After that, it was deja vu all over again, as in "what has that got
to do with my post?"
As Kissinger warrants a mention, here's a C. Hitchens writing about
the good Dr.
"The Nation
June 7, 2001
The Fugitive
Christopher Hitchens
It was, take it for all in all, a near-faultless headline: HENRY KISSINGER RATTRAPÉ AU RITZ, À PARIS, PAR LES FANTÔMES DU PLAN CONDOR. I especially liked the accidental synonymy of the verb rattraper. What a rat. And such a trap. It was in this fashion that the front page of the Paris daily Le Monde informed its readers that on Memorial Day the gendarmes had gone round to the Ritz Hotel--flagship of Mohamed Al Fayed's fleet of properties--with a summons from Judge Roger Le Loire inviting the famous rodent to attend at the Palace of Justice the following day. In what must have been one of the most unpleasant moments of his career, noted Le Monde, the hotel manager had to translate the summons to his distinguished guest. Kissinger left the hotel, surrounded by bodyguards, and later announced that he had no desire to answer questions about Operation Condor. He then left town.
Operation Condor (see Peter Kornbluh, "Kissinger and Pinochet," March 29, 1999, and "Chile Declassified," August 9/16, 1999) was a coordinated effort in the 1970s by the secret police forces of seven South American dictatorships. The death squads of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador and Bolivia agreed to pool resources and to hunt down, torture, murder and otherwise "disappear" one another's dissidents. They did this not just on their own soil but as far away as Rome and Washington, where assassins and car-bombs were deployed to maim Christian Democratic Senator Bernardo Leighton in 1975 and to murder the Socialist Orlando Letelier in 1976. The Pinochet regime was to the fore in this internationalization of state terror tactics, and its secret police chief, Col. Manuel Contreras, was especially inventive and energetic.
Thanks to the efforts of Representative Maurice Hinchey, who attached an amendment to the Intelligence Authorization Act last year, we now know that this seven-nation alliance had a senior partner. At all material times, those directing the work of US intelligence knew of Operation Condor and assisted its activities. And at all material times, the chairman of the supervising "Forty Committee," and the key member of the Interagency Committee on Chile, was Henry Kissinger. It was on his watch that the FBI helped Pinochet to identify and arrest Jorge Isaac Fuentes de Alarcón, a Chilean oppositionist who was first detained and tortured in Paraguay and then turned over to Contreras and "disappeared." Contreras himself was paid a CIA stipend. Other Condor leaders were promised US cooperation in the surveillance of inconvenient exiles living in the United States."
More at;
The Nation Also;
"Why has he got away with it?
Henry Kissinger is revered as a statesman, cosseted guest, star of the lecture circuit. He is also the one-time US Secretary of State who oversaw the destruction of civilian populations, the assassination of politicians and the kidnapping of those who got in his way - from Indochina to Cyprus, East Timor and, here, Chile. Christopher Hitchens lays the charges
Christopher Hitchens
Guardian
Saturday February 24, 2001
On December 2, 1998, Mr Michael Korda was being interviewed on camera in his office at Simon & Schuster. As one of the reigning magnates of New York publishing, he had edited and "produced" the work of authors as various as Tennessee Williams, Richard Nixon and Joan Crawford. On this particular day, he was talking about the life and thoughts of the singer Cher, whose portrait adorned the wall behind him. And then the telephone rang and there was a message to call "Dr" Henry Kissinger as soon as possible. A polymath like Mr Korda knows - what with the exigencies of publishing in these vertiginous days - how to switch in an instant between Cher and high statecraft. The camera kept running, and recorded the following scene for a tape which I possess.
Asking his secretary to get the number (759 7919 - the digits of Kissinger Associates), Mr Korda quips drily, to general laughter in the office, that it "should be 1-800-cambodia . . . 1-800-bomb-cambodia". After a pause of nicely calibrated duration (no senior editor likes to be put on hold while he's receiving company, especially media company), it's "Henry - Hi, how are you? . . . You're getting all the publicity you could want in the New York Times, but not the kind you want . . . I also think it's very, very dubious for the administration to simply say yes, they'll release these papers . . . no . . . no, absolutely . . . no . . . no . . . well, hmmm, yeah. We did it until quite recently, frankly, and he did prevail . . . Well, I don't think there's any question about that, as uncomfortable as it may be . . . Henry, this is totally outrageous . . . yeah . . . Also the jurisdiction. This is a Spanish judge appealing to an English court about a Chilean head of state. So it's, it . . . Also Spain has no rational jurisdiction over events in Chile anyway so that makes absolutely no sense . . . Well, that's probably true . . . If you would. I think that would be by far and away the best . . . Right, yeah, no I think it's exactly what you should do and I think it should be long and I think it should end with your father's letter. I think it's a very important document . . . Yes, but I think the letter is wonderful, and central to the entire book. Can you let me read the Lebanon chapter over the weekend?" At this point the conversation ends, with some jocular observations by Mr Korda about his upcoming colonoscopy: "a totally repulsive procedure".
By means of the same tiny internal camera, or its forensic equivalent, one could deduce not a little about the world of Henry Kissinger from this microcosmic exchange. The first and most important thing is this. Sitting in his office at Kissinger Associates, with its tentacles of business and consultancy stretching from Belgrade to Beijing, and cushioned by innumerable other directorships and boards, he still shudders when he hears of the arrest of a dictator. Syncopated the conversation with Mr Korda may be, but it's clear that the keyword is "jurisdiction". What had the New York Times been reporting that fine morning? On that December 2, 1998, its front page carried the following report from Tim Weiner, the paper's national security correspondent in Washington. Under the headline "US Will Release Files On Crimes Under Pinochet", he wrote:
Treading into a political and diplomatic confrontation it tried to avoid, the United States decided today to declassify some secret documents on the killings and torture committed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile . . . The decision to release such documents is the first sign that the United States will cooperate in the case against General Pinochet. Clinton Administration officials said they believed the benefits of openness in human rights cases outweighed the risks to national security in this case. "
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Guardian Unlimited
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