Hillary Clinton and State Dept. to Celebrate War Criminal Henry Kissinger, While the White House Rep

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Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger addresses a keynote on the theme of power shifts and security at the opening day of the eighth Annual IISS Global Strategic Review conference in Geneva.


Hillary Clinton and State Dept. to Celebrate War Criminal Henry Kissinger, While the White House Repeats His Deadly Mistakes
AlterNet / By Fred Branfman

September 28, 2010 | Nothing more symbolizes how the temptations of power can corrupt youthful values and idealism than Secretary Hillary Clinton's invitation to Henry Kissinger and Richard Holbrooke to keynote a major State Department conference on the history of the Indochina war. As an idealistic college student, Clinton protested Kissinger's mass murder of civilians in Indochina. She knows full well that had the international laws protecting civilians in war been applied to Kissinger's bombing of civilian targets in Indochina he would have been indicted for crimes of war.

But on Sept. 29 she will introduce Kissinger at the State Department Historian's conference, giving him a platform to continue 40 years of Orwellian deception in which he has sought to blame Congress for the fall of Indochina rather than accepting responsibility for his massive miscalculations and indifference to human suffering.

Clinton has also invited Richard Holbrooke, who as State Department head of Afghanistan/Pakistan policy has learned nothing from history and is repeating precisely the same policies that caused the U.S. to lose in Indochina -- support of a corrupt and unpopular regime that cannot stand on its own. Inviting Holbrooke is particularly egregious, because following Obama's strategy review, according to Bob Woodward's new book, "perhaps the most pessimistic view came from Richard Holbrooke. "It can't work," he said. Lacking even a fraction of the integrity and moral courage of a Daniel Ellsberg, Holbrooke continues to promote in public a policy he privately believes is doomed to fail.

Inviting Kissinger to keynote a conference on U.S. history in Indochina insults history, the memories of tens of thousands of Americans and countless Indochinese civilians who needlessly died as a result of his policies, the young people of America who desperately need to learn the truth about what occurred in Indochina so as not to repeat it, and all those who oppose indiscriminate mass murder of civilians.

Giving Kissinger and Holbrooke a platform also has important policy implications for the present.