Someone, somewhere, has to say it and thus confirm what the Pentagon always feared would happen if an international war crimes court were established: That the US harbors war criminals of its own and they have served not that long ago at the apex of power in the American government.

No one is going to act like the recently deceased Robert McNamara who served as secretary of defense under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In one speech he described himself as a war criminal — for being party to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and for his role in the Vietnam War.

The Obama administration has to move faster.

After a furious public debate it has agreed to look into whether senior members of the administration of President George W. Bush should be prosecuted for war crimes including torture. But the process is achingly slow. One wonders if it will end up hitting a brick wall, as did the talk that has gone on for decades about prosecuting the former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State to President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, who became a media star during Nixon’s term of office has managed while out of power to remain a darling of the movers and shakers in American high society. He remains courted by business, politicians, journalists and society hostesses.

I can be no judge of the charges made on his role in Cambodia, Cyprus and East Timor but I can speak on Chile which I researched in detail for my book “Like Water on Stone.” Chile was unique in Latin America with an almost unbroken continuous democracy since independence in 1818. But in the presidential election of 1970 a Marxist socialist, Salvador Allende, surprised Washington by winning 36.2 percent of the vote in the first round. The CIA in an intelligence memorandum observed that the US “has no vital interests with Chile. But Nixon and Kissinger hit the roof. A couple of weeks later Nixon, with Kissinger’s ardent approval, gave Richard Helms, the CIA boss, the widest possible authority (“a marshal’s baton,” Helms later called it) to prevent Allende’s presidency by any means available.

Although the US ambassador to Chile came to Washington and strongly argued to Kissinger and Nixon that a military coup would not be in the best interests of Chile, and although Kissinger later claimed he called off the CIA operation, Chile’s chief of staff, Gen. Rene Schneider, who was known to be strongly opposed to a coup, was duly murdered.

The assassins were the very conspirators the CIA had funded earlier.

Washington followed this with a severe economic squeeze that gave Gen.

Augusto Pinochet his opening. On Sept. 11, 1973, Pinochet ordered the bombing of Allende in the presidential palace and immediately ordered the arrest and torture of thousands of Allende supporters. Two years later, after Amnesty International had widely publicized the ongoing torture of suspected dissidents, Kissinger, in a conversation with Patricio Carvajal, Pinochet’s foreign minister, said, “I hold the strong view that human rights is not appropriate for discussion in a foreign policy context.” 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 are available to try people who are accused of all crimes against humanity, not just torture.

Fortunately for Kissinger it cannot deal retroactively, but 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. And there need be no reticence about prosecuting senior members of the Bush administration.

And if there is, the International Criminal Court should step in and demand their arrest and trial, just as it has with lesser war criminals in Africa.