Turned his back
Thus the man who, along with Nixon, had made the illicit coup possible turned his back on the consequences.
After Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998, the ruling by Britain's highest court, the House of Lords, crystallized half a century's debate on the legal and political problems of accountability for crimes against humanity. For the first time in a high court anywhere it was decided that sovereign immunity must not be allowed to become sovereign impunity. For that we have to thank most of the nations of the world, including the US of Ronald Reagan and the Britain of Margaret Thatcher who put their signatures to the UN Convention Against Torture and thus laid the legal basis for the British ruling.
Now, since the vote in Rome in the summer of 1998 approving the statute creating the International Criminal Court, the means will soon be available to try people who are accused of all crimes against humanity, not just torture. Fortunately for Kissinger it cannot deal retroactively and is doubtful if the Convention Against Torture can be used as a basis for prosecuting a person once removed.
Still, if the discussion now afoot gives Kissinger himself something of a frisson it will not be in vain. Society should have other means of punishing this man and one way would be to take him off the pedestal on which he now stands. This man should be scorned not feted. It is time overdue that western high society stopped courting a man who, for all his intellectual bravado, is arguably nothing more than a common war criminal.
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