The question of whether Henry Kissinger was involved in the “Operation Condor” assassination campaign that led to the Chilean government killing a former ambassador on the streets of Washington, DC has long been the subject of controversy. Now thanks to the work of the National Security Archive we know the answer:

As secretary of state, Henry Kissinger canceled a U.S. warning against carrying out international political assassinations that was to have gone to Chile and two neighboring nations just days before a former ambassador was killed by Chilean agents on Washington’s Embassy Row in 1976, a newly released State Department cable shows. [...]

Discovered in recent weeks by the National Security Archive, a non-profit research organization, the Sept. 16, 1976 cable is among tens of thousands of declassified State Department documents recently made available to the public. [...]

In the Sept. 16, 1976 cable, the topic of one paragraph is listed as “Operation Condor,” preceded by the words “(KISSINGER, HENRY A.) SUBJECT: ACTIONS TAKEN.” The cable states that “secretary declined to approve message to Montevideo” Uruguay “and has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter.”

The fact that this stayed classified for so long is yet another data point for the principle that we have far too much formal government secrecy in the United States. Recently there’s been a lot of emphasis on “transparency” in things like fundraising, earmarks, etc. And that’s all to the good. But the most important powers of the government are the life-and-death powers wielded by the national security establishment and they remain largely shrouded in secrecy. What operational danger would revealing the truth about this cable have created for the United States? It was just a decades-long effort to help Kissinger and the Ford administration evade democratic accountability for their policies.

John McCain believes that there should be no real accountability for Bush-era lawbreakers, based on the Watergate precedent: “Most people in retrospect believe that Ford’s pardon was right, because we moved on. We have got to move on.”

I would say that adherence to this precedent still implies that Jay Bybee should be forced from office even if there’s no further punishment for him.

But a broader question here is whether it isn’t time to reconsider the idea that the “system worked” during the Watergate process. I think a good case can be made that starting with Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon, moving forward into George H.W. Bush’s use of the pardon power to kill off the Iran-Contra investigation, and now shifting toward the present day when it’s apparently become a fringe left position that the laws of the United States of America should be enforced that we’ve moved through a dangerous cycle of impunity. It seems to me that, in effect, Nixon’s dictum that “if the president does it, it’s not a crime” has been entrenched into American customary law. Officially, he was repudiated. But in reality I think you’d have to say that the Nixon Doctrine—that claims of national security allow the President to order whatever he wants, irrespective of statutes or treaties—has become the de facto law of the land.

And it was Ford who got the ball rolling.