DP
>
> Censorship at the National Press Club
> By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
>
> Henry Kissinger came to the National Press Club here in Washington, D.C.
> last night to give a talk, sell his latest book, Does America Need a
> Foreign Policy? and take questions from an audience of about 300 people.
>
> We weren't as interested in the talk or the book as much as the question
> period. We figured, correctly as it turned out, that Henry hadn't change
> over the years -- his unspoken theory of foreign policy was still the
> same: the corporate state -- including his client corporations -- should
> dictate the country's foreign policy. As usual, his words barely masked
> that reality.
>
> But 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. This system seemed
> to work well at luncheon talks, where the past three presidents of the
> Press Club -- Doug Harbrecht of Business Week, John Cushman of the New
> York Times and Dick Ryan of the Detroit News -- would ask speakers some
> pretty tough and newsworthy questions. We never got the sense that Press
> Club moderators were pulling punches.
>
> Last night, things changed.
>
> Earlier this year, Harper's magazine published a two-part series of
> articles by British journalist Christopher Hitchens, "The Case Against
> Henry Kissinger that has since been published as a book, The Trial of
> Henry Kissinger (Verso).
>
> Hitchens has drawn up an indictment, charged Kissinger with war crimes,
> and is begging some government to go after the former Secretary of State
> under Richard Nixon for the killings of innocents in Laos, Cambodia, South
> America, East Timor and elsewhere.
>
> Magistrates in three countries -- Chile, Argentina, and France -- have
> responded and 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 promptly left the hotel, and then left town. The judge wanted to
> ask Kissinger about his knowledge of Operation Condor, an effort by the
> dictators of South America to kill or "disappear" dissidents.
>
> The fact that Kissinger was being sought for questioning didn't make the
> mainstream media here in the United States, until yesterday's New York
> Times reported that the Chilean judge wanted Kissinger to "testify about
> the disappearance of an American in Chile when the dictator Augusto
> Pinochet seized power in the 1970s."
>
> Kissinger began lashing back at Hitchens last week, not by answering the
> substance of Hitchen's argument, but by smearing the journalist.
>
> Kissinger told Detroit radio talk show host Mitch Albom that Hitchens had
> "denied the Holocaust ever took place."
>
> In response, Hitchens, who says both and he his wife are Jewish, told the
> New York Post: "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."
>
> So, you can imagine that the Press Club audience had questions. And so did
> we.
>
> We wrote down six questions -- about the report in the Times, Kissinger's
> interview with Albom, the incident at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Hitchen'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?"
>
> We met a friend there who told us that in the 1970s, when Kissinger was
> asked about the bombing of Laos and Cambodia, he responded this way:
> "sometimes we have to operate outside the law."
>
> Her question to Kissinger: "How do you square that with our Constitutional
> values?"
>
> Koonce had other ideas. He 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, we sought out Koonce.
>
> "Was there an agreement with Dr. Kissinger not to ask questions related to
> Christopher Hitchens and allegations of war crimes?"
>
> To our surprise, 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.
>
> We asked Koonce how many written questions dealt with Hitchens or war
> crimes? Two or three, Koonce said.
>
> We knew this not to be true. We handed up six ourselves. And we suspect
> that there were many more. (Only Kissinger knows for sure, since it's
> Press Club policy to deliver the written questions to the guest after the
> event.)
>
> According to Press Club standards, these book events must be held in
> accordance with the Club's "Code of Ethics."
>
> So, we want to know -- how can it be ethical to agree secretly with an
> author before hand not to ask a certain set of questions?
>
> We're tracking down the Code of Ethics. Stay tuned.
>
>
> Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
> Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
> Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The
> Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common
> Courage Press, 1999).
>
> (c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
>
>
>
>