Document Friday: The 1978 World Cup in Argentina, Part I

June 21, 1978 cable from the US embassy in Buenos Aires to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance

Today, the 1978 World Cup hosted by Argentina is widely remembered for the victorious Argentine team’s “alleged stalling tactics” and the refusal of the defeated Dutch players to honor their hosts at the post-championship ceremony. Today’s “hot doc” shows that the World Cup also contributed to a “less repressive atmosphere” in Jorge Rafael Videla’s Argentina with fewer arrests, disappearances, and killings.

This 21 June 1978 cable from the US embassy in Buenos Aires to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance cites the World Cup as the reason for fewer government arrests, an increase in the number of prisoners released, as well as those “authorized to leave the country [read: deported].” This, the embassy reports, is because “Police and military forces in Argentina have been under strict orders to avoid reactions or incidents which would give foreign visitors and press fuel for criticizing the country’s security practices.”

The State of the State Secrets Privilege

Earlier this week, I attended an all-day conference on “The State of the State Secrets Privilege,” presented by the American University Washington College of Law Collaboration on Government Secrecy.

The organizers at CGS brought together quite the roster of experts on state secrets, with topics ranging from the historical background of the privilege, to the problem of its current use, to the prospects for legislative reform. Some panels included litigators from opposite sides of the courtroom.

In the interest of full disclosure, I do not have any legal training whatsoever.  I learned quite a bit from the great speakers on the program, but I left the conference yesterday even more firm in the belief that the state secrets privilege is a dangerous feature of executive power.

The China-Pakistan Nuclear Connection Revealed

An extraordinary article in The Washington Post on November 13, 2009, by R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick broke open the story of Chinese-Pakistani secret nuclear technology sharing during the 1970s and 1980s.  Earlier work by Warrick and Peter Slevin disclosed Beijing’s transfer of nuclear design data to Pakistan, but this article shows for the first time how the two countries launched their nuclear cooperation program.

The notorious Pakistani nuclear technologist Abdul Qadeer Khan played a key role, and one of Smith-Warrick’s primary sources is Khan’s personal account of the episode.   The nuclear relationship began with a meeting in 1976 between the mortally ill Mao Zedong and Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, which “set the terms of the exchange.”  While Bejing would ultimately provide Islamabad with the design of a nuclear weapon and 50 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, nuclear sharing was reciprocal.

LA Times on the Anniversary of El Salvador Jesuit Killings

A Los Angeles Times article published today features Archive Analyst Kate Doyle discussing the upcoming trial of Salvadoran officials accused in the 1987 assassination of six Jesuit priests in San Salvador.  According to the article,

“Next week, attorneys and witnesses on behalf of the Jesuits’ families will present evidence based on hundreds of pages of declassified U.S. documents from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The documents, including cables from U.S. Embassy, military and CIA officials in El Salvador to Washington, describe the Salvadoran army’s ‘role in planning, ordering and committing the crime and covering it up afterward,’ said Kate Doyle, a researcher with the National Security Archive, a Washington-based organization that has been key in bringing much of the information to light.”

Read more from Kate’s blog post on the anniversary of the murders.

The Right to Information is the Right to Justice: Declassified Documents and the Assassination of the Jesuits in El Salvador

Twenty years ago today, Salvadoran soldiers entered the campus of the renowned University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador, and brutally murdered the university’s rector, Ignacio Ellacuría, and five other Jesuit priests, along with their housekeeper and her daughter. The killings were meant to destroy the spirit of the social justice movement in El Salvador and undermine the insurgent FMLN forces after ten years of civil war. Instead, the crime sparked worldwide outrage and condemnation and helped lead to a negotiated settlement between the government and the guerrillas that ended the war in 1992.

President Obama Recognizes the Basic Human Right to Access to Information

In a speech November 16 in China, President Obama spoke of basic human freedoms, saying “These freedoms of expression and worship, of access to information and political participation, we believe are universal rights.  They should be available to all people.”

President Obama’s recognition of access to information in his list of “universal rights” relating to expression recognizes something that is implicit, though not often stated explicitly, in US law: our cherished rights to free speech, to petition our government, and to vote, are given substance by our ability to know what our government is doing.  If we do not know what decisions were made by our leaders, then the power of our speech and votes is terribly diminished.

Still Orphans of the Cold War? President Obama’s Decision to Postpone Meeting with the Dalai Lama in Historical Context

President Obama will make his first major trip to Asia this week. The visit takes place against the backdrop of criticisms for his decision to postpone meeting with the Dalai Lama in Washington, DC, spiritual leader of the Tibetan exile community and fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Published accounts indicate that President Obama pressed the Dalai Lama’s representatives to delay any meeting until after Obama has met with the Chinese leadership. This marks the first time in nearly two decades that a US president declined to meet with the Dalai Lama during a visit by the Tibetan leader to Washington. The National Security Archive is launching a new project on US policy towards Tibet, which will work to identify and bring to light the hidden inside story of how US policymakers assessed and addressed the Tibetan dilemma during the Cold War and afterwards. In many ways the dilemma faced by President Obama is illustrative of this history.

Document Friday: “Some Views of the Gorbachev Era”

Gorbachev at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, Germany, 1986. Photo by Hartmet Reiche.

Western analysts doubted the early assertion by Mikhail Gorbachev’s former roommate and close friend, Zdenek Mlynar, that the new General Secretary of the USSR was “a reformer who considered politics a means and the needs of the people an end,” according to a 1985 biographical report used by the CIA. The report, entitled “Some Views of the Gorbachev Era,” argued the opposite and concluded “it seems possible if not probable that the prospect of gradual reforms that would modify that [Soviet] system and affect the whole Soviet bloc exists more in the hopes of Zdenek Mlynar than in the intentions of Mikhail Gorbachev.”

50 Years at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights: An OAS Policy Roundtable

On the 50^th anniversary of the creation of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights earlier this week, representatives from international organizations, civil society, and academia gathered to celebrate the accomplishments of the inter-American system and reflect on the ongoing challenges. The venue was the Organization of American States, in the Hall of Americas, at a roundtable entitled “Challenges and Futures of the Inter-American System on Human Rights.” The event also commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Inter-American Court on Human Rights.

Over the past 50 years, the Commission and the Court have adapted to the many controversial challenges that have arisen in the human rights arena, responding with innovative approaches in jurisprudence and becoming a leader on human rights issues in the Americas and the world. However, the question remains whether the Commission and the Court will be prepared for what Juan Méndez (a former president of the Commission and currently a consultant at the International Criminal Court) called the “new horizons of human rights,” that continue to challenge the system.

Who Are We Fighting in Afghanistan?

PRI’s The World Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Barbara Elias, the director of the National Security Archive’s Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Taliban Project, about the US strategy against Taliban and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan.