More Kissinger Nastiness from the National Security Archive

The National Security Archive has just issued another set of documents regarding Henry Kissinger's efforts to sabotage democracy and coddle a brutal dictator in Chile:

The transcripts also capture Kissinger disparaging his own State Department staff for being soft on the human rights issue. In an exchange with Assistant Secretary for Latin America, William Rogers, on December 3, 1974, for example, Kissinger accuses his staff of "egging on" Senator Edward Kennedy who was the leading advocate of cutting assistance to the Pinochet regime on human rights grounds. "How many of our people are really egging Kennedy on," Kissinger demands to know. At the beginning of a September 1975 meeting with Pinochet' foreign minister, Adm. Patricio Carvajal, according to another transcript, Kissinger told him:

Well, I read the briefing paper for this meeting and it was nothing but Human Rights. The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there were no enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State.[italics in original]

I guess making torture systematic and widespread, having bodies dumped in the ocean and the Rio Mapocho just didn't bother Kissinger. I urge you to go to the site and read the documents.