Who are the No. 1 War Criminals?

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Kissinger

LBJ, concluding that he was never able to control ‘that Goddamn murder incorporated, the cia’, was succeeded by the walking disaster, Richard Nixon. Travelling in 1968 in New-Hampshire for one week on his plane and, I also got to know some of his associates like Herb Klein (press), Richard Price (speech writer), and Richard Allen, (foreign policy-advisor) who later was appointed Ronald Reagan's first national security advisor, but was forced from his job after he had accepted illegal gifts in Japan.

At the airport in Keene, there was a problem with transportation, because snow had fallen. Nixon, John Chancellor of nbc and I were talking under the wing of the plane, when the future president made an astonishing remark. Referring to the two wars Holland had fought to sabotage Sukarno's efforts of nation-building, Nixon said to me: ‘We should have sent the Marines to assist the Dutch in defeating Sukarno.’⁶⁶ I recalled Nixon's words on welcoming Sukarno in 1956 to Washington likening him to Abraham Lincoln. I realized I had caught a rare first glimpse of what this presidential candidate was really about.

I got in touch with columnist Drew Pearson in Washington, who published October 29, 1968 a syndicated column on this dangerous off hand observation by the candidate for the White House. This article led to an inquiry from the editors of Life magazine, who telephoned me in New-York. On November 25, 1968, they published a two-page editorial on Nixon's foreign policy options, in which they warned to be more prudent in making statements about the sending of the Marines anywhere in the world.

Nixon invited Nelson Rockefeller's foreign policy advisor, Henry Kissinger to join him at the White House. While much is known about the bloody hands of this man, the regular revelations about secret deals and new lies further tarnish his record. He turns out book after book to demonstrate that he sees himself as the greatest statesman Washington ever produced, a twentieth century reincarnation of Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), the Prussian statesman and first chancellor of the German empire. He might even be quite right. Bismarck established empirical power through a series of wars. In 1878 he also presided over the Congress of Berlin, where decisions were made regarding stability on the Balkans and about the Middle-East following the Russo-Turkish War. Bismarck initiated in 1884 another Conference at which Africa was partitioned. Considering the effect of Bismarck's calls for German greatness it ought to be remembered that all this accumulated power led in a relatively short time, in 1914 and 1938, to two World Wars. Kissinger watchers around the globe view him in retrospect as indeed a first class warmonger, who with his Jewish German background might some day be written up as a first classic German politico made-in-usa.

66 Willem Oltmans, Den Vaderland Getrouwe, Bruna, Utrecht, 1973, p.p. 356-357.

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During a Florida vacation I picked up a January February 2001 copy of Harpers, one of the last surviving important us monthly's in the us, thanks to editor Lewis Lapham. It contained part one of an article about Henry Kissinger's war crimes. These were the days that the newly arrived Bushites in Washington were screaming for the blood of Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and others. The report, which now appeared as a book⁶⁷, was written by Washington journalist Christopher Hitchens. At last an authoratative compilation of Kissinger crimes and misdeeds reached the bookshelves, even that of Barnes & Noble.

Hitchens mentioned six principal evil machinations by Henry Kissinger in the introduction of his book:

‘1	The deliberate mass killing of civilians in Indo-China. (Is there any difference with Ho Chi-minh killing us terrorists, Stalin killing Nazi invaders or Milosovic killing Albanian terrorists?)
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 - Chili - 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 DC’.

Telford Taylor, Chief Counsel at the Nazi's War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg, later Law Professor at Columbia University, contemplated the pivotal question: What is a war crime? To simply say that it is a violation of the laws of war might be true, but it is hardly meaningful. War consists largely of acts considered crimes in times of peace. Yugoslavia was attacked by the us and nato without even a declaration of war. That in itself was a war crime and illegal in the absence of a Security Council resolution. nato followed the Mussolini-Hitler dictum: attack, bomb, invade and forget the rules of war and the League of Nations.

At Nuremberg 21 Nazis were condemned to die. In total, by 1948, 3.500 people were indicted for war crimes in Europe and 2.800 in Japan. In 1970 Taylor published Nuremberg and Vietnam, An American Tragedy in which he warned, that us War Crimes in Vietnam ressembled Nazi behaviour in World War II so strong, that Americans could some day be brought before a Nuremberg Tribunal.⁶⁸ On abc television (Dick Cavett Show), professor Taylor suggested, that General William Westmoreland, as commander in Vietnam, could be tried for a wide-range of American War Crimes in Southeast Asia.

Professor Richard Falk of Princeton University recal-

67 Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Verso Publishers, New-York, 2001.

68 Telford Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam, An American Tragedy, New York Times Book, Random House, New-York, 1970.

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led in the New York Times magazine of 27 December 1970, that the War Crimes Tribunal organised by British philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1966 was correct in warning that the us was entering the dangerous territory of genocide in Vietnam. Article 2 of the Charter of the un said:

‘All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat of use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.’⁶⁹

When eighteen nato members attacked Belgrado for refusing to give in to a premeditated allied ultimatum, the so-called allies simply behaved like Nazis. Kosovo was a repeat Vietnam performance, again outside the un and now joined in full force by all nato countries.

What has to be taken into account is that the great Yankee Bismarck of the past century has been the fundamental architect of the worldwide acceptance of us criminal behaviour in world affairs. Not only was he awarded a Noble Prize for his unscrupulous and sinister operations. But he has also been regarded as one of the most respectable Foreign Policy figures of the twentieth century. But what was worse, he was lending unwarranted respectability to his malicious conduct of us Foreign Affairs. His phony probity fooled many unsuspecting victims. Recently, when Henry dropped in on the then Indonesian President Abdurachman Wahid to lobby on behalf of us firms, his host became so enchanted with Kissinger's soft words, that he appointed him special advisor on the spot.

Hitchens described how Henry entered the halls of power in 1969 ‘from a mediocre and opportunistic academic to an international potentate to a life of sycophancy and duplicity.’ He continued: ‘Obsessed with Vietnamese intransigence Kissinger at one point contemplated using thermonuclear weapons to obliterate the pass through which ran the railway line from North Vietnam to China, and at another stage considered bombing the dikes that prevented North Vietnam's irrigation system from flooding the country.’

General Alexander Haig and his deputy Colonel Ray Sitton mapped the secret bombing of Cambodia. Kissinger oversaw this operation personally. His own collaborators joked at the time: ‘Henry is playing Bismarck again.’ Some of his aides like Anthony Lake and Roger Morris resigned from his staff in protest over what they considered us mass-murder of Asian civilians outside Vietnam as well. Kissinger would inquire if pilots knew where they were bombing, because he was worried that they would hit cia crews operating in enemy territory. As more articles about his war crimes are appearing in the media, the more enraged Henry becomes. To the troubled minds of Nixon and Kissinger, the truth has always been synonymous with treason. When The New York Times decided to print the Pentagon Papers, June 13, 1971, a telephone

69 Richard A. Falk, Gabriel Kolko & Robert Jay Lifton, Crimes of War, A legal, political-documentary, and psychological inquiry into the responsibility of leaders, citizens, and soldiers for criminal acts in wars, Random House, New-York, 1971.

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conversation between these two men became known years later. ‘It is treasonable, there is no question. It's actionable, I am absolutely sure this violates all sorts of security laws,’ Kissinger told his boss.

They arranged for Attorney General John Mitchell to ask the courts to bar further publication. But the us Supreme Court rejected 6 to 3 the presidential request. Anthony Lewis recalled this tragic episode in the The Times, June 9, 2001, and reminded readers of the fact, that Congress in 2000 introduced a bill that would make publication of classified papers a crime. ‘The press paid little attention to the menacing legislation until it had gone through both the House and Senate and been sent to the White House. President Clinton then saved the day by vetoing the legislation.’

In the end, the casualty figures as a result of war crimes by five us heads-of-state and their errand boys - of whom Kissinger was the worst -became unacceptably high. They make Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic look like small time operators. Between March 1969 and May 1970 alone Nixon and Kissinger approved no less than 3.630 secret missions above Cambodia and Laos, with 600.000 dead people in Cambodia and 350.000 in Laos. Sukarno and Sihanouk opposed this massmurder in South East Asia and were promptly removed for their refusal to cooperate with the us war criminals.

The us Senate Subcommittee for Refugees estimated that between 1969 - when Nixon and Kissinger began to run the war - and 1972, three million Asians had been killed. During those four years the us dropped 4.500.000 tons of high explosives on the three countries, that once made up Indo-China. According to the Pentagon the us Air Force dropped about half this load during World War II above Germany. The notorious cia counter-guerrilla ‘Phoenix’ program initiated by this murderous duo in the White House, killed an additional 35.708 Vietnamese civilians in the period 1969-1972.

Chapter 8 of the Hitchens book dealt with East-Timor invaded on December 7, 1975 by the Suharto regime. That day, President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger left Jakarta after an official visit to the fascist junta, which the us and a dozen rich nations had kept in the saddle since 1965 with billions and billions of dollars. Later C. Philip Liechty, cia operations officer in Jakarta, confirmed that Ford and Kissinger had given Suharto the green light to invade Portuguese East-Timor.

On August 11, 1995, Henry presented a new book in a New-York Hotel. Hitschens recalled that the first question was raised by Constancio Pinto, a former Timorese resistance fighter, who asked where Kissinger had been when 200.000 Timorese were killed by Suharto's Army. Henry improvised and said that the subject of Timor never came up during the visit to Suharto. They had only been informed upon leaving at the airport that Timor would be invaded. The next questioner, Allan Nairn,

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confirmed that former President Ford in an interview with him had said that Timor had indeed been discussed during the Ford-Kissinger talks with Suharto. Nairn even produced a State Department transcript of the Jakarta talks, further confirming that the invasion of East-Timor had been on the agenda. Kissinger was lying with a straight face. C. Philip Liechty went even further. He said, that without heavy us logistics support the Dili operation would not even have been possible, therefore it had been elaborately discussed in Washington as well.

Hitchens presented further shocking details about the Nixon-Kissinger conspiracy to destroy Salvador Allende. In 1998 declassified documents showed how Henry had never before showed the slightest interest in Chili, but this time he intended to impress his boss with an efficient elimination plan. At cia headquarters in Langley a group was set up to map a two-track policy. ‘One the ostensible diplomatic one and the other - unknown to the State Department or the us ambassador to Chili, Edward Korry - a strategy of destabilization, kidnap and assassination, designed to provoke a military coup’, wrote Hitschens on the basis of the documents. This is the standard scenario for cia operations. They were a carbon copy of the set-up for the Jakarta coup of 1965. It had worked in so many places, and it would once more work beautifully against Allende in Chili. It worked in Grenada, in Surinam, in Panama, in Pakistan, everywhere.

December 2, 1998 some Chilean files were released, but as Hitchens warned, much of what Nixon, Kissinger, the visible or invisible Washington gangsters had done, would remain safely under seal. They are being held by the cia, the Defence Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the National Archives, the presidential libraries of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and other government agencies. No wonder. As long as the Chief White House mobster of those glorious Nixon years is still very much alive and kicking, and internationally revered and applauded, no-one is supposed to uncover the truth, until this shady character has left the earth for good. Nixon was carried to his grave two decades after Watergate as one of the greatest presidents in American history. Henry should get a mausoleum in Berlin.