‘WikiLeaks release to hurt ‘Mr. Death Squad’ Kissinger’

The WikiLeaks release of 1.7 million US intelligence documents from the 1970s may seriously hinder US foreign policy power-broker Henry Kissinger, operating behind the scenes in recent years, UK-based investigative reporter Tony Gosling told RT.

Most of the data, comprising records from the beginning of 1973 to the end of 1976, has been compiled by the site's founder, Julian Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since last June.

Many of those reports were written by or sent to Henry Kissinger, who was US secretary of state and national security adviser during the period.

Gosling says that, despite not being part of the US government since 1977, Kissinger has been influencing the international landscape through unofficial channels all these years.  

RT:Is there any indication yet of who gave these documents to WikiLeaks?

Tony Gosling: Well, those documents were, actually, available in the archive. It’s just almost impossible for the general public to search for them. It’s quite clear that Julian Assange isn’t being idle in his incarceration, in his dungeon in London. What he’s and his colleagues have done is turned it into a really useful, searchable database, a massive one. Three hundred and eighty gigabytes of data, 1.7 million records – this new PlusD release from WikiLeaks. And it’s extremely useful. I mean I had a brief look this morning right after the release and you can find quite a lot of stuff in there, which is going into the detail of the US foreign policy during the [Henry] Kissinger years.

We’re talking about 1969, for example, the bombing of Cambodia; this is secret policies, which were going on from the White House in the 1970s; the South American Operation Condor; death squads running around in South America, killing thousands and disappearing thousands of people; 1973, [Salvador] Allende’s Chile, where Henry Kissinger ordered the assassination of the president of Chile because he wasn’t going in the [desired] political direction and installed General Pinochet; 1974, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. There are little bits of details on all of these, in which Kissinger was involved. I mean Kissinger basically gave a green light to Turkey to invade Cyprus. So once there was an official foreign policy going on, which was quite, you know, nice from the US, going alone with human rights – there was unofficial police going on, with Henry Kissinger in the White House, with all those kinds of human right abuses and war crimes going on.

RT:What kind of reaction can we expect from Washington, and how badly could this harm the US interests?

TG: I hope it harms even more because one of the staggering thing is Kissinger – even though he’s not actually officially in any position in the US government anymore – he runs this little company called the Kissinger Associates, he manages these Bilderberg conferences every year where all the rich and powerful from the West get together in secret and he’s been running a secret organization, a privatization in many ways, a private arm of the US foreign policy. For example, in 2003 he was an unofficial adviser to Dick Cheney, who was the US vice-president, over the policy in Iraq.

You could call him Mr. Death Squad. And this goes into details in the 1970s of how he started. Obviously, he couldn’t carry on and the US couldn’t carry on doing this kind of thing overtly in public, with their senior officials getting up to all that stuff. So what happened is that the whole thing has been privatized and gone underground.