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
