A Chilean judge ruled Monday that the country’s former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet was competent to stand trial for human rights abuses. He was placed under house arrest after being charged with nine counts of kidnapping and one of murder. Last night his attorneys successfully won an injunction lifting the house arrest but the charges still stand against the 89 year-old man. Between 1973 and 1990 it is estimated that Pinochet’s government killed off more than 4,000 people. He came to power by overthrowing the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973 in a US-supported coup. In June 1976 declassified documents showed U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Pinochet “we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here.... We wish your government well.” Three months later, former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier was assassinated along with his American co-worker Ronni Moffitt by a car bomb in Washington. At the time George H. W. Bush was the head of the CIA. In determining Pinochet’s competence to stand trial, the judge cited an interview Pinochet gave last year to a Spanish-language TV network in the U.S. Pinochet said at the time “everything I did, I would do again.”