Henry Kissinger usually has an easy time defending the
indefensible on national television. But he faced some pointed questions
during a recent interview with the PBS "NewsHour" about the U.S. role in
bringing a military dictatorship to Chile. When his comments aired on Feb.
20, the famous American diplomat made a chilling spectacle of himself.
Nearly three years after the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the
elected socialist president Salvador Allende in September 1973 and brought
Augusto Pinochet to power, Kissinger huddled with the general in Chile. A
declassified memo says that Kissinger told Pinochet: "We are sympathetic
with what you are trying to do here."
While interviewing Kissinger, "NewsHour" correspondent Elizabeth
Farnsworth asked him point-blank about the discussion with Pinochet. "Why
did you not say to him, 'You're violating human rights. You're killing
people. Stop it.'?"
Kissinger replied: "First of all, human rights were not an
international issue at the time, the way they have become since. That was
not what diplomats and secretaries of states and presidents were saying generally to
anybody in those days."
Right. Back then, we didn't know that it was wrong to kidnap
people; to hold them as political prisoners; to torture them; to murder them.
Kissinger added that at the June 1976 meeting with Pinochet, "I
spent half my time telling him that he should improve his human rights
performance in any number of ways." But the American envoy's concern was
tactical. As Farnsworth noted in her reporting: "Kissinger did bring up
human rights violations, saying they were making it difficult for him to
get aid for Chile from Congress."
In Chile, the victims of Kissinger's great skills numbered into
the thousands; in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, into the hundreds of
thousands and more. Seymour Hersh's 1983 book The Price of Power:
Kissinger in the Nixon White House documented his remarkable record as a
prodigious liar and prolific killer. But the most influential news outlets
continued to treat Kissinger with near-reverence. In 1989, he was elected
to the board of directors of CBS. The autobiography of Katharine Graham,
the owner of the Washington Post Co., praises Kissinger as a dear friend
and all-around wonderful person.
Kissinger is still commonly touted by news media as Dr. Statesman
Emeritus. On Feb. 16 of this year, CNN interviewed him live a few hours
after the United States and Britain fired missiles at sites near Baghdad.
Anchor Bernard Shaw asked about the sanctions against Iraq, but neither man
said anything about the human toll -- although an estimated half-million
Iraqi children have died as a result of sanctions since the early 1990s.
Kissinger offered his wisdom: "The United States has absolutely nothing to
gain abandoning sanctions."
Today, as in the early 1970s, tactical concerns loom large in
Washington's corridors of power -- and in much of the news media. On the
networks, routine assumptions confine the discourse to exploring how the
U.S. government can effectively get its way in the world -- not whether it
has a right to do so. For the present, moral dimensions are pushed to the
margins.
Napoleon observed that it's not necessary to censor the news, it's
sufficient to delay the news until it no longer matters. That might be a
bit of an overstatement; truthful information about the past is valuable
even if it comes late. But when lives are in the balance, truth is vital
sooner rather than later.
In the present tense, with foreign-policy stakes high, media
professionals routinely defer to official sources. Most U.S. journalists
are inclined to swallow the deceptions fed from high levels in Washington.
Months or years or decades later, big news outlets may report more
difficult truths. But by then, the blood has been shed.
No wonder so many high-ranking foreign policy officials are eager
to visit network TV studios, especially in times of U.S. military actions.
If the questions get prickly, they're apt to be of a tactical nature: Will
this missile attack be effective? Will it hurt relations with allies or
backfire in world opinion? Did the targets get hit?
We don't hear much fundamental questioning of top officials from
the White House or State Department or Pentagon about intervention abroad.
Nor do we get much assertive journalism that challenges ongoing support for
repressive American allies such as Indonesia, Turkey, Israel, Egypt and
Saudi Arabia. On the "NewsHour" and other major network programs, when the
subject is current policies, I don't recall questions along the lines of:
"You're violating human rights. You're killing people. Why don't you stop it?"
The recent superb "NewsHour" report on U.S. policies toward Chile
was titled "Pursuing the Past." In truth, that's a very tough endeavor for
mainstream journalists. And pursuing the present is even more difficult.
Norman Solomon is a syndicated columnist. His latest book is The Habits of
Highly Deceptive Media.
