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Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

lunarchick - 05:44pm Jun 22, 2001 EST (#5815 of 5845)
lunarchick@www.com

Putin's speech that GI commended, related to the death of 27 million Russian people .. everyone was and many still are affected by their losses. That WWII stopped in Europe in 1945 doesn't ease the pain of 'living-lives' lost.

Weren't Kissenger's antics post that era ?

If he was behind slaughter through his skewed outlook .. then it must be a matter that is current .. in fact Mr K still breaths ... doesn't he ... ?

rshowalter - 05:49pm Jun 22, 2001 EST (#5816 of 5845)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

And Mr. K's ideas live all through the foreign policy of the United States. And there are some things that can be said to be "beautiful" about "geopolitical" ways of thinking -- in the essentially classical German tradition that Kissinger follows.

But in some other ways, it is terribly, brutally, dehumanizingly incomplete and ugly. That should be remembered, too.

"geopolitics" can justify essentially any inhumanity at all -- it was used to do so in Germany, to justify both WWI and WWII, and it has been used to do so, very often, in American policy discussions.

rshowalter - 05:51pm Jun 22, 2001 EST (#5817 of 5845)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

A "war" on a smaller scale:
MD1160 rshowalter 3/19/01 7:32am

MD1161 rshowalter 3/19/01 7:33am
Conspiracy? Definitions.

lunarchick - 05:51pm Jun 22, 2001 EST (#5818 of 5845)
lunarchick@www.com

Kissenger - Pinochet meeting in Santiago

So this is what it’s come to: a president carries on a clandestine affair with an intern, and it’s headline news every day for a year. But a secretary of state whispers sweet nothings to a violent dictator, and the mainstream media is bored to death.

Okay, so the story took place long ago and far away, on June 8, 1976, in Santiago, Chile. But it has its celebrities: Henry Kissinger, who was then U.S. secretary of state, and Chilean general Augusto Pinochet, whose government had a reputation for torturing and murdering its political opponents. And there’s proof: Their tête-à-tête took place in front of witnesses, one of whom recorded it in a State Department memorandum. Kissinger can only be described as sucking up to Pinochet. He dismissed U.S. complaints about Chilean torture and murder as "domestic problems" and promised to downplay the complaints in a speech scheduled for later that day (which he did). "In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here . . . . We wish your government well," he told Pinochet. Then he laid it on thick. "My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist." A different account appears in Years of Renewal, the third volume of Kissinger’s memoirs, just published by Simon & Schuster. In it, Kissinger describes the tone of the meeting as far chillier than it is depicted in the memo and he fails to footnote the memo. One possible explanation for the sanitizing is that if Kissinger had denounced Pinochet’s violent tendencies in June 1976, he might have prevented the assassination of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier by Pinochet’s secret police, which took place a few months later in Washington, D.C. Then again, he may still be protecting Pinochet. He admits in the book that he intentionally omitted any discussion of the current attempt to prosecute Pinochet for war crimes, but doesn’t say why.

The sleazy flavor of their 1976 rendezvous might never have emerged, if not for Lucy Komisar, a New York-based journalist who discovered the memo as part of her research for a book about U.S. foreign policy. Aware that the Santiago meeting had taken place, she filed a specific request for the memo in 1995. It was finally released to her in October.

That same month, Pinochet was arrested in London. Komisar wrote an article analyzing the memo and sent it to numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, and The Nation. The response: a deafening silence. The New Republic held the story three weeks before passing. The New Yorker sent a note saying, "As we have only recently published a piece on Pinochet, it is too soon to return to the subject." Komisar was disturbed by the lack of interest. "It raises questions about the news judgments of a lot of editors," she says. "They fill their pages with Monica and O.J. and Diana, but when it comes to something important about a person who is still playing a real, if unofficial, role in the world today‹ I find it astonishing that they don’t want to deal with it." Komisar eventually gave up on U.S. media and sent queries to the London Observer and El País, the main daily paper in Spain. The reaction was swift. "I spoke to the Observer on Thursday and to El País on Friday," she says, "and both ran stories that Sunday [February 28]." Then she sent the story to the Pacific News Service, which broke the news in the U.S. on March 1. That was the moment Peter Kornbluh was waiting for. Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, writes about Chile for The Nation. In January, he obtained a copy of the memo in the course of his own research, but out of respect for Komisar chose not to write about it until she published her sto

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