter of TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND Mayan villagers in Guatemala alone. Most of our people never even heard about that dreadful crime, but when they did get informed--as with the Congressional ban on a Reagan war on Nicaragua, and Reagan's blatant violation of that ban--War Democrats then took over to keep Reagan free from prosecution and handslap his henchmen, who were responsible for the murders of tens of thousands of innocent Nicaraguans--teachers, mayors, advocates of the poor, human rights workers, union organizers, students and others.

Lack of accountability leads straight to more abuse, more murders, worse murders--the slaughter of a million innocent people in Iraq to get their oil--and the torture of thousands by our people, in direct violation of the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the on-going murders of union leaders and others by Bush pals in Colombia, happening right now. This out-of-control US government is directly related to the lack of consequences for that other fascist US government, back then.

And the cycle will all be repeated again, because there were no consequences this time either. Our only weapon against presidential tyranny--impeachment--was taken "off the table." Guess who by, once again?

[bagrman]

12. "only weapon" NO. Brings to mind "live by, die by"

[Canuckistanian]

8. Maybe they should ask Kissinger how many victims there were

Pinochet probably made up the list and Kissinger approved it.

[vssmith]

20. Yup! Pinochet was Kissinger's hand-picked dictator

[alfredo]

10. They found written on the wall, "Milton Friedman was here."

[Duppers]

11. K & R

the magnitude of the violence stuns me.

[Adenoid_Hynkel]

13. Ann Coulter, the voice of modern the GOP + multiple-time CPAC speaker had this to say about Pinochet

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/coulter091803.asp

"By not opposing a military coup by the <b>great Augusto Pinochet</b> against a Chilean Marxist, Salvador Allende, the Times implied, the U.S. was party to a terrorist act similar to the 9/11 attack on America."

to steal an old Carson bit - How great was he?

"Soldiers discarded Victor Jara's body at a cemetery entrance south of Santiago. Before shooting him, Generalissimo Augusto Pinochet's men shattered Jara's hands with rifle butts, seemingly afraid that even dead he might pick up a guitar and sing, "La Plegaria a un Labrador" -- The Prayer to a Worker.

Stand up, look at your hands
Give your hand to your brother and grow
We'll go together, united by blood

Joan Turner buried her husband, told anyone who would listen that a dictator had done this crime, then fled Chile with her two daughters. In parting defiance of the regime that killed a poet, she took her husband's name and became Joan Turner de Jara."

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1219-20.htm

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there's your "conservative movement" right there

[struggle4progress]

14. Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (EAAF)

In early 1984, CONADEP and the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, a non-governmental human rights organization searching for children that disappeared with their parents, requested assistance from Mr. Eric Stover, then-director of the Science and Human Rights Program at American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Stover organized a delegation of forensic experts to travel to Argentina, where they found several hundred exhumed, unidentified skeletons stored in plastic bags in dusty storerooms at several medical legal institutes. Many bags held the bones of more than one individual. The delegation called for an immediate halt to exhumations.

Among the AAAS delegation members was Dr. Clyde Snow, one of the world's foremost experts in forensic anthropology. Dr. Snow called on archaeologists, anthropologists and physicians to begin exhumations and analysis of skeletal remains using traditional archaeological and forensic anthropology techniques. Snow returned to Argentina repeatedly during the next five years, trained current EAAF members, and helped form the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) ...

In 1986, the team began expanding its activities beyond Argentina and has since worked in nearly thirty countries throughout the Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe.

A guiding principle for the team since its foundation has been to maintain the utmost respect for the wishes of victims' relatives and communities concerning the investigations, and to work closely with them through all stages of exhumation and identification processes ...

http://eaaf.typepad.com/founding_of_eaaf/


Such investigative techniques have now been standard for many years -- and they should be compared with the chaotic excavations by crowds that the US encouraged at Iraqi sites:

Thousands of bodies exhumed from Iraqi mass grave
Last Updated: Thursday, May 15, 2003 | 11:47 AM ET
CBC News
... Iraqis are continuing to search for remains of family members buried at the site, found about a week ago 100 kilometres south of Baghdad. Heavy machinery is used to dig up piles of dirt. Iraqis then dig through the pile looking for human remains, rotting clothing and identity cards ... http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2003/05/14/iraq_grave030514.html

Bodies Exhumed from Mass Grave in Iraq
Remains Could Be Victims of Saddam's Crackdown on Shiites
May 14, 2003 -- ... Local people say 3,000 bodies have been removed ... Human rights experts fear that valuable evidence for trials of regime leaders is disappearing ... The Marines are there to help, with tents and plastic bags for remains -- but not to excavate or protect the site ... t the main pit, a backhoe "creaks like an old door," Joyce says. "Volunteers kneel and pick through each shovelful of dirt. When they find bones, they put them in a clear plastic bag. A man finds an ID card in the dirt and wipes it clean with his thumb" ... http://www.npr.org/news/specials/iraq2003/joyce_030514.html

[DBoon]

15. politicians, media and academics want the US here as well

remember these bones the next time a John Yoo argues torture should be used, or when Bush invalidates Habeus Corpus, or when our government declares that people can be stripped of their citizenship, or when pop culture TV shows extoll the virtues of the police state in wiping out terrorism.

It would not take much for the US to end up with our own pile of bones.

[GuvWurld]

17. New Yorker, 3/24/08, re: Abu Ghraib, "It had bones in it"

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/24/080324fa_fact_gourevitch

Annals of War

Exposure

The woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib.

by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris March 24, 2008

All that the soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, a Reserve unit out of Cresaptown, Maryland, knew about America’s biggest military prison in Iraq, when they arrived there in early October of 2003, was that it was on the front lines. Its official name was Forward Operating Base Abu Ghraib. Never mind that military doctrine and the Geneva Conventions forbid holding prisoners in a combat zone, and require that they be sped to the rear; you had to make the opposite sort of journey to get to Abu Ghraib. You had to travel along some of the deadliest roads in the country, constantly bombed and frequently ambushed, into the Sunni Triangle. The prison squatted on the desert, a wall of sheer concrete traced with barbed wire, picketed by watchtowers. “Like something from a Mad Max movie,” Sergeant Javal Davis, of the 372nd, said. “Just like that—like, medieval.” There were more than two and a half miles of wall with twenty-four towers, enclosing two hundred and eighty acres of prison ground. And inside, Davis said, “it’s nothing but rubble, blown-up buildings, dogs running all over the place, rabid dogs, burnt remains. The stench was unbearable: urine, feces, body rot.”

The prisoners—several thousand of them, clad in orange—were crowded behind concertina wire. “The encampment they were in when we saw it at first looked like one of those Hitler things, like a concentration camp, almost,” Davis said. “They’re in there, in their little jumpsuits, outside in the mud. Their rest rooms was running over. It was just disgusting. You didn’t want to touch anything. Whatever the worst thing that comes to your mind, that was it—the place you would never, ever, ever, ever send your worst enemy.”

The M.P.s of the 372nd were told to make themselves at home in an abandoned prison block, a compound ravaged by looters and invaded by the desert. The sand lay several inches deep in places, mixed with decomposing trash. Moving in meant digging out and sweeping up, and when you’d purged the debris—weird stuff, some of it; for instance, used syringes, which just made you wonder—what you had were bare prison cells. The military term of art for the place where soldiers sleep and bathe and eat on base is L.S.A., which means “life-support area,” and at other forward operating bases around Iraq an L.S.A. meant climate-controlled tents and a mess hall, electricity and hot water, a gym and an Internet café, phones and satellite television, PX shops and fast-food joints. A proper L.S.A. is an outpost of the motherland, and it affirms the sense of pride and tribe that is essential to morale and discipline. At Abu Ghraib, showers were wooden sheds with cold-water drums propped overhead. The unit had no field kitchen, so chow was combat rations—M.R.E.s, meals-ready-to-eat—breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a cardboard box; everything in a polymer packet.

Nobody had expected luxury at Saddam Hussein’s old prison, but morale was low to begin with—the M.P.s just wanted to know when they were going home—and there was something about living in cells at Abu Ghraib that never felt right. “We had some kind of incinerator at the end of our building,” Specialist Megan Ambuhl said. “It was this huge circular thing. We just didn’t know what was incinerated in there. It could have been people, for all we knew—bodies.” Sergeant Davis was not in doubt. “It had bones in it,” he said, and he called it the crematorium. “But hey, you’re at war,” he said. “Suck it up or drive on.”

MORE

[Judi Lynn]

21. 10,000 bone fragments found in former Argentine detention center

updated 1 hour, 8 minutes ago
10,000 bone fragments found in former Argentine detention center

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (CNN) -- More than 10,000 charred bone fragments were found buried at the site of a former Argentine government detention center, the first find of its kind at one of the secret centers, Argentine officials said.

Bones were unearthed during a seven-month search at an ex-detention post in La Plata, Argentina, officials said.

Searchers said they also found a wall with more than 200 bullet holes and an "important quantity" of spent ammunition shells on the ground nearby. In some cases, bullets were still lodged in the wall.

The announcement was made Tuesday at a news conference by government officials and representatives of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, better known as EAAF, the initials of its name in Spanish.

A team of six professional anthropologists and support crew said it believed the remains were human, but it was unable to determine how many bodies the fragments represented.

"I ask the forgiveness of family members, because I can imagine what the mothers and all who are gathered here will feel, but what we are about to show is not to detail the genocide but so that we have proof for the trials that are to come," said Sara Derotier de Cobacho, secretary of human rights for Buenos Aires province.

More:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/12/10/argentina.bone.fragments/index.html?iref=hpmostpop