Kissinger redux

Henry Kissinger's callousness about mass murder should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed his career. Kissinger appears on a recently released tape of a conversation with  then-President Richard Nixon saying in 1973:

"that helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a totalitarian regime — a huge issue at the time — was 'not an objective of American foreign policy.'

'And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,' he added, 'it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.'

Just a few years later, in December 1975, Kissinger and President Gerald Ford were in Jakarta giving the go ahead to Indonesia's invasion of East Timor. Kissinger would guarantee continuation of weapons shipments. According to Timor-Leste's Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation as many as 180,000 people died as a result.  For more on Kissinger's role in East Timor click here.