What's wrong with this country? The appointment of Henry Kissinger, a war criminal -- well, an accused war criminal -- to oversee a committee that will investigate national-security failures prior to September 11 is an international scandal and only the Nation (as you would suspect) is paying attention. It's true that the New York Times offered tentative criticism of the appointment, claiming that Kissinger may be a "less than staunchly independent" figure to lead a stalwart investigation into failures that may have led to the terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center and ripped a hole in the Pentagon. But our opinion makers have by and large paid scant attention to what may be -- depending on what the investigation finds -- one of the most explosive and debatable appointments Bush ever makes.

But that's not all. No one even noticed last February when John M. Poindexter -- a convicted liar, thief, and traitor for his role in the 1986 Iran-contra affair during his tenure as national-security adviser under Ronald Reagan -- was appointed to head the Pentagon's the newly formed Information Awareness Office. Only recently have reports come out about what that office is up to -- spying on the American public -- and Poindexter's role in it all. But again, there's been a disconcerting lack of outrage. In disturbing contrast to all this were the recent front-page stories previewing Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday on December 5. What are we to make of the fact that the centennial celebration of a racist segregationist gets more attention than the appointment of a convicted secret conspirator to a Pentagon office designed to track our credit-card purchases?

George Santayana has famously noted that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This is the
historian's version of Freud's theory of "the return of the repressed" -- the more we try to forget unpleasant memories or feelings, the more persistently (and monstrously) they will resurface in our consciousness. But the appointments of Kissinger to investigate national-security problems relating to September 11 and Poindexter to spy on Americans, coupled with the celebratory coverage of Thurmond's 100th birthday, are not the result of forgetting the past. Rather, they represent an open and gross manifestation of the desire to re-create the past. This isn't the return of the repressed -- it is the return of the repressive. And President George W. Bush is leading the way.

Bush has peppered his administration with political criminals from the past. John Negroponte -- who, as ambassador to Honduras during the Reagan administration, helped supply arms to Nicaraguan contras in defiance of a congressional ban, and who helped conceal from Congress acts of murder, kidnapping, and torture committed by a CIA-equipped and -trained Honduran military unit -- is now the ambassador to the United Nations. Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty in 1991 to two counts of withholding evidence from Congress for his role in the Iran-contra scandal (and who was pardoned for his crimes by the first president Bush) is now the National Security Council's senior director for Near East and North African affairs. And Otto Reich -- who headed the Office for Public Diplomacy, which was censured by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs for engaging in covert propaganda activities -- is the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. But Bush's appointment of Kissinger -- known primarily for his overlapping stints as national-security adviser (1969-'75) and secretary of state (1973-'77) in the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, but who is remembered by many as "the butcher of Cambodia" for his illegal bombing of Cambodian Laotian civilians in February and March of 1969 -- to head an independent commission to investigate the causes of the attacks and to ask whether the FBI and CIA could have averted them is hard to top.

To both his admirers (yes, they're out there) and his detractors, Kissinger is infamous for his use of secrecy and deceit in wielding political power. He urged Nixon to prosecute newspapers if they published the Pentagon Papers, claiming that publication would erode the power of the federal government to make and implement policy decisions (an argument almost identical to the one used to support Vice-President Dick Cheney's refusal to hand over the list of who attended his energy-commission meetings). He wiretapped his own colleagues and journalists when he suspected leaks about the bombings in Cambodia. Kissinger has never really been much of a pro-democracy sort of guy. During the brutal and murderous military takeover of Chile, he remarked, "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people."

Kissinger's career of public (dis)service ended after his stint as Ford's secretary of state. Six years later, he started his own consulting company, Kissinger Associates. Most of the company's work involves negotiating relationships between multinational corporations and foreign governments. He refuses to make public his list of clients, but they're known to include American Express, ITT, Lockheed Corporation, Coca-Cola, Fiat, Revlon, Union Carbide, and H.J. Heinz. But the world of American consumerism isn't all that far from Kissinger's old world of foreign policy. As Christopher Hitchens points out in his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso, 2001), Kissinger's firm helped Heinz find a market for baby food in China: "Selling baby food in China may seem innocuous enough, but when the Chinese regime turned its guns and tanks on its own children in Tiananmen Square in 1989, it had no more staunch defender than Henry Kissinger. Arguing very strongly against sanctions, he wrote that `China remains too important for America's national security to risk the relationship on the emotions of the moment.' " Is this a man we should trust to determine if any connections exist between Saudi oil money and Al Qaeda?

Even worse, however, is that Henry Kissinger is viewed by many other countries as a war criminal. In May 2001, he was asked to testify about the fate of French citizens who disappeared under the Pinochet regime. He has also been called to testify about his relationship with the Pinochet government's use of assassination and torture in Chile and Argentina. In September 2001, he faced a civil lawsuit charging him with complicity in the murder of General Rene Schneider of Chile. The situation is so bad that the Brazilian government rescinded its speaking-engagement offer to Kissinger because it realized it could not guarantee him immunity from prosecution. Indeed -- like his supporter and friend General Augusto Pinochet -- Kissinger could be snatched up and made to testify on human-rights abuses if he travels abroad. As Hitchens recently reminded us in a piece for Slate, Kissinger gets legal advice before he travels anywhere to avoid becoming another Pinochet -- detained and even arrested for his past crimes against humanity.

It's hard not to ask why Kissinger? Why not, as Senator John Kerry recently suggested to Tim Russert on Meet the Press, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani? Why not former secretary of state Madeleine Albright? Why not Jimmy Carter, who just won the Nobel Peace Prize? (Of course, that award in itself may not necessarily commend him -- Yasser Arafat and Kissinger himself are also Nobel Peace Prize laureates.) Even the first president Bush would have been a better choice.

KISSINGER'S APPOINTMENT isn't the only evidence of Bush's desire to restore America to past glories -- an image that looks like a Norman Rockwell painting crossed with A Nightmare on Elm Street. There's the appointment of Iran-contra liar Poindexter to direct the Information Awareness Office (IAO) in the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The IAO's official mission statement, posted on its Web site at www.darpa.mil/iao, proclaims: "The DARPA Information Awareness Office (IAO) will imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption; national security warning; and national security decision making." Essentially, Poindexter has become the information czar of homeland security, and the Pentagon now has access to the private e- mails, online communications, and personal finances of all United States citizens. Big Brother has met Google.

Like Kissinger, Poindexter is an old-guard remnant of the Nixon White House -- a moment in American history that must burn brightly in the political imagination of George W. Bush (after all, he tapped former Nixon aide Dick Cheney to be his vice-president). Forget the fact that Poindexter was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction, and lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal. In the eyes of many conservatives, he was a patriot in his efforts to support the murderous contras' attempt to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Luckily for him, his 1990 convictions were overturned in 1991 because statements from his congressional testimony -- for which Congress had granted him immunity (an immunity that was at first denied because Poindexter's testimony turned out to be lies) -- had impermissibly been introduced into his criminal trial. It probably didn't hurt his chances for appointment that Poindexter has spent the past decade as the vice-president of Syntek Technologies, which holds many lucrative contracts with the federal government -- especially with the Pentagon. Syntek and Poindexter worked with DARPA over a period of years to develop Genoa, a surveillance device that combines a state-of-the-art search engine and a "peer-to-peer" file-sharing system that can quickly analyze electronic information.

But perhaps the most shocking aspect of Poindexter's appointment is the fact that it happened on February 13, 2002 -- but received scant coverage until this past November. (A lapse duly noted by Project Censored this year.) Was the press sleeping? Is it not important to draw attention to the appointment of a convicted felon (albeit one whose conviction was overturned) who did his best to subvert national law and foreign policy to a position of the highest importance and sensitivity? Or has the press been beaten down, like many Americans, by Bush's attempts to re-create America in the image of its falsely glorified past?

GIVEN ALL THIS, what are we to make of the adoring coverage of Strom Thurmond's 100th-birthday party? The front page of the November 29 New York Times featured a story about Senator Thurmond's preparations for his December 5 birthday. As appalling as the news blackout on Poindexter's appointment was, the celebration of Thurmond is -- in a broader historical sense -- even worse. Forget the fact that at nearly 100, Thurmond can barely perform his duties as senator. He now lives in a hospital and has to be helped to his seat by aides. His votes -- barely audible, even with the aid of a microphone -- are apparently decided by others, as he has trouble grasping the details and facts of legislation. There is little doubt that Thurmond is an embarrassment to the integrity of the Senate and to his constituency.

But even more appalling is that this is a man who spent decades fighting to deny basic human and civil rights to African-Americans. In 1957, he filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes in an attempt to stop passage of the one of the first congressional civil-rights bills. No surprise there, since he had broken away from the Democratic Party in 1948 to run against Harry S. Truman on a Dixiecrat platform that championed opposition to "the intermingling of races." It was during this time that "ol' Strom," as he is known, publicly stated: "I want to tell you that there's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches."

When Truman proposed civil-rights legislation, Thurmond warned: "If the segregation program of the president is enforced, the results of civil strife may be horrible beyond imagination. Lawlessness will be rampant. Chaos will prevail. Our streets will be unsafe. And there will be the greatest breakdown of law enforcement in the history of the nation." Of course, in the 1950s, racists hotly resisted the idea of integration; and make no mistake, during this time Thurmond revealed himself as profoundly and indelibly racist. So much so that in the early 1950s, he was quoted saying: "Our niggers is better off than most anybody's niggers, why, they got washing machines and some of 'em even got televisions. I can't understand why they complaining."

So why is Thurmond celebrated in such sentimental fashion? In 48 years as a senator, he has proposed no striking legislation and chaired no important committees. Indeed, he's made very few worthwhile contributions at all. What he has done is become a symbol -- and a very potent one at that -- of a deeply entrenched conservatism that many Americans are reluctant to give up. Sure, Thurmond gave up his aggressive articulation of race-baiting politics in the 1970s and hired a black aide, but symbolically he has always stood for a part of the American past that is comforting even to some who might resist his race politics. Like a Norman Rockwell painting that has gone the way of the picture of Dorian Gray, Thurmond is a living relic of an American past that reminds people of a world that never existed. It is an illusory world in which America was always right and respected. In which there was prosperity and good will, food on everyone's tables, and cheer in their hearts. That is why photos of Thurmond -- even when he looks doddering and like he has no business helping to run the country -- are presented with an elegiac air. In a world that is falling apart, wracked with violence, and in which the United States more often than not has decided to be a bully rather than striving for the moral high ground, Strom Thurmond represents a happier past to many people. Of course these are not African-Americans or liberals or even people of truly good will, but rather those who retreat into the past when the future looks too scary.

Optimists crow that the past is merely a nightmare from which we awaken. That doesn't seem to be the case at this moment in US history. As the weeks have moved on, it's become increasingly clear that George Bush's vision of America's future is deeply rooted in its past. Not simply some sentimental fantasy of small towns and Fourth of July parades and apple pies set out on country tables, but a nightmarish past that features not new bad guys, but the old bad guys all polished up and presented as shiny new champions of peace, justice, and 1984. There is little doubt that September 11, 2001, is a date that will be forever burned into history. It will not simply mark the first large-scale terrorist attack on the United States, but also the beginning of a new page in American history -- one in which the US government, after decades of slow, but steady movement into a brighter future, abruptly changed direction and marched forthrightly and unblinkingly into the worst horrors of our past.

Michael Bronski can be reached at mabronski@aol.com.

Issue Date: December 6 - 12, 2002