Hitchens su Kissinger a Parigi

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg@tin.it>]

      The Nation, June 25, 2001
      The Fugitive
      by Christopher Hitchens


It was, take it for all in all, a near-faultless headline:

HENRY KISSINGER RATTRAPE;
AU RITZ, A PARIS, PAR LES FANTO; MES DU PLAN CONDOR.

I especially liked the accidental synonymy of the verb rattraper. What a
rat. And such a trap. It was in this fashion that the front page of the
Paris daily Le Monde informed its readers that on Memorial Day the gendarmes
had gone round to the Ritz Hotel--flagship of Mohamed Al Fayed's fleet of
properties--with a summons from Judge Roger Le Loire inviting the famous
rodent to attend at the Palace of Justice the following day. In what must
have been one of the most unpleasant moments of his career, noted Le Monde,
the hotel manager had to translate the summons to his distinguished guest.
Kissinger left the hotel, surrounded by bodyguards, and later announced that
he had no desire to answer questions about Operation Condor. He then left
town.

Operation Condor [see Peter Kornbluh, "Kissinger and Pinochet," March 29,
1999, and "Chile Declassified," August 9/16, 1999] was a coordinated effort
in the 1970s by the secret police forces of seven South American
dictatorships. The death squads of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay,
Paraguay, Ecuador and Bolivia agreed to pool resources and to hunt down,
torture, murder and otherwise "disappear" one another's dissidents. They did
this not just on their own soil but as far away as Rome and Washington,
where assassins and car-bombs were deployed to maim Christian Democratic
Senator Bernardo Leighton in 1975 and to murder the Socialist Orlando
Letelier in 1976. The Pinochet regime was to the fore in this
internationalization of state terror tactics, and its secret police chief,
Col. Manuel Contreras, was especially inventive and energetic.

Thanks to the efforts of Representative Maurice Hinchey, who attached an
amendment to the Intelligence Authorization Act last year, we now know that
this seven-nation alliance had a senior partner. At all material times,
those directing the work of US intelligence knew of Operation Condor and
assisted its activities. And at all material times, the chairman of the
supervising "Forty Committee," and the key member of the Interagency
Committee on Chile, was Henry Kissinger. It was on his watch that the FBI
helped Pinochet to identify and arrest Jorge Isaac Fuentes de
Alarcón, a Chilean oppositionist who was first detained and tortured
in Paraguay and then turned over to Contreras and "disappeared." Contreras
himself was paid a CIA stipend. Other Condor leaders were promised US
cooperation in the surveillance of inconvenient exiles living in the United
States.

Judge Roger Le Loire has had documents to this effect on his desk for some
time and is investigating the fate of five missing French citizens in Chile
during the relevant period. He has already issued an arrest warrant for
General Pinochet. But he understands that the inquiry can go no further
until US government figures agree to answer questions. In refusing to do
this, Kissinger received the shameful support of the US Embassy in Paris and
the State Department, which coldly advised the French to go through
bureaucratic channels in seeking information. Judge Le Loire replied that he
had already written to Washington in 1999, during the Clinton years, but had
received no response.

On the Friday immediately preceding Memorial Day, another magistrate in a
democratic country made an identical request. In order to discover what
happened to so many people during the years of Condor terror, said Argentine
Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, it would be necessary to secure a deposition
from Kissinger. And on June 4 the Chilean judge Juan Guzmán Tapia
asked US authorities to question Kissinger about the disappearance of the
American citizen Charles Horman, murdered by Pinochet's agents in 1973 and
subject of the Costa-Gavras movie Missing (as well as an occasional Nation
correspondent). So that, in effect, we have a situation in which the Bush
regime is sheltering a man who is wanted for questioning on two continents.

Partly because I have written a short book pointing this out, I have
recently been interviewed by French, British and Spanish radio and TV.
Indeed, if it wasn't for that, I might not have learned of Kissinger's local
and international difficulties for some days. The Financial Times carried a
solid story on the Paris episode, with some background, the day after Le
Monde. But in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington
Post--not a line. And where were Messrs. Koppel and Lehrer? They usually
find the views of "Henry" to be worthy of respectful attention. I admit my
own interest, but I still feel able to ask: By whose definition is
Kissinger's moment at the Ritz not news?

It is, meanwhile, practically impossible to open the New York Times without
reading a solemn admonition, either from the Administration or from the
paper itself. Colin Powell lectures Robert Mugabe. George Bush takes a high
moral tone with Serbia. All are agreed that wanted men should be given up to
international law. All are agreed that however painful the task, other
societies must face their own past and shoulder their own grave
responsibilities. For a long time I have found it somewhat surreal to read
this righteous material, but the experience of ingesting it now becomes more
emetic every day.

The seven Condor countries, groping their way back to democracy after
decades of trauma, are making brave and honest attempts to find the truth
and to punish the guilty. Time and again, commissions of inquiry have been
frustrated because the evidence they need is in archives in Washington. And
it is in those archives for the unspeakable reason that the United States
was the patron and armorer of dictatorship. There is a heavy debt here. Is
there not a single Congressional committee, a single principled district
attorney, a single leader in our overfed and complacent "human rights
community," who will try to help cancel it? Or are we going to watch while
the relatives of the murdered and tortured seek justice by lawful means, and
are waved away by armed bodyguards if they even try to serve a scrap of
paper on the man whose immunity befouls us all?