Is Kissinger a War Criminal?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 22, 2001 | by Michael Rust

Christopher Hitchens argues that former Nobel Peace Prize recipient Henry Kissinger was a Cold War criminal. Are his claims just rhetoric, or do they have substance?

It was a good controversy, but it was, as they say, overshadowed by the day's events. On the very morning that terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City and attacked the Pentagon, the Washington Post reported that the family of Chilean military commander Rene Schneider had filed a lawsuit seeking more than $3 million in damages from Henry Kissinger and other Nixon-administration officials. Schneider had been killed during a botched kidnapping in 1970.

The day actually had different connotations for Schneider's family: It also was the anniversary of the death of Salvador Allende in 1973. The Marxist Chilean president either was killed by the CIA, as alleged by the left, or committed suicide, an act his personal physician claims to have witnessed, during the overthrow of his government.

"The 11th of September is the anniversary of the murder of President Allende and the assassination of Chilean democracy by a lawless gang that was then in charge of American democracy," Christopher Hitchens insists to Insight.

And that event is only one of many held against Kissinger by Hitchens in The Trial of Henry Kissinger, his book published this summer by Verso, the left-wing British publishing house. Based on a lengthy two-part article by Hitchens in Harper's last year, the book accuses Kissinger of committing war crimes in a number of countries, including Chile, Vietnam, Cyprus and Indonesia, among others.

Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and The Nation and a contributor to varied outlets, has in the wake of the tragedies in New York City and Washington produced commentary for myriad publications. However, he hopes that the new world situation will not completely blot out consideration of his book's arguments that Kissinger should be tried as a kind of Cold War criminal -- and not just before the bar of public opinion.

"I don't want anyone to suspect my motives in this" the earnest commentator says. "I think I can legitimately say they ought not to."

Some left-wing critics have linked the recent terrorist bombings to the failings of U.S. foreign policy. Hitchens vehemently rejects this argument. "Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by [the Revs. Jerry] Falwell and [Pat] Robertson," he wrote in The Nation, regarding what he called the "masochistic e-mail traffic" emitted by the Marxist-Leninist followers of linguist Noam Chomsky and historian Howard Zinn.

"Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life or ours," Hitchens says of the Sept. 11 attack by terrorists on the United States. The same, he says, holds true for the people he sees as the victims of Kissinger. "I know as well as some people, even most, the grievances [Kissinger's victims] have with American democracy," Hitchens says. "None of them would have dreamed of repaying the United States in kind, and none ever did."

Regarding Schneider, the chief of the Chilean General Staff, Hitchens writes that the CIA put a $50,000 bounty on his head to encourage officers to kidnap him. A conservative who opposed a coup attempt, Schneider himself became the target of a failed coup attempt; afterward, CIA cables said that "headquarters must respond ... to queries from high levels." Thomas Karamessines, then the CIA's director of covert operations, later testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that "high levels" referred directly to Kissinger.

The book may have inconvenienced the former secretary of state in ways that transcend the historical. On Memorial Day, Kissinger was served a summons in Paris at the Ritz Hotel by Judge Roger Leloire, who called him to testify about possible complicity in the overthrow of Allende. European press reports linked this to the then-recent publication of Hitchens' book in French.

Leaving France in a hurry, Kissinger agreed to speak with Time, during which he denounced The Trial of Henry Kissinger as "contemptible." Hitchens says he was inspired to write the book in part by the arrest in London of former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet and the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic in what remains of Yugoslavia. Pinochet escaped trial, but Milosevic was turned over to a U.N. court.

Hitchens argues that Kissinger "may be found liable for terrorist actions under the Alien Tort Claims Act, or may be subject to an international request for extradition, or may be arrested if he travels to a foreign country or may be cited for crimes against humanity by a court in an allied nation."

Hitchens also describes the unwillingness of Kissinger and Richard Nixon in 1971 to prevent Pakistan's suppression of what then was East Pakistan. Its president, Yahya Khan, was serving as Washington's conduit to the Chinese government in Beijing, a service which for Kissinger outweighed the responsibility for massacring thousands of Bengalis.