Obstinate Memory and Pursuit of the Present
by Norman Solomon
Henry Kissinger usually has an easy time defending the indefensible on
national television. But he faced some pointed questions during a recent
interview with the PBS "NewsHour" about the U.S. role in bringing a military
dictatorship to Chile. When his comments aired on Feb. 20, the famous
American diplomat made a chilling spectacle of himself.
Nearly three years after the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the elected
socialist president Salvador Allende in September 1973 and brought Augusto
Pinochet to power, Kissinger huddled with the general in Chile. A
declassified memo says that Kissinger told Pinochet: "We are sympathetic with
what you are trying to do here." While interviewing Kissinger, "NewsHour"
correspondent Elizabeth Farnsworth asked him point-blank about the discussion
with Pinochet. "Why did you not say to him, 'You're violating human rights.
You're killing people. Stop it.'?" Kissinger replied: "First of all, human
rights were not an international issue at the time, the way they have become
since. That was not what diplomats and secretaries of states and presidents
were saying generally to anybody in those days." Right. Back then, we didn't
know that it was wrong to kidnap people; to hold them as political prisoners;
to torture them; to murder them. Kissinger added that at the June 1976
meeting with Pinochet, "I spent half my time telling him that he should
improve his human rights performance in any number of ways." But the American
envoy's concern was tactical. As Farnsworth noted in her reporting:
"Kissinger did bring up human rights violations, saying they were making it
difficult for him to get aid for Chile from Congress." In Chile, the victims
of Kissinger's great skills numbered into the thousands; in Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia, into the hundreds of thousands and more. Seymour Hersh's 1983 book
"The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House" documented his
remarkable record as a prodigious liar and prolific killer. But the most
influential news outlets continued to treat Kissinger with near-reverence. In
1989, he was elected to the board of directors of CBS. The autobiography of
Katharine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post Co., praises Kissinger as
a dear friend and all-around wonderful person. Kissinger is still commonly
touted by news media as Dr. Statesman Emeritus. On Feb. 16 of this year, CNN
interviewed him live a few hours after the United States and Britain fired
missiles at sites near Baghdad. Anchor Bernard Shaw asked about the sanctions
against Iraq, but neither man said anything about the human toll -- although
an estimated half-million Iraqi children have died as a result of sanctions
since the early 1990s. Kissinger offered his wisdom: "The United States has
absolutely nothing to gain abandoning sanctions." Today, as in the early
1970s, tactical concerns loom large in Washington's corridors of power -- and
in much of the news media. On the networks, routine assumptions confine the
discourse to exploring how the U.S. government can effectively get its way in
the world -- not whether it has a right to do so. For the present, moral
dimensions are pushed to the margins. Napoleon observed that it's not
necessary to censor the news, it's sufficient to delay the news until it no
longer matters. That might be a bit of an overstatement; truthful information
about the past is valuable even if it comes late. But when lives are in the
balance, truth is vital sooner rather than later. In the present tense, with
foreign-policy stakes high, media professionals routinely defer to official
sources. Most U.S. journalists are inclined to swallow the deceptions fed
from high levels in Washington. Months or years or decades later, big news
outlets may report more difficult truths. But by then, the blood has been
shed. No wonder so many high-ranking foreign policy officials are eager to
visit network TV studios, especially in times of U.S. military actions. If
the questions get prickly, they're apt to be of a tactical nature: Will this
missile attack be effective? Will it hurt relations with allies or backfire
in world opinion? Did the targets get hit? We don't hear much fundamental
questioning of top officials from the White House or State Department or
Pentagon about intervention abroad. Nor do we get much assertive journalism
that challenges ongoing support for repressive American allies such as
Indonesia, Turkey, Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. On the "NewsHour" and
other major network programs, when the subject is current policies, I don't
recall questions along the lines of: "You're violating human rights. You're
killing people. Why don't you stop it?" The recent superb "NewsHour" report
on U.S. policies toward Chile was titled "Pursuing the Past." In truth,
that's a very tough endeavor for mainstream journalists. And pursuing the
present is even more difficult.
Norman Solomon is a syndicated columnist. His latest book is "The Habits of
Highly Deceptive Media."
