In the February and March 2001 issues of Harper’s Magazine Christopher Hitchens wrote a lengthy indictment of Henry Kissinger. He said “I am concerned only with those Kissingerian offences that might or should form the basis of a legal prosecution: for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offences against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture.”
Henry Kissinger’s Impressive Resume
Born in 1923 in Bavaria, Germany, Kissinger fled the country of his birth with his family in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution. His family settled in New York and he eventually went to Harvard where he received his doctorate.
He spent most of his working life in academia and government. The highlights of his career came in working for two presidents; he served as National Security Adviser to presidents Nixon and Ford from 1968 to 1975. He also held the job of Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977.
Escalation of the Indochinese Conflict
The major item in the Hitchens dossier against Kissinger is his conduct of the Vietnam War. And Hitchens is not alone.
In his 1983 biography of Henry Kissinger, The Price of Power, Seymour Hersh writes that Kissinger, who was a member of the U.S. peace negotiating team, worked behind the scenes to sabotage the Paris Peace Talks aimed at bringing an end to the Vietnam War. The talks were close to a success that would have turned the 1968 election in favour of Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey.
The talks failed, Richard Nixon won the presidential election, Henry Kissinger was appointed to high office, and the Vietnam War dragged on for another four years.
LA Weekly also covers Kissinger’s involvement in the illegal carpet-bombing of Cambodia and the subsequent loss of tens of thousands of lives.
Overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile
In 1970, Salvador Allende, a socialist, won the presidential election in Chile. Three years later, Allende was removed in a coup and murdered and the fingerprints of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Henry Kissinger were all over the plot.
On June 12, 2002, The Guardian reported “Henry Kissinger may face extradition proceedings in connection with the role of the United States in the 1973 military coup in Chile.”
At the time, the man who replaced Allende, General Augusto Pinochet was facing trial over the thousands of Chileans who were tortured and killed under his brutal rule. Kissinger is also implicated in the “death of the American film-maker and journalist Charles Horman, who was killed by the military days after the coup,” wrote The Guardian.
Horman’s story was the subject of the 1982 movie, Missing.
Will Kissinger be Brought to Trial?
It seems extremely unlikely that Henry Kissinger will ever have to face the accusations against him in a court of law. He still circulates among the highest levels of international affairs. When U.S. President Barack Obama chaired a meeting of the UN’s Security Council on September 24, 2009 Henry Kissinger was there glad-handing with the elite of the world’s diplomatic corps.
Kissinger has been found guilty of war crimes but only in the 2002 documentary, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, and the book by the same name written by Christopher Hitchens.
The last word goes to satirist Tom Lehrer who was shocked when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his role in negotiating an end to the Vietnam War. “Irony died,” said Lehrer, “the day they gave Kissinger the peace prize.”
See also: Is Dick Cheney a War Criminal?
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