See ALMA's Amazing Photo's

An artist's view of the completed Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile's Atacama Desert. Here, the array is arranged in a compact configuration.


The first European antenna for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has reached new heights, having been transported to the observatory’s Array Operations Site (AOS) on 27 July 2011.


Japan has provided the first of twelve 7-meter antennas to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in Chile. ALMA will have an array of 50 antennas with 12-meter diameter dishes. The 7-meter antenna is seen here at the ALMA Operations Support Facility (OSF), at an altitude of 2,900 meters in the foothills of the Chilean Andes. Later it will be moved to the plateau of Chajnantor at a 5,000-meter altitude.


This picture of the ALMA radio antennas on the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile, 16,500 feet above sea level, was taken a few days before the start of ALMA Early Science operations. Nineteen antennas are on the plateau.


The moon and the Milky Way shine over the ALMA telescope array in this photo. When the panorama was taken, the moon was lying close to the center of the Milky Way in the sky, its light bathing the antennas in an eerie night-time glow.


ESO Photo Ambassador Babak Tafreshi snapped this remarkable image of the antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), set against the splendour of the Milky Way.


Orion over ALMA antennas, Chile.

The ALMA radio telescope array in Chile captured this shot of the Antennae Galaxies, which are about 75 million light-years from Earth. This is the first ALMA image to be released to the public.


A combined view of the Antennae Galaxies, taken by the ALMA radio telescope array and the Hubble Space Telescope.


Observations using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have revealed an unexpected spiral structure in the material around the old star R Sculptoris.



Via: "Space"

National-Security Assassination of Americans in 1973 

By Jacob G. Hornberger 
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 
Courtesy Of "The Future Of Freedom Foundation"

A Chilean judge has indicted a retired U.S. Naval officer, Capt. Ray E. Davis, in the murder of two American citizens in Chile during the U.S.-supported Pinochet coup in 1973. The indictment indicates that the U.S. military and the CIA may have been responsible for the national-security assassination of two Americans several decades before the start of the war on terrorism.

The two Americans were journalists — 31-year-old Charles Horman and 24-year-old Frank Teruggi. During the Pinochet coup in 1973, both men were taken captive and executed in cold blood.

For decades, the CIA, playing the innocent, denied any involvement in the murders.

Then, in 1999 a declassified State Department document revealed that the CIA had, in fact, played some unidentified role in at least Horman’s murder.

What role? We don’t know. Ever since the revelation of that State Department document, the CIA has remained mum on the case, obviously taking the position that secrecy and cover-up is the best policy.

By the same token, despite the fact that the State Department document clearly furnished sufficient cause to impanel a federal grand jury to investigate the CIA’s role in the murders, the Justice Department under both Republican and Democratic regimes has steadfastly failed and refused to do so.

At the same time, Congress has failed and refused to open an investigation into the murders, in the process subpoenaing CIA officials to testify what exactly the CIA’s role was in the murders, the identity of the CIA officials who participated in the murders, and whether President Richard Nixon or other high U.S. officials ordered the hit to be made on the two Americans.

Horman’s murder was the subject of the movie “Missing,” starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.

The Chilean indictment of a retired U.S. military officer brings a new dimension to the case — the confluence of the two branches of the U.S. national security state — the military and the CIA — to allegedly bring about the murder of two American journalists, on grounds of national security.

What did Horman and Teruggi supposedly do to justify being taken out? The allegation is that during the coup, Horman acquired evidence documenting the U.S. government’s complicity in the coup. Therefore, the argument goes, by acquiring such information Horman became an immediate threat to the national security of the United States.

Moreover, the fact that Horman and Teruggi were leftists, liberals, or socialists who were supporting the socialist regime of Salvador Allende might have also constituted evidence of their being a grave threat to the national security of the United States during the Cold War.

The Chilean indictment of Davis alleges that he gave Horman a ride from the U.S. military installation in Valparaiso, where Horman allegedly acquired the information showing U.S. complicity in the coup, to Horman’s apartment in Santiago.

After that, Horman was picked up by Pinochet’s national-security goons, taken away, and executed.

While no one except the CIA, and possibly the U.S. military, knows exactly what the CIA role was in the murder, the allegation is that the CIA and the military signaled Pinochet that they wanted Horman (and possibly Teruggi) executed but without any evidence pointing to U.S. complicity in the murders.

One ironic twist to this saga involves the murder of a Chilean citizen by the Pinochet regime, on grounds of national security. During his brutal dictatorship, Pinochet sent a national-security hit team to Washington, D.C., where it murdered Orlando Letelier, who had served in the Allende government, on the streets of Washington, D.C. Even though the person who orchestrated the murder, a man named Michael Townley, ultimately got a sweetheart plea deal, no doubt because he had been an agent of the CIA, at least the Justice Department treated the hit as a murder rather than a legitimate assassination by the Pinochet regime to protect Chile’s national security.

On the other hand, however, the U.S. government has never treated the executions of Charles Horman and Michael Teruggi in the same way. Apparently, the notion has been that once the U.S. national security state decides that someone is a threat to national security, including an American, it has the legal authority to eliminate such a threat through assassination.

Equally important, the presumption seems to be that the final judge of what constitutes a sufficient threat to national security to justify an assassination of an American or anyone else lies with the national-security state itself, either through the CIA making the determination itself or by following orders of the president.

All of this, of course, is sheer nonsense. There is clear evidence indicating that two Americans have been murdered by agents of the U.S. national security state. This is not a case where the victims are alleged to have played an “operational role” in attacking the United States or even releasing classified information embarrassing to the U.S. government. The very worst thing Horman and Teruggi allegedly did was acquire information from military sources indicating U.S. government complicity in a regime-change operation in a foreign country and of being liberals, leftists, or socialists.

Since when do such things justify the national-security assassination of American citizens by either the U.S. military or the CIA?

There is no statue of limitations on murder. The U.S. government, including the Justice Department and the Congress, owe it to the American people, including the families of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, to open official investigations into the murders of these two young men and to bring to justice every U.S. official who participated in such murders.

If Chileans aren’t scared to confront the truth, why should Americans be?

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Hornberger’s Blog Archives

The Pinochet Files

A series of declassified US documents have revealed the extent of America's role in the Chilean coup

By Jonathan Franklin
Wednesday 10 September 2003 14.07 BST
Courtesy Of The Guardian

September 11 1973 was a day of terror and bloodshed in Chile. After months of rising tension, army troops stormed the presidential palace, leaving President Salvador Allende dead and thousands prisoners throughout this previously democratic nation.

Now, on the 30th anniversary of the coup, professors, journalists and citizen activists around the world are continuing to expose the full role of the US government in financing and promoting this bloody coup, which ushered in the 17-year military dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet.

Thousands of top secret documents which were declassified over the past five years have now been synthesized in a new book, The Pinochet File, by investigative reporter Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archives, a Washington-based investigative centre. "The US created a climate of a coup in Chile, a situation of chaos and agitation," said Kornbluh. "The CIA and state department were worried that the [Chilean] military ... were not ready for a coup."

The top secret documents accumulatively detail the crude workings of Washington during the Cold War. "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup," reads a CIA document from October 1970. "It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [US government] and American hand be well hidden."

Two days after this document was written, top CIA officials proposed a terrorist campaign to stun the Chilean people into accepting a military regime.

"Concur giving tear gas cannisters and gas masks ... working on obtaining machine guns," reads a CIA memo dated October 18 1970.

"Use good officers ... Some low-level overflights of Santiago and bomb drops in areas not likely to cause casualties could have great psychological effect and might swing balance as they have so many times in past in similar circumstances."

While conservative Chileans argue that the coup was a home-grown affair, the current Chilean minister of education, Sergio Bitar, says: "That internal crisis was activated by the North American policies against it. We see how they energetically obstructed all types of credit from the World Bank and the InterAmerican Bank ... these were decisive actions. This were political and financial pressures that were very relevant [to the ensuing coup.]"

The US effort to destabilise Chile was led by a policy of massively funding and bribing non-leftwing Chilean politicians.

Throughout the 1960s, the US secretly spent millions funding political parties of their choosing - usually the moderate Christian Democrats led by Eduardo Frei Montalva. By the early 1970s, Chilean society had become so leftwing that Washington decided to change tactics. First, President Nixon authorised $10m to be spent "to make the economy scream".

He also authorised pro-coup initiatives designed to destroy the traditional reluctance of Chilean military men to take over civilian government.

"Pinochet will not be a stumbling block to coup plans", reads one memo written six months before the coup, in which the American government looks to build a veritable Dream Team of coup plotters. "The navy and air force are ready ... the military is getting ready to move."

As part of a particularly crude effort to remove army officers who supported democratic rule, the CIA organised to kidnap Rene Schneider, a Chilean army general.

That plot was botched; Schneider died, and today his family is suing the US government and Henry Kissinger in particular for playing a role in his murder.

Citing documents declassified in the past few years, the lawsuit alleges that the US government paid $35,000 to the men who plotted the actions against Schneider.

"I don't want revenge, I want the truth to be established," said a son of the murdered general, also named Rene, who now lives in Santiago and works for a television station.

Immediately after the coup, US officials worked hard to ease international criticism of the human rights record of the Pinochet regime. Rather than fear Washington¿s reproach, the military regime repeatedly sought help and advice.

Just weeks after the coup, the US ambassador in Chile sent a memo to Henry Kissinger noting that "the military government of Chile requires adviser assistance of a person qualified in establishing a detention centre for the detainees ... adviser must have knowledge in the establishment and operation of a detention centre".

Even when the full extent of the torture and executions in Chile were well known, the US government sought to integrate the Pinochet regime into international business circles.

Probably no figure more personalised the cruelty of the Pinochet regime than the head of its secret DINA police force, Manuel Contreras.

Previously classified documents now confirm that, not only was Contreras on the CIA payroll, but that when he came to Washington during the height of human rights abuses, the US state department had specific tasks for him.

"Contreras was also asked to check in with Anaconda [Copper] and General Motors to encourage them to resume operations in Chile."

· A documentary, The Other 9/11, is broadcast at 11pm on Thursday September 11 on BBC Four

US Role In 1973 Death Of Charles Horman

Washington and the Pinochet coup in Chile

By Bill Vann
26 October 1999
Courtesy of The World Socialist Web Site

More than a quarter century after the execution in Chile of Charles Horman, an American freelance journalist, Washington has released a document admitting that US intelligence agents played a role in his death.

The Horman case was made famous by the Hollywood movie Missing. Directed by Constantino Costa Gavras, the film dramatized the struggle of Charles Horman's family to uncover the truth about his murder and the collaboration of US officials with the Chilean military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in carrying it out.

The State Department memo, dated August 25, 1976, was declassified just over two weeks ago (October 8), together with 1,100 other documents released by various US agencies. These papers dealt primarily with the years leading up to the military coup that brought Pinochet to power in September 1973. An initial set of 5,800 previously classified documents, made public last June 30, concerned the first five years of the dictatorship, when tens of thousands of Chilean workers, students and political oppositionists were imprisoned, tortured and executed.

Charles Horman was one of the victims of the Pinochet coup. On September 17, 1973, six days after the US-backed military takeover, Horman was seized by Chilean soldiers and taken to the National Stadium in Santiago, which had been turned by the military into a make-shift concentration camp. There prisoners were interrogated, tortured and executed. One month later, Horman's body was found in a morgue in the Chilean capital. A second American journalist, Frank Terrugi, was killed in the same fashion.

Written by three State Department functionaries—Rudy Fimbres, R.S. Driscoll and W.V. Robertson—and addressed to Harry Schlaudeman, a high-ranking official in the department's Latin American division—the August 1976 document described the Horman case as "bothersome," given reports in the press and Congressional investigations charging that the affair involved "negligence on our part, or worse, complicity in Horman's death." The memo was written while Henry Kissinger was still Secretary of State.

The State Department, the memo declared, had the responsibility to "categorically refute such innuendoes in defense of US officials." It went on, however, to lay out the case that these "innuendoes" were well founded.

The three State Department officials said they had evidence that "The GOC [Government of Chile] sought Horman and felt threatened enough to order his immediate execution. The GOC might have believed this American could be killed without negative fall-out from the USG [US Government]."

The report went on to declare that circumstantial evidence indicated "US intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman's death. At best it was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his murder by the GOC. At worst, US intelligence was aware the GOC saw Horman in a rather serious light and US officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of GOC paranoia."

What the document does not mention is that the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency had their own reasons not only to feed the Chilean dictatorship's "paranoia," but also to take a direct role in sanctioning the execution. Horman spent the day of the military uprising and several days thereafter in the resort town of Viña del Mar, near the port of Valparaiso, which was a key base for both the Chilean coup plotters and US military and intelligence personnel who were supporting them. While there, he spoke with several US operatives and took careful notes documenting the US role in overthrowing the elected government of President Salvador Allende.

After the release of the State Department memo, Horman's widow, Joyce, described it as "close to a smoking pistol."

The same document had been released to the Horman family more than 20 years ago. But the paragraphs cited above were blacked out by the State Department. It took nearly two decades for Washington to reveal what had been hidden in the 28 lines blacked out by government censors.

Still, the Clinton administration's "Chile Declassification Project," touted by the president as an effort to "shed light on human rights abuses, terrorism and other acts of political violence" under Pinochet, has amounted to an exercise in hypocrisy. Motivated by Washington's desire to distance itself from its former ally after the ex-dictator's arrest in London and efforts to extradite him to Spain, the declassification has hidden more than it has revealed.

The Horman document released October 8 came from the State Department, as have the vast bulk of the material that has been declassified. In it, the State Department officials themselves express skepticism about the account given by the CIA of its relations with key Chilean figures involved in Horman's case.

While this section of the document still has sections deleted for reasons of "national security," it declares that the agency's account "needs further illumination no matter CIA disclaimers." It goes on to declare that the authors find it hard to believe "that the Chileans did not check with [name deleted] regarding two detained Americans ... lack of candor with us on other matters only heightens our suspicions."

But where are the CIA documents, both those shared with the State Department at the time and those whose concealment prompted such suspicions? They remain classified, as do documents from the Pentagon which would have recounted contacts between US military officers and Charles Horman in Viña del Mar.

In the first batch of declassified material, 5,000 of the 5,800 documents came from the State Department, while the CIA released only 500. Out of some 25,000 pages of reports, memos and cables that have been made public thus far, not a single one provides any information on the part played by the CIA, the Pentagon or other US agencies in the Chilean coup itself and the bloody repression which followed.

There is no dispute that these documents exist. Daily cables went back and forth between Washington and Santiago as the CIA and the Nixon government followed the progress of "Track II," as the planned coup was known in intelligence circles. These documents have been referred to repeatedly in congressional investigations and access to them has been repeatedly denied in various Freedom of Information requests.

One of the recently released State Department documents gives an indication of the scale of US collaboration with Pinochet's preparations. It establishes that US military aid was raised dramatically between the coming to power of Allende in 1970, when it amounted to $800,000, to $10.9 million in 1972, as the coup plans were elaborated. Even as Nixon and Kissinger vilified the Allende government, they poured vast resources into the instrument they would use to overthrow it, the Chilean military.

Further documents withheld by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies concern the 1976 car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean minister and opponent of the dictatorship, together with his American aide, Ronni Moffitt, in Washington, DC. American officials have made the improbable claim that these documents must remain secret because they are material to the investigation of Pinochet's crimes.

According to Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, the CIA has rejected any review of documents emanating from its Directorate of Operations, the covert arm that earned the agency the nickname Murder Inc., on the grounds that the US government has never officially acknowledged carrying out covert operations in Chile. Similarly, the agency has taken the position that planning and policy documents are not covered by Clinton's declassification order.

This guarding of Washington's dirty secrets relating to Chile is motivated in part by the fact that former and present US officials who played a role as criminal as that of Pinochet himself are still alive. They, like the ex-dictator, could conceivably be called to account.

Men like ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the CIA's former coup master in Latin America, General Vernon Walters, are among them, as are many lesser-known functionaries of US intelligence and the Pentagon.

Even more important, "national security interests" are at stake in keeping these documents secret because, 25 years after the Chilean coup, US imperialism is still prepared to use the methods employed by Pinochet and his American backers in defending the interests of the US banks and multinationals and suppressing the struggles of the working class all over the world.