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Henry Kissinger |
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Right wing academic turned Washington insider Henry Kissinger plumbed new depths of sleazy political behavior by helping Republicans destabilize the Paris peace talks during Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. Richard Holbrooke, then a senior negotiator with the Lyndon Johnson administration, recalled that "Henry was the only person outside of the government we were authorized to discuss the negotiations with.... It is not stretching the truth to say the Nixon campaign had a secret source within the U.S. negotiating team." Kissinger advised the Nixon camp to derail talks by using a "back channel" to South Vietnam. Saigon authorities subsequently scuttled the deal with Johnson, believing Nixon's bogus promise of better terms. This effectively added four more years to the war; half the battle deaths in Vietnam took place between 1968 and 1972. As Nixon's Secretary of State, Kissinger was directly responsible for deliberate massacres of civilians, from the notorious "pacification" campaigns like Operation Speedy Express (in which at least 10,000 Vietnamese villagers were killed) to the secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia, which were given the code names "Breakfast," "Lunch," "Snack," "Dinner" and "Dessert." By conservative estimates, the U.S. killed 600,000 civilians in Cambodia and another 350,000 in Laos. In another characteristic act of homicidal duplicity, Kissinger next ran cover for a bloody junta in Bangladesh to secure the much-lauded "opening" to China that Richard Nixon parlayed into a career as respected elder statesman. Using weapons supplied by the U.S., General Yahya Khan overthrew the democratically elected government of Bangladesh and murdered at least half a million civilians in 1971. The U.S. National Security Council wanted to condemn these actions. Kissinger refused, instead thanking Khan for his "delicacy and tact." Similarly, Kissinger helped rubberstamp the brutal regime of the Greek colonels who seized power in 1967, and approved Operation Condor, which helped military juntas in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay assassinate leftists. Kissinger helped to plan the 1973 U.S.-backed overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende. Right-wing general Augusto Pinochet then took over as moderates fled for their lives and CIA-financed hit men tracked down and killed Allende supporters. These attacks included the car bombing of Allende's foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, and an aide, Ronni Moffitt, at Sheridan Circle in downtown Washington. Among the more telling quotes from Kissinger himself on that sordid section of his CV: "the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves" and "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people." One of the strongest calls for an investigation into Kissinger's status as a war criminal stems from his support for the Indonesian military's bloody 1975 invasion and subsequent occupation of East Timor, which by the early 1980s killed 200,000 East Timorese. With then-President Ford, Kissinger provided Indonesian dictator Suharto a political go-ahead for the invasion and was instrumental in continuing the flow of U.S. weapons. Kissinger sits on the board of New Orleans-based Freeport-McMoRan Gold and Copper, the majority shareholder in the world's largest gold mine, located in the remote Indonesian province of West Papua. In April 2000 Kissinger took on an unpaid role as advisor to the Indonesian government, and cautioned Jakarta that "it is in the interests of Indonesia" to honor its contract with Freeport, which has been implicated in numerous atrocities committed by Indonesian troops (who the mining giant employ as security) in Papua. Kissinger was a staunch defender of the People's Republic of China after the June 1989 massacre in and around Tiananmen Square, writing that "no government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its capital occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators" (ironically, almost exactly the line taken by hard-line sectarian Left apologists for the butchers of Beijing). While the client list of Kissinger's consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, is secret, it is public knowledge that Kissinger helped H.J. Heinz, Atlantic Richfield/Arco and other conglomerates do business in China. Six months before the Tiananmen Square massacre, Kissinger set up a limited investment partnership called China Ventures, of which he was chairman, CEO and chief partner. The firm's brochure explicitly stated that it only took on projects "that enjoy the unquestioned support of the People's Republic." Kissinger dismissed Palestinian aspirations for self-determination, saying that the tension between "European rationalism and Arab romanticism" scuttled prospects for peace in the occupied territories. But perhaps Kissinger's most telling remark about the Middle East is his infamous statement that "oil is much too important a commodity to be left to the Arabs." What a relief for Dr. K that former State Department Official Paul Bremer, former managing director at Kissinger Associates and Kissinger's executive assistant in the 1970s, was recently appointed civil administrator to oversee the reconstruction of Iraq (Kissinger Associates was also involved in the arming of Saddam Hussein's regime in the 1980s; the Dr. does get around!). Sources: Take Him Away With Friends Like These; Kissinger does Indonesia How You Can Do What the Government Won't: Arrest Henry Kissinger
Mondo Washington Neither State nor Defense can fault choice of Bremer |
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