Mmmmm… ‘K.

Transcript

(W)hat I’ve really been outraged by this week, even though there have been some victories, is a photograph I saw that actually was issued or published on 9/11. And what I call it is I call it the meeting of the KK–not the KKK, but the KK, on 9/11. And it was astounding, the photograph, because what it shows was a meeting of two people. And you can’t make this stuff up. And it’s a picture of our secretary of state, John Kerry, with a former secretary of state, and that’s Henry Kissinger, two Ks getting together.



(O)ne observation is striking about the photograph of Kerry and Kissinger, one who served Nixon, a Republican, and one who serves Obama, a Democrat. What does it say about U.S. foreign policy? What it says to me is something a lot of us have known for a long time is that U.S. foreign policy is more or less–and you would have to say more–consistent than you would ever think. It doesn’t make a lot of difference whether you get a Republican or a Democratic president or secretary of state. They both love the military. They brag about it as Obama has bragged about the military. They love to use it. And at their core, they’re imperialists through and through. Both Ks, both Ks believe in American exceptionalism.

Kerry, Kissinger and the Other Sept. 11

By Amy Goodman, Truth Dig

Posted on Sep 11, 2013

Kissinger’s role in plotting and supporting the 1973 coup in Chile becomes clearer as the years pass and the documents emerge, documents that Kissinger has personally fought hard to keep secret. Peter Kornbluh of the nonprofit National Security Archive has been uncovering the evidence for years, and has recently updated his book, “The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.” Kornbluh told me that Kissinger was “the singular most important figure in engineering a policy to overthrow Allende and then, even more, to embrace Pinochet and the human-rights violations that followed.” He said that Kissinger “pushed Nixon forward to as aggressive but covert a policy as possible to make Allende fail, to destabilize Allende’s ability to govern, to create what Kissinger called a coup climate.”

The Pinochet regime was violent, repressive and a close ally of the United States. Pinochet formed alliances with other military regimes in South America, and they created “Operation Condor,” a campaign of coordinated terror and assassinations throughout Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Brazil. Operation Condor even reached onto the streets of Washington, D.C., when, on Sep. 21, 1976, a former Chilean ambassador to the U.S. during the Allende government, Orlando Letelier, along with his assistant, a U.S. citizen named Ronni Moffitt, were killed by a car bomb planted by Pinochet’s secret police on Embassy Row, just blocks from the White House.

Eventually, under increasing global condemnation and growing internal, nonviolent resistance, the Pinochet regime was forced to hold a plebiscite, a national vote, on whether Pinochet would continue as Chile’s dictator. With a resounding “No!” the public rejected him, ushering in the modern, democratic era in Chile.

At least two U.S. citizens were murdered during the 1973 coup. Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were in Chile to observe the democratic experience there, working as writers and journalists. Their abduction and murder by Pinochet’s forces, with the likely collaboration by the U.S. government, is depicted movingly in the 1982 Oscar-winning film “Missing,” directed by Costa Gavras, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. On the week of the coup’s 40th anniversary, Charles Horman’s widow, Joyce Horman, held a commemoration. The event, hosted in New York City by the Charles Horman Truth Foundation, attracted hundreds, many who were personally involved with the Allende government or who were forced into exile from Chile during those terrible years

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