[CTRL] Regarding Henry Kissinger (fwd)

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Regarding Henry Kissinger
http://www.harpers.org/online/kissinger_forum/kissinger_forum.php3?pg=1

The following forum was held on February 22, 2001, at the National Press
Club in Washington, D.C. The conversation was moderated by Lewis H. Lapham,
editor of Harper's Magazine, and was broadcast live by C-SPAN. For more
information on the Kissinger debate, please visit Britannica.com.
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/original/article/0,5744,17211,00.html

==================================

Scott Armstrong
is the Executive Director of The Information Trust and founder of The
National Security Archive.

Christopher Hitchens
is the author of "The Case Against Henry Kissinger" (Harper's Magazine,
February and March 2001) as well as When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of
the Kurds (Random House, 1997), Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship
and the Palestine Question (Verso, 1986), and No One Left to Lie To: The
Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton (Verso, 1999).

Stanley I. Kutler
is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions at the University of
Wisconsin and the author of Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (The Free
Press, 1997).

Roger Morris
is a former member of the National Security Council under presidents Johnson
and Nixon, and the author of Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their
America (Henry Holt & Co., 1996) and Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger
and American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins, 1977).

Alfred P. Rubin
is the Distinguished Professor of International Law at the Fletcher School
of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and the author of The Law of Piracy
(Transnational Publishers, 1998) and Ethics and Authority in International
Law (Cambridge University Press, 1997).


Lewis Lapham: You can begin, Christopher.

Christopher Hitchens: Thank you, Lewis. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen,
for coming. I'm acutely conscious of having already had my say, so to speak,
at some length. And acutely conscious also of being the only one who stands
between you and people who have greater expertise than I do.

But I thought I would offer you a play on some recent words you may have
been made to memorize. These words are: peaceful, orderly, democratic
transition. You may have heard these words recently uttered in a
self-congratulatory, not to say self-regarding, manner. You may have had the
opportunity to tire of hearing the words peaceful, orderly, democratic
transition. You may have wondered why you are so often assured that the
great distinction of the United States is what it does, or has, or can boast
of. You may even think that it's slightly sinister that you keep being told
that you have a peaceful, democratic, orderly transition. You may even
wonder why, if it was so obvious, it had to be restated so often. So I'll
stop saying it myself, hoping I've made my play on words direct your
attention to two elements of my folio on Mr. Kissinger..

The first is the election of 1968 in these United States. If I can make a
claim to-not to originality, perhaps, but to a certain synthesis in what
I've written-it would be this: I think that I can say that Harper's has
published for the first time the summation of all the available evidence of
how that election was undermined, distorted, and fixed by a most appalling
piece of cynicism by Richard Nixon and others, who negotiated secretly with
a foreign military dictatorship to undermine the position of the United
States government and its legal and visible negotiators in Paris. They made
an illegal and immoral pact that this foreign military dictatorship would
get a better deal from an incoming Republican administration. And in making
this pact they took out what one might euphemistically describe as a
mortgage or lease on another four years of an already proven immoral and
atrocious war.

The combination of the subversion of that election and the extension of that
war is the price of the bargain, which qualifies, I think, to be termed,
without any other statement, the single wickedest act in the history of this
republic. And it may be doubted whether it quite qualifies under the
tradition of a democratic, peaceful, and orderly transition. Of the four
people who concerted that policy-Richard Nixon, Attorney General John
Mitchell, Vice President Spiro Agnew, and Henry Kissinger-only one has
escaped any kind of indictment so far. John Mitchell was the first attorney
general to go to jail. Richard Nixon had to accept a pardon in order to
avoid indictment and impeachment. And Spiro Agnew had to publicly resign.
There's only one unindicted co-conspirator still on the loose. I suggest
that's a reproach to a country that considers itself to be bound by law and
bound by justice.

Democratic, peaceful, orderly transition was also the great boast, and
rightly so, of the people of Chile, our southern neighbor-a country that has
never offended or threatened to offend (or had the capacity to offend or
threaten) the United States. Chile was distinguished among its hemispheric
neighbors precisely by the fact that when its people voted their choice for
the next government, the armed forces or the police or the oligarchy didn't
determine the outcome and couldn't intervene. And that would remain the
state of affairs until 1970, when it was coldly decided at a meeting in
Washington held by Mr. Kissinger that there was to be no peaceful,
democratic, orderly transition in Chile; that the 60-day constitutionally
mandated waiting period between the election of the president-in this case
Salvador Allende-and his inauguration would be used for a campaign of murder
and subversion in order that that transition not occur.

And this involved the cold-blooded planning of the murder of General René
Schneider, the head of the Chilean armed forces, an honorable, conservative,
and constitutionally minded officer in a country which, I repeat, was a
democracy that had opened diplomatic and trade relations with the United
States and posed no threat to it. And that murder is now what a lawyer could
decently call a lay-down case. A lay-down case from soup to nuts: we know
who commissioned it, who paid for it, who organized it, who shipped the
illegal money, who shipped the dirty weapons to Chile to have this done, and
who paid the murderers after the crime had been committed. And the same name
and the same face recurs throughout. We charge Henry Kissinger with murder
for that, and we say that the society that tolerates it is tolerating
murder, too. And that's, therefore, a big reproach to a society that claims
to be bound by law and responsive to justice. And of course, it's an utter
cynical negation of all the claims that have been made about democratic,
peaceful, orderly transition.

As I said of the four people who conducted the election subversion in 1968,
only one remains unindicted. If you, now, look at the international scene
and see the people with whom Dr. Kissinger was in business during his tenure
in office, you will find that almost all of them are also in jail in their
own countries, or are going there. Of Mr. Kissinger's business and political
partners, Mr. Suharto, General Pinochet, General Papadopoulos in Greece, the
brigadiers in Bangladesh who committed the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur
Rahman, and quite a number of others are in jail, I'm glad to say-tried in
public courts in their own countries and condemned to life imprisonment.

Once again, the grand exception is the man who made their political or
military careers possible. That he dwells as an honored citizen among us is
a reproach to any society that considers itself bound by international law
or responsive to the claims of justice on an international scale. So let
that be my opening bid and let me accept counter offers for more
enlargements or undercuts from these distinguished gentlemen. Thank you.

Scott Armstrong: Christopher, I'm not sure this is directly responsive to
your bid, but I think I share with you and everyone here a deep concern
about accountability in public service. To me, it's a given that without
high-quality public servants we would not have even the mere bones of
government that we now have. I encourage young people that I meet to go into
government, to get the experience, to persevere. I've even been known to
congratulate senior officials on their departure from government-usually for
what they didn't do and usually cataloged so that I can show them that if
they had acted in the way that was suggested, the result would have been
worse. And I often find that they're surprised to be thanked, that they
rarely are thanked except by the corporate interest they're expected to
represent.

The difficulty of accountability, it seems to me, is that if we don't have
accountability for the past, we will not have people willing to serve in the
future. We must make and document some arrangements that will allow the
debate that we'll have here today to be more clearly focused on individual
service. It is a dangerous, violent world out there. We're often told that
public officials can't avoid regional conflicts, ethnic cleansing, the harsh
realities involved in the national security decisions of every
administration, which generally seems to me to mean arguments to protect
American interests that are not necessarily the interests of the American
people, except by virtue of their investment in a corporate society. And the
difficulty of dealing with a political leadership that's elected to protect
these interests is most dramatically presented in Kissinger's case.

There is an adage that I'm afraid we are likely to invert. The adage is to
make the punishment fit the crime. And I think now we sometimes are in
danger of making the crime fit the punishment. Mr. Kissinger is, in the
parlance of street protests in the '60s, already known as a war criminal.
We're prepared to punish him as such. Now we find ourselves ordering our
facts in such a way as to construct the crimes with which we're prepared to
punish him. I have some question about this. These were not unique actions.
They were not covert. They were not Oliver North-type government out of
control. These actions were, in fact, very singular in their arrogance. They
were openly contemptuous of many constitutional niceties, and Henry
Kissinger and those around him were very much in control. These were
deliberate manipulations of the levers of power. And Henry Kissinger
was-is-very much in the loop. He defined the loop. And Christopher's
indictment, if I can call it that, is of an entire administration, stretched
by the Nixon administration into two administrations. And those who served
with him, above him, across the Potomac, and even in Congress bear similar
measures of responsibility.

So, what are we to do if we are not just to loosely throw around the term
"war criminal"? We must dig out, analyze, and order the facts, the
documentary record, and the forensic explanations that are offered by Mr.
Kissinger, Mr. Nixon, and virtually every other member of that
administration.

It is in the bureaucratic context that we find this most interesting. And
Henry Kissinger has done something quite remarkable. He's taken the most
important of his papers and hidden them in plain sight. He has installed
them in the Library of Congress under a deed that makes them inaccessible
until 2001 or five years after his death. That means no matter how tragic
his life may be this year, we're not going to be looking at those papers for
another five years.

They include authentic telephone transcripts of virtually every important
meeting he had. The case in which the appropriateness of taking government
records and putting them into the Library of Congress was litigated is
Kissinger v. the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The other
plaintiffs were the Military Audit Project and one William Safire of the New
York Times.

By an unusual Supreme Court majority that actually only had, depending on
how you read the opinions, four members-it included two concurrences and a
partial concurrence and two abstentions-we have established a rule of law
that allows one to put his papers out of the reach of the public. General
Haig and Caspar Weinberger did this. In fact, Caspar Weinberger was indicted
for doing it, before he was pardoned by President Bush, because it was seen
as a deliberate attempt to obstruct justice.

The difficulty we now have is that there is an ongoing investigation of
General Pinochet. The FBI has been pursuing this more actively than has been
publicly reported. But even public reports acknowledge that there's now
enough information to indict General Pinochet in the United States. However,
the best evidence is in the Library of Congress. The FBI is getting some
access to that evidence, but it has to negotiate with Henry Kissinger's
lawyers. These are government records needed in a criminal investigation for
which the United States government has to negotiate access.

I think these materials will elucidate a variety of things Kissinger has
done. But the most important aspect of the situation is that he and his
staff have had complete access to this material. And Henry Kissinger has put
out a very carefully selected and shaped account that is outside the control
of history, beyond the memory of those who might refute it. It is very
unlikely that in five years this material will be accessible. The Library of
Congress has conspired to some degree to support this.

What are we to do now? How do we approach this? I don't think there are
simple answers. We'll hear, I'm sure, in a minute about crimes against
humanity and international prosecutions. My concerns are much more about the
American legal system and the ability to get some sort of truth and
reconciliation process. Henry Kissinger's defense, which was quite
deliberately articulated just the other night on The NewsHour With Jim
Lehrer was that much of this was done in the name of the Cold War. And in
the Cold War, he said: "We may have been wrong, but we genuinely believed
that we had to do something about Chile, and other places, to prevent
Communist takeovers."

Well, I think it's time that we understood the range of those activities.
Christopher has laid them out quite clearly. One of the more interesting
rebuttals to the notion that there should be international accountability
was given by John Bolton, one of the people with such responsibilities in
the Reagan administration. Bolton testified during that administration that
an international court of criminal justice would not be an adequate
deterrent to the activities of dictators like Pol Pot or Saddam Hussein.

And yet, I remember listening to John Deutch explain that he was very
disturbed that the records of a previous Central Intelligence Agency
director might be released after 40 years. His remark was: "Imagine if those
were released. If I knew that those were going to be released, it would
change the way I treated my peers in the intelligence community from other
countries. It would change my behavior." Precisely so.

The notion of accountability seems to be such a shock within government
circles. And I think it's a rare opportunity to see that the obvious lies
right on the surface. And so, the empirical issues of chain-of-command
claims of responsibility, efforts to effect the outcome--the very things
that we see in government decision-making are now something that we have an
opportunity and a responsibility to demand, whether it's done by legislation
or by a commission. I fear a commission. And who would appoint a commission?
But there needs to be some mechanisms of accountability to lay out and
complete the record that Christopher has begun to describe.

Stanley Kutler: Well, Scott touched on some of the issues I wanted to
mention, but let me reiterate a few of them. First of all, the problem with
Christopher's indictment here is that Senator Helms has made it clear that
he will block any treaty that would turn any American over to foreigners for
war crimes trials. I suspect that Senator Helms might like to make an
exception for Henry Kissinger-not necessarily on Christopher Hitchens'
grounds, but on grounds that reflect his own prejudices and agenda.

Lapham: One count of everything.

Kutler: Let me just say a few words briefly about the work. It's quite
devastating, I think. It's built on a lot of first-rate digging into primary
sources, paralleling, I would tell you, a lot of the work that's going on in
the scholarly history community these days.

You know, the director of the Nixon Library has always said that when all
the good stuff comes out, Nixon's reputation will be rehabilitated. Well,
perhaps you're not aware of it, but there are books now on Nixon and the
economy, Nixon and agriculture, Nixon and Vietnam, and so forth. All of them
make extensive use of the Nixon papers, which include things about Henry
Kissinger as well. And I will tell you, he ain't doing so well.

It's very, very clear, I think, where this historical record is going. It
would take massive revisionism to turn it around, and I just don't see that
in the cards.

It's interesting that Christopher touched on a number of new issues. Work
has been done on Vietnam, some on Chile. But no work on Cyprus among
historians, none. Nothing on Bangladesh. And nothing, of course, on the
distinguished gentleman from Greece, Elias P. Demetracopoulos, about whom
Christopher wrote at length, describing what happened to him here.

I'd like to say, parenthetically, that when I interviewed John Mitchell a
number of years ago, I asked him what he knew about Demetracopoulos. And
this is the man who, as Christopher points out in the article, was
reportedly livid with Demetracopoulos, and was going to get him and so
forth. Mitchell was in a very serious mood that day, and he told me--he gave
me an advanced peek into the notion-that there was a prostitute ring at the
Democratic National Headquarters and that John Dean had masterminded the
whole Watergate break-in, for which he had an audience of one. Namely, G.
Gordon Liddy.

But when I asked Mitchell about Demetracopoulos, he said: "Never heard of
him. Didn't know him." So-I don't have this on videotape, and it didn't show
up on audiotape-he explained to me his whole notion of Dean masterminding
Watergate. I said to him, "You can't be serious." He just winked at me. But
I couldn't record that on audiotape, unfortunately. When we talk about
Kissinger's crimes and so forth, one of the things I think we have to
remember is that Kissinger was the national security advisor. He
subsequently became secretary of state. Now, he bears a great deal of
responsibility that things were done, but I'm still a great believer that
responsibility begins at the very top. And if we're going to talk about
Kissinger here, we're going to have to talk very, very much about Richard
Nixon's culpability in all this.

But as Christopher said, Richard Nixon had his comeuppance in terms of the
resignation; Spiro Agnew, Mitchell also. But, you know, the responsibility,
the accountability is very widespread. Scott briefly alluded to this. What
about leaders in Congress? I've always been bemused by this notion of the
secret bombing of Laos that wasn't so secret. Congressional leadership knew
about that. It's very interesting that, when they come down to the
impeachment articles against Nixon, Congressional leaders got the proposal
to impeach him on the grounds of the secret bombing of Laos withdrawn
because they know they were culpable and accountable in that matter as well.
So, these are not isolated acts, they permeate as "policy," and were
justified in the name of the Cold War. But it's on a very, very broad level.

Lest anyone think that Kissinger's critics are all to the left, or liberals,
I would remind you that on the right in this country there has long been a
very, very strong distrust of Henry Kissinger. There's a whole
literature-this belongs in the realm of kookdom about Kissinger-that he was
really a secret Soviet agent. That I dismiss. But we can't dismiss Elmo
Zumwalt, the naval commander who gave us that unforgettable remark about the
Paris Peace Accord, which was described as peace with honor. He said it was
neither peace nor honor. But he wrote in his memoirs: "I had first become
concerned many months before the June 1972 burglary [Watergate] about the
deliberate, systematic, and, unfortunately, extremely successful efforts of
the President, Henry Kissinger, and a few subordinate members of their inner
circle to conceal, sometimes by simple silence more often by articulate
deceit, their real policies about the most critical matters of national
security."

That great leaker, Alexander Haig, didn't like them either. And I've always
believed that Haig had a strong part in the Joint Chiefs of Staff spying on
Kissinger.

One remark about the papers. I've been aware for some time of what Kissinger
and Haig and later Weinberger got away with by depositing their papers in
the Library of Congress. You understand, first of all, that Congress was
able to get most of the Nixon stuff sealed off and kept from people. We have
extensive files from Haldeman, Ehrlichman, John Dean, and others in the
Nixon administration, but we don't have very much extensive on Kissinger and
extraordinarily little about Alexander Haig. Well, did you know, as Scott
told you, they put their papers in the Library of Congress, papers that were
generated under their duties as public servants, and got the government of
the United States to pay for the cost of processing and warehousing those
materials. (Processing those materials, I can assure you, is a very, very
expensive proposition.) And there they sit in the Library of Congress. Henry
Kissinger and his aides have absolute access to them. Henry Kissinger and
Alexander Haig have made millions of dollars off their memoirs. And in
pursuit of historical truth, we are forbidden to use them. Now, I've always
regretted that the Reporters Committee failed to liberate those materials. I
mean, I think the agreement is perfectly legal, as it turns out. I've gone
through this with one of my former students, who is pretty high up in the
management division, and he's persuaded me that there's not much anyone can
do about this now. But if Kissinger is really interested in defending
himself, well, how about putting it all out on the record and letting us see
it.

In conclusion, I want to say a word about Vietnam policy. I think, of all
these subjects, this is the one that still has the greatest allure to us.
It's still an extraordinarily seductive question. There's been some
wonderful work done on this subject. There's an interesting book by a young
man named Jeffrey P. Kimball called Nixon's Vietnam War. There's a book
coming out this summer by Larry Berman on Kissinger and Vietnam. Mr. Berman
has had access to the transcripts of the negotiations between Kissinger and
Le Duc Tho. You might find that Le Duc Tho's frustration and anger with
Kissinger make him a rather attractive character.

Lapham: How does he get access without ...?

Kutler: Well, I don't know exactly. But the quotes are there. I haven't read
the footnotes that extensively yet. I just got the manuscript. But what is
now clear to us is, despite Nixon's very vague talk in 1968 about doing
something to end the war, until late 1970 Kissinger and Nixon were convinced
they could win that war. But in late 1970, Nixon becomes concerned because
of the domestic situation in the United States. Yet he's got this hang-up
about honor. He doesn't want to be the first president to lose a war. (I
thought James Madison was the first one to lose a war.) Suddenly he's
concerned about his reputation. He talks in late '70 with Kissinger about
withdrawing all remaining U.S. ground forces except those who could be
considered residual. I'm not sure exactly what that means. But he would
compensate for that step and also apply pressure on Hanoi by canceling
negotiations, issuing an ultimatum, and massively bombing, mining, and
blockading North Vietnam. Now, Kissinger argued against that policy. He
considered it kind of a bug-out, meaning that a pullout by the end of 1971
would leave them incapable of dealing with setbacks in South Vietnam during
the upcoming 1972 presidential election. It would be better, therefore, he
said, to continue with negotiations, which on a certain level were a sham,
and extend the timing of troop withdrawals until the end of 1972. And I must
quote him precisely here from one of the tape transcripts: "So that we won't
have to deliver, finally, until after the elections." Yeah, peace was at
hand after the elections. That's the point. Now, is he indictable by his own
words? It's not very good for his historical reputation, that's for sure.

Alfred Rubin: I'm tempted to respond to everybody, but I'm not going to.
Instead I'm going to just give some legal outlines. I might mention, by the
way, I knew Bud Zumwalt 35 years ago and haven't seen him since.

First of all, the U.S. Constitution does not give authority to the Secretary
of State, it gives authority to the President, to the Congress and to the
courts. The remedy for evil is therefore impeachment, and impeachment
applies not only to Presidents, but it can also apply to Congressmen and to
the members of the courts. Another remedy in the moral sphere, and one
that's probably essential, is exposure. And that's a responsibility of the
press-a responsibility, I'm afraid, that the press has not borne terribly
well, with the exception, I suppose, of Christopher and some others. If the
available remedies are not applied, society is weakened. We have, for
example, a failure to pay our United Nations dues. It's positive law
obligation. There's no question that we owe over a billion dollars in dues.
Now, the press has been talking about Senator Helms being willing to approve
something over half a billion dollars, as if that were a great achievement.
We owe over a billion. Half a billion is not a billion. At the same time, we
argue that the U.N. should pursue various activities that it cannot pursue
without money. We argued before the International Court of Justice many
years ago that France and Russia owed money for a peacekeeping operation in
the Congo. I happen to have been in government at the time and I said we
shouldn't be doing this because it might come back against us. Well, by
golly, it has come back against us.

Similar things go on today. The NATO operation in Kosovo, for example, is
viewed as an illegal operation by the United Nations. There's no secret
about that. The operation was clearly illegal under the U.N. Charter. The
U.N. Charter is a treaty, a positive law obligation of the United States. We
have done nothing in the press to publicize the illegality of that
operation. The result has been not a successful operation, but the handing
over of Kosovo to a group of people who have difficulty administering the
country. We see atrocities against Serbs, as there have been Serbian
atrocities against Kosovar Albanians. And frankly, in my own experience
atrocities are not limited to one side or another; there are right-wing nuts
and there are left-wing nuts and there are a lot of innocent folks in the
middle who get hurt by both sides.

Secondly, international law does not involve personal crimes. I know that a
lot of international lawyers disagree with that statement, and I'm prepared
to take them all on. (I have, in a number of articles.) There is simply no-I
repeat, no evidence in the usual logic of international lawyers to support
the notion of an international criminal court other than the positive law
document concluded in Rome in 1998.

Victor's justice, as in Nuremberg, applied our version of international law
to the defeated enemy. It did not apply our version of international law to
our own people who admitted war crimes. There is documented evidence of
this. For example, the note was passed to the court during the trial of the
commander-in-chief of the German navy, Admiral Doenitz, saying it was a war
crime for him personally to be involved in the unrestricted submarine
warfare decree that Germany had made. Admiral Nimitz submitted a letter
saying that under orders from Washington, he had issued an identical decree
on December 7, 1941. As far as I know Admiral Nimitz has never been tried
for the crime for which Doenitz was convicted. He was never even hauled
before a domestic tribunal. In fact, if I remember correctly he was given a
ticker tape parade.

The notion that an international criminal court will work, therefore,
assumes that we are prepared to have our people tried for the same things
that we say others violate international law by doing. It has never, never
happened except in victor's justice courts. Never-I repeat, never.

There are all sorts of reciprocal operations about which we purport to get
upset from time to time. For example, in the last election there was a big
fuss made about Chinese paying the Democratic party for helping support its
campaign. And yet I saw not a mention in the press of the things that
Christopher talks about, the United States paying various folks in Greece,
Portugal, Indonesia, and elsewhere, to affect their local elections.
Obviously, the things that we do come back to haunt us. We fuss about them
when they're against the perceived interest of these who are fussing, we do
not fuss about them when those people neglect the rules of reciprocity.

Thirdly, I would emphasize that immorality is not illegality, and illegality
is not personal criminal liability. The word "justice" is not a word in the
legal order, it's a word in the moral order. Aristotle wrote a book about it
actually, Nicomachean Ethics. Ethics is the Greek word that's equivalent to
mores in Latin, which is frequently translated practices or justice,
morality. Aristotle wrote that there are at least three different kinds of
justice: commutative justice, distributive justice, rectificatory justice.
He didn't mention retributive justice. There are many other categories of
justice-probably a dozen or more. So when we speak of justice, it behooves
us to understand what we're talking about. Some people will never be
satisfied that justice is done until the world is emptied of everyone but
themselves and their family or their tribe. Otherwise everything is self
defense, including the actions by the United States in Vietnam and
elsewhere, and including the actions by Vietnamese or Usama Bin Laden
against the United States.

These are regarded as divine-law decrees in the interest of justice as
defined by the people who blasphemously attribute to God their own
interests. I say it's blasphemous because by all religions that I know of,
including the Muslim religion, it is blasphemous to presume to know the will
of God. And yet we're surrounded by people who claim to know that will.

I'd say before going on that I know I'm fallible because I'm a younger
brother. I knew when I was three years old that my big brother, who was six
years old, was infallible, and he made it quite clear that I was fallible.
(That fallibility evolves over time, of course, and when you're 14 your
parents become fallible and you become infallible. By the time you're 20
they've learned a great deal.) From this knowledge flows two corollaries.
First, if I'm fallible, it's likely that you are too. Second, even if you
can convince me that you're infallible, I might be wrong because I'm
fallible and therefore I would never accept the word of Jerry Falwell, or
Henry Kissinger, or anybody else about anything, whether or not I can check
the primary sources, because I'm fallible.

The moral remedy, therefore, for these moral derelicts, for the lack of
perceived justice, is not a criminal trial. The moral remedy is shunning
somebody. It's exposure. Exposure has been the role of the press or the
media in the United States, and it has failed. Mr. Kissinger is getting, as
I understand it, about $30,000 per speech. Who's paying him? Has there been
no fuss about the people who are paying him? Why is there not an outcry of
those whose moral level is so poor that they pay Kissinger $30,000 for an
appearance?

Other remedies are truth-and-reconciliation commissions. There's been no
talk that I know of in the United States of a truth commission. Exposure is
the job of the press. I would argue that not only is concealing the primary
evidence in the Library of Congress or elsewhere legal, but in criminal
actions in the United States we have a privilege against self-incrimination.
It seems to me that that privilege against self-incrimination indicates
among other things the weakness of applying criminal law remedies, even
domestic criminal law remedies, where they might exist in these matters.
These are political faults. These are things that demand exposure. If
democracy is to work they must be exposed. They were not being fully exposed
until Christopher began his articles, except in the extreme left-wing press
that nobody reads. It seems to me that there are remedies available and I
wish people would go to them more often. Thank you.

Roger Morris: I suppose I have the dubious distinction here of being the
only member of the panel who's actually worked for a war criminal. I want to
respond briefly to some of the comments that were made earlier.
Christopher's quite right, I think, that the collusion with the South
Vietnamese regime prior to Mr. Nixon's first election was a great
Constitutional crime. There is, of course, no enduring honor among
Constitutional scoundrels.

Within three months, I know personally, Christopher, the United States
government was contemplating the assassination of General Ky, because he
proved to be, as you know, rather recalcitrant from time to time about
American diplomacy and policy in Vietnam. So the collusion, the cooperation,
the collaboration, including covert money from the South Vietnamese as well
as from the Greeks and others was of a very short duration.

In the early days of the Nixon administration, Stanley, there was indeed a
serious effort to negotiate a peace in Vietnam. Tony Lake and I were
personally involved working for Kissinger in the first covert peace talks,
in Paris. (Covert in the sense that they were unknown even to the Secretary
of State or the Secretary of Defense, anyone else outside the White House.)
In conducting these negotiations, we took elaborate precautions to avoid
surveillance, not by the Soviets or the Chinese or any other power, but by
the American government.

And there was on the table in the early spring of 1970 a negotiated
withdrawal of all American forces by the end of 1970. That was interrupted
by the dementia, not, alas of Henry Kissinger, but of the man he worked for,
Richard Nixon, and the ensuing Cambodian invasion. And you know the sequel,
several thousand Americans died in the years that followed as a result.

I wanted to say too, Stanley, that if these transcripts are revealing,
please be cautious. One of Tony Lake's and my assignments after each of the
sessions in Paris with Le Duc Tho was to doctor the transcripts so that
Henry would look good for posterity. There was a deliberate and conscious
and very elaborate falsification of the record, including the insertion
sometimes of humorous and erudite remarks that had not, in fact, been made
at the table, but which we thought would serve historians well when they
came to judge Henry's statesmanship as well as his humor-which of course
was, I think, almost as important as his diplomatic achievements. I remember
quite vividly, in fact, spending a good deal of time writing speeches and
trying to concoct jokes for appearances in this very building, in which he
was, as you must remember, the darling of the American press.

This war criminal we now meet to excoriate and to expose was the preeminent
celebrity of the Nixon years. Not only because he was successful and not
only because he was charming at briefings, but because he trafficked in that
most wonderful of all Washington commodities-the selective leak. He was the
greatest leaker, I think, in the history of American politics-foreign or
domestic-and it was not by accident that he was appreciated by those to whom
he leaked. He made careers possible, salaries larger, and reputations more
enduring.

I suspect we shall never know all his transgressions in foreign policy. And
we shall never know his machinations with the Washington press corps or on
the Hill, which were, believe me, equally impressive. He spent most of his
time cultivating that audience, not plotting against Allende or propagating
genocide in Bangladesh, but making sure that Joe Craft and the Times and the
Post and all the others were well fed and nourished.

In a final comment about my colleagues here, I must say that it's quite true
that John Mitchell and Richard Nixon and others were held accountable in
some way, but my goodness, we must remember that no American political
figure has ever gone to jail for an act of foreign policy of any dimension.
Richard Nixon was not driven from office because he bombed Cambodia, but
because he violated other canons of the elite. It was not the savaging of a
country from 30,000 feet with utter impunity, it really involved other
crimes, other transgressions. John Mitchell did not go to jail, Haldeman did
not go to jail, Ehrlichman did not go to jail for acts of foreign policy in
which, of course, they were all complicit.

That brings me to just two or three brief remarks about Christopher's
absolutely wonderful work. And I agree with Alfred that exposure is
everything. We haven't begun to have it yet in America in either domestic or
foreign policy. We are really still very much in the dark.

I would just remind you that though Henry Kissinger's culpability is quite
clear, he was never alone. He could not have conducted this savage,
heedless, criminal foreign policy by himself. He was surrounded by
Kissinger's Kissingers. And they were men who profited personally,
materially, in career terms, in terms of reputation, in terms of power,
almost as much as he. Only a few of the names you know, Alexander Haig-we
have here a catalog of future secretaries of state-Alexander Haig and Larry
Eagleburger and future national security advisor Brent Scocroft, the list
goes on. You must understand, of course, that their proteges populate the
new administration. There is a direct genealogical line between Henry
Kissinger and the national security apparatus, as it were, of George W.
Bush. Henry's transgressions would not have been possible without the active
intellectual and substantive support of his aides.

Ed Corey was an old journalist who had been burned in career terms in
Eastern Europe after World War II. He was haunted by the Communist menace.
His cables from Santiago, his characterization of Allende and his regime,
his portrayal of that election campaign had a great deal to do with the
mania that then overtook the White House. And Henry's orders did not go into
the ether, they were executed and carried out and supported and often
enthusiastically backed by an entire bureaucracy in the Department of State
and the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon. Please don't assume
that war criminals are lone rangers. Despite Henry's characterization of
himself as that, he was never a lone ranger. He was the commandant of a
willing and eager army. And they are men who have equally escaped any
accountability, even the kind of exposure we're trying to give Kissinger
here today. And they all went on, not only to new power, but also to
wonderful lives of respect and sinecure and pensions and academic postings
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Henry's not the only one who has been
honored by our culture. His men were as well. And many of them are still
alive.

I must just say that it strikes me as very encouraging that you have come in
such numbers this morning. I'm not generally optimistic about the issue of
accountability in American foreign policy. I think, to paraphrase one of
Lewis' wonderful books, there is no area in which there is a greater wish
for kings in American life than in the conduct of our foreign relations.
Henry Kissinger reflected then, as I think his successors have reflected,
the overwhelming urges and prejudices of the American people. The racism
that was reflected in our policy in Southeast Asia was a racism deeply
embedded in American society. Henry was not an aberration. He was a kid from
George Washington High in the Bronx and, I need not remind you, Harvard. And
he reflected the values and the often unspoken inner ethic of our most
revered institutions. He got away with it, not because he was some sly
magician or some skillful manipulator, but because he reflected so often
what so many of his peers in the press, in Congress, in the Executive
branch, in the bureaucracy, in the political world, in the intellectual
world, in academia felt. In his savagery toward the outside world, his
heedlessness, his imperial mentality, he was quintessentially reflective of
very powerful strains in American life, and we must not forget that. He was
not apart from the main. And though we now single him out for
responsibility, the responsibility, of course, ultimately is ours. Thanks.

Lapham: Christopher, a closing word or a comment on each of the remarks and
then we can turn it over to questions.

Hitchens: Well, I'm just delighted that the other panelists have so much
materialized the way in which-how shall we put it, Harper's plays for very
high stakes. We're not just talking about justice, in other words, today,
ladies and gentlemen, but also about freedom of information and the
historical record. Therefore, in seeking to clarify a case against a
successful example of the criminal type in politics and to say that's a
reproach to what we think of as the prevailing standards, we also demand
that the record become open and that the historical record be inspected
because it belongs to us. It's been annexed, chunks of it have been sawn off
and made into private property and converted for private use with appalling
distortions. I'll give you one example only. The word Timor, T-i-m-o-r,
significant of a country in Asia, a whole country and society and culture
utterly devastated by Henry Kissinger's attentions, does not appear in his
own memoirs, out of which he's made a fortune and which he qualified himself
to write by having been secretary of state. But it's up to him what is and
isn't going to be included in that record. This is a fantastic abuse, not
just of the free information process, but also of the historical record
itself, and it demands redress.

I'm also very glad that Roger turned up the fire a little under my own
profession. It's appalling to me that Henry Kissinger should appear in the
mass media, not as-I don't insist he appear in an orange jumpsuit at all
times, though, well, I'll step lightly over that-a subject of scrutiny, but
more often as a independent and objective commentator.

In other words, his opinion and advice are sought as if they were mutual by
people such as Ted Koppel and Jim Lehrer, by The Los Angeles Times op ed
page and the op ed page of our own hometown rag, The Washington Post, which
had to be written to, I think, perhaps 50 times by groups of congressmen and
others before it would identify Mr. Kissinger as other than a former
secretary of state when he was writing about business relations with China,
in which he had a direct interest. That it took a long time to get The
Washington Post to add a tag line noting that the author of a certain piece
has an interest in the outcome of the argument is a great cause for reproach
in our profession.

And, finally, since we may as well leave no one standing while we're about
it, implied in everything I've written is a rebuke to the fantastically
complacent and overfed community, the American human rights set. I believe
if you live in New York or Washington and you are a member of any sort of
committee on human rights, you probably need never dine alone. Almost every
night of the week someone is giving another member of this community a human
rights award for their brave work on, as it might be, Sri Lanka or the
Taliban. And only the other day I saw Aryeh Neier, who must be the absolute
czar and pope of this community, writing a long and thoughtful ruminative
piece, grazing on the lower slopes of international morality, in the New
York Review of Books. The question before him was, How should we deal with
the monsters of this world? What, for example, to do to bring Slobodan
Milosevic to justice? And yet not a word about the man who sits within a few
blocks of where he was writing and who is the proper object of his
attentions. And until this relationship can be brought into a finer
alignment, it seems to me, a mockery is made of all the customary standards
by which our press and human rights and freedom of information and
historical truth seminars are carried on. Well, thank you anyway. Thanks.

Lapham: We have questions. We have about a half-hour. Please direct a
question at the panelist you feel is best suited to answer it.

Al Miliken: My question is for anyone who has, in recent months, followed
the United States government's dealings with the massacre of civilians
during the Korean War. And does anyone see a correlation between how they've
been dealing with that situation and how they're dealing with what you've
uncovered about Henry Kissinger and his associates?

Lapham: Well, I think Roger Morris might answer that, because that goes to
what kind of a country we are. I mean, that's the question you raised, that
Kissinger is not acting alone, and that ...

Hitchens: You're alluding to the No Gun Ri investigation? Yes.

Morris: Let me just say, I was in the White House on the National Security
Council staff when the first really serious evidence of the My Lai massacre
was presented to the administration. And like all these matters, it was not
viewed, I'm afraid, in moral or legal terms. It was not even viewed in
diplomatic terms for what it might mean in the conduct of the war in
Southeast Asia. Rather, it was viewed as a domestic political problem. And
even then, not as a problem involving so much the American people as the
President's relationship with the American military, which was spying on him
quite actively even as he was contemplating what to do about the massacre.

It's important to remember that this government is a court of the Borgias
and has been for some time, and I suspect will remain so. And these are not
matters that can be dealt with in camera in any responsible way. The only
hope is to deal with them in the open, and that comes back to you, of
course--to the press. I think the Hill is hopeless, and so the only real
chance at accountability is exposure. And that's coercion, that's forcing
them to do something against all of their instincts and against their will.

But the handling of the Korean massacre is just exactly characteristic, it
seems to me.

Lapham: Let's get a question from the gentleman about to get the microphone.

Unidentified Man: I wonder if one of you will discuss the issue of sovereign
immunity. That is really what we're talking about, so there's a subtext here
that probably needs some legal discussion . . .

Lapham: First of all?

Unidentified Woman: Roger Morris, we've had 20 years of exposure and
disclosure about Henry Kissinger. Walter Isaacson, Seymour Hersch, the
Church Committee, haven't made the slightest bit of difference in his
reputation, in his life. Would you comment on that? Why didn't it take?

Morris: Mary, I remember you and I tried this even when I was still working
for the administration, if you'll recall? It doesn't take, I think, because
it's not of sufficient shock value. I don't think we've ever really gotten
close to the heart of the matter, as Christopher has gotten in these two
pieces. I think there's been a lot of surface smut, but I don't think we've
really put it all together the way Hitchens has in these two articles. And I
think, quite frankly, that this is an incremental process. I think the
education of the American people is a very slow and agonizing business,
especially in foreign affairs. And we benefit, in part, from the trail of
scandal and disgrace and dishonor by other politicians who followed
Kissinger.

We are now much more sophisticated, it seems to me, about our domestic order
and about our conduct in the world. And it doesn't seem hopeless that we
would come at some point to a reckoning. So I don't count the failure of
previous exposure or disclosure as all that decisive. I think it is
incremental and I think we need a great deal more.

Lapham: Could we have Mr. Rubin on that question, because this is about
exposure and this is your remedy.

Rubin: Let me answer two questions then. First, with regard to exposure, the
U.S. has been notoriously two-faced about it. For example, we argued for
command responsibility in the so-called Yamashita case after World War II,
where an American military commission held that Admiral Yamashita had
violated international law by not controlling the troops that were under his
command in Manila. But we acquitted Captain Medina after the My Lai massacre
under a charge that was totally inconsistent with the earlier Yamashita
case.

We tend not to try our own people for doing the things that we blame others
for doing. The same thing is going on in the No Gun Ri case. We understand
why our people, to save their own lives, shot a lot of innocent civilians.
We don't understand why the other side might shoot a lot of innocent
civilians. As far as sovereign immunity is concerned, the American courts
have been notoriously confused about it, and the reasons go way back. You
may remember that in the American Journal of International Law this was
discussed in 1975 or '76 before the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act was
passed. It's the only edition of the proceedings of the American Society of
International Law in which those who spoke from the floor are not identified
by name. The reason for that is fairly clear-it's not admitted by the people
who were running the thing at the time, but the reason's clear. Those who
spoke against the act were people like Myers McDougal of Yale, Mike Cardozo,
myself. Not that that matters very much, but anyhow there were a number of
people who spoke against the act, saying it wouldn't work the way it was
planned, but Monroe Leigh was behind it and he was the legal advisor, and
that was that.

There are two problems in sovereign immunity. First of all, the sovereignty
is to states and not to individuals. The Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, in
effect, says that when the foreign sovereign acts in a commercial capacity,
he can be sued as if he's an ordinary corporation. That's fairly clear.
Every corporation in the United States, after all, is a result of an act of
some legislature or some executive branch submitting appropriate documents.
Even if you're DuPont in Delaware, you owe your legal existence to some
legal act by somebody empowered to act in that way. Therefore, all
corporations in the United States are, in effect, branches of the sovereign
in that they are licensed by the sovereign to be an individual person.
Whether Amtorg, the former USSR trading corporation, or ICI, the British
Imperial Chemical Industries, these are the same category.

We say that U.S. courts should apply a rule of whether an act is a
commercial act or a sovereign act. And the U.S. Supreme Court has split
notoriously on delicate cases. In fact, the two leading cases split, believe
it or not, three to one to one to four in one of the cases, where three plus
one plus one made the five-man majority. So the three-man minority wrote the
majority opinion, in effect, even though only three concurred in it. And the
other one was four to one to four a year later, in which the one made one of
the four into five and was clearly absurd. It said, this act is certainly a
commercial act when, in fact, had the case been tried in the country
involved, there's no question that there would have been no recovery. So it
was clearly an illegal act, which is a sovereign act.

The Supreme Court has not heard a serious sovereign immunity case, other
than an Argentine case, where it held nine to nothing that a particular act
was not entitled to sovereign immunity alone, which was clearly in
contradiction to a Nicaraguan case totally, exactly the opposite a couple of
years before. Why the court ruled nine to nothing in that particular case, I
don't know. I presume the parties had negotiated out of court and the
newspapers never picked it up. As far as I know, therefore, the U.S. Supreme
Court has never made up its mind on sovereign immunity, and won't hear a
case; or if it does, will come down five to four or six to three again.
Nobody will know what the proper answer is, and that means that if you've
got a case against a foreign sovereign, you're likely to settle out of court
rather than waste money on lawyers to get a decision that won't be
meaningful. That has to be distinguished from the choice-of-law situation.
Once a case is before the court, the American courts will try to decide what
body of law applies to govern the case. In a civil case, it's been fairly
clear since 1834, since Joseph Story wrote the book on the subject, that
there is a choice of law involved-that there are some cases where we will
apply Cuban law or Argentine law or what have you. We abandoned that in the
so-called Felipe Ortega case, where we applied what we call international
law to the acts of a foreign individual. Now sovereign immunity had nothing
to do with the case. It was a choice-of-law decision and it went, peculiarly
enough, under the alien tort claims provision of the Judicature Act of 1789,
which, in fact, if you read it carefully, makes no sense at all, none. If
you read it with any knowledge of the history-for example, noting that
international is not identical with the law of nations of 1789, noting that
for 150 years after Story wrote his book there has been no case under the
Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

The reasons are absolutely clear. The constitutional provision changed its
meaning. International law is not the same as the law of nations. Therefore,
I find that sovereign immunity would be no defense to Kissinger. But the
choice-of-law problem would apply and the question would be, what law
applies? Is it American law, in which case he's not guilty of anything,
we're all guilty. Or is it international law, in which case it seems to me
he gets off free because international law has never, except in a victor's
tribunal, held a person to be a criminal at international law? And I wrote a
book on piracy at one time where I looked at all piracy precedence. The
arguments that you hear from human rights lawyers are just not true. Piracy
is not the paradigmatic defense, it's a municipal law defense, always has
been, always, as far as I can see, will be.

Kutler: I just want to respond to Mary's question here. Indeed, it is a bit
of a mystery how there are these critical things that are said and done
about Mr. Kissinger. His reputation remains really rather high. But I would
distinguish for you between your world and another world. I suppose these
days we call it spin control. Roger Morris used a wonderful word before,
speaking of Henry Kissinger's imaginations. I think that this is a full-time
enterprise on his part. You remember when he was in government, there were
reporters who would follow him around and make good money writing books
about him and about his diplomacy? Those were "as told to me by Henry
Kissinger" books. There was no digging into sources, no wide-range of
anything rivaling scholarship and so forth. And what fascinates me about
Hitchens' work is that he has done what is often not done in that world. He
has looked at a multiplicity of sources. He's looked at archival primary
documents. It would have been very, very easy to write about Henry Kissinger
and his policies by just asking for an interview and letting Henry Kissinger
tell you what happened, which is what usually does result from these kinds
of works.

As you see, Christopher did try to interview Mr. Kissinger, but to no avail.
Who knows, had Kissinger agreed, maybe he could have found Christopher a
little soft in the head and converted him. I doubt that, but he might have.
But there's a question here of the responsibility of the media, the people
who report these things. They want access. You don't certainly think that
somebody like Ted Koppel is going to be that critical of Kissinger. He wants
him on his program. He's got star appeal, so to speak. But that's what I
mean, I think it's a question of preserving one's access and sources, so
there's a reluctance to be critical here. There is, as you correctly pointed
out, some criticism, but it hasn't stood much of a chance against all this
other stuff.

Unidentified Man #2: Having plowed through this very formidable body of
work, I'd like to ask Christopher if he could clarify one particular point
for me on which I'm still not clear. How do we define and trace the precise
distinction between an utterly ruthless, rare politic as carried out by
great powers for many, many generations and a personal, indictable
responsibility for an act of international crime. And I'm still a little bit
unclear about whether there is a border between those two in your thinking
or whether this is in a sense indictment number one in a whole litany of
potential indictments that can then go on to include, for example, Margaret
Thatcher over the sinking of the Belgrano, the late Leonid Brezhnev over
Soviet behavior in Afghanistan, and so on. Are you arguing that there is
something about the Kissinger record that is unique and wicked beyond the
ordinary wickedness of super powers?

Hitchens: Oh, I'm so sorry. You should have said before. Well, as Mary said
a few minutes ago, think of how many times Kissinger's been exposed by Sy
Hersch or the Church Committee or Walter Isaacson. So the Church Committee
and Walter Isaacson both examined the case of General Schneider, the one
with which I opened my bid today, and concluded that Kissinger hadn't had
him killed, right? A fantastic conclusion from the evidence available to
them, even then. They said it probably was a kidnapping that was botched.
Absolutely not true. Every stage of it now can be demonstrated. And now I
think it's only really with the final disclosures that arose from the
Hinchley Amendment last year, which forced the CIA to disclose fully what it
had done in Chile. We've only known since about November about the giving of
$35,000, which is a lot of money in 1971 prices, to the people who'd killed
Schneider after they'd finished the job, OK? Not the sort of sum that could
be disbursed, I think, by a local station chief either.

Hitchens: Probably involving the knowledge of someone chairing the 40
Committee, I would think. But once you've established that money was paid to
the murderers after the murder's been done, than all the stuff in Isaacson
and the Church Commission is sure to be nonsense and a euphemism. Because
once that final bit is in place, all the A words kick in: aiding, abetting,
accessory, accomplice. And that's a murder case. And there's no law, as far
as I know, that allows someone to say, "Well, OK, I did have this guy who'd
never done anything to me or to anyone else killed in another country. But I
did it because the president told me to." If that can be entered as a
defense, I would like to see it entered as a defense. But first somebody has
to say you can't do that. I would just as soon hear them say-and take
Professor Rubin's rather pessimistic but very forensic line on this-very
well then, let us have it said that that is legal as long as you are an
American. Let's have that clarified, too. What one cannot go on doing is
living in this semi-opaque world of multiple standards, if standards they
may be called.

Now to your question, Is there anything unique about the good doctor and
would it be the case that if we were to go after him we'd have to go after
everyone else in history as well? I'm one of those who's completely
fascinated with the question of why most school productions of Henry V leave
out the bit where Shakespeare puts in King Henry's massacre of the French
prisoners at Agincourt. And should this case not be re-opened, and should we
now not rather view King Henry V in the light of a war criminal? I'm all for
that. I love these kinds of arguments. But, I also have a maxim permanently
in my head in these matters. Don't make the best of the enemy of the good,
OK? In the case of Kissinger we have someone who's still around, very much
in our midst, and we have all the evidence about the crimes that he
committed in a series of countries, making it look as if aberrations
couldn't form a defense, say in the matter of Vietnam or Cambodia or Chile
or Laos or Bangladesh or Cyprus or East Timor. Because after a bit it stops
looking like coincidence, OK?

I was going to call this "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer," but then I
thought that might be offensive to some potential readers, so we called it
"War Criminal" instead. But here we have such a test case in the making, and
here we have international law and customary law involved somewhat with the
arrest of Pinochet and the warrant for Milosevic. And we know (I have the
tape, and it's in the Harper's piece) that Mr. Kissinger is smarter than we
are. He knows he could be in legal jeopardy for the Schneider business. He
knows he could be the subject of an alien tort claims suit brought by
Chilean relatives. He knows he has to be careful where he travels. I make a
little holiday in my heart every time I hear this. He's told various
associates that he's not sure he can go to Europe anymore. He's only welcome
in certain rather grungy salons in New York these days. It's not punishment
enough in my view. I think we should proceed further with it. So that's my
answer to that.

Rubin: Can I say something to that? Under the extradition laws of the United
States, we do not have any exception for American nationals. Unlike Chile,
where we said they had an obligation to extradite, or Libya, where there's
no extradition treaty, the U.S. has extradition treaties with many
countries, including Spain, and we do not except American nationals from
their operation. Therefore, if any Latin American-well, I don't know about
Latin American countries, but if any countries in Europe or elsewhere would
like to extradite Henry Kissinger, they can bring a case right now in an
American court, and I'll bet you that Henry Kissinger knows all about that.

Lapham: I would think one of the things that's unique about Kissinger is how
small the stakes are. I mean, it's usually about his own career. He's
prepared--as opposed to the ruthless real politik, which is for reasons of
the state or has a larger purpose. And with most of Kissinger's actions,
it's about his personal advancement, and that strikes me as fairly unique.

Unidentified Woman #2: Another question for Christopher Hitchens. As you
know, there's some effort now to bring Pinochet to trial, and he was
released by the British, as we all know. And it calls to mind Tom Hauser's
book on the execution of Charles Horman, where Horman's father said that the
reason the United States wouldn't allow Chile to be blamed was that Chile
would turn around and point the finger at Kissinger or at the United States.
Do you think that the release of former President Pinochet from England and
the fact that he may now be described as unfit to stand trial, is an effort
to protect those in this country who, one could say, created Pinochet, or
certainly subsidized him? And is it also possible that Kissinger is being
spared because, as you say, he could turn it around and say, "The President
gave me orders." It's a fairly complex question, but I know you can get to
the core of it.

Hitchens: But I think I understand the groundwork of the question. There are
two things: one is that Kissinger's suborning of murder in Chile helps bring
to power a government there which repays the United States, so to speak-if
we can confuse the United States and Henry Kissinger for a second, which I
admit is an obscenity, but just for the vernacular purposes-repays the
United States in the same coin by setting off a car bomb a few hundred yards
from here at rush hour, which kills Orlando Letelier, our late and great
comrade, and his American citizen friend and driver, Ronni Moffitt. That's
still illegal in the United States, by the way. You can't set off car bombs
at rush hour in downtown Washington, D.C., especially not if there's an
American citizen being killed. There's no law that says you can do that.

And gradually-and Scott knows more about this case than anyone-we have,
again, another lay-down case. We know exactly how that murder was
commissioned and authored and carried out and paid for. And it leads right
back to Pinochet. And it's still possible, if not probable, that a U.S.
indictment will have to be made of the good general who was Henry
Kissinger's client. So it goes around, it comes around. These two skeins of
investigation also do touch upon the material that he has tried to sequester
in the Library of Congress. So I think he feels these threads slightly
tightening around his pudgy neck and-and I think that he should feel so. And
I was very intrigued to see a statement that was carried by the German Press
Agency and just given to me yesterday of a press conference in Barcelona of
some of the Chilean and Spanish magistrates who've been involved in the
attempt to bring death squads within the reach of international law, saying
that they want to proceed with the Pinochet case and extend it to Henry
Kissinger. It's the logical next step, because Pinochet as a torturer and
assassin and author of disappearances and kidnappings and murders and so on
was, after all, not acting on his own. He was acting as the instrument of a
certain policy by a certain super power, the threads of which ran through a
certain fist. So, yes, the skein is tightening.

Lapham: Do we have another question?

Unidentified Man #3: Mr. Morris, I'm from the Mexican News Agency. My
question is about Chile, too. When a Latin American journalist goes to the
State Department or the White House to ask questions about the documents
that have been released in the case of Mr. Pinochet and the involvement of
Mr. Henry Kissinger, the answer is always that they don't want to put
national security at risk. Is it really a risk of the national security of
the United States to give names or remove those black ink marks over the
lines of those documents, or is it just a matter of trying to defend
personalities such as Mr. Henry Kissinger?

Morris: In my experience very, very few the redacted documents that are
withheld from the American public or Congress or from history concern
genuine matters of national security. It would be hard to estimate, but I
would say 90 to 95 percent of the secrets kept by the American government
are secrets of expedience and political convenience, usually attendant on
the administration in power, but sometimes on the reputations of people who
are still powerful, such as Henry Kissinger, so that his successors would in
their own interest, of course, and as a part of the club mentality that
obtains here, try to prevent the release of incriminating documents.

Morris: This is, as a famous governor of ours in New Mexico once said, "a
whole box full of Pandoras." Once you start opening this box, culpability,
as I said earlier, does not stop with Henry Kissinger. The foreign policy
establishment, and by a larger extension the American political
establishment, has a very great stake in the maintenance of these secrets.
And Henry's secrets, as Christopher begins to suggest, curl far beyond
murder and mayhem and genocide and great crimes of state. They curl back to
corporate and other collusions that are with us even today. Ultimately,
what's at stake here is not the national security, but national profit. And
a good deal of money was made. The foundation for the current oligarchy that
prevails in American policy today-foreign and domestic-was laid during the
Nixon years. So these are very momentous matters, but don't let anybody tell
you that it's authentic national security. That's nonsense. This is
self-protection. But until we change our methods of governance, you're stuck
with it.


Copyright C 2001 Harper's Magazine Foundation.
All rights reserved.

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