Posted on 09/14/2005 7:11:49 PM PDT by HAL9000
Excerpt -
Britain's biggest arms firm, BAE Systems, has been identified on US banking records as secretly paying more than £1m to General Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. A Guardian investigation has revealed some of the money was listed as being paid through a front company in the British Virgin Islands, which BAE has used to channel commission on arms deals.Covert payments to Pinochet-linked groups are listed on documents compiled by the Chilean authorities and obtained by the Guardian. They record large payments from BAE as recently as last year.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
and the problem is?
they got caught.
Better it was going to Pinochet than to that Commie he saved Chile from. Three cheers for BAE.
Inevitable when an arms company expects to sell arms in a dictatorship where tendering process is of less import than the sweeteners.
He was a dictator, they needed his blessing to sell weapons. The rest is hardly surprising.... Not nice, but hardly earth-shattering. None of the big arms companies can plead free of this, wherever they hail from.
Yup! When you're the leader of the band the checks get written to you.
IT'S NICE TO BE KING!
Better a dictatorship than some god-hating commies. Want to know what the Allende (and governments like that around the world) stood for? Take the Bill of Rights, invert it, and you've got your answer.
We're way too kind to communists and socialists in this country these days. It's amazing that the very people who used to fight to protect our society, like McCarthy, are now treated as being a greater historical evil than Nazism.
I made no comment re Pinochet's worth or otherwise. Whether he was a better leader or not is irrelevant to my point that he was a dictator. That's not automatically abd thing necessarily, if you can turn up that rarest of critters, a 'benign dictator' as opposed to one who thinks he is.
As for me, I'm happy to leave opinions on Allende and Pinochet to the Chileans. They can have the final say. I've got a depressing enough clash of leaders in my own land to keep me busy.
Doesn't anyone at the Guardian think it odd that BAE would make huge payments to Pinochet as late as last year, when he stepped down as dictator in 1990? As everyone knows, arms dealers are benevolent institutions, so why would they be paying money to Pinochet many years after he could possibly do anything for them?
The Guardian is a British rag that makes the Washington Post look right wing.
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