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CounterPunch
December
5, 2002
Bush the Comedian:
Poindexter, Abrams and Now Henry K.
by SAUL LANDAU
I didn't think President Bush had a highly developed
sense of humor. Then, earlier this year, he appointed retired
Admiral John Poindexter President Reagan's National Security
Adviser to head the Information Awareness Office, the ultra secret,
Pentagon snooping expedition to look through your email and underwear
to discover possible terrorist connections. In the late 1980s,
Poindexter lied to Congress and secretly plotted to circumvent
the law prohibiting the sale of missiles to the US-hating fanatics
in Iran. Poindexter colluded with other officials to use the
proceeds to buy weapons for the CIA's contra rebels. Congress
had de-funded the Contras. Bush (41) absolved him.
Previously, W had tested the Washington
insiders' sense of humor by naming Elliott Abrams to a high national
security post. Abrams pled guilty to lying to Congress in the
same scandal and wrote in his autobiography that he told his
own kids that lying to Congress served the national interest.
But Bush's biggest laugh came from appointing
the 79 year old Henry Kissinger to head the investigation into
the actions -- or inactions -- of government agencies around
the 9/11 events.
"Ha," I laughed aloud, "the
man least likely to reveal the truth, the man least interested
in honesty and disclosure, the man with a world class reputation
for spreading and supporting terror in several continents now
reigns as commish of a panel to investigate terrorism! Wow! Talk
about irony!
Instead of investigating Kissinger for
his own terrorist acts, Dubya named the sly old fox to investigate
mass murder in the proverbial hen house. The public will certainly
feel assured - that is, those without memory or the ability to
read history.
"Maybe," a friend suggested
as a reason for appointing Kissinger, "the cartoonists'
association made a large contribution to W's 2004 campaign fund!
They will have a field day portraying Kissinger the master liar
as the man charged with ferreting out the truth. Indeed, if Bush
wasn't kidding around how would one explain appointing an arch
criminal to investigate a fiendish crime?"
Is Bush just a moron as a Canadian official
recently said before being forced to resign, or is there something
behind this bizarre appointment? In the December 1 New York Times,
Maureen Dowd attributes the K gag to Dick Cheney "Only someone
as pathologically opaque as the vice president could appreciate
the sublime translucency of Henry Kissinger. And only someone
intent on recreating the glory days of the Ford and Nixon White
Houses could have hungered to add the 79-year-old Dr. Strange--
I mean, Dr. Kissinger to the Bush team."
Strange----- I mean Kissinger as a teammate?
When Kissinger won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize after slaughtering
tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians in his infamous Christmas
bombing, a friend suggested he should have won the prize for
Physics.
"What did he know about physics?"
I asked, like a straight man.
"Ah ha!" sneered my friend.
Some relatives of the 9/11 victims didn't
get the joke when they heard of Bush's decision to dub Henry
the chief prober. Why, some asked, appoint a man who had proven
his hatred for democracy and much of humanity! But, most of all,
why place a man who despises truth, especially in its published
form?
In the 1970s, the Washington media, living
in a world of liars, informally dubbed Henry as an unequaled
prevaricator. An apocryphal story from the early 1970s has a
confounded Washington press corps hiring a shrink and giving
him press credentials to observe Kissinger during his famed media
background briefing sessions and provide clues as to when the
architect of US foreign policy is lying. After several sessions
the shrink tells the reporters: "It's simple. When Kissinger
folds his hands like a German school boy or fiddles with his
glasses, he's telling the truth. When he opens his mouth to speak,
he's lying."
W's advisers surely knew that Kissinger
stands for governmental honesty as Al Capone symbolizes civic
virtue and Ariel Sharon represents peace with Palestinians. So
the Bushies may well have a non humorous motive for appointing
this mountebank among charlatans.
Remember, W had opposed any investigation
into 9/11. However, the media revealed that US agencies had foreknowledge
of the horrid events and the families of the victims' exerted
heavy pressure on Bush to probe. So, he had to investigate, but
didn't want truth to emerge, that is, actual facts to appear
in print.
So, Kissinger is the logical choice to
insure that the public receives a contemporary Warren Commission
report. When he wasn't actually carrying out campaigns of terror
and murder, he spent much of his time lying and covering up his
dirty deeds.
In 1968 Republican Party heavies choose
him to fly to Paris to help sabotage President Johnson's peace
talks with the Vietnamese. In his campaign, Nixon had promised
to end the war and if the Vietnamese held out, Kissinger assured
them secretly, Nixon would make a better peace with them. Nixon
rewarded Kissinger for his nefarious behavior by naming him national
security adviser. Kissinger rewarded the Vietnamese by prolonging
the war, although he knew the United States could not win it.
His "peace with honor" nonsense cost more than a million
Vietnamese lives and scores of thousands of US soldiers dead
and wounded.
In 1970, Kissinger had helped persuade
Nixon to widen the war to include Cambodia. Without congressional
authorization or even knowledge, Kissinger presided over the
secret bombing and invasion of Cambodia, in an attempt to "cut
off the Ho Chi Minh trail" and deprive the Vietnamese enemy
of supplies. No one has yet accurately calculated how many hundreds
of thousands of civilians died in this futile terrorist operation.
Kissinger and Nixon secretly declared war against Cambodia without
telling even the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Indeed, the pilots of
the bomber planes kept false logs indicating that the Cambodia
missions were flown over North Vietnam so as to deceive the Joint
Chiefs.
Also in 1970, Kissinger conspired to
alter the destiny of Chile. Dr. Salvador Allende, a socialist,
won the election to head a popular unity government. With Nixon's
approval, Kissinger directed a CIA covert operation to "destabilize"
the government. In October 1970, with Kissinger's knowledge and
approval, the CIA tried to assassinate Allende and did assassinate
Chilean Army Chief, General Rene Schneider who stood as an obstacle
to removing Allende, with the help of hired fascist thugs from
"Patria y Libertad". (Currently, poor Henry is facing
legal problems in connection with that murder). The Schneider
family has sued K for wrongful death, claiming that documents
prove "that [Kissinger] was involved in great detail in
supporting the people who killed General Schneider, and then
paid them off."
In another Chile-related case, Kissinger
was asked by Chile's Supreme Court to answer official questions
about the murder of an American reporter in Chile shortly after
the September 1973 coup. It appears that very high officials
in the State Department refused to help Charles Horman (See Costa
Gavras' film Missing) when Pinochet's Gestapo were torturing
and then murdering him.
K denied involvement in the coup from
day one, although he chastised the Chilean people for being irresponsible
in electing Allende as President. In 1972, Kissinger arranged
to meet Orlando Letelier, Chile's Ambassador to Washington, at
a dinner party. "With no trace of a smile," Letelier
recounted to me, "Kissinger wanted me to assure Allende
that the US government was not destabilizing the Chilean government."
Letelier laughed. He knew what was going
on in Chile even if Kissinger was covering up his approval of
CIA plans to commit violent acts to disrupt Chilean society.
When the press corps pushed Kissinger as to why an elected socialist
government threatened US security, Kissinger jokingly retorted:
"Chile is like a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica."
After three years of dirty tricks against
the government and people of Chile, including routine acts of
violence, the Chilean military with CIA urging finally launched
the coup that overthrew the elected government. In its place,
a pro-US military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet carried
out a long reign of terror, murdering, torturing and exiling
its political opponents.
After the coup, Kissinger ordered immediate
recognition and aid for the illegal government. In June, 1976,
he graced Pinochet with a personal visit while most of the world
was condemning him for its gross violations of human rights.
Before delivering a speech at an OAS meeting in Chile, K met
privately with Pinochet and assured the mass murderer that his
forthcoming speech on human rights was not "directed against
your government."
A State Department transcribed memo of
the conversation shows that Kissinger flattered the man who he
knew had murdered thousands including "enemies" abroad
that "we are sympathetic to what you are trying to do here."
Pinochet twice mentioned Orlando Letelier's name as being the
man responsible for his bad "image" throughout the
world. Kissinger assured Pinochet of Washington's support for
his methods. I think he meant economic methods and the means
he used for established "order." I don't think K meant
to give Pinochet the green light to assassinate Letelier in Washington.
But in September 1976, three months later,
Pinochet sent his assassins to Washington to car bomb Letelier.
Ronni Moffitt, a US colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies
where they both worked, also died in the terrorist attack. The
FBI discovered that the Letelier car bombing was part of Operation
Condor, a network of Latin American intelligence agencies headquartered
in Chile that carried out surveillance on each other's dissidents
and sometimes "disappeared" and assassinated them in
each other's countries. Pinochet had extended his murderous reach
beyond the friendly military dictatorships of South America,
however. The FBI discovered that he had set up assassination
plots in Rome, London, Paris and Madrid as well. Kissinger knew
all about them before he gave Pinochet his Good Housekeeping
Seal of Approval.
Like Stanley Kubrick's film character
Dr. Strangelove, K possesses an eccentric sense of humor. After
having initially backed a Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein
the mid 1970s, he abruptly pulled the rug from under the rebelling
Kurds. When a subordinate responded in shock to K's lightning
desertion of an ally since he had heard the Secretary promise
the Kurds undying loyalty and aid, K quoted the old adage: "Promise
them anything, give them what they get and f. them if they can't
take a joke."
In recent years, however, Kissinger himself
has become the butt of a few jokes. In 2001, a Chilean judge
investigating Condor has tried to include Kissinger in his witness
list. (Letelier was killed in a Condor operation.) Baltazar Garzon,
the Spanish judge who requested the English to arrest Pinochet
in 1998 also wants to question Kissinger about his knowledge
of Pinochet's crimes. A French judge presiding over a case involving
the kidnapping of French citizens in Chile wants Kissinger to
answer questions. Last May, he sent police to Paris' Ritz Hotel,
where Kissinger was staying, to serve him questions. In February,
Kissinger canceled a trip to Brazil when he heard that human
rights groups would picket him.
In December 1975, the jocular Kissinger
tacitly accepted Indonesian President Suharto's "understanding
if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action"
in East Timor. Ford replied: "We will understand and will
not press you on the issue. We understand the problem you have
and the intentions you have." Suharto quickly carried out
his "intentions" on East Timor. Kissinger denied knowledge
and wrote the lie, like the one on Chile, into his memoirs.
K preferred dealing with "authoritarian"
regimes (dictatorships) because he found them less troublesome
than democracies. So, in 1976 the Argentine foreign minister
representing the military dictatorship described Kissinger as
"euphoric" over their plans for repression. Kissinger's
advice was to make the killing quick. This was early in what
came to be known as the "dirty war," in which with
tacit US backing as many as 30,000 died at the hands of the military
government.
The man who once loved terrorists as
long as they occupied state power in Chile, Argentina and Indonesia
and behaved obediently to him will now investigate terrorism
used against the master state itself. The Democrats have accepted
this farce without a smile and agreed to work with K. Will they
co-author with Kissinger the equivalent of the Warren Commission
Report on 9/11? Or will Dr. Strangelove undergo basic character
change and redeem himself by forcing an honest search? On December
3, Kissinger announced that taking the top investigative job
did not entail his revealing the names of his business clients.
Reporters suspect that Kissinger has had a long and profitable
relationship with Saudi Arabian royal family members. If Vice
President Cheney doesn't have to tell Congress whom he met with
on the energy plan, why should Kissinger. So, more than ever
we look forward to full disclosure and an open investigation.
Did someone say bookies are giving 100 to 1 against it?
Saul Landau
teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University and is a fellow at the
Institute for Policy Studies. Landau's new film, IRAQ: VOICES
FROM THE STREETS is distributed by The Cinema Guild in New York
City.
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December 1,
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