Christopher Hitchens: Don't Sue Kissinger!; Putin in Utah; More

Hitchens says Kissinger is a war criminal, and Kissinger responds to 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. Don't do it, Christopher. It changes the subject from Kissinger's blood-stained rampages through the late 20th century to what precisely Hitchens wrote about David Irving, and what he may have said to Edward J. Epstein at Elaine's. Besides, it makes Hitchens sound defensive. 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' two articles in Harper's on Kissinger, magistrates in three countries?Chile, Argentina and France?have summoned Kissinger to answer questions. Le Monde recently reported that when French judge Roger Le Loire had a summons served on Kissinger on May 31 at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Kissinger fled the city. 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, then 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 in Paris, Hitchens' articles in Harper's, about the three magistrates, and simply this last: "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...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 a journalist and editor of a political newsletter, CounterPunch, I'm generally opposed to libel actions, though I 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 attack against aforementioned bad people. I should mention that after I wrote in CounterPunch some years ago that Kissinger tried to steal a vase from his Chinese guest house during his first trip to China, lawyers for HK wrote to me in threatening terms. Fearing protracted and costly litigation I promptly retracted the slur, noting that in the same item I had described HK as a war criminal and Kissinger's lawyers had not contested this description.

Putin in Utah

Bush got whacked by Jesse Helms and the other paleo-cons for telling the world that in gazing into the eyes of Vladimir Putin he'd divined the soul of a good man whom he could trust and work with. This was certainly over the top, given Putin's manifest dishonesty and weasel-like demeanor. Bush probably felt he had to atone for shoving missile defense down Putin's throat earlier in the trip.

Certainly the description of Putin as a decent fellow raised hollow laughs among the river guides on the Colorado who, a couple of years ago, took Putin and a relative down Cataract Canyon, one of the world's most demanding stretches of whitewater. My CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair talked to the river guides, one of whom told him, "We get a lot of wacked-out people coming down the river, but Putin really is a dangerous guy, a real mobster. His packs were loaded with guns, vodka and tens of thousands of dollars in cash. He seemed to be a little on edge. It was during a time when it was unclear what was going to happen to the Yeltsin government. He was a real bully. He was drunk much of the time and bossed people around as if they were his personal slaves."

Putin and son soon got bored with the red-rock canyons and class-5 rapids. By the third day the future leader of Russia was demanding that the guides call in a helicopter to have his party picked up and flown out. Then, so Jeffrey was told, "he got drunk and started bragging about how many people he had personally killed. More than 40." The guide said that later, from the Hite marina, Putin placed a call to Las Vegas. "We want some whores," he shouted into his cellphone. "Price is no object."

Triangulation Lives!

But Bush is surely aware it does him no harm to be attacked by Helms and Lott. In the wake of the Jeffords defection, the Bush White House must now adopt the strategy of Clinton's White House, when Clinton came back from the dead after the Republicans took over Congress in 1995. It's the strategy known as "triangulation," whereby you run some of the time against your own party and make deals with factions in the opposition. That's the way Bush worked as governor in Texas. And now, if he wants some movement on health reform (on prescription drugs and the Patients' Bill of Rights), the only way he can advance on these fronts is by doing deals with Democrats.

All the way through the 2000 campaign, Democrats sought to chasten Nader supporters with the dread specter of a Republican president, backed by a Republican Congress. And with Bush's stolen election and the gerrymandering of the black vote, that is what the nation got. But those fearmongering Democrats were ignoring the central fact, repeatedly emphasized by Naderites, that political realities have little to do with the supposed agendas of our main political parties.

This became plain in the earliest hours of Republican rule in Washington, when Tom Daschle announced there would be no filibuster against the nomination of Ashcroft as attorney general, and Feingold of Wisconsin, probably the most liberal Democratic senator on many issues, actually voted for the racist, death-penalty-loving Missourian. Simultaneously the Bush White House realized that its cherished plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge wasn't even going to get out of the House Resources Committee, controlled by Republicans and chaired by Jim Hansen of Utah.

By April Bush's hopes for allocation of federal money to faith-based groups lay in rubble, as do, now, core elements of his education plan. On Social Security Republicans are doing exactly what Clinton did, establishing a blue-ribbon panel that will spend many months mooting notions for ways in which the system can be "reformed" to benefit the mutual-funds industry, just as Clinton's blue-ribbon panel did. And as previously, inaction will follow, since Social Security remains the third rail in American politics.

With Democrats now controlling the Senate, life can proceed exactly as it did in the Clinton era, with roughly the same judicial appointments, the same savage posture toward the poor, the imprisoned and the condemned, and the same servility toward the corporations. To top it off, Senate Majority Leader Daschle has promised no investigation of financial malfeasance by Karl Rove or Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

Norton's Secret Past

"At Merritt Hutton High School, she was a studious, socially concerned, and politically aware student, campaigning in 1972 for presidential candidate George McGovern." And who are we talking about here? None other than Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, disciple of James Watt and a woman who, if we are to believe frantic fundraising letters from the big green groups, snacks on endangered species and would okay an oil well next to Old Faithful. McGovern's campaign manager in that ill-fated '72 campaign was Gary Hart, another Coloradan, just like young Norton. Norton's McDisclosure of Norton's McGovernite past comes courtesy of the recent February-March edition of People Land and Water.

"The Saddest Voice I Ever Heard"

I saw John Lee Hooker performing in Berkeley a couple of years ago, when he would have been 81, though estimates of his age in the obits varied between 80 and 83, as did the location of the home he died in, variously described as Redwood City, Los Altos, San Jose and, most insultingly of all, "Silicon Valley." At that Berkeley concert, introed by Bonnie Raitt, he still had a commanding voice, though mostly he confined himself to "boom, boom, boom." The best obit I came across was by Tony Russell in Friday's London Guardian, who quoted Ry Cooder's description of Hooker's voice, "That deep, well-like Sound." For Raitt it was "one of the saddest things I've ever heard."

"Every song I sing," Hooker said, "is something that happened to my life or somebody else's life in this world. You might lose your money or your car, or can't pay the rent?every person has had these heartaches and tribulations. That's why everybody digs the blues. When I sing these songs I feel them down deep and reach you down deep."

Bill Westerman is telling friends that in his last year of graduate school, he served on the honorary degrees committee at Penn. Having heard John Lee Hooker several times, including at the concert of the National Heritage Fellows award in 1983, he nominated him for an honorary doctorate. Westerman was from the Dept. of Folklore and Folklife, but the committee chair went to the Penn music department for references and recommendations regarding Hooker's significance. No one in the music department had heard of him. Finally they worked out a compromise, and agreed to give an honorary degree to Ella Fitzgerald instead, but by that point she was too ill and weak to accept. Finally the committee decided to offer one to Yo-Yo Ma, but given his schedule, it had to be for the following academic year at the earliest. Westerman says he thinks "that episode taught me more about the canon and the curriculum than anything else I experienced in all my years of schooling."