.
The Case Against Kissinger
According to the Senate calendar, the committee hearing was “to examine global challenges and the U.S. national security strategy,” again raising the implicit question of why the Senate would want to hear from people who were associated with the worst national security failures of the past half century, people who remain in substantial denial about the scale of their failures. As the hearing began, Kissinger joined the others at the witness table, and perhaps a dozen Code Pink members with several signs and a pair of plastic handcuffs started demonstrating with chants of “Arrest Kissinger for War Crimes.”
As the hearing room was cleared of the peaceful protestors, chairman McCain shouted, “Get out of here, you low-life scum.” There were no arrests. Later McCain apologized to Kissinger, commenting that: “I have never seen anything as disgraceful and outrageous and despicable as the last demonstration that just took place.”
For Armed Services chairman McCain to seek the advice of Kissinger, accompanied by former secretaries of state George Shultz and Madeleine Albright, does not send a peace-keeping signal to the country or the world. Albright, recall, has yet to express regret for her part in killing half a million Iraqi children, by supporting a sanctions policy about which she said: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.” [The collateral damage of child-killing has been acceptable to American policy makers for at least seventy years, and these three witnesses have yet to take exception to it.]
The war crimes case against Kissinger is well known and detailed by, among others, the late Christopher Hitchins in his book “The Trial of Henry Kissinger [2001]
The East Timor report by the UN Commission on Human Rights describing the horrific consequences of that Kissinger-backed invasion:
It includes gang rape of female detainees following periods of prolonged sexual torture; placing women in tanks of water for prolonged periods, including submerging their heads, before being raped; the use of snakes to instill terror during sexual torture; and the mutilation of women’s sexual organs, including insertion of batteries into vaginas and burning nipples and and genitals with cigarettes.
The day after this hearing,Medea Benjamin issued a piece titled “Who’s the ‘Low Life Scum:’ Kissinger or CODEPINK?” in which she outlined Kissinger’s most egregious crimes against Viet-Nam, Chile, East Timor, and the United States.
alexmanhatten 