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.]
Code Pink attempted a citizens' arrest of Kissinger for war crimes
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 to "Arrest Kissinger for War Crimes." Calm was restored in about two minutes, during which Kissinger sat impassively and unthreatened, paying almost no attention to the demonstrators. At the same time, Albright squirmed restlessly in her seat and Shultz stood up and shouted at Code Pink.
As the hearing room was cleared of the peaceful, unresisting protestors, chairman McCain shouted, "Get out of here, you low-life scum." There were no arrests. Later McCain apologized "profusely" to Kissinger, commenting incredibly and hyperbolically that: "I have never seen anything as disgraceful and outrageous and despicable as the last demonstration that just took place."
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, also an excellent 2002 movie]. Code Pink's Medea Benjamin has previously challenged President Obama for his war crimes, particularly torture and assassination by drone. The day after this hearing, 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.
Benjamin suggested that McCain might have read 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 genitals with cigarettes."
If he read that report, would McCain still say: "I have never seen anything as disgraceful and outrageous and despicable as the last demonstration that just took place." Probably, given that those practices were part of Henry Kissinger's "great service" to his nation.
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