Bush the Comedian:
Poindexter, Abrams and Now Henry K.
by SAUL LANDAU
I didn't think President Bush had a highly developed sense of humor. Then,
earlier this year, he appointed retired Admiral John Poindexter President
Reagan's National Security Adviser to head the Information Awareness
Office, the ultra secret, Pentagon snooping expedition to look through your
email and underwear to discover possible terrorist connections. In the late
1980s, Poindexter lied to Congress and secretly plotted to circumvent the
law prohibiting the sale of missiles to the US-hating fanatics in Iran.
Poindexter colluded with other officials to use the proceeds to buy weapons
for the CIA's contra rebels. Congress had de-funded the Contras. Bush (41)
absolved him.
Previously, W had tested the Washington insiders' sense of humor by naming
Elliott Abrams to a high national security post. Abrams pled guilty to
lying to Congress in the same scandal and wrote in his autobiography that
he told his own kids that lying to Congress served the national interest.
But Bush's biggest laugh came from appointing the 79 year old Henry
Kissinger to head the investigation into the actions -- or inactions -- of
government agencies around the 9/11 events.
"Ha," I laughed aloud, "the man least likely to reveal the truth, the man
least interested in honesty and disclosure, the man with a world class
reputation for spreading and supporting terror in several continents now
reigns as commish of a panel to investigate terrorism! Wow! Talk about irony!
Instead of investigating Kissinger for his own terrorist acts, Dubya named
the sly old fox to investigate mass murder in the proverbial hen house. The
public will certainly feel assured - that is, those without memory or the
ability to read history.
"Maybe," a friend suggested as a reason for appointing Kissinger, "the
cartoonists' association made a large contribution to W's 2004 campaign
fund! They will have a field day portraying Kissinger the master liar as
the man charged with ferreting out the truth. Indeed, if Bush wasn't
kidding around how would one explain appointing an arch criminal to
investigate a fiendish crime?"
Is Bush just a moron as a Canadian official recently said before being
forced to resign, or is there something behind this bizarre appointment? In
the December 1 New York Times, Maureen Dowd attributes the K gag to Dick
Cheney "Only someone as pathologically opaque as the vice president could
appreciate the sublime translucency of Henry Kissinger. And only someone
intent on recreating the glory days of the Ford and Nixon White Houses
could have hungered to add the 79-year-old Dr. Strange-- I mean, Dr.
Kissinger to the Bush team."
Strange----- I mean Kissinger as a teammate? When Kissinger won the 1973
Nobel Peace Prize after slaughtering tens of thousands of Vietnamese
civilians in his infamous Christmas bombing, a friend suggested he should
have won the prize for Physics.
"What did he know about physics?" I asked, like a straight man.
"Ah ha!" sneered my friend.
Some relatives of the 9/11 victims didn't get the joke when they heard of
Bush's decision to dub Henry the chief prober. Why, some asked, appoint a
man who had proven his hatred for democracy and much of humanity! But, most
of all, why place a man who despises truth, especially in its published form?
In the 1970s, the Washington media, living in a world of liars, informally
dubbed Henry as an unequaled prevaricator. An apocryphal story from the
early 1970s has a confounded Washington press corps hiring a shrink and
giving him press credentials to observe Kissinger during his famed media
background briefing sessions and provide clues as to when the architect of
US foreign policy is lying. After several sessions the shrink tells the
reporters: "It's simple. When Kissinger folds his hands like a German
school boy or fiddles with his glasses, he's telling the truth. When he
opens his mouth to speak, he's lying."
W's advisers surely knew that Kissinger stands for governmental honesty as
Al Capone symbolizes civic virtue and Ariel Sharon represents peace with
Palestinians. So the Bushies may well have a non humorous motive for
appointing this mountebank among charlatans.
Remember, W had opposed any investigation into 9/11. However, the media
revealed that US agencies had foreknowledge of the horrid events and the
families of the victims' exerted heavy pressure on Bush to probe. So, he
had to investigate, but didn't want truth to emerge, that is, actual facts
to appear in print.
So, Kissinger is the logical choice to insure that the public receives a
contemporary Warren Commission report. When he wasn't actually carrying out
campaigns of terror and murder, he spent much of his time lying and
covering up his dirty deeds.
In 1968 Republican Party heavies choose him to fly to Paris to help
sabotage President Johnson's peace talks with the Vietnamese. In his
campaign, Nixon had promised to end the war and if the Vietnamese held out,
Kissinger assured them secretly, Nixon would make a better peace with them.
Nixon rewarded Kissinger for his nefarious behavior by naming him national
security adviser. Kissinger rewarded the Vietnamese by prolonging the war,
although he knew the United States could not win it. His "peace with honor"
nonsense cost more than a million Vietnamese lives and scores of thousands
of US soldiers dead and wounded.
In 1970, Kissinger had helped persuade Nixon to widen the war to include
Cambodia. Without congressional authorization or even knowledge, Kissinger
presided over the secret bombing and invasion of Cambodia, in an attempt to
"cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail" and deprive the Vietnamese enemy of
supplies. No one has yet accurately calculated how many hundreds of
thousands of civilians died in this futile terrorist operation. Kissinger
and Nixon secretly declared war against Cambodia without telling even the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. Indeed, the pilots of the bomber planes kept false
logs indicating that the Cambodia missions were flown over North Vietnam so
as to deceive the Joint Chiefs.
Also in 1970, Kissinger conspired to alter the destiny of Chile. Dr.
Salvador Allende, a socialist, won the election to head a popular unity
government. With Nixon's approval, Kissinger directed a CIA covert
operation to "destabilize" the government. In October 1970, with
Kissinger's knowledge and approval, the CIA tried to assassinate Allende
and did assassinate Chilean Army Chief, General Rene Schneider who stood as
an obstacle to removing Allende, with the help of hired fascist thugs from
"Patria y Libertad". (Currently, poor Henry is facing legal problems in
connection with that murder). The Schneider family has sued K for wrongful
death, claiming that documents prove "that [Kissinger] was involved in
great detail in supporting the people who killed General Schneider, and
then paid them off."
In another Chile-related case, Kissinger was asked by Chile's Supreme Court
to answer official questions about the murder of an American reporter in
Chile shortly after the September 1973 coup. It appears that very high
officials in the State Department refused to help Charles Horman (See Costa
Gavras' film Missing) when Pinochet's Gestapo were torturing and then
murdering him.
K denied involvement in the coup from day one, although he chastised the
Chilean people for being irresponsible in electing Allende as President. In
1972, Kissinger arranged to meet Orlando Letelier, Chile's Ambassador to
Washington, at a dinner party. "With no trace of a smile," Letelier
recounted to me, "Kissinger wanted me to assure Allende that the US
government was not destabilizing the Chilean government."
Letelier laughed. He knew what was going on in Chile even if Kissinger was
covering up his approval of CIA plans to commit violent acts to disrupt
Chilean society. When the press corps pushed Kissinger as to why an elected
socialist government threatened US security, Kissinger jokingly retorted:
"Chile is like a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica."
After three years of dirty tricks against the government and people of
Chile, including routine acts of violence, the Chilean military with CIA
urging finally launched the coup that overthrew the elected government. In
its place, a pro-US military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet carried
out a long reign of terror, murdering, torturing and exiling its political
opponents.
After the coup, Kissinger ordered immediate recognition and aid for the
illegal government. In June, 1976, he graced Pinochet with a personal visit
while most of the world was condemning him for its gross violations of
human rights. Before delivering a speech at an OAS meeting in Chile, K met
privately with Pinochet and assured the mass murderer that his forthcoming
speech on human rights was not "directed against your government."
A State Department transcribed memo of the conversation shows that
Kissinger flattered the man who he knew had murdered thousands including
"enemies" abroad that "we are sympathetic to what you are trying to do
here." Pinochet twice mentioned Orlando Letelier's name as being the man
responsible for his bad "image" throughout the world. Kissinger assured
Pinochet of Washington's support for his methods. I think he meant economic
methods and the means he used for established "order." I don't think K
meant to give Pinochet the green light to assassinate Letelier in Washington.
But in September 1976, three months later, Pinochet sent his assassins to
Washington to car bomb Letelier. Ronni Moffitt, a US colleague at the
Institute for Policy Studies where they both worked, also died in the
terrorist attack. The FBI discovered that the Letelier car bombing was part
of Operation Condor, a network of Latin American intelligence agencies
headquartered in Chile that carried out surveillance on each other's
dissidents and sometimes "disappeared" and assassinated them in each
other's countries. Pinochet had extended his murderous reach beyond the
friendly military dictatorships of South America, however. The FBI
discovered that he had set up assassination plots in Rome, London, Paris
and Madrid as well. Kissinger knew all about them before he gave Pinochet
his Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
Like Stanley Kubrick's film character Dr. Strangelove, K possesses an
eccentric sense of humor. After having initially backed a Kurdish uprising
against Saddam Hussein the mid 1970s, he abruptly pulled the rug from under
the rebelling Kurds. When a subordinate responded in shock to K's lightning
desertion of an ally since he had heard the Secretary promise the Kurds
undying loyalty and aid, K quoted the old adage: "Promise them anything,
give them what they get and f. them if they can't take a joke."
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