There is much to be admired in a political system that opens the documentation of its secret operations to the public gaze. We should applaud the fact that there has been a disclosure of 16,000 more of the papers from covert CIA operations in Chile, first during the rule of the democratically elected President Salvador Allende and then during that of the military dictator General Augusto Pinochet. However, the content of these papers is less inspiring.

It transpires that apart from giving military, political and financial support to General Pinochet, the Central Intelligence Agency had already been engaged in a long campaign to defeat democracy in Chile: for instance by distributing money to groups planning the military overthrow of the government, which duly took place in 1973.

It is also suggested that the papers provide evidence that the CIA assisted in the assassination in Washington of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in 1976, in order to reinforce the rule of General Pinochet, who presided over a period of terror in Chile in which thousands died or disappeared.

These were the policies of a particularly hysterical period of anti-communist sentiment in the USA, but even so, the public were clearly not to be trusted when it came to interfering in the internal affairs of another state like this. Democracy plays no role in this kind of policy-making. But does anyone care? Will anyone try to do anything about it?

Let us remember the case of the School of the Americas. This institution, founded in 1946 and moved from Panama to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984, is close to the front line in the U.S. government's attempts to keep the Generals in power in Latin America. Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina and Roberto D'Aubuisson of El Salvador were all graduates of the school, and the death and torture squads of half a dozen countries — Chile included - were led and organised by U.S.-trained officers.

The dreadful record of the School of the Americas in turning out murderers and gangsters was largely uncovered through the efforts of one man, U.S. Navy officer turned Roman Catholic priest Roy Bourgeois. He had served in Latin America, and was so shocked by what he saw being done there in the name of the United States that he devoted years of effort to making the public aware of some of the worst excesses. In 1998 and 1999 this protest reached the national and international level.

But did it make any difference? Did it change anything?

Questions were asked in Congress, a fact which got a box in Newsweek, and nobody even really noticed.. Perhaps this is because the American public generally accepts that its government routinely does this sort of thing, and is on the whole rather glad not to be consulted about it.

The same thing will in all likelihood happen with these CIA papers. Everyone is too busy with Florida and the votes and everything to pay much attention: and hey, weren't they communists or something down there in Chile anyway?

In a country which believes that its government has kept bits of flying saucers for decades without telling anyone, no one is going to get too excited about the Pentagon secretly helping to kill and torture the proponents of democracy in Latin America, along with a lot of poor peasants and anyone else who got in the way. Nor will anyone be concerned that the fight against democracy in the name of fighting Communism indirectly promoted the dope business that boomed so spectacularly in many of these same countries during this same period.

So this is the hidden catch - the devil in the detail. Yes, in America you can publish old CIA papers. This right is guaranteed. But what if it doesn't make any difference? It is rather like the situation with American politics as a whole. The system has evolved to the point where everybody has an absolute right to free speech and free political expression - but in fact the choice is between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The military and intelligence elites have realized that you can let academics and journalists and intellectuals shout as loudly as they want. Most of America is not listening. Most of America does not want to know.

How much of this kind of thing is still going on? Is the U.S. taxpayer still in the cocaine and torture business? This is an important question, one would have thought. But only if the public feels sufficiently interested to try and find out.

U.S. involvement in Latin America is still significant, although the focus has changed. It is now Drugs and not Communism that are soaking up the tax dollars. The School of the Americas is still doing its gung-ho thing, but we are told that there are no more covert operations connected with the School these days. The CIA has moved with the times too, and runs web pages and information services, and has even recently got involved in peace negotiations in the Middle East.

And yet... Why exactly did the Pentagon and the White House decide that it was a good idea to launch a cruise missile attack on a veterinary pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan in August 1998? How much of the Balkans disaster is the result of backfired covert American action? What truth is there in the European Union's charge that the NSA uses the Echelon system of satellite intelligence gathering for industrial espionage on behalf of U.S. corporations? And when will we be told what the CIA is doing in Cuba or the Great Lakes region of Africa today? Only when it is certain that no one will care any more, and when it becomes too late to do anything about it anyway? How long will incompetence be allowed to hide behind the mask of discretion?

What is so shocking about the CIA campaign in Chile in particular is that it was completely counter-productive. There was no need to install a military dictatorship in Chile. Soviet Communism did not take over Latin America. It was never going to. We see in retrospect that the trade union and other left-wing movements there prepared the ground for the democracy that is now more generally established. The threat to liberty in Latin America comes from the right and not from the left: from the Noriegas and the D'Aubuissons; from American-trained killers and thieves with braids on their hats and their money in Switzerland.

There is just no reason to trust these people lurking in the basement of the Washington establishment with foreign policy decisions. Their record is one of disaster after disaster. The whole principle of covert action against governments you don't like, or, even worse, in favor of dictators or gangsters you do like, needs to be abandoned. These actions tend to be conceived and executed in an atmosphere of paranoia, and usually succeed in making everything worse. But as political America continues to tune out foreign policy issues, the sad reality is that more and more influence will end up in the hands of the spooks and the knuckle-draggers.

Christopher Lord is the editor in chief of Perspectives - the Central European Review of International Affairs, published by the Institute of International Relations in Prague. His recent books include Politics (Prague, 1999) and Family Values (2000), a collection of fiction published in the United States.

Is Lord right when he charges that "political America continues to tune out foreign policy issues"? Was the situation in the Balkans the result of backfired covert American action? Should the "whole principle of covert action" be abandoned?