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)
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