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Ambassador to Guatemala Marilyn McAfee, several former directors of the CIA and other high-level Clinton Administration officials. The case has never gone to trial; in March 1999 a district court judge dismissed most of her claims. In December 2000, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reversed the dismissal on one key claim, holding that Harbury’s right of access to the courts had been violated. “If her allegations are true,” wrote Judge David Tatel,”then the defendants’ reassurances and deceptive statements effectively prevented her from seeking emergency injunctive relief in time to save her husband’s life.” Christopher and the other government officials petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case, and it was argued last March. Sometime this month the Court is expected to issue a decision in the case of Christopher v. Harbury, addressing a deceptively narrow question of constitutional law: Did Warren Christopher, Anthony Lake, and other high-level Clinton Administration officials deprive Jennifer Harbury of her right to access to the courts by repeatedly lying to her, withholding information about her husband’s secret detention, torture, and eventual murder? About a year ago, I started following Harbury’s cases as they made their way through two very different court systems. I began wading through transcripts filled with characters like Asisclo Valladares, the middle-aged, heavy-set Attorney General with manicured nails and an expensive suit, who 10 years ago rushed off an army plane to stop an exhumation that would have proved that the Guatemalan army had committed a hoax and substituted the body of another man for that of Everardo. Or Simeon Cum Chuta, a military intelligence “specialist,” with a buzz cut, dark glasses, and barely audible monotone voice, who was one of Everardo’s torturers. Over and over again I read through the baroque prose of the Intelligence Oversight Board, along with the declassified memos made public by the National Security Archive’s Guatemala Project. From time to time I was reminded of a lawyer I know who likes to quote Leonardo Sciascia whenever the subject of “political crimes” is mentioned. Sciascia is a brilliant Italian writer who chronicles the murky world of politics and mafia in his native Sicily. Sciascia’s rule number one is that political murders are never solved; occasionally a name and a face are attached to the trigger man, the sicario, the low-life paid to do the dirty work, but never the asesino intellectual. The larger truth in Guatemala is the one that scholars and independent journalists had been telling for years about the scope of the atrocities and the role of the United States. But it was not until a U.N.-sponsored truth commission issued its final report in 1999 that the full extent of the horror was known. The Guatemalan army and other state-sponsored forces were responsible for 93 percent of all the atrocities committed during the 36-year civil war. The Commission found that the military had committed genocide, and it found that the United States shared in the responsibility for what had happened in Guatemala. In 1954, a CIA-sponsored coup toppled the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz and went so far as to provide the military government that followed with a list of assassination prospects. The Jennifer Harbury Barbara Belejack The larger truth in Guatemala is the one that scholars and independent journalists had been telling for years about the scope of the atrocities and the role of the United States. But it was not until a U.N.-sponsored truth commission issued its final report in 1999 that the full extent of the horror was known. 6 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 617102