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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When Harper's magazine was good enough to publish the two long essays
that together became the core of this book, my friend and publisher Rick
MacArthur sent an early copy round to ABC News in New York. Since we
had criticized the deference of the American media quite as much as we
had attacked the moral sloth of the overfed American "human rights"
community, he thought it was only fair to give Nightline's producer the
right of reply. After an interval, we got our answer. "Is there," said
the top
man at that top-rated Kissinger-showcasing show, "anything new here?"
Rick and I hugged ourselves with promised laughter at that. In
Washington and New York and Los Angeles and every other cultural capi
tal, the shallow demand for novelty is also an ally of a favorite
spin-tactic of
the powerful, which is to confront a serious allegation not by refusing
to
deny it but instead by trying to reclassify it as "old news:' And of
course, the
joke was therefore on the producer, who had come up with a stale and
pre-
dictable and exhausted response. (We later asked him if there was
anything
fresh about his question. )
Had it been asked in good faith, of course, that same question would
still require a straight answer. Here it is. The information in this
book is not
"new" to the people of East Timor and Cyprus and Bangladesh and Laos
and Cambodia, whose societies were laid waste by a depraved statecraft.
Nor is it "new" to the relatives of the tortured and disappeared and mur-
dered in Chile. But it would be new to anyone who relied on ABC News for
information. It is not new to the degraded statesmen who agree to appear
on that network in return for being asked flattering questions. But some
of
it might come as news to the many decent Americans who saw their own
laws and protections violated, and their own money spent in their name
but without their leave, for atrocious purposes that could not be
disclosed,
by the Nixon-Kissinger gang. Oh yes, this is an old story all right. But
I
hope and intend to contribute to writing its ending.
As a matter of fact, there are a few disclosures in the book; some of
the
new material shocked even its author. But I'm not here to acknowledge my
own work. Wherever possible, I give credit and attribution in the
narrative
itself. Some debts must still be mentioned.
Nobody in Washington who takes on the Kissinger matter can ever be
clear of debt to Seymour Hersh, who first contrasted the man's
reputation
with his actions, and by this method alone, as well as by heroic
excavations
of the record, began the slow process which will one day catch up with
the
worthless, evasive cleverness of official evil. This is a battle for
transparency
and for historical truth, among other things, and if Hersh has any rival
in
that area it is Scott Armstrong, founder of the National Security
Archive,
which has been deputizing as Washington's equivalent of a Truth and
Justice Commission until the real thing comes along. ("Then let us pray
that come it may ..."')
During their long absence from the moral radar-screen of the West, the
people of East Timor could have had no better and braver friends than
Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn. The family of Orlando Letelier, and the
families of so many other Chilean victims, could always count on Peter
Kornbluh, Saul Landau and John Dinges, who in Washington have helped
keep alive a case of crucial importance that will one day be vindicated.
Lucy
Komisar, Mark Hertsgaard, Fred Branfman, Kevin Buckley, Lawrence
Lifschultz will, I know, all recognize themselves in my borrowings from
their more original and more courageous work.
Sometimes a chat with an editor can be encouraging; sometimes not. I
was in the middle part of my first explanatory sentence with Lewis
Lapham, editor of Harper's magazine, when he broke in to say: "Done.
Write it. High time. We'll do it." I didn't trust myself then to thank him, as
I do now. So instead I got on with it, which I could not have done
without
the unusual Ben Metcalf at the Harper's office. Together with Sarah Vos and
Jennifer Szalai, punctilious fact-checkers, we went over it again and
again,
marvelously nauseated at the renewed realization that it was all true.
The current state of international human-rights
legislation
inchoate. But, in an uneven yet seemingly discernible fashion, it is
evolving
to the point where people like Kissinger are no longer above the law.
Welcome and unexpected developments have had a vertiginous effect: I
hope that my closing section on this area is out of date by the time it
is pub
lished. For their help in guiding me through the existing statutes and
precedents, I am enormously obliged to Nicole Barrett of Columbia
University, to Jamin Raskin and Michael Tigar at the Washington College
of Law at American University, and to Geoffrey Robertson QC.
There are very few mirthful moments in these pages. Still, I remember
so well the day in 1976 when Martin Amis, then my colleague at the New
Statesman, told me that his literary pages would serialize Joseph
Heller's
Good as Gold. He showed me the proposed extract. Chapters 7 and 8 of
that
novel, in particular, are imperishable satire, and must be read and
reread.
(The relevant passage of sustained and obscene and well-reasoned abuse,
which shames the publishing industry as well as the journalistic racket
for
its complicity with this deceitful and humorless toad, begins with the
sen
tence: "Even that fat little fuck Henry Kissinger was writing a book!")
I later
became a friend of Joe Heller, whose death in 1999 was a calamity for so
many of us, and my last acknowledgement is to the invigorating effect of
his warm, broad-minded, hilarious, serious, and unquenchable
indignation.
Christopher Hitchens
Washington, DC, 25 January 2001
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