<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/>Henry
Kissinger’s War Crimes Are Central to the Divide
Between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=171981#171981
Sec. Clinton and Sen. Sanders full exchange on Henry Kissinger
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG9GFzM7zc4
<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/https://theintercept.com/staff/dan-froomkin/>Dan
Froomkin - Feb. 12 2016, 6:16 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/
The sparring during Thursday’s Democratic
presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and
Bernie Sanders over whether Henry Kissinger is an
elder statesman or a pariah has laid bare a major
foreign policy divide within the Democratic Party.
Clinton and Sanders stand on opposite sides of
that divide. One represents the hawkish
Washington foreign policy establishment, which
reveres and in some cases actually works for
Kissinger. The other represents the marginalized
non-interventionists, who can’t possibly forgive
someone with the blood of millions of brown people on his hands.
Kissinger is an amazing and appropriate lens
through which to see what’s at stake in the
choice between Clinton and Sanders. But that only
works, of course, if you understand who Kissinger
is which surely many of today’s voters don’t.
Some may only dimly recall that Kissinger won a
Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the
Vietnam War (comedian Tom Lehrer famously said
the award made political satire obsolete), and
that he played a central role in President
Nixon’s opening of relations with China.
But Kissinger is reviled by many left-leaning
observers of foreign policy. They consider him an
amoral egotist who enabled dictators, extended
the Vietnam War, laid the path to the Khmer Rouge
killing fields, stage-managed a genocide in East
Timor, overthrew the democratically elected
left-wing government in Chile, and encouraged
Nixon to wiretap his political adversaries.
First, let’s review what happened at the debate.
Here’s the video, followed by the
<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/us/politics/transcript-of-the-democratic-presidential-debate-in-milwaukee.html?_r=0>transcript:
SANDERS: Where the secretary and I have a very
profound difference, in the last debate and I
believe in her book very good book, by the way
in her book and in this last debate, she talked
about getting the approval or the support or the
mentoring of Henry Kissinger. Now, I find it
rather amazing, because I happen to believe that
Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive
secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.
(APPLAUSE)
I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my
friend. I will not take advice from Henry
Kissinger. And in fact, Kissinger’s actions in
Cambodia, when the United States bombed that
country, overthrew Prince Sihanouk, created the
instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to
come in, who then butchered some 3 million
innocent people, one of the worst genocides in
the history of the world. So count me in as
somebody who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger.
(APPLAUSE)
IFILL: Secretary Clinton?
CLINTON: Well, I know journalists have asked who
you do listen to on foreign policy, and we have yet to know who that is.
SANDERS: Well, it ain’t Henry Kissinger. That’s for sure.
CLINTON: That’s fine. That’s fine.
(LAUGHTER)
You know, I listen to a wide variety of voices
that have expertise in various areas. I think it
is fair to say, whatever the complaints that you
want to make about him are, that with respect to
China, one of the most challenging relationships
we have, his opening up China and his ongoing
relationships with the leaders of China is an
incredibly useful relationship for the United States of America.
(APPLAUSE)
So if we want to pick and choose and I
certainly do people I listen to, people I don’t
listen to, people I listen to for certain areas,
then I think we have to be fair and look at the
entire world, because it’s a big, complicated world out there.
SANDERS: It is.
CLINTON: And, yes, people we may disagree with on
a number of things may have some insight, may
have some relationships that are important for
the president to understand in order to best protect the United States.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: I find I mean, it’s just a very
different, you know, historical perspective here.
Kissinger was one of those people during the
Vietnam era who talked about the domino theory.
Not everybody remembers that. You do. I do. The
domino theory, you know, if Vietnam goes, China,
da, da, da, da, da, da, da. That’s what he talked
about, the great threat of China.
And then, after the war, this is the guy who, in
fact, yes, you’re right, he opened up relations
with China, and now pushed various type of trade
agreements, resulting in American workers losing
their jobs as corporations moved to China. The
terrible, authoritarian, Communist dictatorship
he warned us about, now he’s urging companies to
shut down and move to China. Not my kind of guy.
(APPLAUSE)
And now, some background about Kissinger.
Greg Grandin, a history professor at New York
University, just published a timely book called
<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/http://us.macmillan.com/kissingersshadow/greggrandin>Kissinger’s
Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most
Controversial Statesman. In an article in The
Nation last week,
“<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/http://www.thenation.com/article/henry-kissinger-hillary-clintons-tutor-in-war-and-peace/>Henry
Kissinger, Hillary Clinton’s Tutor in War and
Peace,” he offered this pithy summary:
Let’s consider some of Kissinger’s achievements
during his tenure as Richard Nixon’s top foreign
policy–maker. He (1) prolonged the Vietnam War
for five pointless years; (2) illegally bombed
Cambodia and Laos; (3) goaded Nixon to wiretap
staffers and journalists; (4) bore responsibility
for three genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and
Bangladesh; (5) urged Nixon to go after Daniel
Ellsberg for having released the Pentagon Papers,
which set off a chain of events that brought down
the Nixon White House; (6) pumped up Pakistan’s
ISI, and encouraged it to use political Islam to
destabilize Afghanistan; (7) began the U.S.’s
arms-for-petrodollars dependency with Saudi
Arabia and pre-revolutionary Iran; (8)
accelerated needless civil wars in southern
Africa that, in the name of supporting white
supremacy, left millions dead; (9) supported
coups and death squads throughout Latin America;
and (10) ingratiated himself with the
first-generation neocons, such as Dick Cheney and
Paul Wolfowitz, who would take American
militarism to its next calamitous level. Read all
about it
in<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?index=books&linkCode=qs&keywords=9781627794497>Kissinger’s
Shadow!
A full tally hasn’t been done, but a
back-of-the-envelope count would attribute 3,
maybe 4 million deaths to Kissinger’s actions,
but that number probably undercounts his victims
in southern Africa. Pull but one string from the
current tangle of today’s multiple foreign policy
crises, and odds are it will lead back to
something Kissinger did between 1968 and 1977.
Over-reliance on Saudi oil? That’s Kissinger.
Blowback from the instrumental use of radical
Islam to destabilize Soviet allies? Again,
Kissinger. An unstable arms race in the Middle
East? Check, Kissinger. Sunni-Shia rivalry? Yup,
Kissinger. The impasse in Israel-Palestine?
Kissinger. Radicalization of Iran? “An act of
folly” was how veteran diplomat George Ball
described Kissinger’s relationship to the Shah.
Militarization of the Persian Gulf? Kissinger, Kissinger, Kissinger.
The late essayist Christopher Hitchins examined
Kissinger’s war crimes in his 2001 book,
<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger.html?id=pBBBEH0OEoUC&source=kp_read&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false>The
Trial of Henry Kissinger. He listed the key elements of his case:
1. The deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina.
2. Deliberate collusion in mass murder, and later
in assassination, in Bangladesh.
3. The personal suborning and planning of murder,
of a senior constitutional officer in a
democratic nation Chile with which the United States was not at war.
4. Personal involvement in a plan to murder the
head of state in the democratic nation of Cyprus.
5. The incitement and enabling of genocide in East Timor
6. Personal involvement in a plan to kidnap and
murder a journalist living in Washington, D.C.
Kissinger’s role in the genocide that took place
in East Timor is less well-known than the one he
enabled in Indochina. Author
<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/http://takimag.com/article/henry_kissingers_fakepolitik/print>Charles
Glass wrote about that episode in 2011:
On December 6, 1975, Kissinger and Gerald Ford
met President Suharto in Indonesia and promised
to increase arms supplies to sustain Indonesian
suppression of the former Portuguese colony.
Kissinger, quoted verbatim in U.S. Embassy cables
of that war council, insisted that American
weapons for the Indonesian Army’s invasion could
be finessed: “It depends on how we construe it;
whether it is in self-defense or is a foreign operation.”
Since no one in East Timor had attacked or
intended to attack Indonesia, Suharto could
hardly plead self-defense. But Kissinger would
make the case for him. All he asked was that
Suharto delay the invasion a few hours until he
and Ford had left Jakarta. He presumably relied
on the American public’s inability to connect the
Jakarta conference with the invasion so long as
he and Ford were back in Washington when the
killing began. As far as the American media went,
he was right. The Indonesian Army invaded on the
anniversary of a previous day of infamy, December
7, massacring about a third of the population.
The press, apart from five Australian journalists
whom the Indonesian Army slaughtered, ignored the
invasion and subsequent occupation. Well done, Henry.
By the time Suharto was overthrown in 1998,
Kissinger had gone private charging vast fees
to advise people like Suharto on methods for
marketing their crimes. He also kept posing as an
elder statesman whose views were sought (and
often paid for) by a media that enabled his
penchant for self-publicity. He was a patriot
whose love of country stopped short of taking
part in the 9/11 Commission if it meant
disclosing how much the Saudi royal family paid him for his counsel.
The continuing role Kissinger plays in modern
foreign policy is perfectly illustrated by
Hillary Clinton, his longtime fan and friend.
Just recently, in November, she
<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hillary-clinton-reviews-henry-kissingers-world-order/2014/09/04/b280c654-31ea-11e4-8f02-03c644b2d7d0_story.html>reviewed
Kissinger’s latest book, World
Order<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hillary-clinton-reviews-henry-kissingers-world-order/2014/09/04/b280c654-31ea-11e4-8f02-03c644b2d7d0_story.html>,
for theWashington Post. There’s a summary of that
<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2016/02/12/hillary-clinton-reviewed-henry-kissingers-latest-book-and-loved-it/>here.
Clinton called it “vintage Kissinger, with his
singular combination of breadth and acuity along
with his knack for connecting headlines to trend
lines.” She wrote that “his analysis, despite
some differences over specific policies, largely
fits with the broad strategy behind the Obama
administration’s effort over the past six years
to build a global architecture of security and
cooperation for the 21st century.”
And she said he came off as “surprisingly
idealistic. Even when there are tensions between
our values and other objectives, America, he
reminds us, succeeds by standing up for our
values, not shirking them, and leads by engaging
peoples and societies, the source of legitimacy, not governments alone.”
A key passage:
Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his
counsel when I served as secretary of state. He
checked in with me regularly, sharing astute
observations about foreign leaders and sending me
written reports on his travels. Though we have
often seen the world and some of our challenges
quite differently, and advocated different
responses now and in the past, what comes through
clearly in this new book is a conviction that we,
and President Obama, share: a belief in the
indispensability of continued American leadership
in service of a just and liberal order.
The difference between the two views of Kissinger
is not simply of academic or historical interest.
How a presidential candidate feels about him is a
clear sign of her or his worldview and indicates
the kind of decisions she or he will make in
office – and, perhaps even more importantly,
suggests the kind of staffers she or he will
appoint to key positions of authority in areas of
diplomacy, defense, national security, and intelligence.
Sanders has not made clear who he is turning to
for foreign policy advice, if anyone. (What’s
your dream foreign policy team? Email me
at<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/mailto:froom...@theintercept.com>froom...@theintercept.com.)
But Clinton is clearly picking from the usual
suspects the “securocrats in waiting” who make
up the Washington, D.C., foreign policy establishment.
They work at places like Albright Stonebridge,
the powerhouse global consulting firm led by
former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, a
staunch Clinton backer. They work at places like
<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/https://theintercept.com/2015/12/18/beacon-global-strategies/>Beacon
Global Strategies, which is providing
high-profile foreign policy guidance to Clinton
as well as to Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. And they
work at places like Kissinger Associates. In
fact, Bob Hormats, who was a Goldman Sachs vice
chairman before serving as Clinton’s
undersecretary of state, is now advising
Clinton’s campaign even while serving as the vice
chairman of Kissinger Associates.
Despite the wildly bellicose and
<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/09/gop-candidates-compete-over-who-will-commit-most-war-crimes-once-elected/>human
rights-averse rhetoric from the leading
Republican presidential candidates, they’re
picking from essentially the same pool as well.
A few weeks ago, I talked to Chas Freeman, the
former diplomat I once called a
“<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/blog/?p=827>one-man
destroyer of groupthink,” whose
non-interventionism and even-handed approach to
the Middle East was so un-Kissingeresque that his
surprising appointment to President Obama’s
National Intelligence Council in 2009 lasted
<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/http://voices.washingtonpost.com/white-house-watch/a-departure-that-leaves-a-void.html>all
of a few days.
He marveled at the lack of any “honest brokers”
in the D.C. foreign policy establishment. “We
have a foreign policy elite in this country
that’s off its meds, basically,” he said.
“There’s no debate because everybody’s
interventionist, everybody’s militaristic.” They
all are pretty much in the thrall of
neoconservatism, he said. You can see them
“speckled all over the Republican side” and “also in the Clinton group.”
Henry Kissinger is thus a litmus test for foreign
policy. But don’t count on the mainstream media to help you understand that.
Imagine two types of people: those who would
schmooze with Kissinger at a cocktail party, and
those who would spit in his eye. The elite
Washington media is almost without exception in
that first category. In fact, they’d probably
have anyone who spit in Kissinger’s eye arrested.
Since they only see one side, they don’t want to
get into it. And there was a little indicator at
Thursday night’s debate, hosted by PBS, of just
how eagerly the elite political media welcomes an
honest exploration of the subject.
Just as Sanders raised the issue of Kissinger’s
legacy in Vietnam, either Gwen Ifill or Judy
Woodruff both of whom are very conventional,
establishment, Washington cocktail-party
celebrities was caught audibly muttering,
“<https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/http://gawker.com/moderator-accidentally-whispers-oh-god-into-mic-when-1758651605?utm_campaign=version_e&utm_medium=sharefromsite&utm_source=Gawker_twitter>Oh,
God.”
Top photo: Hillary Clinton smiles as Henry
Kissinger presents her with a Distinguished
Leadership Award from the Atlantic Council in Washington in May 2013.
--
--
Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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