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June
27, 2001
Hitchens
v. Kissinger
Don't Sue Henry!
Christopher Hitchens writes in Harper's,
and in his new book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, that Kissinger
is a war criminal. Kissinger responds to a Detroit radio talk
show host, Mitch Albom, that Hitchens had "denied the Holocaust
ever took place." Does that mean that Kissinger accepts
he's a war criminal? Now Hitchens tells the New York Post that
he and his wife Carol are Jewish and that "Mr. Kissinger
will be hearing from my attorney, who will tell him two things
he already knows -- what he said is false, malicious and defamatory,
and if he says it again, we will proceed against him in court."
That's a mistake, surely. It
makes Hitchens sound defensive. It also changes the subject from
Kissinger's blood-stained rampages through the late twentieth
century to what precisely Hitchens wrote about David Irving,
and what he may have said to Edward J. Epstein. (Back in Clintontime
Epstein (partisan of Sidney Blumenthal in the latter's face off
with Hitchens) told the New York Observer that during dinner
at Elaine's Hitchens had told him and boon companions that actual
evidence of six million Jews dead in gas ovens was in short supply.
Hitchens adamantly denied Epstein's recollection.)
The idea may be to get HK into a libel action and then see what
can be dragged out of the monster's archives in the discovery
process. But such a suit would cost a fortune, and even though
CH is surely well paid by Vanity Fair for his monthly column,
we doubt he wants to see $200,000 end up in a lawyer's back pocket
(unless he has a Magic Christian or Magic Jew ready to finance
the whole enterprise.) Better, surely, to make a joke about Kissinger's
counter-slur and then refocus public attention on the desirability
of putting HK on trial.
In the wake of Hitchens's two
articles in Harper's on Kissinger's war crimes, magistrates in
three countries -- Chile, Argentina, and France -- have summoned
Kissinger to answer questions. Le Monde reported earlier this
month that when French Judge Roger Le Loire had a summons served
on Kissinger on May 31 at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Kissinger
fled Paris. The judge wanted to ask Kissinger about his knowledge
of Operation Condor, the scheme evolved by Pinochet and other
Latin American proconsuls of the American Empire to kill or "disappear"
their opponents.
Russell Mokhiber and Robert
Weissman, who put out the excellent Naderite publication, Multinational
Monitor, wrote up an interesting account of Kissinger's recent
appearance at the National Press Club in Washington DC.
"Scattered throughout
the ballroom at the Press Club were little white note cards for
questions, and it appeared that perhaps 100 questions were scribbled
and sent up to the moderator, Richard Koonce, a member of the
Press Club's book and author committee.It was Koonce's job to
sift through the questions, pick out some interesting ones, and
ask Henry some probing questions.".
Mokhiber and Weissman say they
wrote down six questions -- about the report in the Times, Kissinger's
interview with Albom, the incident at the Ritz Hotel in Paris,
Hitchens's articles in Harper's, about the three magistrates
and simply this one: "If you are indicted for war crimes,
will you defend yourself in court?"
The fix was in. Koonce "lofted
six or seven puff balls
about Kissinger in China, about Kissinger on Nixon, about
his generic views of foreign policy. Nothing about war
crimes, nothing about operating outside the law, nothing
about Hitchens."
After the event, Mokhiber and
Weissman confronted Koonce.
"Was there an agreement
with Dr. Kissinger not to ask
questions related to Christopher Hitchens and allegations of
war crimes?"
Koonce did not deny it.
"There was a definite
sensitivity to that," Koonce said. "He
[Kissinger] was afraid that if we got into a discussion of
that, for the vast majority of people that, it would take so
much time to explain all of the context, that you know, he
preferred to avoid that, and so . . ."
And so Kissinger's wishes were
accommodated and the
questions were avoided.
Be it noted, as journalists
and editors of, CounterPunch, we're generally opposed to libel
actions. But before anyone heaps libelous mud upon our good names,
they should be aware that we might make an exception if the suit
stands a good chance of extorting large sums from bad people,
or represents the only avenue of successful counter-attack against
aforementioned bad people. We should mention that after we wrote
in CounterPunch some years ago that Kissinger tried to make off
with a vase from his Chinese guest house during his first trip
to China, lawyers for HK wrote to us in threatening terms. Fearing
protracted and costly litigation we promptly retracted the slur,
noting that in the same item we had described HK as a war criminal,
and Kissinger's lawyers had not contested this description as
inaccurate or libelous. CP
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