Amazing! War criminal Henry Kissinger is made use of by TIME to praise our beloved Great Leader. That is a travesty. Surely they could have found someone like John McCain or even Hilary Clinton????
Published on Tuesday, June 11, 2002 in the Toronto Globe & Mail
Is Henry Kissinger a War Criminal?
Thirty years after the death of Charles Horman inspired a bestseller and an Oscar-winning movie, his widow still pursues those she believes are really to blame -- including the former U.S. secretary of state. It's one reason the quest for international justice makes the United States so nervous.
by Marcus Gee
THE ACCUSED
Henry Alfred Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of state, national security adviser and Nobel laureate
THE ACCUSATIONS
Complicity in coup against Chilean government plus the "killing, injury and displacement" of three million people during Vietnam War.
CURRENT WHEREABOUTS
Head of Kissinger Associates, Inc., international consulting firm in Washington.
It was a rainy day in spring when they brought Charles Horman home.
Also See:
For Chilean Coup, Kissinger Is Numbered Among the Hunted
New York Times 3/28/02
Chile Court OKs Kissinger Queries in 'Missing' Case
Reuters 7/31/01
Chileans Call on Kissinger for Answers About Killing
Guardian of London 7/6/01
U.S. Victims of Chile's Coup: The Uncensored File
by Diana Jean Schemo, New York Times 2/13/00
The U.S. journalist and filmmaker had been abducted and killed after the Chilean military overthrew president Salvador Allende in September, 1973. Six months later, his body arrived by plane in a crude wooden crate with "Charles Horman from Santiago" scrawled on the side.
As the makeshift coffin was unloaded at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, N.Y., the driving rain washed the words away, sending trails of black ink down the box. It was April 13, 1974.
Even before Mr. Horman's widow, Joyce, found herself standing in the rain that day, she had vowed that no one would ever erase the memory of what had been done to her husband.
She has been true to her word.
In the chaos that followed General Augusto Pinochet's decision to depose Mr. Allende on Sept. 11, 1973, hundreds of the leftist president's supporters were taken away to be tortured, beaten or killed. Mr. Horman, an Allende sympathizer living in Santiago, was one of them.
In the month that followed, Ms. Horman, then 29, and her father-in-law, Ed, searched frantically for Mr. Horman -- an ordeal dramatized in the Oscar-winning 1982 film Missing, starring Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon.
The movie ends when Joyce and Ed discover that Charles is dead, killed by the military and his body hidden in a wall at a Santiago cemetery. But Joyce Horman's search continues. For 28 years, she has struggled to track down those who killed the man she loved. And the person at the center of her quest is none other than Henry Alfred Kissinger.
A leading citizen of the world's most powerful nation, Mr. Kissinger served as U.S. Secretary of state and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year as the coup in Chile. He was also national security adviser to president Richard Nixon, and Ms. Horman believes that he and other U.S. officials were deeply involved in the events that cost her husband his life.
It has been almost 30 years, and she doesn't seem bitter. At 57, she is pleasant and straightforward, in her stylish glasses with owlish frames, and has friends, a career and a social life. Nor does she seem obsessed with her dead husband. No photographs of him are to be seen in her bright apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Even so, the events of 1973 still cast a dark shadow. Asked what she misses most about Charles, she dissolves into tears and then explains: "He was intelligent, friendly, interesting -- he just loved life, and that's why his friends loved him."
Of course, nothing can replace the life she and her husband might have had. All that she wants now, she says, is the simple truth -- and that leads to Mr. Kissinger.
"There's no way around him," she says. "He is the most responsible person for the behavior of the U.S. government in Chile at that time. He needs to be put on trial."
A few years ago, that would have seemed wildly improbable. The armor of sovereign immunity protected all officials from the acts they committed on government service, no matter how unsavory.
But the 1998 arrest of the man behind the coup, Gen. Pinochet, has knocked a gaping hole in that armor Since then, a posse of victims, human-rights activists and crusading prosecutors has tried to apply this "Pinochet precedent" to others accused of mass killing, torture, abduction and war crimes.
Mr. Kissinger is their biggest quarry yet, and they are getting closer all the time. Now, prosecutors in Chile, Argentina, Spain and France want him to testify about what happened in Chile. Last month, a Chilean judge staged a re-enactment of the Horman killing at Santiago's National Stadium, and now wants Mr. Kissinger at least to answer written questions about U.S. involvement in the coup.
Ms. Horman is thrilled, but she has a different reason for chasing the great statesman: "My main goal is to find out what happened to Charles."
