Maybe that's Saddam's problem- he hasn't invaded *enough* states to merit
that award. Yet, Gorby collected his the week he sent troops to crush the
Lithuanian independence movement, and he only managed to kill a dozen, if
my memory serves me correctly. Life is unfair...
--On 02 December 2002 10:50 +0000 Ron Johnston <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> But he got the Nobel Peace Prize!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
> On Mon, 2 Dec 2002 10:40:18 GMT Storey Dave <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> From 'The Nation'
>> Looks like irony is alive and well!
>> Dave
>>
>> Kissinger's Back...As 9/11 Truth-Seeker 11/27/2002 @ 4:19pm {HYPERLINK
>> "javascript:email_article_popup()"} Asking Henry Kissinger to
>> investigate government malfeasance or nonfeasance is akin to asking
>> Slobodan Milosevic to investigate war crimes. Pretty damn akin, since
>> Kissinger has been accused, with cause, of engaging in war crimes of his
>> own. Moreover, he has been a poster- child for the worst excesses of
>> secret government and secret warfare. Yet George W. Bush has named him
>> to head a supposedly independent commission to investigate the
>> nightmarish attacks of September 11, 2001, a commission intended to tell
>> the public what went wrong on and before that day. This is a sick,
>> black-is-white, war-is-peace joke--a cruel insult to the memory of those
>> killed on 9/11 and a screw-you affront to any American who believes the
>> public deserves a full accounting of government actions or lack thereof.
>> It's as if Bush instructed his advisers to come up with the name of the
>> person who literally would be the absolute worst choice for the post
>> and, once they had, said, "sign him up."
>> Hyperbole? Consider the record.
>> Vietnam. Kissinger participated in a GOP plot to undermine the 1968
>> Paris peace talks in order to assist Richard Nixon's presidential
>> campaign. Once in office, Nixon named Kissinger his national security
>> adviser, and later appointed him secretary of state. As co-architect of
>> Nixon's war in Vietnam, Kissinger oversaw the secret bombing
>> campaign in Cambodia, an arguably illegal operation estimated to have
>> claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
>> Bangladesh. In 1971, Pakistani General Yahya Khan, armed with US
>> weaponry, overthrew a democratically-elected government in an action
>> that led to a massive civilian bloodbath. Hundreds of thousands were
>> killed. Kissinger blocked US condemnation of Khan. Instead, he noted
>> Khan's "delicacy and tact."
>> Chile. In the early 1970s, Kissinger oversaw the CIA's extensive covert
>> campaign that assisted coup-plotters, some of whom eventually
>> overthrew the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende
>> and installed the murderous military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
>> On June 8, 1976, at the height of Pinochet's repression, Kissinger had a
>> meeting with Pinochet and behind closed doors told him that "we are
>> sympathetic to what you are trying to do here," according to minutes of
>> the session (which are quoted in Peter Kornbluh's forthcoming book,
>> The Pinochet File.)
>> East Timor. In 1975, President Gerald Ford and Kissinger, still serving
>> as secretary of state, offered advance approval of Indonesia's brutal
>> invasion of East Timor, which took the lives of tens of thousands of East
>> Timorese. For years afterward, Kissinger denied the subject ever came
>> up during the December 6, 1975, meeting he and Ford held with
>> General Suharto, Indonesia's military ruler, in Jarkata. But a classified
>> US cable obtained by the National Security Archive shows otherwise. It
>> notes that Suharto asked for "understanding if we deem it necessary to
>> take rapid or drastic action" in East Timor. Ford said, "We will
>> understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the
>> problem you have and the intentions you have." The next day, Suharto
>> struck East Timor. Kissinger is an outright liar on this subject.
>> Argentina. In 1976, as a fascistic and anti-Semitic military junta was
>> beginning its so-called "dirty war" against supposed subversives--
>> between 9,000 and 30,000 people would be "disappeared" by the
>> military over the next seven years--Argentina's foreign minister met with
>> Kissinger and received what he believed was tacit encouragement for his
>> government's violent efforts. According to a US cable released earlier
>> this year, the foreign minister was convinced after his chat with
>> Kissinger that the United States wanted the Argentine terror campaign to
>> end soon--not that Washington was dead-set against it. The cable said
>> that the minister had left his meeting with Kissinger "euphoric." Two
>> years later, Kissinger, then a private citizen, traveled to Buenos Aires
>> as the guest of dictator General Jorge Rafael Videla and praised the
>> junta for having done, as one cable put it, "an outstanding job in
>> wiping out terrorist forces." As Raul Castro, the US ambassador to
>> Argentina, noted at the time in a message to the State Department, "My
>> only concern is that Kissinger's repeated high praise for Argentina's
>> action in wiping out terrorism...may have gone to some considerable
>> extent to his hosts' heads....There is some danger that Argentines may
>> use Kissinger's laudatory statements as justification for hardening
>> their human rights stance." That is, Kissinger was, in a way, enabling
>> torture, kidnapping and murder.
>> Appropriately, Kissinger is a man on the run for his past misdeeds. He is
>> the target of two lawsuits, and judges overseas have sought him for
>> questioning in war-crimes-related legal actions. In the United States,
>> the family of Chilean General Rene Schneider sued Kissinger last year.
>> Schneider was shot on October 22, 1970, by would-be coup-makers working
>> with CIA operatives. These CIA assets were part of a secret plan
>> authorized by Nixon--and supervised by Kissinger--to foment a coup
>> before Allende, a Socialist, could be inaugurated as president.
>> Schneider, a constitutionalist who opposed a coup, died three days later.
>> This secret CIA program in Chile--dubbed "Track Two"--gave $35,000 to
>> Schneider's assassins after the slaying. Michael Tigar, an attorney for
>> the Schneider family, claims, "Our case shows, document by document,
>> that [Kissinger] was involved in great detail in supporting the people
>> who killed General Schneider, and then paid them off."
>> On September 9, 2001, 60 Minutes aired a segment on the Schneider
>> family's charges against Kissinger. The former secretary of state came
>> across as partly responsible for what is the Chilean equivalent of the
>> JFK assassination. It was a major blow to his public image: Kissinger
>> cast as a supporter of terrorists. Two days later, Osama bin Laden
>> struck. Immediately, Kissinger was again on television, but now as a
>> much-in-demand expert on terrorism.
>> In another lawsuit, filed earlier this month, eleven Chilean human rights
>> victims--including relatives of people murdered after Pinochet's coup--
>> claimed Kissinger knowingly provided practical assistance and
>> encouragement to the Pinochet regime. Kissinger's codefendant in the
>> case is Michael Townley, an American-born Chilean agent who was a
>> leading international terrorist in the mid-1970s. In his most notorious
>> operation, Townley in 1976 planted a car-bomb that killed Orlando
>> Letelier, Allende's ambassador to the United States, and Ronni Moffitt,
>> Letelier's colleague, on Washington's embassy row.
>> Kissinger has more trouble than these lawsuits. The Chilean Supreme
>> Court sent the State Department questions for Kissinger about the death
>> of Charles Horman, an American journalist killed during the 1973 coup
>> in Chile. (Horman's murder was the subject of the 1982 film Missing.) A
>> criminal judge in Chile has said he might include Kissinger in his
>> investigation of Operation Condor, a now infamous secret project, in
>> which the security services of Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay,
>> and Argentina worked together to kidnap and murder political
>> opponents. (Letelier was killed in a Condor operation.) The Spanish
>> judge who requested the 1998 arrest of Pinochet in Great Britain has
>> declared he wants to question Kissinger as a witness in his inquiry into
>> crimes against humanity committed by Pinochet and other Latin
>> American military dictators. In France, a judge probing the
>> disappearance of five French citizens in Chile during the Pinochet years
>> wants to talk to Kissinger. Last May, he sent police to a Paris hotel,
>> where Kissinger was staying, to serve him questions. In February,
>> Kissinger canceled a trip to Brazil, where he was to be awarded a medal
>> by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. His would-be hosts said he
>> had pulled out to avoid protests by human rights groups.
>> A fellow who has coddled state-sponsored terrorism has been put in
>> charge of this terrorism investigation. A proven liar has been assigned
>> the task of finding the truth. By the way, in 1976, when Kissinger was
>> secretary of state, he was informed by his chief aide for Latin America
>> that South American military regimes were intending to use Operation
>> Condor "to find and kill" political opponents. Kissinger quickly
>> dispatched a cable instructing US ambassadors in the Condor countries to
>> note Washington's "deep concern." But it seems no such warnings were
>> actually conveyed. And a month later, this order was rescinded. The next
>> day, Letelier and Moffit were murdered. (Peter Kornbluh and journalist
>> John Dinges recently chronicled this sad Kissinger episode in The
>> Washington Post.) Kissinger's State Department had not
>> responded with the force needed to thwart the official terrorism of its
>> friends in South America. Perhaps this provides Kissinger experience
>> useful for examining the government's failure to prevent more recent acts
>> of terrorism.
>> Other qualifications for the job, as Bush and Vice President Dick
>> Cheney might see it? A leaks-obsessed Kissinger, when he served as
>> Nixon's national security adviser, wiretapped his own staff. (One of his
>> targets, Morton Halperin, sued and eventually won an apology.) And
>> when he left office, Kissinger took tens of thousands of pages of
>> documents--created by government employees on government time--
>> and treated them as his personal records, using them for his own
>> memoirs and keeping the material for years from the prying eyes of
>> historians and journalists. He and the Bush-Cheney White House agree
>> on open government: the less the better.
>> Remember, the White House was never keen on setting up an
>> independent commission that would answer to the public. Cheney at one
>> point reportedly intervened to block a compromise that had been
>> painstakingly worked out in Congress regarding the composition and
>> rules of the commission. Finally, the White House said okay, as long as
>> it could pick the chairman and subpoenas would only be issued with the
>> support of at least six of the commission's ten members. With Kissinger
>> in control, the secret-keepers of the White House--who already have
>> succeeded in preventing the House and Senate intelligence committees'
>> investigation of 9/ll from releasing embarrassing and uncomfortable
>> information--will have little reason to fear.
>> The Bush-Cheney administration has been a rehab center for tainted
>> Republicans. Retired Admiral John Poindexter, a leading Iran-contra
>> player, was placed in charge of a sensitive, high-tech, Pentagon
>> intelligence-gathering operation aimed at reviewing massive amounts of
>> individual personal data in order to uncover possible terrorists. Elliott
>> Abrams, who pled guilty to lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal,
>> was warmly embraced and handed a staff position in Bush's National
>> Security Council. But the Kissinger selection is the most outrageous of
>> these acts of compassion and forgiveness. It is a move of defiance and
>> hubris.
>> For many in the world, Kissinger is a symbol of US arrogance and the
>> misuse of American might. In power, he cared more for US credibility
>> and geostrategic advantage than for human rights and open government.
>> His has been a career of covertly moving chips, not one of letting them
>> fall. He is not a truth-seeker. In fact, he has prevaricated about his
>> own actions and tried to limit access to government information. He
>> should be subpoenaed, not handed the right to subpoena. He is a target,
>> not an investigator.
>> With Kissinger's appointment, Bush has rendered the independent
>> commission a sham. Democrats should have immediately announced
>> they would refuse to fill their allotted five slots. But after Bush
>> picked Kissinger, the Democrats tapped former Democratic Senator George
>> Mitchell to be vice-chairman of the panel, signaling that Kissinger was
>> fine by them. How unfortunate. The public would be better served and the
>> victims of 9/11 better honored by no commission rather than one headed
>> by Kissinger.
>>
>>
>>
>> Dr. David Storey
>> Geography Department &
>> Centre for Rural Research
>> University College Worcester
>> Henwick Grove
>> Worcester WR2 6AJ
>> England
>>
>> Tel: 01905 855189
>> Fax: 01905 855132
>
> -------------------
> Ron Johnston
> School of Geographical Sciences,
> University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1SS
> 0117 928 9116 (FAX 0117 928 7878)
> [log in to unmask]
>
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