Henry Kissinger’s Murderous Life & Legacy: A Perfect Symbol of the Rotted US Security State
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
Henry Kissinger, almost certainly the single most influential figure shaping post-World War II foreign policy in the United States, died yesterday at the age of 100.
Kissinger simultaneously served as the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor for two consecutive American presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
And in that position, and then well after, he exerted immense influence over some of the most defining events of U.S.
history in the 20th century, the Vietnam War, The secret and illegal bombing of Laos and Cambodia, the U.S.
sponsored and engineered coups in multiple countries around the world, and vital support for some of the most savage and brutal pro-American dictatorships on the planet, including various genocides in which they engage in order to hold on to their power.
Kissinger is He's easily one of the most controversial figures in modern American political history.
He is intensely despised in so many countries where he helps build enormous amounts of bloodshed, though he was treated until the day he died as a figure of great honor and respect in China, largely as the result of the key role that he played in forging relations between the United States and Beijing, culminating largely as the result of the key role that he played in forging relations between the United States and Beijing, culminating in Nixon's 1972 visit to that country, ending 23
Entire books have been written with the sole purpose of proving that Kissinger is one of the great monsters of the 20th century.
One of those books was written in 2001 by Christopher Hitchens entitled, quote, The Trial of Henry Kissinger.
Hitchens concluded that Kissinger was unquestionably guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracies to torture, kidnap, and murder all over the world.
The world-traveling and beloved chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain famously wrote, quote, Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.
Witness what he did and you will never understand why he's not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milosevic.
But for all those crimes, and for all the hatred harbored for him around the world, Kissinger was one of the most beloved and revered figures among the bipartisan U.S.
foreign policy elite up until the day that he died.
When Hillary Clinton was seeking the 2016 Democratic Party nomination against Bernie Sanders, she heralded Kissinger as her close friend and talked about how often she sought his advice and counsel when she was Secretary of State under President Obama and how she intended to do so again as President.
Western leaders today from Joe Biden and Antony Blinken to Tony Blair and George W. Bush and so many more gush with praise for Kissinger as they have many times over the years.
Much has been written about Kissinger over the last several decades and while it is definitely worth examining his key moments and policies in order to understand the underlying ideology that shaped him and the U.S.
government throughout the Cold War and then well after, it's far more valuable to take a hard sustained look at Kissinger in order to understand that his foreign policy mentality continues to this day.
to shape U.S.
foreign policy in very fundamental ways.
That's why U.S.
foreign policy elites and both political parties still revere him, because they're following him.
And it's also why anti-American sentiment continues to proliferate and intensify around the world in ways that, now that there's a competitor to the United States and China, is actually more threatening to the United States than ever.
We have a, I think, very well-researched and an illuminating show prepared for you that we are excited to show for you.
Before we get to that, just a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
There's no denying that Henry Kissinger was one of the most influential figures of the latter half of the 20th century.
That is not even remotely in doubt.
And in many ways his life story is a quintessentially American one.
He wasn't born in the United States, despite all the high office he held inside of our government.
He was born in Germany and he was a German Jew who fled rising anti-Semitism in Germany and came to the United States in 1938 and he intended to go to college and graduate school and was accepted to Harvard but before he went he enlisted in the army and fought for the United States in World War II and actually helped
It was part of the military that freed Germany, that liberated it from Hitler, freed Jews from the various concentration camps throughout Europe, and that was obviously one of the defining moments of his understanding of the use of military force was the great good that he participated in and saw that it do in that war.
He was able to go to Harvard and become a graduate student and a PhD and quickly gain a reputation at Harvard for being one of the most innovative and insightful foreign policy thinkers.
And despite having this very heavy Bavarian accent that he kept with him from Germany to the day that he died, It was sort of in English that people often had difficulty understanding.
He quickly became an advisor to the highest levels of the U.S.
government under the Kennedy administration and the Johnson administration.
And then it was once Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 when he appointed Kissinger to the position of his national security advisor.
He then became Secretary of State, and he was one of the only people in history to simultaneously hold these two very different positions.
Secretary of State, responsible for the diplomatic efforts and relations between the United States and foreign countries, and also the National Security Advisor, advising the president, the key National Security Advisor, on all questions of war and conflict and the relations between United States and other on all questions of war and conflict and the relations between
And this is a time, the late 60s into the 70s through the mid 70s of the Ford administration, where there was a lot of extremely complex and important and consequential foreign policy events taking place, the most dominant of which was the Vietnam War.
But beyond that, it was the height of the Cold War and under Kissinger, under Nixon and Kissinger and under the ideology that began to become dominant in the United States, The United States was heavily involved in the internal affairs of countless countries all over the world, nominally in the name of stopping communism.
That was the ostensible purpose of the Cold War.
And yet, Kissinger became such a fanatical warrior of the Cold War that he really convinced himself, often explicitly, That there were no moral constraints, no legal constraints, no ethical constraints, no constraints of any kind on the right of the United States, on the duty of the United States government to use military force, to use power, to use coups, to use the imposition of dictatorships.
No matter how many bodies were piled up of innocent people, and there were millions piled up in the policies that Henry Kissinger helped pursue and helped implement and conceived of and defended.
Literally millions, that's not hyperbolic.
The coups that he helped engineer all over the world were ones in which the United States helped topple the democratically elected governments of countries all over the world to replace them with pro-American dictators.
As the United States was selling the story to itself and to its population and to the world, that the United States stood for the spread of democracy.
We were often destroying other countries' democracies in order to replace them with dictators who would be more friendly to the United States.
And many of what the policies that he did under Nixon, under Ford, were illegal under American law, including the initiation secretly of a war in Cambodia and Laos that was an extension of the Vietnam War that had no congressional authorization.
Most people in Congress didn't know about it.
That was one of the most indiscriminate uses of military force in the history of the United States that ended up killing enormous numbers of people for no good whatsoever.
And I want to go through, not all, because obviously we wouldn't have time to do that, but many of the defining policies of Henry Kissinger.
Not so much to shape and define his legacy in the wake of his death 24 hours ago, because as I said, there's entire books that do that very well, but more to give you some insight into the fact that for all of the attempts to put Kissinger in the past and say, oh, those were things we used to do,
It's so often when someone brings up something like the coup that the CIA performed in Iran in 1954 that overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and replaced that government with one of the most savage, brutal dictators of the 20th century, the Shah of Iran, who then proceeded to rule that country with an iron fist for the next 25 years until he was overthrown.
In an Islamic revolution by a government that continues to govern Iran to this day, and obviously a population that hates the United States for having done that, there's an attempt to always say, oh yes, we used to do things like that back in 1954 and in the 60s and 70s.
We don't really do that sort of thing anymore.
That was the CIA of the old.
That was the Cold War.
The Cold War is over.
We don't really do that much anymore.
That is completely false, and that's what I want to illustrate more than anything.
Is that the reason there's so much bipartisan worship of Henry Kissinger, and that is what it is.
He lived an extremely wealthy life.
Once he got out of government, he was the most sought-after foreign policy voice on the planet.
He was paid a lot of money by foreign governments to help build influence inside Washington.
He was paid enormous amounts of money by corporations for his influence.
He wrote books that the media promoted and consumed and made him a lot of money as well.
But it was basically the well-worn path now of Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
of taking influence, political power and influence and access and converting it into massive amounts of personal wealth once you get out of power.
Kissinger trod that path as well, and he was able to do so because he was revered in the highest quarters of American power and Western power up until the day that he died.
So he's not a historical figure of the past that's worth studying to understand history.
He is a figure whose shadow is cast in a very long way in Washington and the foreign policy corridors of Western capitals to this very day.
And that's the connection I want to make.
That's the insight that I want to develop more than any other.
Because A lot of people didn't live through Henry Kissinger's governance.
He was in power officially in the late 60s and into the 70s.
Only people who were older were adults at that point.
And so the majority of the population really only knows Henry Kissinger as kind of a historical figure, but he's a very contemporary figure.
Someone without whom it's almost impossible to understand American foreign policy and foreign policy elites and the bipartisan consensus that continues to govern our country's foreign policy to this very day.
So let's just take a look at a couple of media articles that discussed his death and you'll get a sense for the tone here from Reuters.
Yesterday, Henry Kissinger, dominant U.S.
diplomat of the Cold War era, dies at the age of 100.
Democratic President Joe Biden called Kissinger's death, quote, a huge loss and noted his World War II military service and years of public service afterward.
Added National Security Spokesman John Kirby, quote, whether you saw eye to eye with him on every issue, there's no question that he shaped foreign policy decisions for decades.
And he certainly had an impact on America's role in the world.
Here is the U.S.
State Department official notice from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as well as Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog, who met today.
And here's a transcript of that part of the meeting.
Quote, you noted the passing of Henry Kissinger.
Secretary Kissinger really set the standard for everyone who followed in this job.
I was very privileged to get his counsel many times, said Blanken, including as recently as about a month ago.
He was extraordinarily generous with his wisdom, with his advice.
Few people were better students of history.
Even fewer people did more to shape history than Henry Kissinger.
Thank you.
Now I just want to take note of the fact, about six months ago, the alliance that's intended to be an alternative to the G20, the BRICS alliance, which we've talked about many times on this show before, the alliance that is named after its founding members, which are Russia, India, China, South Africa, and Brazil, had their summit in Johannesburg in South Africa.
And Vladimir Putin was unable to attend physically because South Africa is a signatory to the International Criminal Court and to the Hague, where the United States has ensured that war criminal charges are filed against Vladimir Putin.
And the South Africans are indignant about this.
The Russians are their ally.
And they know that the United States has done far worse than what the Russians have done in Ukraine and have never been charged ever with war crimes.
In fact, the United States is exempt from the ICC, has never signed on to become a party, and in fact enacted legislation the Congress has that authorizes the use of military force to go to The Hague and take American officials or American service members who are put there on trial as part of war crimes investigations.
And yet the United States engineered war crime charges against Vladimir Putin.
And no matter what you think of Vladimir Putin, no matter what you think of him, the amount of blood on his hands and the body count at his feet is an infinitesimal fraction of what Henry Kissinger built up in his life.
And not only isn't Kissinger considered a war criminal in any kind of official international law tribunal, He's heralded as a hero, someone of great wisdom, that Antony Blinken, knowing that Henry Kissinger is despised in so many countries, is willing to stand up and say, I constantly got advice from him and wisdom from him, including up until a month ago.
Here is PBS, quote, global leaders pay tribute to Henry Kissinger, while some online critics remember him as, quote, war criminal.
So you see that division.
American elites, the people who have had their hands on the levers of American power, adore and revere Henry Kissinger.
And then who's willing to say critical things of him?
Online critics.
Quote, America has lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices on foreign affairs, said former President George W. Bush, striking a tone shared by many high-level officials past and present.
Speaking of people who are not at the Hague and charged with war crimes, Quote, I have long admired the man who fled the Nazis as a young boy from a Jewish family, then fought them in the United States Army, Bush said in a statement.
When he later became Secretary of State, his appointment as a former refugee said much about his greatness as it did about America's greatness.
Former Prime Minister, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose defining legacy is The leading spokesperson for George Bush's invasion and destruction of Iraq said he was quote, in all of Kissinger.
And I understand why Tony Blair is because he not only was the leading advocate for the United States and British invasion of Iraq, but he also was an expert at running around the world becoming extremely wealthy.
serving foreign autocrats in order to become their spokesman worldwide and get paid very, very lucratively for doing so.
"Of course, like anyone who has confronted "the most difficult problems of international politics, "he was criticized at times, even denounced," Blair said.
"But I believe he was always motivated "not from a coarse real politic, "but from a genuine love of the free world "and the need to protect it.
He was a problem solver, whether in respect of the Cold War, the Middle East, or China and its rise.
This is the kind of propaganda that only Western leaders are capable of issuing with a straight face.
And the only people who take it seriously, I promise you, Our Western media outlets and the people who are fans of these political leaders.
How is it that Henry Kissinger can live his entire life being associated with United States engineered coups in other countries that destroyed the democratically elected government of other countries because they weren't subservient enough to the United States?
Replacing them with some of the most savage dictators and tyrants and despots the 20th century has seen.
That is indisputably what Henry Kissinger did.
Like bowling pins went around knocking democratically elected governments off and replacing them with despotic leaders.
Now, maybe you can justify that on the ground that, well, that served U.S.
interests.
We don't care if We spread democracy or tyranny as long as the governments are pro-American.
We don't care if they're democratic or despotic.
That's at least an honest description of Henry Kissinger's worldview.
But they cannot be honest.
So what they say and said was that, look, whatever you thought of Kissinger, he was the man devoted to spreading freedom and defending the free world.
Even though there are countries that have hundreds of millions of people who live in them, who to this very day live under dictatorship and tyranny, not democracy, because of Henry Kissinger.
One of his biggest fans, one of the most enthusiastic and unflinching, was Hillary Clinton, who actually created some controversy in the Democratic Party primary debate in 2016, when Bernie Sanders decided to Say in response to Hillary Clinton's attacks on his foreign policy, well at least I'm proud to say that Henry Kissinger was never my friend.
And here's part of that debate and what Hillary Clinton said in defense of her good friend Henry Kissinger.
The Secretary and I have a very profound difference.
In the last debate, I believe in her book, very good book by the way, in her book and in this last debate, she talked about getting the approval or the support or the mentoring of Henry Kissinger.
Now I find it rather amazing because I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive Secretaries of State in the modern history of this country.
I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend.
I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger and in fact Kissinger's actions in Cambodia When the United States bombed that country, overthrew Prince Sina, created the instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to come in, who then butchered some three million innocent people.
One of the worst genocides in the history of the world.
So count me in as somebody who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger.
Now, Bernie, of course, For all that, political drama has been a longtime supporter of some of the defining policies which Hillary Clinton stands for as well.
I saw and put online a very interesting interview that was conducted with Hillary Clinton in 2016 by Chris Matthews, the former MSNBC host who was one of the most blustering and kind of dumb people who have been on television for a long time.
In many years, just a standard cable blowhard.
But one of the things that is true of Chris Matthews is he was always contemptuous of neocons.
He hated neocons.
He came from this kind of Irish-Catholic-Paleo-Conservative line.
He was critical of Pat Buchanan, but had a lot in common with Pat Buchanan.
And even in the run-up to the Iraq War, when almost nobody on TV was questioning it, Chris Matthews was often insinuating that the reason that we were going to war in Iraq wasn't for the American interest, but for Israeli interests, or because of neocons.
And he had this very, very contentious 15 or 10 minute exchange with Hillary Clinton about where he basically accused her of supporting one war after the next, just constantly wanting to go around the world and start new wars, start new invasions, overthrow governments, like she did in Libya and Syria and Iraq and all these other places.
And she really had no way to try and justify it because there's no Justifying theory, but that was not a throwaway line where Hillary Clinton said Henry Kissinger was my friend.
That wasn't just some kind of thing in Washington that people say.
She had a very close relationship with him.
She really also did seek advice from him all the time and vowed she would do so as president.
Here from ABC News, Hillary and Henry Clinton's relationship with Kissinger Clinton and Kissinger's ties extend beyond politics.
Quote, the two former Secretaries of State have been close for years with Clinton calling him a, quote, friend and noting that she, quote, relied on his counsel when she was Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.
Quote, he checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels.
Though we have often seen the world and some of our challenges quite differently, And advocated different responses now and in the past.
She wrote in a review of his book, World Order, that was published in the Washington Post in 2014.
Notice when people say that, they don't actually ever specify what those differences are.
She knows he's a hated figure, so she's trying to say, don't hold everything he did against me just because I'm heaping praise on him and sought his counsel and will continue to do as president.
But I don't know of any specific policy That she actually disagreed with.
When she was a young college student, she protested the Vietnam War with Bill Clinton, but there was nothing in her subsequent career as an adult politician that suggested she would have opposed that in any way.
I don't believe she would have.
There's no way to reconcile Everything she did in every word she supported with the notion that she would have opposed the Vietnam War had she been an actual power and not a college student at the time.
The article goes on, quote, Clinton and Kissinger's ties extend beyond politics.
The two are so friendly that when Clinton was set to present a fashion industry award to designer Oscar de la Renta, the event was rearranged so that both Clinton and de la Renta were able to attend Kissinger's 90th birthday party in New York.
Henry Kissinger loved celebrity.
He dated many actresses.
He was famously credited with the phrase, powers an aphrodisiac, to explain why so many beautiful actresses were attracted to him, despite, let us be generous, saying that he was not exactly conventionally handsome.
And Hillary Clinton, of course, loves those kinds of elite power circles as well.
Her husband Bill has gallivanted around the world with all sorts of people.
And so this is the kind of circles that they kept together.
And Henry Kissinger was always at these sort of events, often with Hillary Clinton.
Here from The Intercept in 2016, Samantha Power to receive a prize from Henry, I was meaning to say that Bill Clinton traveled the world with Jeffrey Epstein.
I just couldn't, that name didn't come to mind.
The Intercept, Samantha Power to receive prize from Henry Kissinger, whom she once harshly criticized.
Quote, the former human rights activist used to have harsh words for Kissinger's blood-soaked legacy, but now she's a top Obama administration official.
Samantha Power built her journalistic and academic career around human rights.
Criticizing powerful nations for their complicity in abuses and failure to stop acts of genocide.
Then she joined the Obama administration, where she currently serves as U.S.
Ambassador to the UN.
Early next month, Powell will be receiving an award named for a man she used to criticize quite harshly, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who has been implicated in a significant number of war crimes across the globe.
And she'll be getting it from Kissinger herself.
Power did not respond to a request for comment.
However, a 2014 profile in the New Yorker may provide some insight into how Power's worldview on human rights abusers has changed.
Quote, as my time wears on, I find myself gravitating more and more to the GSD people, the get shit done people, she told the magazine.
We're racing against the clock here to get as much done as we can.
So when you run across people who know how to be bureaucratic samurais or are especially persuasive in their diplomacy internationally, spend more time on those relationships and on brainstorming with those individuals to achieve a common purpose.
Principles and positions only take you so far.
I think this is so often so much of what happens.
Chris Hayes, the MSNBC host, actually wrote a very good book in 2011 before he got his primetime show called Twilight of the Elites.
And one of the concepts he discussed at length was something he called cognitive capture, which means that no matter how well-intentioned you are, no matter how smart you are, If you start to enter elite institutions of authority and power and become immersed in them and succeed in them and your career and your self-esteem and your self-identity start to depend on them, inevitably they will co-opt you.
You will start to see the world through their prism because everybody that you're around that matters to you and your prosperity thinks this way and you'll start to think that way too.
Inevitably, he said.
I remember in that interview I asked him, You seem like you're rising at MSNBC.
Are you doing anything to insulate yourself against this?
And he said, I haven't really thought about it.
And he turned out to have been speaking honestly because Chris Hayes went from a left-wing critic of the Democratic Party to one of the most hackish and reliable and blind defenders of the Democratic Party as a result of being at MSNBC, just like Samantha Power went from being a critic of Henry Kissinger to just being one of the people who automatically viewed him as someone from whom she should learn, at whose feet she should sit.
That's what happens with these people when they get integrated into this D.C. culture.
Now let's look at a few of the specifics of the kinds of things Henry Kissinger did.
One of the worst was his support for what became the completely savage junta that ruled Argentina, the military junta that ruled Argentina in the 1970s in which hundreds of thousands of people were disappeared.
And here is a National Security Archive posting from August of 2004.
That reveals that Kissinger told the Argentine generals in 1976 who were at the head of this military junta, because this was at a time when these countries that relied on the United States and were in the corner of the United States in the Cold War, had to observe the limits the United States imposed for what they could and couldn't do.
And Kissinger wasn't a fan of limits.
And he told them, quote, if there are things that you have to do that have to be done, you should do them quickly.
A newly declassified document obtained by the National Security Archive shows that amidst vast human rights violations by Argentina's security forces in June 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Argentine Foreign Minister Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti, quote, if there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly, but you should get back quickly to normal procedures.
Another document recently unearthed by the National Security Archive and posted for the first time there shows that on July 9th, 1976, Secretary Kissinger was explicitly briefed on the rampant repression taking place in Argentina.
Quote, their theory is that they can use the Chilean method.
Kissinger's top aide on the Latin America, Henry Schlauderman, informed him.
Quote, that is, to terrorize the opposition, even killing priests and nuns and others.
Kissinger reiterated his message during another meeting with Guzzetti in New York on October 7th, telling him, the quicker you succeed, the better.
A day earlier on June 9, 1976, clandestine Argentine security forces had ransacked the Catholic Commission for Refugees in Buenos Aires and stolen refugee records.
The day after Guzzetti and Secretary Kissinger met on June 11, 24 Chilean and Uruguayan refugees were kidnapped, held illegally for two days, and tortured by a combined Argentine-Chilean-Uruguayan squadron.
Guzzetti also described the intelligence coordination with neighboring dictatorships, quote, the terrorist problem is general to the entire southern cone.
To combat it, we are encouraging joint efforts to integrate with our neighbors, all of them, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil.
This collaboration was codenamed Operation Condor, By the end of 1976, 10,000 Argentines had been disappeared or assassinated by the Argentine security forces.
Half a dozen American citizens had been kidnapped and tortured.
On the international front, the cooperation between Argentine military and intelligence forces and other Southern Cone militaries left hundreds of Uruguayans, Chileans, Bolivians, Paraguayans, and Brazilians disappeared, tortured, and or dead.
Here's the Buenos Aires Herald, the largest newspaper in Argentina, in April of this year.
And I just want you to see, these things don't go away in the consciousness of the countries to whom the United States does these things.
When the people in these countries think of the United States, especially when you have China over here saying, come be in our corner, we don't invade countries, we don't bomb countries, we don't engineer coups, we want to do business with you.
These perceptions linger for obvious reasons.
If you lived in a country where there was a bloody coup and a bloodbath that followed where the government that you or your parents voted for was removed from power with the help of a foreign government wanting to control your country and its resources and imposed on your parents or your family or your country was a brutal dictatorship that slaughtered
Tens of thousands of dissidents and journalists and activists and members of the opposition party and piled up bodies by disappearing them.
And you knew the United States or some other country was directly responsible for it.
Of course, you would have great animosity toward that other country.
And you wouldn't trust the things they say.
And you would scoff at the idea that they're devoted to spreading freedom and democracy around the world.
When they start a new war, and they say, we want to go help, you would, of course, be very cynical or jaded about that.
And the more countries where that happens, I'm talking about large countries here, then of course the more anti-Americanism there's going to be in the world.
And if you're the only superpower and there's no alternative, then on some level you let countries stew in their resentment and there's not much that they can do, but the minute there's a multipolar world or some alternative, those countries can't wait to Put the knife in the back of the United States because they feel like they've been waiting decades, if not generations, for vengeance.
This is the sort of thing that has serious consequences all over the world.
Here's the Buenos Aires Herald from this year.
46 years of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
They took on the dictatorship looking for their children and have not stopped since.
Quote, "Once a week, come rain or shine, a group of mothers gathers in a Buenos Aires square and walks.
They wear white handkerchiefs tied to their heads with names sewn onto them." Today marks the 46th anniversary of their first demonstration on April 30th, 1977.
On that Saturday, the mothers of Plaza de Mayo first got together at the square, which would give them their name.
Since then, they have returned demanding to know the fate of their disappeared children 2,392 times.
In 1977, as silence and fear coded social life in Argentina, the Buenos Aires Herald was one of the few media outlets that reported on the forced disappearances denounced by families and friends of those who went missing.
The mothers, as well as the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, would visit the Herald's newsroom to tell their stories and provide information for its reporters to write about what was otherwise completely made invisible.
Now, let's assume you're in Argentina.
And you know that one of the people who enabled all that to happen in your country was Henry Kissinger, who, representing the most powerful country on Earth, told The generals who had assumed dictatorial control of your country go take care of whatever you need to take care of in the quickest way possible knowing that they were talking about exactly this.
Giving them the green light to go ahead.
Providing them the support and the arms needed to stay in power as they did it.
These are things you don't learn in American schools.
I went to school Elementary school, middle school, high school in the United States.
I know what I was taught about my country and what I should think about my country and this history was not included, but it is included in most of the world.
And it's a reason why so often Americans think other people in other parts of the world are crazy in their views.
But maybe that's because we are as propagandized as any other place in the world.
And maybe our perspective of our country's role in the world is what is distorted or incomplete.
Probably, again, it is very hard to say what the worst thing Kissinger did.
I probably would put Laos and Cambodia at the top.
One of the worst things about the United States in the latter half of the 20th century was its very close partnership with the extremely savage dictators of Indonesia, the military leaders of Indonesia, and the mass murder, the genocide really, that they perpetrated in East Timor.
And Henry Kissinger was at the heart of that as well, as was the entire United States government.
Indonesia is today one of the top four or five most populous countries on the planet.
And Indonesians also know of this history, of course, much better than the United States does.
So imagine you're in Argentina, you're in India, you're in Indonesia and Henry Kissinger dies and you see Joe Biden and Blinken and Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush saying this was the greatest man, we loved him, we took advice from him to this very day we did.
A month ago I was taking advice from Henry Kissinger.
What would you think about the United States government?
From the Washington Post in 2001, the 1975 East Timor invasion got U.S. go-ahead.
President Gerald R. Ford and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger gave Indonesian President Suharto, easily one of the worst monsters of the 20th century, the go-ahead for Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor that left at least 200,000 people dead.
Newly declassified documents show.
It has long been suspected that Ford and Kissinger approved the invasion of the former Portuguese colony.
They met with Suharto in Jakarta on December 6, 1975, the day before he sent Indonesian forces into East Timor.
In a secret State Department telegram, Ford and Kissinger assured Suharto, That they would not object to what the Indonesian leader termed, quote, rapid or drastic action in East Timor.
Quote, we will understand and will not press you on the issue, Ford said, according to the Telegram, which was declassified in June and posted on the website of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
Quote, we understand the problems you have and the intentions you have.
Kissinger told Suharto, quote, it is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.
Same thing he told the Argentinian generals.
He also urged Suharto to wait until he and Ford return to the United States.
Quote, the president will be back on Monday at 2 p.m.
Jakarta time, he said.
We understand your problem and the need to move quickly, but I'm only saying it would be better if it were done until after we return.
That was the only request that he had of Indonesia, knowing they were going to invade and massacre the people of East Timor.
He said, just do us a favor, wait until we're back home for you to start it now.
You might be thinking, well, why is it the responsibility of the United States to stop Indonesia from invading and massacring the people of East Timor?
That is not the point.
The point is that the United States had helped put these people in power.
We're propping them up in power with military aid and money.
They were controlling Indonesia, like they control so many countries today through aid and through weaponry.
So it wasn't just a question of the United States failed under Henry Kissinger to take action to stop atrocities in their countries.
It was Henry Kissinger who gave it the green light, who enabled it to happen.
Massive amounts of bodies piled up by supporting dictatorship at the same time that the American people largely believed because their media and their government told them.
That all of these wars and all of these military actions and all of the CIA coups were all designed to just make the world freer.
When in fact, we were implanting and controlling the most savage despots on the planet.
The exact opposite of what the American people were told to believe about their country.
Here from Sciences Po in October of 2011.
Three centuries of violence and struggle in East Timor.
Quote, incidents of mass violence have on many occasions made East Timor a focus of attention.
That has received the greatest media coverage.
Those that received the greatest media coverage were perpetrated during the Indonesian occupation from 1975 to 1990, which saw the death of 20 to 25 percent of a population that totaled 700,000 in 1975.
So when we're talking about 200,000 people being massacred and murdered, And this invasion that Henry Kissinger said, just the only request I have is you wait until we're back home.
Talking about out of a population of 700,000.
They wiped out a quarter of the population.
In December 1978, the Indonesian military admitted to having interned 372,900 Timorese people, 60% of the population, in 150 camps, confined in with very little land to cultivate the prisoners experienced the famine that the International Committee of the Red confined in with very little land to cultivate the prisoners experienced the famine that the International Committee of the Red Cross says, quote, "was The situation did not improve in subsequent years.
three other famines occurred in 1981, 1982, 1984, 1987.
This is a monster, Henry Kissinger, and his view of the world was very clear, which was if anything in some way advances American interests, then we should which was if anything in some way advances American interests, then we should do it regardless of the body count, regardless of the ethical considerations or the moral considerations or In other words,
We're not interested in the democracy of other countries at all, even though we keep saying that that's what makes us better than the Soviet Union, even though we keep telling the American people that that's what our project is.
Our project is the opposite.
Henry Kissinger's view was not that we should sit at home and ignore the rest of the world.
That's an isolationist view.
Henry Kissinger was not an isolationist.
He was the opposite.
He was an interventionist.
He wanted to go around intervening in other parts of the world, not under the pretense of helping those countries, although, of course, that was the propaganda, but not his pretense that he would offer to himself.
Instead, it was, if we need something that we want to take here, if we need to control a country here, we're going to put in whoever we want, and whatever the cost is in terms of human life, to do it is the cost we're going to pay.
It's like a sociopathic foreign policy spread all over the world.
This morning, one of the senior foreign policy officials in the Obama administration, Ben Rhodes, with whom I've had all kinds of clashes and for whom I have all kinds of critiques, wrote an article in the New York Times about Henry Kissinger's death that was very mildly headlined, Henry Kissinger, the hypocrite.
But it was actually a Much better and more scathing indictment of Henry Kissinger than that headline suggests.
Now, ironically, a lot of the critiques that Ben Rhodes made of Henry Kissinger apply very much so to the Obama administration and to Obama officials.
But nonetheless, it was a critique that you don't often hear of the American foreign policy community from a top-level foreign policy official published in the New York Times.
And one of the focal points of this op-ed was this illegal war that Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon started where we were in the Vietnam War and we were losing.
That, of course, is what the Pentagon Papers proved, that American officials knew we were losing, we were unlikely to win, that a stalemate was the best possibility.
While we were telling the public, while the government was telling the public for all those years that victory was six months away, that they just had to keep being a little more patient and paying for a little bit more and sending their sons to die in the jungles of Vietnam, inside the Pentagon, inside the White House, including in the Nixon administration, they knew that victory was impossible.
And it was Daniel Ellsberg who exposed that in the Pentagon Papers and that was why Nixon and Kissinger despised Daniel Ellsberg.
They broke into his psychoanalyst office.
Henry Kissinger suggested he was a Soviet agent because he exposed the truth.
But one of the things that happened As part of the Vietnam War was that Nixon and Kissinger started a secret war that not even the US Congress knew about in Cambodia and Laos on the other side of the Vietnam border, based on the view that there were Viet Cong operating from Cambodia and Laos.
And it was at a time when the Americans really were getting humiliated and starting to lose the war.
And the order that Kissinger gave to the Pentagon, to the military, To take this illegal war, this secret war that was not known to the Congress, let alone authorized by it, let alone to the American people, was to shoot and bomb everything that moves.
Shoot and bomb everything that moves.
The United States dropped so much ordnance on Laos and Cambodia that it might have been the most amount of bombing it did, including World War II, as I'm about to show you.
To this very day, children of Laos are killed when they find undetonated bombs and traps of all kinds in their country.
It was one of the most savage and indiscriminate war crimes committed in that time.
It was domestically illegal and morally reprehensible.
And we all know it.
Hillary Clinton knows it.
Anthony Blinken knows it.
Tony Blair knows it.
George W. Bush knows it.
And yet, just nothing but oozing praise for this person.
Well, we report to be the moral authority and beacon of freedom in the world.
Quote, for him, this is Ben Rhodes in the New York Times, credibility for Kissinger, credibility was rooted in what you did more than what you stood for, even when those actions rendered American concepts of human rights and international law void.
He helped extend the war in Vietnam and expand it to Cambodia and Laos, where the United States rained down more bombs than it dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II.
That bombing, often indiscriminately massacring civilians, did nothing to improve the terms on which the Vietnam War ended.
If anything, it just indicated the lengths the United States would go to express its displeasure at losing.
Kissinger wrote a shelf of books, many of which polish his own reputation as an oracle of global affairs.
After all, history is written by men like Henry Kissinger, not by the victims of superpower bombing campaigns, including children in Laos who continue to be killed by their unexploded bombs that litter their country.
Credibility, after all, Sorry, I just lost my place.
Credibility, after all, is not just about whether you punish an adversary to send a message to another.
It's also about whether you are what you say you are.
No one can expect perfection in the affairs of the state any more than in the relations among human beings.
The United States has paid a price for its hypocrisy, though it's harder to measure than the outcome of a war or negotiation.
Over the decades, our story about democracy has come to ring hollow to a growing number of people who can point to the places where our actions drained our words of meaning and democracy just sounded like an extension of American interests.
Similarly, our insistence on a rules-based international order has been ignored by strongmen who point to America's own sins to justify their own.
Now, one of the major culprits in all of this has been the corporate media, and I've talked many times before about how people like to debate what is the ideological bias of the corporate media.
I was thinking about this recently, in fact, when if you ask Supporters of Israel, they will tell you that the New York Times is one of the most viciously anti-Israeli pro-Palestinian newspapers on the planet.
But if you ask pro-Palestinian activists, they will tell you the New York Times is a fanatically Zionist Newspaper that's owned by a family, the Sulzberger family, that are fanatical supporters of Israel.
They editorialize in favor of Israel.
And it made me realize that people love to complain about the media being biased.
Everyone insists the media is being biased.
I've never once heard, never once, anyone say the media is biased, but on this particular important issue it's biased in favor of my view.
Everyone always thinks the media is against it.
Against them.
Everybody.
But when people argue, is the media a bias toward the left?
Is it a bias toward the right?
I do think on cultural issues and the like, you can have that debate, and they're clearly biased toward the left.
On culture war issues, like abortion and LGBT issues and gun control, those sorts of things.
But on issues of war and foreign policy, it's absolutely not a bias of the left or the right.
The bias is subservience to the security state.
They describe to their viewers and propagandize their readers on behalf of the vision of the US security state.
And I can show you so many examples, so many examples, where the CIA would overthrow a democratically elected government in a particular country.
And the media in the United States, Time Magazine under Henry Luce, which was very influential in the Cold War, and the New York Times and the Washington Post, and to this day they do the same, they would describe the overthrow of a democratically elected government and the imposition of a dictatorship as an advancement of democracy.
They would say the people rose up and overthrew their corrupt dictators and it's a vindication of democracy.
Even though it was the CIA overthrowing the government, the leaders that those people had elected democratically.
That's how Orwellian the media was going hand in hand with these policies.
Now, here from The Intercept in 2023, There's the title blood on his hands with a picture of Henry Kissinger.
Survivors of Kissinger's secret war in Cambodia reveal unreported mass killings.
Quote, Kissinger bears significant responsibility for the attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians, according to Ben Kiernan, former director of the Genocide Study Program at Yale University and one of the foremost authorities on the U.S.
air campaign in Cambodia.
Grandin estimates that overall Kissinger, who also helped to prolong the Vietnam War and facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh, we haven't even gotten to Bangladesh, accelerated civil wars in Southern Africa, and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America, has the blood of at least three million people on his hands.
Let's just stop here for one second.
Henry Kissinger has the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands.
This is a very systematic study.
This person at Yale specializes in the air campaign in Cambodia.
And what they're talking about is the policy of Kissinger in prolonging the Vietnam War, facilitating the genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh.
And the civil wars that he accelerated in Southern Africa, and then the death squad throughout Latin America.
And if you total that up, we're talking about somebody who has the blood on his hands of at least 3 million people.
And yet, US leaders have no problem going before the world to these in front of these countries and saying, Henry Kissinger was a great man who represented us and from whom I sought counsel and advice.
One night in December 1970, Nixon called his National Security Advisor in a rage about Cambodia.
Quote, I want the helicopter ships.
I want everything that can fly to go in and crack the hell out of them.
Nixon barked at Kissinger according to a transcript.
I want gunships in there.
That means armed helicopters.
I want it done.
Get them off their asses.
I want them to hit everything.
Five minutes later, Kissinger was on the phone with General Alexander Haig, his military aide, relaying the command for a relentless assault on Cambodia.
Quote, it's an order, it's to be done.
Anything that flies or anything that moves, you got that?
So that was the US approach to the bombing campaign in Cambodia.
Anything that flies, anything that moves, you bomb.
How is the United States ever having moral credibility to accuse others of war criminality or crimes against humanity?
Here from Al Jazeera, the U.S.
bombs continue to kill in Laos 50 years after the Vietnam War.
The U.S.
dropped 2 million tons of bombs on Laos at the height of the Vietnam War.
Why are cluster munitions still killing?
Now, again, the United States was not at war with Laos.
Congress never declared war on Laos.
Kissinger and Nixon ordered the bombing of Laos secretly, meaning illegally.
Obviously, Laos wasn't a country that could attack the United States.
They claimed at Harvard, or that pro-Vietnamese, pro-Viet Cong fighters were using Laos as a base to attack American soldiers.
And their solution was just to unleash a bombing campaign on Laos, worse than what happened in Japan and Germany in World War II.
That, as we just showed you, had no constraints of any kind.
Kill anything that moved, bomb anything that flies.
On Thanksgiving Day in November 1968, the United States escalated its war against North Vietnam in Laos.
At the same time, the U.S.
began dropping millions of tons of bombs.
They quote, fell like rain on the supply lines in Laos, a network of path and tracks known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
And most of the east of the country.
Now some 80 million unexploded bombs and airdrop cluster munitions left over continue to maim and kill Laotian men, women, and children.
Quote, about 75% of injuries from cluster munitions involve children, she tells Al Jazeera, referring to the tennis ball-sized fragmentation bomblets.
that have acquired the local name Bommies.
They were dropped in their millions on Laos.
Thousands of children have been killed or severely wounded by them.
And Tor says they are, quote, everywhere.
Callum Gibbs, a 26-year-old Scot, working in the southern province of Savakonet for Halo Trust, a U.K.-backed NGO, a U.S.-based NGO focused on bomb clearance, said data suggests there have been 50,000 casualties since the war ended, just from the remnants of bombs that Kissinger casualties since the war ended, just from the remnants of bombs that Kissinger Here's in The Guardian that also attempted to define the worst parts of Kissinger's legacy.
And it's from Latin America.
It's the Latin American perspective.
Latin America remembers Kissinger's quote profound moral wretchedness.
And this is about what the United States and Kissinger did in Chile in overthrowing the democratically elected left-wing government in Chile, Andorra Lende, and replacing him in a military coup with Augustin Pinochet, who ruled that country as a dictator for many years to come.
Again, they had a democratically elected government in Chile voted for by the people.
We didn't like the results of that election.
So we work with Chilean generals that we paid, that we courted, to use military force to remove that government.
And then imposed dictatorship on Chile that murdered all kinds of dissidents and journalists, dropped people from helicopters, terrorized the country to submit to Pinochet's rule.
U.S.
statement, encouragement of Pinochet's coup in Chile and his backing of Argentine military dictatorship left a lasting stain.
Quote, nowhere has been the reaction more damning than in Chile, where Kissinger was instrumental in the 1973 coup that led to the death of a democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and the installation of a dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, and his military junta.
Kissinger was a man, quote, whose historical brilliance was never able to conceal his profound moral wretchedness.
Wrote Juan Gabriel Valdez, Chile's ambassador to the U.S.
on X. Formerly Twitter, the coup was seen as a major victory by Richard Nixon's White House, but it marked the start of 17 years of autocracy in Chile.
The files published by the NSA made clear Kissinger's central role in the Chilean coup.
In 1970, he warned Nixon that Chile would become, quote, the worst failure of his administration and that it might develop into, quote, our Cuba without U.S.
intervention.
He chaired the committee that oversaw CIA operations to undermine the Allende government.
Quote, I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.
Kissinger said the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
Now as many of you know, I live in Brazil and have lived here for 18 years and my husband was a congressman and I I started a media outlet here and did reporting in Brazil.
I know Brazilian political culture quite well.
And Brazil had its own US-sponsored coup in 1964.
And that wasn't on the ledger of Henry Kissinger.
He wasn't in government yet.
But it was very similar to the kinds of coups Henry Kissinger loved to engineer all over the world.
And Brazil had elected not even a left-wing government, a center-left government.
That was doing things like offering land reform and rent control.
And first, the Kennedy administration and the Johnson administration said, we're concerned you're moving too far left.
Remember, this is a democratically elected government in Brazil.
The CIA, JFK, and Lyndon Johnson are sitting in Washington telling the Brazilians, thousands of miles away, you're moving too far left in your economic policies.
And if you don't stop that, We're going to do something about it.
And the Brazilian president said, I was elected by the Brazilian people.
We have radical economic inequality, and I intend to fix that.
And Brazil was determined to be neutral, to stay out of the access of the United States or the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
But neutrality wasn't enough for Washington.
They demanded that governments be fully pro-Washington, and so the CIA under LBJ worked hand-in-hand with Brazilian generals to violently overthrow the democratically elected government in Rio de Janeiro, that was the capital of Brazil at the time, force the Brazilian president into exile, took over the country, And proceeded to rule Brazil as a military dictatorship supported by the U.S.
and the U.K.
for the next 21 years, from 1964 until 1985, when it began to redemocratize.
And there was all kinds of brutality.
Disappeared journalists, exiled dissidents, murdered and disappeared people of all kinds.
And obviously the shadow of that dictatorship hangs over Brazil.
And if you ask somebody who's in Brazil what they think of the United States, that Coup 60 years ago is going to color what they think of the United States and what they think of the United States claims that they're going to war to protect democracy and spread freedom.
And this repeats itself over and over and over and over.
What was done in Brazil was not even close to the top of the list of horrors, but it still shapes Views of the United States in a way that I think many Americans are incapable of understanding because they aren't told that history.
So when they hear this anti-American sentiment, they think people just hate the United States irrationally.
And so much of this was on the ledger of Henry Kissinger.
Here from the BBC, November 2018.
Chile's caravan of death.
Ex-army sheriff convicted for Pinochet-era crimes.
Quote, General Pinochet had seized power from the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.
An estimated 3,200 people were murdered and 28,000 tortured by agents of the state during his dictatorship.
More than 1,000 people are still listed as missing.
I began writing about politics in late 2005.
That's when I started my blog.
And about a year later, General Pinochet died.
And I knew this history.
I knew that he had imposed these incredible horrors, complete destruction of democracy and freedom inside Chile.
And when he died, the Washington Post editorialized by heaping praise on Pinochet.
And I wrote about it at the time because This is when I was really starting to pay close attention to American politics and it was amazing to watch media outlets in the United States, again, depict these things as positive when the people of Chile were terrorized by them.
And here's the title of what I wrote, the Washington Post's praise for Augusto Pinochet.
Quote, the editorial page of the Washington Post today lavishly praised right-wing dictator, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The editorial begins with the cursory, really almost bored and resentful acknowledgement that, quote, for some, Pinochet was the epitome of an evil dictator.
Why would the dreaded unnamed some shriek that Pinochet was an evil dictator?
No good reason, only this, quote, Mr. Pinochet was brutal.
More than 3,000 people were killed by his government and tens of thousands tortured, mostly in the first three years.
Thousands of others spent years in exile.
The Post even belittles the contempt expressed for Pinochet by claiming that it is due less to the murder and torture of his political opponents.
and is instead driven by the fact that, quote, he helped to overthrow with U.S. support an elected president considered saintly by the international left, socialist Salvador Allende, whose responsibility for creating the conditions for the 1973 coup is usually overlooked.
This is what is exactly done today.
The United States helped engineer a coup in Ukraine because the government was considered to pro-Moscow, even though it was democratically elected, We had U.S.
senators going to Kiev outside of the presidential palace and encouraging the protesters to overthrow their democratically elected government.
And they did, and there was imposed in the place a pro-EU, pro-U.S.
President that wasn't elected, that was imposed.
Victoria Nuland, remember, was plotting who should be in the government and got caught.
It had nothing to do with democracy, it was the opposite of democracy.
And yet at the time, the bipartisan DC class claimed that we were advancing democracy in Ukraine and that's how it was depicted by the military.
The Brazilian coup, that I just explained in American media, Was wildly heralded as a blow for democracy, the people rising up against their dictator.
The CIA lied and said it had nothing to do with it.
It was six years later that documents started to emerge proving it did.
That's true for every one of these cases.
The CIA denied involvement.
We only learned after that they did.
And so here you see the Post somehow blaming the elected government.
It doesn't matter if Salvador Allende was a saint.
What matters is he was elected by the people of Chile and Henry Kissinger wanted a different government and so engineered an overthrow.
This is what the US media has been doing for a long time.
They, of course, play a crucial role in the ability to propagandize the public into not just accepting this but to thinking of it as the opposite of what it really is.
Here's Politico in June of 2022, where they ask, is the State Department trolling Henry Kissinger?
Quote, an official ceremony will honor a diplomat who paid a steep price to cross the master of real politic.
Quote, when the State Department hosts a gathering next week to dedicate a conference room to the memory of Archer Blood, the official man of the hour will be the late American diplomat who, in 1971, protested a US ally's shockingly bloody crackdown in what was then East Pakistan.
But another name will likely linger unspoken, Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State most associated with America's support for what many scholars now understand as a genocide.
This is a totally different case.
This is Pakistan in Bangladesh.
A career Foreign Service officer, Blood spent 1970 and 1971 as the U.S.
Consul in Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, but then the major city in Pakistan's impoverished, rustic eastern wing.
The posting in the isolated military-ruled province made Blood the senior American witness to one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 20th century.
A campaign against separatists that erupted into a mass murder of students, intellectuals, and the local Hindu minority.
10 million refugees fled to the neighboring India.
A reign of terror bled reported in a cable back to Washington soon after Pakistan's launch of Operation Searchlight.
Thousands were slaughtered, innocent, along with allegedly guilty.
In another cable, he called it selective genocide.
The problem for Blood was that Washington didn't want to hear it.
As far as the Richard Nixon administration was concerned, Pakistan was a crucial Cold War partner, and the staffers calling attention to the violence were an unwelcome complication.
Kissinger, then the National Security Advisor, argued against even asking the Pakistanis to avoid violence, according to meeting notes from the time.
There you see again, Kissinger giving the green light to American allies this time in Pakistan to commit absolutely a genocide.
Now one of the reasons that they said that I think it's so important to look at this I mean, it is an important part of American history, and it's an important part of recent American history.
That defines how so many people on this planet think of the United States in ways that our media likes to ignore if they have to hear it dismissed as those other populations being propagandized.
I think it's important to know what our government has done around the world to the people of the planet who remember it very well.
But these things are not of the past.
There's a reason that Hillary Clinton considers Henry Kissinger's advice so relevant, as does Anthony Blinken, as does Tony Blair.
It's because the premises of Henry Kissinger's worldview continue to shape American foreign policy in so many ways.
We continue to do coups.
We continue to support the most savage dictators around the world.
Here is the New York Times in August of 2021, the legacy of America's post 9-11 turn to torture.
Quote, 20 years after the attacks, the United States is still grappling with the consequences of brutal interrogations carried out in the name of national security.
Mr. Sly was one of the detainees whose torture at Guantanamo Bay was carried out.
This is Mohammed Sly, by the way, who I just recently met with in Amsterdam.
He had that amazing story.
He was in Guantanamo for 15 years, never charged with any crime.
He was picked up when he was 21 years old.
Absolutely tortured.
And then when he was finally released, he preached the virtues of forgiveness and moving past it.
He did a tour with his Guantanamo guard with whom he had befriended.
And his Guantanamo guard went around Steve Bell with him talking about the torture and abuse that he witnessed at Guantanamo.
And he wrote a book called The Guantanamo Diaries that was turned into a film.
He's an amazing person.
I have a friend of him.
I met with him in Amsterdam just a couple months ago.
And he actually, we went out to dinner and he was telling me it was one of the first times in two years he had even gone outside of his house because of all the trauma from being in Guantanamo for 15 years.
Mr. Sly, who was one of two detainees whose torture at Guantanamo Bay was carried out under a program approved by Donald A. Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary at the time, the United States also sent 119 people into CIA's overseas network of secret prisons, including the accused plotters of the September 11th attack, where detainees were routinely sleep deprived, shackled in excruciating ways, and subjected to rectal abuse and other brutal treatment.
The CIA has acknowledged that three detainees were waterboarded, one died of abuse, many more were brutalized, and the U.S.
or allied detentionist interrogators improvised their own methods.
A comprehensive study by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee of the agency's program concluded that the techniques did not save lives or disrupt terrorist plots and were not necessary, finding that the CIA disputed.
But beyond the torture regime, and I know as a participant in that debate, people always say, oh, it was three people who were waterboarded.
The CIA tortured, not just at Guantanamo, but they created secret black sites all over Eastern Europe.
So that human rights organizations had no idea where they were, so they couldn't visit, used the most brutal kinds of torture.
People died in detention as a result of those techniques.
But what we also did was a kidnapping program that we called Rendition, where the United States would simply target people in Europe that they suspected of having some kind of terrorist ties, and the CIA would kidnap them from the streets of Europe and send them to Egypt and Syria to be tortured by Assad and Mubarak and then by Sisi afterwards.
These aren't things of the past that used to be done in the Cold War.
CIA agents were indicted in Italy for having kidnapped one of their citizens off the streets of Milan and sent to Egypt to be tortured.
The United States intervened sufficiently so none of them ever suffered any charges.
But the Italians, who were American allies who helped invade Iraq...
Saw it that way.
Here from the Human Rights Watch, January 9th, 2022.
Legacy of the quote, dark side, the cost of unlawful U.S.
detentions and interrogations post 9-11.
Quote, with the participation of at least 54 governments, the CIA secretly and extrajudicially transferred at least 119 foreign Muslims from one foreign country to another for incommunicado detention and harsh interrogation at various CIA black sites.
At least 39 of the men were subjected to waterboarding, walling, rectal feeding, a form of rape, and other forms of torture.
The U.S.
military also held thousands of foreign Muslim security detainees and prisoners of war, including some women and boys, at its detention centers abroad, including Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and its naval base at Guantanamo, and subjected many to physical and psychological abuse.
Here from the BBC in August of 2013 tells the story of the Egyptian coup that the United States helped participate in that to this day empowers General Sisi, one of the most savage dictators on the planet.
And that was an amazing history because the pictures of the Arab Spring and all those people protesting against their dictatorship in Tahrir Square in Egypt, in Cairo, were so inspiring.
CNN showed it every day.
Americans really identified with these protesters, were so moved by them.
It was almost never mentioned during that coverage that the dictator against whom they were protesting was Hosni Mubarak.
Who stayed in power with United States money and weapons.
Hillary Clinton, in a cable released by WikiLeaks, referred to Hosni Mubarak and his wife as very close friends of the Clintons.
So you hear about some of the worst, most barbaric dictators on the planet.
And what happened was those protests succeeded in having Mubarak step down and having an election held in Egypt, the first democratic election in decades.
And the people of Egypt went and voted.
And they didn't vote for the preferred American candidate.
They voted for Mohammed Morsi, who was part of the Muslim Brotherhood.
And he became the president of Egypt.
And obviously, the United States was not going to tolerate that.
And participated in a coup with the Egyptian military that overthrew Morsi before he even had a year in office.
Again, as Kissinger said, this is far too important to leave to the Egyptian people.
And installed a brutal dictatorship that does the United States bidding to this very day.
And when it happened, under the Obama administration, as the BBC here headline shows in August of 2013, Obama's Secretary of State John Kerry called it a restoration of democracy.
Called the military coup that overthrew the only elected government of Egypt that had, in decades, a restoration of democracy.
Egypt army, quote, restoring democracy, says John Kerry, quote.
Mr. Kerry said the removal was at the request of millions and millions of people.
That's what they do.
They hold elections, which counts everybody's vote, and the majority, the person who gets the most votes wins.
And then when they want to change That government, by removing them, they get protesters, like they did in Kiev.
And they're like, oh, look, there's a lot of protesters here.
This must be the Democratic will.
Kerry's remarks came as police prepared to disperse two pro-Morsi sit-ins in the capital, Cairo.
Washington has refused to describe Mr. Morsi's removal as a coup.
Doing so would require the U.S.
government to cut off its estimated $1.5 billion in annual aid to Egypt.
Here from the Wall Street Journal, June 2014, John Kerry voices strong support for Egyptian President Sisi.
Secretary of State becomes the highest-ranking U.S.
official to meet Sisi.
Quote, Mr. Kerry said that the U.S.
had recently released $575 million in assistance for Egypt's military and that he was confident 10 Apache helicopters would soon be delivered to Egypt.
The U.S.
froze much of its $1.3 billion in annual military aid to Egypt last year, including the helicopter sales, after the army overthrew President Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood.
an Islamist movement.
Quote, I am confident that we will be able to ultimately get the full amount of aid.
Mr. Kerry said in his first step on a regional tour focused largely on responding to the crisis in Iraq.
Quote, I am confident that the Apaches will come and they will come very soon.
Remember, Ben Rhodes said the United States under Kissinger violated our image in the world and contradicted what we told our population about how we intend to spread democracy by instead undermining and Ben Rhodes said the United States under Kissinger violated our image in the world and contradicted what we told our population about how we intend Undermining and removing democratically elected governments and replacing them with dictators that are hated by their people.
And here you see, in Egypt, the Obama administration doing exactly that.
And calling it a restoration of democracy.
And, as General Sissi was gunning down protesters who still wanted democracy, like they were promised, the United States provided him with the helicopters that the Egyptian military used to open fire on those protesters in Egypt.
So you can try and isolate this to Kissinger if you want, but the reality is it continues to shape American foreign policy to this very day.
Speaking of American support for the world's worst dictators here in Reuters in 2016, Obama Administration Arms Sales Offered as Saudi Arabia Tops $115 Billion It's the most of any U.S.
administration in the 71-year U.S.-Saudi alliance, a report seen by Reuters has found.
Washington arms sales to Riyadh recently have come under fire from rights groups, and some members of Congress are disturbed by the rising number of civilian casualties in the war in Yemen.
Where a coalition led by Saudi Arabia is fighting Iran-allied Houthi rebels.
The conflict has killed at least 10,000 people.
Last month, the United States Human Rights Office said that 3,799 civilians have died in the conflict, with coalition airstrikes responsible for an estimated 60% of the deaths.
The coalition said it does not target civilians and accuses the Houthis of placing military targets in civilian areas.
Always the same justification, but Ben Rhodes went and wrote in the New York Times today that Henry Kissinger was responsible for the destruction of America's standing in the world by preaching democracy and supporting dictatorships and yet the Obama administration helped engineer a coup and supported the coup leaders in Egypt and continues to prop up the Saudis with the very weapons they use to have created the worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen and to stay in power.
One of the Snowden stories we did Was about how during the Obama administration, the Saudis got upgraded in terms of how the NSA classifies them and the types of intelligence technology that they can receive.
So much of the technology, the surveillance technology, that the Saudi Interior Ministry uses to monitor its population and punish and arrest and murder dissidents comes directly from the NSA.
Because the real foreign policy of the United States, a staple of foreign policy of the United States, is not, as neoconservatives like to claim when it's time to sell a new war, go to spread democracy.
The staple is the opposite.
The staple is to keep populations under control, to prevent their anti-American sentiments from finding expression in their governments by imposing on those populations brutal dictators, savage dictators, Which murder people who are dissidents and prevent any kind of populist uprising against their governments.
And everyone in the region and everyone in those countries knows that it's the United States that imposes those dictatorships on them.
The Osama Bin Laden letter that people recently discovered, a lot of them did, and started reading until The Guardian removed it from its website and rendered those links broken.
And that TikTok ended up banning at the demand of the United States government.
Talked a lot about how the reason people in the Muslim world hate the United States, because they know their hated dictators are ones imposed on them by the United States.
But it's not just in the Middle East.
It's also true in Asia, and Latin America, and all over the world.
And it's not from the distant past, but from right up until this very day.
Speaking of the Obama Administration, here in 2016, the last year of the Obama Administration, NBC News reported the following.
The U.S.
bombed Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia in 2016.
Quote, the U.S.
dropped 26,171 bombs on seven countries in 2016, according to an analysis by the Council of Foreign Relations.
And here's one very recent coup that doesn't get a lot of attention.
It happened under Hillary Clinton.
It's from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
August of 2017, quote, investigation reveals new details of the U.S.
role in the 2009 Honduras military coup.
Quote, with the coup occurring just six months after Obama came to office, pledging new relations with the hemisphere, the article focuses on the Pentagon and its Latin American subsidiary, Southcom, and how vested interests undermine U.S.
official policy, helping the coup succeed in ushering in a new wave of violence and repression in Honduras.
A high-level U.S.
military official met with Honduran coup plotters late the night before the coup, indicating advanced knowledge of what was to come.
While the U.S.
ambassador intervened to stop an earlier attempted coup, a Honduran military advisor's warning the night before the coup was met with indifference.
Multiple on-the-record sources support the allegations of a whistleblower at South Com's flagship military training university that a retired general provided assistance So that is the legacy of Henry Kissinger.
And the reason U.S.
lobbying in defense of the coup, U.S. training of Honduran military leaders and personnel relationships forged during the Cold War, likely emboldened the Honduran military to Al-Salea, the democratically elected leader, and helped ensure the coup's success.
So that is the legacy of Henry Kissinger.
And the reason U.S. officials continue to say that they find Kissinger so admirable and rely on his advice so much is precisely because they continue to follow in his path.
Yes.
Now, if you believe that the United States should not in any way be constrained by morality as it goes around the world pillaging and killing, as long as there's a perception that it's in American interest to do so, and you say that, that's at least candid.
That of course is never what the United States government or its media say.
It's not what most Americans believe their government does, because that is the very definition of propaganda.
And the problem is, is that if Other people on the planet in these countries know the United States is doing this that can never be positive for U.S.
national security in the long run.
Maybe there's some short-term benefit to gain by overthrowing a democratically elected government, imposing a dictatorship, helping a genocide where hundreds of thousands of people are died or tens of thousands of people are disappeared.
But over time, The world starts to understand or perceive that your country is a force for evil in the world, not for good.
And when you have a multipolar world or a competing superpower now in China saying, you really want to keep following the United States after all these things it's done?
Or do you want a new world where you're going to be free of these sorts of
Imperialist attacks and violence and potentials to destabilize your country that's going to be very attractive to countries not because China is some angelic country, but because they have a real story to tell based in fact and truth that other people in the world see with the American population has all often been kept from And it is remarkable remarkable
That someone like Henry Kissinger and the blood that he has on his hands is considered one of the most revered and beloved figures in Washington, D.C.
and in elite circles that run bipartisan D.C.
foreign policy.
But on the one hand, while it's shocking that it's true, on the other hand, it's completely unsurprising because the people who continue to run bipartisan foreign policy in the United States really are the progeny, the seeds, the children of Henry Kissinger and his twisted and rotted mentality.
That concludes our show for this evening.
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