Reply
Mon 2 Oct, 2006 10:00 am
Note the date of this article in view of Kissinger being major adviser to Bush and Cheney. ---BBB
The Latest Kissinger Outrage
Why is a proven liar and wanted man in charge of the 9/11 investigation?
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2002
The Bush administration has been saying in public for several months that it does not desire an independent inquiry into the gross "failures of intelligence" that left U.S. society defenseless 14 months ago. By announcing that Henry Kissinger will be chairing the inquiry that it did not want, the president has now made the same point in a different way. But the cynicism of the decision and the gross insult to democracy and to the families of the victims that it represents has to be analyzed to be believed.
1) We already know quite a lot, thanks all the same, about who was behind the attacks. Most notable in incubating al-Qaida were the rotten client-state regimes of the Saudi Arabian oligarchy and the Pakistani military and police elite. Henry Kissinger is now, and always has been, an errand boy and apologist for such regimes.
2) When in office, Henry Kissinger organized massive deceptions of Congress and public opinion. The most notorious case concerned the "secret bombing" of Cambodia and Laos and the unleashing of unconstitutional methods by Nixon and Kissinger to repress dissent from this illegal and atrocious policy. But Sen. Frank Church's commission of inquiry into the abuses of U.S. intelligence, which focused on illegal assassinations and the subversion of democratic governments overseas, was given incomplete and misleading information by Kissinger, especially on the matter of Chile. Rep. Otis Pike's parallel inquiry in the House (which brought to light Kissinger's personal role in the not-insignificant matter of the betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds, among other offenses) was thwarted by Kissinger at every turn, and its eventual findings were classified. In other words, the new "commission" will be chaired by a man with a long, proven record of concealing evidence and of lying to Congress, the press, and the public.
3) In his second career as an obfuscator and a falsifier, Kissinger appropriated the records of his time at the State Department and took them on a truck to the Rockefeller family estate in New York. He has since been successfully sued for the return of much of this public property, but meanwhile he produced, for profit, three volumes of memoirs that purported to give a full account of his tenure. In several crucial instances, such as his rendering of U.S. diplomacy with China over Vietnam, with apartheid South Africa over Angola, and with Indonesia over the invasion of East Timor (to cite only some of the most conspicuous), declassified documents have since shown him to be a bald-faced liar. Does he deserve a third try at presenting a truthful record after being caught twice as a fabricator? And on such a grave matter as this?
4) Kissinger's "consulting" firm, Kissinger Associates, is a privately held concern that does not publish a client list and that compels its clients to sign confidentiality agreements. Nonetheless, it has been established that Kissinger's business dealings with, say, the Chinese Communist leadership have closely matched his public pronouncements on such things as the massacre of Chinese students. Given the strong ties between himself, his partners Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft, and the oil oligarchies of the Gulf, it must be time for at least a full disclosure of his interests in the region. This thought does not seem to have occurred to the president or to the other friends of Prince Bandar and Prince Bandar's wife, who helped in the evacuation of the Bin Laden family from American soil, without an interrogation, in the week after Sept. 11.
5) On Memorial Day 2001, Kissinger was visited by the police in the Ritz Hotel in Paris and handed a warrant, issued by Judge Roger LeLoire, requesting his testimony in the matter of disappeared French citizens in Pinochet's Chile. Kissinger chose to leave town rather than appear at the Palais de Justice as requested. He has since been summoned as a witness by senior magistrates in Chile and Argentina who are investigating the international terrorist network that went under the name "Operation Condor" and that conducted assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings in several countries. The most spectacular such incident occurred in rush-hour traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., in September 1976, killing a senior Chilean dissident and his American companion. Until recently, this was the worst incident of externally sponsored criminal violence conducted on American soil. The order for the attack was given by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who has been vigorously defended from prosecution by Henry Kissinger.
Moreover, on Sept. 10, 2001, a civil suit was filed in a Washington, D.C., federal court, charging Kissinger with murder. The suit, brought by the survivors of Gen. Rene Schneider of Chile, asserts that Kissinger gave the order for the elimination of this constitutional officer of a democratic country because he refused to endorse plans for a military coup. Every single document in the prosecution case is a U.S.-government declassified paper. And the target of this devastating lawsuit is being invited to review the shortcomings of the "intelligence community"?
Better Brent Scowcroft than Kissisnger
'Running the World': In the War Room
By EVAN THOMAS
Published: June 26, 2005
During the early days of the cold war, when America was first taking on the role of leader of the West, there was no national security staff. Policy coordination, such as it was, often occurred over lunch at the F Street Club, a WASP-y hangout a few blocks from the White House. Sometimes this informality worked. In 1947, the deputy secretary of state, Robert Lovett, laid the groundwork for the creation of NATO by bringing top secret cables over to the apartment of the Senate foreign relations committee chairman, Arthur Vandenberg. The two men would have a martini and discuss the Western alliance. But sometimes casualness was a prescription for disaster. President Kennedy at first disdained bureaucratic committees, preferring to cozy up with the dashing old boys at the C.I.A. The result was the Bay of Pigs.
The formal bureaucratic machinery of the National Security Council was created in 1947, but it didn't really become the true engine of foreign policy making until the Nixon years. David J. Rothkopf has written an enlightening insider's history of what he calls ''the committee in charge of running the world.'' Formally, the N.S.C. comprises the president, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense and other cabinet secretaries as designated by the president; but as a practical matter, it consists of the president's inner circle of foreign policy advisers, served by up to 200 staff members writing papers and proposals. The N.S.C. tends to work well when the president uses it to think through problems, and to fall apart when it becomes either too much like a debating society or too ''operational'' (think of Lt. Col. Oliver North's escapades during the Reagan administration).
Rothkopf, a former midlevel official in the Clinton administration and a worker bee for some N.S.C. meetings, is a risk consultant who once worked in the private sector for Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national security adviser and the man who forged the present-day N.S.C. In ''Running the World,'' Rothkopf shows that Kissinger's acolytes have essentially become the modern foreign policy establishment. He plays a game he calls ''Two Degrees of Henry Kissinger'' to illustrate that every national security adviser since Kissinger, all 13 of them, either worked for Kissinger or worked directly for someone who did.
But Rothkopf's true hero is not Kissinger, who seemed locked in a fatal embrace with Nixon. It's Brent Scowcroft, who was Gerald Ford's, then George H. W. Bush's national security adviser. Scowcroft is a retired Air Force general, but there is no hint of Wild Blue Yonder about him. Short and a little gnarly, he looks more like Yoda than the square-jawed fighter jock he once was (until a plane crash cut short his flying days in 1949). Scowcroft is funny and disarming but also low-key; he prefers to operate behind the scenes. Less flashily brilliant than Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser, or McGeorge Bundy, who held the post in the Kennedy administration, Scowcroft was effective as a shrewd but honest broker who made sure the president heard from all sides of a foreign policy debate and considered the consequences before acting.
Scowcroft, Rothkopf explains, always planned for failure as well as success, on the well-grounded assumption that failure -- or at least unintended consequences -- was a possible if not likely outcome in a messy, balky world. His most difficult challenge as Bush 41's national security adviser -- the 1991 Persian Gulf war -- was a model of clever hedging through alliance-building. Working with the equally cagey secretary of state, James A. Baker, Scowcroft even got America's allies to pay much of the cost of the war.
Interviewed by Rothkopf, Scowcroft called himself a ''traditionalist,'' meaning that he is in the mainstream of foreign policy makers who believe that the United States cannot succeed in the world without working through friends, allies and international organizations. He contrasted himself with the ''transformationalists,'' the true believers in the George W. Bush administration who argued that after 9/11 the United States could not afford to dicker with the United Nations or foreign appeasers before getting on with the urgent work of democratizing the Middle East -- by force, if necessary.
Rothkopf is openly critical of Condoleezza Rice, Scowcroft's onetime disciple and Bush 43's first-term national security adviser. In his view, she allowed herself to be pushed around by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Rice saw herself more as a personal adviser to the president than as a referee of bureaucratic battles. But by narrowly defining her role, she let Rumsfeld's Defense Department become, in Rothkopf's words, a ''thumb on the scales'' of debate, and permitted Cheney's shadow national security staff to end-run the regular foreign-policy-making process.
Bureaucratic histories like this one can be dull reading, but Rothkopf enlivens his with an appreciation of human foibles (he begins with Dr. Strangelove's admonition, ''Gentlemen, you can't fight in here -- this is the war room''). His insider status also serves him well; he seems to know everyone in the foreign policy world and has interviewed most of the former national security advisers, as well as various other heavyweights. Rice was unusually reflective with Rothkopf. It appears that she, too, has been pondering cold war history. She seems to have taken comfort in the realization that the world looked just as frightening in 1947 as it did after 9/11, and that the great architects of the Western alliance and the Marshall Plan were constantly adjusting and compensating as they went along. Rice candidly predicted to Rothkopf that it would take 30 or 40 years before we know whether the initiatives of the Bush administration were ''really creative responses'' to 9/11 or ''disastrous'' ones. Maybe, Rothkopf suggests, she is finally learning the wisdom of her onetime mentor, Brent Scowcroft.
--------------------------------------------------
Evan Thomas, an editor at Newsweek, was the co-author, with Walter Isaacson, of ''The Wise Men.'' He is at work on a book about the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
Yea, I know you would have preferred he talk to Jimmy Carter.
I only read the other day that Kissinger advises Rumsfeld....found it quite chilling.
Henry, Machiavellian master of international treachery and deceit.
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace