The following series of questions and answers was drawn up for a Cambridge
anti-war campaign group, and may be of use:

http://www.campeace.org/iraqarchive/war_on_iraq.html

Nick Megoran

--On 03 December 2002 11:46 +0000 Nick Megoran <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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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