The Chris Moeller Archives

The tyrant kings

War criminal Henry Kissinger remains a free man, but now some citizens of his own country have seemingly had enough. Members of the Code Pink political action group held up handcuffs and chanted the words "war criminal" as the 91-year-old Kissinger appeared before at a Senate Committee hearing, a setting in which Kissinger has long been welcomed as an honored guest.

The principles established by the international convention at Nuremberg in 1946, during the forced de-Nazification of Germany, have no statute of limitations, and Kissinger’s crimes against humanity are numerous and well-documented. U.S. federal courts have also established that they have jurisdiction over crimes such as terrorism, assassination, and kidnapping involving non-U.S. citizens in foreign countries, and have established precedent for acting when a non-citizen of the United States brings suit for a violation of a U.S. treaty or of international law. Kissinger’s role in the sabotage of the Indochina peace process in Paris in 1968, the secret, illegal and genocidal bombings of Cambodia and Laos, the assassination of the democratically-elected president of Chile, Salvatore Allende, in 1973 (the original 9-11), and the authorization of genocidal military actions in Bangladesh and East Timor, should make him most vulnerable. Kissinger’s ally in Chile, the butcher Augusto Pinochet, was likewise prosecuted for crimes against humanity in his own country after third-party countries found him to have committed acts in violation of the Geneva Convention. While thousands of Chileans were being tortured and murdered by Pinochet, Kissinger told the General, "You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende."

Kissinger, the lion in winter, has as enough time to appear on Capitol Hill and to write op-ed pieces on U.S. foreign relations for respected publications like the Washington Post and the New York Times partially because his prospects of international travel during his golden years are severely restricted by the threat of arrest. He has fled indictments in France, Spain, Argentina, and Uruguay. The U.S.’s failure, to this point, to adhere to signed treaties and to international law when it comes to Dr. Kissinger has severely damaged its reputation as an honest broker when it addresses other nations on the topic of human rights. They are empty words from a rogue state.

Since the U.S. political establishment protects Kissinger, as the complicit always must, it falls to human rights groups like Code Pink to act as agents of provocation. Senator John McCain, whose legacy of public service would have been better protected had he been left for dead in a Vietnamese POW camp, this week called the Code Pink activists "low-life scum." He had no comment, that I could find, for the U.N. Commission on Human Rights and its report of the 100,000+ civilians raped, tortured, mutilated, and starved following the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. That was a massacre greenlit by Kissinger. As was the indiscriminate murder of more than a million people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos by the United States military. On tape, we can hear Kissinger ordering that particular genocide, "Anything that flies or anything that moves."

Free of his bunker for a day, Kissinger should have been arrested by Capitol guards at McCain's insistence. Instead, the Senator imagined the idea of a physical threat upon the life of Kissinger by a political group that's dedicated itself to non-violence. He came to the swashbuckling aid of perhaps the greatest enemy of democracy on the planet, the man who famously authored the line that the United States "should not stand by and watch a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible," and a man who treated the United States Constitution with the same disdain that he treated the Chilean one.

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If you wish to know more of why America has so little authority in the world on matters of human rights, check out this essay by Glenn Greenwald in the Intercept addressing the contrasting White House obituaries of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah...

One obvious difference between the two leaders was that Chávez was elected and Abdullah was not. Another is that Chávez used the nation’s oil resources to attempt to improve the lives of the nation’s most improverished while Abdullah used his to further enrich Saudi oligarchs and western elites. Another is that the severity of Abdullah’s human rights abuses and militarism makes Chávez look in comparison like Gandhi.

In case you're wondering, John McCain joined Obama's chorus of praise for Abdullah. He eulogized the monarch last week as "a vocal advocate for peace, speaking out against violence in the Middle East." I wonder what convinced him. Was it the public floggings for the distribution of non-Muslim religious materials, such as Bibles, or the public beheadings for adultery or sorcery? Maybe it was the flood of money from the House of Saud that funneled straight to the Syrian rebel army, to Boko Haram in West Africa, to al-Shabab in East Africa, and to the 9-11 hijackers. Nothing but praise for Abdullah from Obama, McCain, and Secretary of State John Kerry upon his passing, yet today, Kerry's department imposed visa restrictions on unnamed Venezuelan officials accused of suppressing anti-government protests a year ago.

You gotta love this quote from a State Department official upon announcing the new restrictions, "We are sending a clear message that human rights abusers, those who profit from public corruption, and their families are not welcome in the United States."

posted by CM @ 9:01 PM