The wife and younger son of Gen. Augusto Pinochet were in police custody in Santiago, Chile, on Wednesday after a judge ordered them detained in connection with a tax fraud investigation of secret bank accounts that General Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, opened in an American bank.
Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet and Marco Antonio Pinochet are charged with being General Pinochet's accomplices in a decade-long scheme to shift millions of dollars, whose origins are also being investigated, to safe havens abroad. In recognition of her fragile health, Mrs. Pinochet, 82, was being held in the Military Hospital in the Chilean capital, where her husband visited her on Wednesday afternoon.
"This is like a bullet in the head," said Augusto Pinochet Jr., the couple's elder son, as he arrived at the hospital. He was convicted of fraud last year and fined in a case involving stolen cars. "What do they want? There is no respect for anything or anyone on our side."
The above is from Larry Rohter's "Police in Chile Detain Pinochet's Wife and Son in Fraud Inquiry" in this morning's New York Times. Susan e-mails that it not only is the spotlight entry, it's also "the 'Cry Me A River' story of the day."
Lloyd e-mails to note Matthew Rothschild's latest, "Oil Addiction and Saudi Dependence" (The Progressive):
So here we are, four years after September 11, an attack carried out by 19 hijackers, 15 of them Saudi, an attack masterminded by the prodigal son of a wealthy Saudi family, an attack justified by the madrassas financed by the Saudis, and the United States is still on bended knee before the Saudi throne.
All because of our addiction to oil, and because of our government's policies that serve ExxonMobil and GM, and because of Bush's hostility to conservation, to clean energy, and to anything that might take the United States seriously down the responsible path of energy independence and environmental sanity.
Such a course would require Bush to take on the big energy and car companies.
Such a course would require Bush to acknowledge the necessity of regulation.
But he has neither the inclination to take on his friends nor the ideological equipment to grasp the need.
Rod passes on the scheduled topics for Democracy Now! today:
*A debate on the American Psychological Association position on the role ofpsychologists in military interrogations. We speak with the head of theAPA's ethics committee Stephen Behnke, renowned psychiatrist Robert JayLifton and British medical ethicist Michael Wilks.
*On the 40th anniversary of the Watts uprising in Los Angeles, we have aconversation with Gerald Horne, author of "Fire This Time: The WattsUprising and the 1960s."
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