Paul Haeder, Author

…and so, all those war crimes, tens of millions bombed and tortured and starved, here, on his 100th birthday, but many more spring chickens have learned Kissinger’s Rasputin-Machiavelli Ways

But few can rival the feral reputation that history has hung around the neck of Grigory Rasputin, the evil-smelling Siberian peasant, hypnotist and confidant to Russian royalty.

Svengali is a character in the novel Trilby which was first published in 1894 by George du Maurier. Svengali is a Jewish man who seduces, dominates and exploits Trilby, a young half-Irish girl, and makes her into a famous singer.

After the book’s publication in 1894, the word “svengali” has come to refer to a person who, with evil intent, dominates, manipulates and controls another.

In court, the Svengali Defence is a legal tactic that portrays the defendant as a pawn in the scheme of a greater, and more influential, criminal mastermind.

George Bush Sr book reveals a more dangerous Dick Cheney than anyone knew

Destiny and Power shows a VP with more authority than almost all his predecessors, making plain Bush Jr’s administration could have been even worse

Cheney and Rumsfeld used their enhanced power to poison the flow of information to the president’s desk about Iraq and its supposed weapons of mass destruction. The vice-president even made repeated trips to CIA headquarters in Langley to bully analysts into producing more hawkish reports, while Rumsfeld’s Pentagon sucked up highly dubious “evidence” from Iraqi exiles and ideological freelancers. But, as even as the ever-forgiving father admits in Meacham’s book, it was President Bush who allowed Cheney to grow his own empire.

Perhaps the most alarming revelation to emerge from the new Bush biography is the elder man’s recollection that while Cheney had been his defence secretary, he had commissioned a study on how many tactical nuclear weapons would be needed to eliminate a division of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard.

Apparently the answer was 17, though a more profound conclusion is that Cheney was a more dangerous figure than anyone knew. It adds weight to reporting by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker that Cheney also contemplated the use of low-yield nuclear bunker-busters against Iran’s underground uranium enrichment facilities. The more we hear about the George W Bush administration, the clearer it becomes that the global damage it wrought could have been even worse.

Evil eyes of a barbaric woman:

Machiavellian’ German refugee Kissinger shaped US policy with Jewish philosophy | The Times of Israel

February 28, in 1961, John F. Kennedy appointed Kissinger as consultant for foreign affairs. Despite spending only several days a week in the White House and being kept at bay by his dean-turned-boss, Kissinger earned wide influence over the president’s policies.

As part of America’s chess game with the Soviets during the Cold War, Kissinger, as secretary of state and national security advisor to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, became an unflinching supporter and, at least in the case of Chile, co-conspirator, of the coups d’etat and military dictatorships that spread throughout South America in the 1970s. Tens of thousands of people were tortured and killed in clandestine camps, their bodies dumped from planes into rivers, their children stolen and given away under false identities. In his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens argued convincingly that Kissinger deserved prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture.”

[Photo: U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger greets Argentina’s Foreign Minister, Alberto J. Vignes, as Ismael Huerta Diaz, right, foreignministers of Chile, looks on during break in Latin Foreign Ministers Conference in Mexico City, Feb. 22, 1974. ]