Fernando A. Torres is a freelance journalist, author, musician and poet. Under the Chilean military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Torres joined the Chilean resistance and in 1975 was arrested by the regime's secret police. While in prison, he recited poetry and handwritten quotes about optimism and hope among his fellow prisoners. After being expelled from Chile, Torres came to the U.S. as a political refugee. Torres’ debut book: Walks through the memory of oblivion; tales of resistance, prison, and exile, was published by Unsolicitedpress.com in Oregon. In Antofagasta, Chile, it was published in Spanish as Paisajes desde el olvido by Pampa Negra Ediciones.
“You should always say something good about the dead. He’s dead. Good.”
— Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley
On Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023, at the age of 100, the former secretary of state, well-known “diplomat,” security advisor, counselor of more than 11 presidents, pathological liar, and cold-blooded war criminal died in the town of Kent in the State of Connecticut.
Henry Kissinger will go down in history as one of the cruelest and bloodthirsty politicians of the modern era. What is known and hidden are the atrocities authorized by Nixon’s Secretary of State in Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus, East Timor, Indochina, the bloody treason against the Iraqi Kurds plus the secret actions to commit kidnappings, torture, and assassinations of social leaders around the world.
The carrot-and-stick approach, enriched malevolently by Kissinger on his trots around the planet, could be a picturesque subject of study in many prestigious universities, but for the rest of the world was a bloody way of imposing, torturing, and murdering that has left thousands of widows around the world.
Any phrase carved on Henry Kissinger’s tombstone should read: Here lies one of the greatest war criminals of the 20th century. His actions were so hidden within his foul political verbiage that many to this day hide his bloodthirsty political heritage that murdered thousands of people around the globe. Our country has a political system that from time to time produces such “neck and tie” hitmen and hides them in its aberrant system of political immunity until the end of their lives.
Kissinger: the Last Condor
On March 5, 2013, a historic trial was held in Argentina to clarify and eventually close one of the most horrendous chapters in the history of Latin America: Operation Condor. The trial was a great example of justice and truth not only for the entire continent, but for other nations that suffered similar trauma around the globe. However, in the dock, there was a key absentee.
Operation Condor was a coordination of the secret services and political police of the military dictatorships in Latin America during the 70s. The dismal agencies exchanged information and prisoners. In many cases, the agents traveled to other countries to torture those detainees who were not in a condition to be transferred or to have their bodies disappear in deserts or dumped into the sea. This operation manufactured false passports and allowed transportation of weapons in civilian passenger planes … and they communicated with each other in the event of terrorist attacks and political assassinations.
The exact number of victims of Operation Condor has not been established exactly. Some estimates indicate that at least 60,000 deaths can be attributed to Condor; approximately 30,000 of them in Argentina. The so-called “Archives of Terror” list 50,000 dead, 30,000 missing, and 400,000 prisoners. Most of the military officers directly responsible for Condor have been prosecuted and imprisoned, except for some of them who are protected by the U.S. “justice system” and are in hiding in this country. The last free Condor that international justice has not been able to capture was Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger was serving as Nixon’s Secretary of State, and while a well-known photo showed him shaking hands with Pinochet in Santiago, Chile, tens of thousands of people were being kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the continent’s military dictatorships.
He knew everything and was able to stop it. But he didn’t
According to documents declassified in 2010, Kissinger annulled a directive (approved by himself) with which he could have stopped the disgraceful Operation Condor. In a cable, dated September 16, 1976, Kissinger overturned a previous directive ordering ambassadors to warn dictators that the United States was against Condor and the international assassination campaign jointly planned by the military dictatorships.
Discovered among thousands of declassified documents, the cable was released on April 10, 2010, by the National Security Archives (NSA). This directive stopped Washington’s political pressure against blatant plans to physically eliminate political opposition to dictatorships and revealed Kissinger’s deep meddling and support for military dictatorships. It also unmasked the lie of Kissinger’s assistant, William Rogers (RIP), who said in 2004 that his boss “has nothing to do” with the said cable.
On Sept. 21, 1976 — 120 hours after Kissinger sent the cable canceling the political pressure against political assassinations — Chilean, Cuban, and American terrorists assassinated the Chancellor of Salvador Allende’s government, Orlando Letelier, and his aide Ronni Moffitt with a powerful bomb in the capital of Washington: the largest terrorist attack on American soil after the attack on the Twin Towers of September 11, 2001.
“… It is the final piece of the historic puzzle of the role of Henry Kissinger and the United States government in action and inaction after learning of the murderous plans of Operation Condor … Now we know what happened: The Department of State initiated an effort to stop a murder factory in the Southern Cone in time and Kissinger, without any explanation, aborted it … With the cancellation of the alert to the Condor nations, Kissinger prevented the delivery of a diplomatic protest that could conceivably stop a terrorist act in Washington DC,” said Peter Kornbluh, an NSA analyst.
On the television show Democracy Now (March 7, 2013), John Dinges, Professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism and author of the book The Years of the Condor: How Pinochet and His Allies Spread Terrorism to Three Continents, said that impunity has free will.
“There has never been any trial (by the International Court) against any Americans. There were also attempts in Italy and France. The United States, for one reason or another, the Democrats and the Republicans, protect our criminals.” When asked if he would describe Kissinger as a Human Rights criminal, Dinger replied, “Yes, totally.”
Kissinger: The Fifth Man in the Chilean Military Junta
In Chile, before Allende was ratified by the legislature as the legitimate president in 1970, the “Nobel Peace Prize winner” Kissinger — better known as the fifth man in the Chilean military junta — was already planning his overthrow and assassination. He once said that Chile was a dangerous “dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica.” A dagger that he had to remove at any cost. Allende had to be stopped regardless of whether democracy itself was destroyed in the process. Thus, he devised the policy of the “two paths,” on the one hand to isolate Allende at the international level and on the other, much dirtier side, to provoke the Chilean military to decide on the coup, through assassinations, political and economic sabotage.
Perhaps the Coup d’état of September 11, 1973, was the only battle Kissinger has ever won in his life.
Kissinger was Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977 and his international crimes and political ineptitude have been so numerous that in the book The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2002), the author Christopher Hitchens traces the legal path for any prosecutor, with three fingers head-on, anywhere in the world prosecute him for war crimes in Indochina, Bengal, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor. Hitchens makes it clear that this will not happen at his home in the United States (The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Christopher Hitchens. Editorial Verso. May 2001.)
Hitchens was a brave man. He was one of the few investigative journalists who dared to dig deep and write a detailed book on Kissinger’s crimes. Hitchens, who died of cancer in 2011, knew this boldness could cost him his life. In one of the many editions of it reads: The author “investigates and reveals Kissinger’s involvement in the massive and deliberate killings of civilian populations in Indochina; deliberate collusion in mass and targeted killings in Bangladesh; the personal bribery and planning of the assassination of a high constitutional official in a democratic nation with which the United States was not at war: Chile; inciting and enabling mass genocide in East Timor; and the personal participation in the kidnapping and murder of a journalist living in Washington DC. ” (Book introduction. Verso, 2001)
The Nobel Peace Prize 1973 has his hands bloody
A brief review of Kissinger’s crimes — his most notorious actions that made him an internationally renowned “statesman” with an honorarium of more than $25,000 per talk and at the same time, a fierce war criminal:
- Civilian deaths resulting from the U.S. aerial bombardment of Laos and Cambodia beginning in 1964, the extension of the Vietnam War through the sabotage of Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in Paris in 1968.
- The invasion of Cyprus by the Greek military junta in 1974.
- The coup, the destruction of Chilean democracy and the installation of the Pinochet dictatorship (1970 – 73).
- The crimes against humanity of the Pakistani army in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) known as the 1971 Bangladesh Genocide and Indonesia’s no-less bloody invasion (Operation Lotus) of East Timor in 1975.
A rather impressive record for a man awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize.
Between 1972-75, Kissinger lied to and betrayed the Iraqi Kurds when he encouraged them to take up arms against Saddam Hussein. After a diplomatic agreement with the Shah of Iran, Hussein almost exterminated the Kurdish-Iraqis. The findings of Congressman Otis Pike’s report detailing these bloody events, reaffirm Kissinger’s callous disregard for life and human rights.
Kissinger also defended and covered the bloody apartheid regime in South Africa and the destabilization of Angola. At the beginning of the 1980s Kissinger was president of the Presidential Commission for Central America and together with the mercenary Oliver North, tried to whitewash and hide the bloody activities of the death squads in Central America.
The Pahlavi (1925-1979) was the last dynasty of the Iranian monarchy of the Persian Empire that reigned in Iran until its overthrow by the Islamic Revolution. Kissinger protected and gave green light to the Pahlavi dynasty and its regime of torture and repression.
The name Indochina refers to the mixture of Indian and Chinese influences in the culture of the region made up of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, countries allied with France. Until 1950, the region was known as French Indochina and was considered a battlefield to stop the peasant and worker revolutions influenced by China and the Soviet Union. This led the United States and its politicians like Kissinger to the fore in covering and even supporting the deliberate mass murder of various civilian populations in the region.