Huffington Post finds evidence of Pinochet-McCain meeting

In a scoop over at Huffington Post, John Dinges obtained previously undisclosed information:

"John McCain, who has harshly criticized the idea of sitting down with dictators without pre-conditions, appears to have done just that. In 1985, McCain traveled to Chile for a friendly meeting with Chile's military ruler, General Augusto Pinochet, one of the world's most notorious violators of human rights credited with killing more than 3,000 civilians and jailing tens of thousands of others.

The private meeting between McCain and dictator Pinochet has gone previously un-reported anywhere."

The whole story is worth reading, and provides documentation to back up the story. One question this raises for me is why the story is being broken on a blog rather than in a newspaper or on one of the television news outlets. If the story gets MSM attention (which I predict will require the Obama campaign raising it), it will be interesting to see how the McCain campaign explains this as not a contradiction of the McCain-Palin attacks on Obama for being naive enough to meet without preconditions with dictators with terrorist associations. I'm sure they'll come up with a number of reasons why this doesn't count, but we're talking about someone who not only 'disappeared' thousands of his country's citizens, but also was involved in a car bombing in Washington, D.C.