John McCain Met Terrorist Pinochet Without Preconditions

In 1976, Augusto Pinochet's intelligence agency killed Orlando Letelier with a car bomb in Washington DC. The CIA also learned they were planning the assassination of US Congressman Ed Koch. But a decade later, then-Congressman John McCain met with Pinochet, a rogue terrorist, without preconditions.



John Dinges broke the story this morning on The Huffington Post:

According to a declassified U.S. Embassy cable about the meeting secured by The Huffington Post, McCain described the meeting with Pinochet "as friendly and at times warm, but noted that Pinochet does seem obsessed with the threat of communism." McCain, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the time, made no public or private statements critical of the dictatorship, nor did he meet with members of the democratic opposition, as far as could be determined from a thorough check of U.S. and Chilean newspaper records and interviews with top opposition leaders.

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UPDATE: You can read a Spanish-language story about John McCain meeting a foreign dictator on CIPER.cl. Click here now to read the story.