Bush appoints
controversial statesman
to head 9/11 investigation
Compiled by Eamon Martin
Dec. 4 (AGR)— Despite initial objections, on Wednesday,
Nov. 27, President George W. Bush appointed controversial veteran
US diplomat Henry Kissinger to head a new independent commission
to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
On Wed., Nov. 27, President
Bush appointed Henry Kissinger to head a new independent commission
to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
The Bush administration had long opposed the commission, arguing
that a congressional investigation was better equipped to preserve
national security secrets. Even after it accepted the idea in
September, it argued with lawmakers over the panel’s composition.
Bush backed down only after the families of the victims applied
pressure and congressional hearings began to uncover intelligence
and law enforcement failures.
Kissinger, 79, is one of the best-known and most controversial
figures in 20th-century diplomacy. He was both Secretary of
State and National Security Adviser to Republican presidents
Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He won the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1973 with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho for ceasefire negotiations
during the Vietnam War.
But in all those years of public service, Kissinger was famous
for secrets. He was the architect of secret diplomacy with China,
secret peace talks with Vietnam, a secret bombing of Laos, and
a secret war involving 3,630 American bombing raids over the
nation of Cambodia. Kissinger’s biographers have dubbed
him a genius of secrets -- a man who played in-house politics
better than any other official of his time. His control over
the information of state reached the level of obsession. Leaks
were cause for investigation -- unless they were leaks made
by himself. He was said to be a true artist of the media leak.
He has fought battles in and out of office to keep the public
from knowing things. Not surprisingly, the appointment surprised
and shocked numerous political observers.
“I honestly don’t think he has a stellar track record
for this [assignment],” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director
of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, an organization
that sued Kissinger over access to his official papers and lost
in the US Supreme Court. After leaving public office, Kissinger
had appropriated the records of his time at the State Department
and took them on a truck to the Rockefeller family estate in
New York.
”One would hope the American public will learn what went
wrong on Sept. 11,” she said. “My concern is his propensity
for secrecy, which unfortunately fits too well the pattern of
the current White House.”
In Kissinger, Bush has appointed a man who understands the
prerogatives of power, and who would seem to believe in strict
limits on the public’s right to know what powerful people
do or don’t do behind closed doors.
In his memoirs, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, former commander of naval
forces in Vietnam, wrote of his frustration with the efforts
of Kissinger and Nixon “to conceal, sometimes by simple
silence, more often by articulate deceit, their real policies
about the most critical matters of national security.”
The man who once confided, “The illegal we do immediately.
The unconstitutional takes a little longer,” is regarded
by many outside the US as a war criminal. There are countries
he can’t travel to for fear of arrest.
Vietnam
Kissinger participated in a GOP plot to undermine the 1968
Paris peace talks in order to assist Richard Nixon’s presidential
campaign. As co-architect of Nixon’s war in Vietnam, Kissinger
oversaw the secret bombing campaign which reached into neighboring
Cambodia, an arguably illegal operation estimated to have claimed
the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians. During the
first 30 months of the Nixon-Kissinger administration, the US
counter-insurgency “Phoenix Program” was responsible
for the murder or abduction of 35,708 Vietnamese civilians.
According to the US Senate sub-committee on refugees, from March
1969 to March 1972, in excess of three million civilians were
killed, wounded or made homeless. Also during this period, the
US launched approximately 4.5 million tons of high explosives
on Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, which was 200% more than all
of the bombs used during the entire period of World War II.
The peace settlement that Kissinger negotiated in 1973 approximated
what the Johnson Administration could have gotten four years
earlier if Nixon and Kissinger hadn’t sabotaged the effort.
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.”
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. One-third of the East Timorese
population was exterminated during the subsequent 20-year occupation,
but this had little impact on continuing US and western arms
shipments to the regime in Jakarta. For years afterward, Kissinger
denied the subject ever came up during the Dec. 6, 1975, meeting
he and Ford held with General Suharto, Indonesia’s military
ruler. 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.
Chile
Kissinger is the target of two lawsuits, and judges overseas
have sought him for questioning in war-crimes-related legal
actions. On Sept. 9, two days before the Sept. 11 attacks, the
family of Chilean General Rene Schneider sued Kissinger. Schneider
was shot on Oct. 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 Salvador 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. Every single
document in the prosecution case is a US-government declassified
paper.
Michael Tigar, an attorney for the Schneider family, said at
the time the lawsuit was filed, “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.”
“The United States did not want Allende to assume the
presidency, and my father was the only political obstacle for
a military coup,” said Schneider’s eldest son, also
named Rene Schneider.
The family chose to sue after carefully reviewing the materials
that became public in the past two years, Schneider said. A
Senate committee in 1975 found evidence that US officials hoped
to instigate a coup to stop Allende and did in fact provide
arms and encouragement to those plotting the general’s
kidnapping. According to the Schneider family, the materials
show that the CIA continued to encourage a coup in the days
leading to the kidnapping.
“Every single factual assertion in this complaint is based
on a document that has been furnished by the US government,”
said Tigar.
Allende remained in power until a 1973 military coup that was
supported by the CIA. Gen. Augusto Pinochet then began a 17-year
reign in which thousands of people were killed or tortured.
Before the coup, Kissinger had remarked: “I don’t
see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist
due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much
too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for
themselves.” On June 8, 1976, at the height of Pinochet’s
repression, Kissinger had a meeting with the Chilean dictator
and behind closed doors told him that “we are sympathetic
to what you are trying to do here.”
Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 and indicted in Chile
last year. But an appellate court recently suspended the legal
proceedings because of concerns about his mental fitness for
trial.
But Kissinger has more trouble than 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. (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. Judges
in France, Spain and Chile have requested that Kissinger answer
questions about the deaths of their citizens in Operation Condor,
but Kissinger, so far, has not been cooperative.
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.
In late 2001, the Brazilian government canceled an invitation
for Kissinger to speak in Sao Paulo because it could no longer
guarantee his immunity. Earlier this year, a London court agreed
to hear an application for Kissinger’s imprisonment on
war crimes charges while he was briefly in the United Kingdom.
‘An investigatee, not an investigator’
“Dr. Kissinger will bring broad experience, clear thinking
and careful judgment to this important task,” Bush said
at the signing ceremony last week in the Roosevelt Room of the
White House. “Secretary, thank you for returning to the
service of your nation.”
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States has a broad mandate, building on the limited joint inquiry
conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees. The
independent panel will have 18 months to examine issues such
as aviation security, diplomacy, terrorist financing and border
problems, along with intelligence.
However, Bush did not set as a primary goal for the commission
to uncover mistakes or lapses of the government that could have
prevented the attacks. Instead, he said it should try to help
the administration learn the tactics and motives of the enemy.
The commission’s creation is part of a bill authorizing
intelligence activities in the 2003 budget year. Though most
details of the legislation remain secret, lawmakers say it provides
the biggest-ever increase in intelligence spending.
Ahead of the signing ceremony, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer
made clear that Bush does not envision testifying before the
panel.
The White House disclosed in May that Bush was told in the
months before the Sept. 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden’s
al-Qaida network might hijack US passenger planes, prompting
the administration to issue an alert to federal agencies —
but not the American public.
Several critics say Kissinger’s appointment would make
a thorough investigation impossible. The Federation of American
Scientists called it “an astonishing move that heralds
stark limits on the scope of the investigation… He is an
investigatee, not an investigator, and one who has stubbornly
resisted the disclosure of official information to members of
Congress, courts of law, private researchers, and others.”
In an editorial, the New York Times questioned Kissinger’s
independence and suggested that the White House might have appointed
him to contain the investigation rather than pursue it. The
newspaper opined further that it would seem “improbable
to expect Kissinger to report unflinchingly on the conduct of
the government, including that of Bush. He would have to challenge
the established order and risk sundering old friendships and
business relationships.”
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd mused, “Who better
to ferret out government duplicity and manipulation than the
man who engineered secret wars, secret bombings, secret wiretaps
and secret coups, and still ended up as a Pillar of the Establishment
and Nobel Peace Prize winner?”
Sources: BBC News, Boston Globe, CBSNews.com,
Financial Times (UK), Guardian (UK), The Nation, New York Times,
Newsday, Pan-African News Wire, Reuters, Washington Post
|
