September 11, 1973, the city Santiago, Chile, British supplied Hawker Hunter aircraft destroy the Presidential palace in a US backed military coup d'etat against the elected socialist President Salvador Allende.

On the tenth anniversary of the twin towers atrocity the fickleness of foreign policy shouldn't be too easily forgotten. Twenty eight years earlier it was Chilean freedom and democracy that was destroyed with the help of the very nation now promoting its expansion across the globe.

With Allende's death died the democratic dreams of a nation to be replaced by the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet and his military Junta who would rule with an iron fist for the next 15 years.

Times change and with it enemies. Communism not religious fundamentalism was the threat at the height of the Cold War. Stopping the spread of the Red Terror was the number one priority for the protection of the free world, whatever the cost.

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

Henry Kissenger, US Secretary of State at the time, was then less keen on promoting the benefits of the ballet box to voters who didn't elect who he wanted.

Pinochet went on to rule directly until losing a plebiscite to reintroduce democratic government in 1988. During the intervening period more than 3000 opponents of the regime were killed and 100,000 plus locked up as political prisoners, many of them tortured.

The bodies of hundreds of these victims have never been found. It was a favourite tactic of the Junta to drug prisoners, fly them out to sea and dump their bodies for the sharks to dispose of.

A death toll in fact not too dissimilar to the twin towers tragedy 28 years later. The irony cannot be lost on those who survived the Pinochet years. In Santiago they died for democracy denied them by the leader of the 'free' world. In New York they died at the hands of those who didn't want it in the first place.