Yahoo Finance The Fact That Henry Kissinger Is Still Alive Convinces Me That There Is No God
Every now and again, the good people at the National Security Archive share some of what they’ve newly pried loose from history’s abandoned mine shafts. Generally, this information adds to what we know about our government’s past crimes and blunders that were kept from us at the time. This week’s dispatch involves the United States’ knowledge of, and assistance to, the creation and subsequent horrors of the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 until 1983. That involvement was considerable, shameful, and had a lot to do with Henry Kissinger. But I repeat myself.
The documents posted today record the U.S. government knowledge of the plotters, their preparations for the coup, and their potential plans for what State Department officials described as “military rule for an extended duration and of unprecedented severity.” They show that the U.S. “discreetly” advised the military more than a month before the actual coup that Washington would recognize the new regime…Anticipating problems with the United States over the repression against subversion they would implement, the Argentine “military planning group” approached officials in their own foreign ministry to advise “as to how the future military govt can avoid or minimize the sort of problems the Chilean and Uruguayan govts were having with the U.S. over [the] human rights issue.”
Perhaps to discuss that very issue, the documents show that the Argentine military sought to meet with Kissinger in advance of the coup—an idea discouraged by Ambassador Hill. On February 13, 1976, Hill met with an Argentine-born U.S. businessman named “Mr. Carnicero” who informed him that “several high-ranking military officers have asked him to arrange a meeting between an appropriate military representative and Secretary Kissinger” so that they could explain why they needed to take power and seek assurances of prompt recognition.
How Henry Kissinger, a one-person blight on human history, is still walking around free, let alone still welcome in so many government and media venues and halls of power, is an eternal shame to this nation and to the highest ideals it pretends to honor. The fact that he is still alive convinces me that there is no god, and the only good I can conceive of in his continued survival is that we haven’t yet had to read the inevitable elite encomia that invariably will attend his demise.
“There is no evidence that the U.S. instigated the coup,” said Carlos Osorio, Director of the National Security Archive Southern Cone Documentation Project. “But the United States accepted, and tacitly supported, regime change because Washington shared the military’s position that the putsch was the only alternative to chaos in Argentina.” The documents, Osorio noted, “indicate that U.S. officials wanted to believe that General Videla, the coup leader, was a moderate. The military dictatorship that followed killed and disappeared more than 20,000 people.”
In retrospect, it appears that the Monroe Doctrine was an idea that at the very least should have had an expiration date.
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