And for the poignant photo of these about-to-be-tortured people. It is heartening that one of them survived--the daughter--and went on to be elected president of Chile--but heartbreaking to realize what they were about to face.

Tortured with the collusion, training, support and funding of the U.S. government--and probably including U.S. torturers.

My suspicion: The burglars were CIA and they were looking for any scrap of evidence that Weibel's investigative files may have contained about U.S. torturers and/or heretofore unknown U.S. connections.

Why? Because I believe that's what Leon Panetta was doing in Bogota, in his first visible travel as CIA Director, a position that he probably obtained under Obama due to his membership in Bush Sr.'s "Iraq Study Group." The primary mission of that group was to stop Cheney and Rumsfeld from nuking Iran, but one of its secondary missions was likely to arrange for no investigation, no impeachment and no prosecution of Bush Junta criminals that might endanger Jr. I think there was some really bad, filthy dirty stuff that went on in Colombia during the Bush Junta, and Panetta was cleaning up Jr.'s trail when he went to Bogota first thing as CIA Director.

Now we find investigative files on the horrors in Chile that Nixon and Kissinger were involved in, burglarized and stolen. Is the CIA trying to clean its own trails, past and recent? With all of these leftist democracies emerging in Latin America--and with Chile likely to re-join them in the next election cycle in Chile--the CIA has much to worry about, as to more investigations of U.S. covert activities in Latin America. The record is quite horrible as it is. Could there be more?

This is just a guess. There are plenty of likely culprits in Chile, too. I haven't read Weibel's book but I presume that he has already named a lot of names. He must be wondering what they were looking for--names and connections he didn't recognize the importance of, threads that he couldn't follow up, seeming dead-ends (blockaded by disinformation)? I hope he had his files backed up somewhere. Talk about a red alert as to their importance! Who would be interested in what he DIDN'T use in his book?