Ex-officer may face justice for atrocities (Vietnam war crime charge)

[kskiska]

Army lawyer calls for war-crime charge


Three decades after an Army platoon repeatedly executed unarmed civilians and prisoners in Vietnam, a military lawyer has recommended the unit's former commander be brought up on a war-crime charge.

In what would be an unprecedented event, retired Maj. James Hawkins could face a military court-martial regarding his actions commanding a platoon known as Tiger Force that killed hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children 37 years ago, The Blade has learned.

As the scope of war crimes in Vietnam becomes a key question in the presidential election, the military lawyer recommended this spring that Army officials charge Mr. Hawkins, who led Tiger Force between July and November, 1967.

The recommendation came during a broader Army review of Tiger Force prompted by a four-part series in The Blade in October. The series revealed the platoon's seven-month rampage through Vietnam's Central Highlands in 1967.

more…
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040905/NEWS08/409050410/-1/NEWS

[GCP]

1. This is a kick in the teeth for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

and their ilk who were trying to say that Kerry had been lying about atrocities.

[bread_and_roses]

13. Right!

I hope the revisionist liars calling Kerry's testimony "unpatriotic" are choking on their own bile reading this. This is a good article to "media blast" and to reference in letters to the editor.

[clydefrand]

2. My, my...could it be possible

that our candidate was actually telling the truth when he spoke so eloquently about the atrocities that the SBV call lies???? Wonder who Hawkins is voting for?? Wonder what O'Neill thinks of this development? Should we send him this article? Who knows how? I'll do it...

[madmom]

3. But but but..there were no atrocities, they are all lying! n/t

[olddem43]

8. Right, Lt. Calley was innocent -

all those people at Mi Lai are still alive and well.

[UpInArms]

4. beyond the "call of duty"

and horrific in its detail:

The atrocities began in May, 1967, near Duc Pho, and continued after the unit moved to the remote Song Ve Valley, just as the Army was starting to force civilians from the area into relocation camps.

The valley, which was supposed to be evacuated, is where the platoon ran into the elderly carpenter on July 23, 1967, as he was crossing a river.

The unit had been drinking beer most of the day, according to witnesses, and by the time they encountered the carpenter, many were drunk. Two of the soldiers escorted the man toward the rear of the element, where Mr. Hawkins and Mr. Trout were walking. With the carpenter babbling loudly, Mr. Trout clubbed the man with a rifle. As Tiger Force medic Barry Bowman began to treat the wounded villager, Mr. Hawkins lifted the carpenter up from where he was kneeling and shot him in the face with a Carbine 15 rifle, according to sworn statements to Army investigators in the early 1970s.

At least four witnesses said the carpenter was pleading for his life before he was shot by Mr. Hawkins.

In an interview with The Blade last year, Mr. Hawkins justified the killing by saying the carpenter's voice was loud enough to alert the enemy to the American unit's position: "I eliminated that right there." But four Tiger Force soldiers told Army investigators that there were other ways to silence the carpenter and said the shooting gave away the unit's position anyway.

this article also states that when soldiers complained, they were "transferred":

Records show that two soldiers in the platoon, Lt. Donald Wood of Findlay, and Sgt. Gerald Bruner of Colon, Mich., tried to stop the atrocities but were transferred from the platoon after they complained to superiors.

[Jackpine Radical]

10. Note that the coverup gfoes up the ranks:

"Records show that two soldiers in the platoon, Lt. Donald Wood of Findlay, and Sgt. Gerald Bruner of Colon, Mich., tried to stop the atrocities but were transferred from the platoon after they complained to superiors."

[Judi Lynn]

5. It's important that there will be more work done on this.

The Toledo Blade did the world a favor by digging this story up which has been there to be revealed, explained, and adjudged all this long time:

The story began with a tip-off to the Blade's Washington bureau about some classified documents. The information was passed back to Ohio, where a reporter, Mike Sallah, began to dig. That process began to turn up references to a secret investigation into Tiger Force. Requests for army documents were repeatedly turned down, meaning The Blade's team would have to track down witnesses and victims themselves.

The details of the scoop are harrowing, both for the Vietnamese survivors and many of the still-living US Army soldiers.

Tiger Force operated out of control in the Vietnamese highlands for seven months in 1967. Moving across the region, the platoon of 45 paratroops slaughtered unarmed farmers and their wives and children. They tortured and mutilated victims. A litany of horror has emerged - a baby decapitated for the necklace he wore, a teenage boy for his tennis shoes. A former Tiger Force sergeant, William Doyle, told reporters of a scalp he took off a young nurse to decorate his rifle. The Blade investigation concluded that hundreds probably died. 'We weren't keeping count,' Ken Kerney, a former soldier who is now a California firefighter, told the paper. 'I knew it was wrong, but it was an acceptable practice.' Another, Rion Causey, then a 19-year-old medic and now a nuclear physicist, talked of how villagers were routinely shot: 'If they ran we shot them, and if they didn't run we shot them anyway.'

The killing spree was either ignored or encouraged by army top brass, but when an inquiry did take place it lasted for four years. No one was charged. Details were not released to the public, and are still classified. Bill Carpenter, a former special infantryman with Tiger Force, believes the self-styled death squad's former commander, Lt James Hawkins, should be held accountable. He 'thoroughly enjoyed killing' and, now retired to Florida, still defiantly defends his platoon's wartime activities. 'I don't regret nothing,' Hawkins has said.
(snip/...)

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1071214,00.html

[Ohio rules]

6. Olliver North joins the smear boaters now

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1504&ncid=1504&e=1&u=/afp/20040905/ts_afp/iraq_duri_arrest_040905123110

He calls Kerry a flip flopping war criminal !
He has no room for calling out Kerry

[jimshoes]

7. Ollie North should be in jail

scum has no credibility.

[fishface]

11. You might want to correct your link before someone accuses

You of being a freetard..

[Shallah Kali]

17. Olliver North helped men get off for the massacre at Son Thang

http://factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=244

In 1998, for example, Marine Corps veteran Gary D. Solis published the book Son Thang: An American War Crime describing the court-martial of four US Marines for the apparently unprovoked killing 16 women and children on the night of February 19, 1970 in a hamlet about 20 miles south of Danang. The four Marines testified that they were under orders by their patrol leader to shoot the villagers. A young Oliver North appeared as a character witness and helped acquit the leader of all charges, but three were convicted.

[Moderator]

21. Headline

doesn't match story

[TahitiNut]

9. Will people ever get it through their heads?

War is insanity! There has never been a war when atrocities haven't been committed on both sides. War is an atrocity! It's every bit as much or more of an atrocity to murder people with a carbine from 3' as to murder people with bombs dropped from 20,000' by some fellows who'll toast a "successful mission" that evening over a few beers. The only "line" seems to be that only the senior leadership of the defeated side can be found guilty of their complicity - when, in fact, it comes from the top on all sides.

The delusion that this isn't so only helps seduce us into the next war.

[salin]

12. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!

The discussion that never occurs in the run-up to the war - is about cost. Not just monetary cost (oh, ya... the Iraq oil will cover all of the costs).... not just about troop over extension (if you read carefully in the news - there is a big push to get us going again towards Iran)... and never discussed is the psychological toll on those sent. To be able to kill ... one has to be able to dehumanize those killed... and when one begin to suspect that all civilians are potentially going to kill you, then that dehumanization generalizes to all civilians... this, in and of itself, is a given. We, the people, are never asked... is THIS (proposed) conflict important enough for the costs required: monetary, human, psychological, and thinning of resources for national security? I would bet, that had this been put before the American people - in an honest discussion (without the faked OSP intelligence) - that the Afghanistan efforts would have been supported but NOT the gulf war. Harder to say how the public would have answered those questions about the conflicts in the Balkans... though the American public has a pretty weak stomach for currently occuring mass exterminations (e.g., ethnic cleansing - hence the use of the older ethnic cleansing in Iraq as one of the war rationales.)

Will we ever hear these questions asked before we send young people into the hell we call war? Doubt it.

Btw, my above comment is not made to condone those who commit atrocities - far from it... Just to suggest that it is to be an expected cost... and that I would suggest that some who get so warped as to commit egregious atrocities would probably not have committed such acts had it not been for war (e.g., this is not just a character flaw and that those who committed them would have inevitably committed heinous crimes at home had they not been in war... )

[brentspeak]

14. When will the mainstream media finally cover this story?

The Toledo Blade won the Pulitzer last year for their series of articles on Tiger Force, but the revelations were not mentioned on any of the major news networks, and even the New York Times refused to reprint the articles for their own readers (claiming that they would have if only the articles had been written by Times staffers).

The kinds of things that Tiger Force did are almost word-for-word a list of the kinds of atrocities that Kerry relayed to the Senate in 1971: random shooting of civilians, blowing people up with grenades, cutting off ears, heads, scalps, you name it. But Tiger Force has been unknown to even military historians up until last year.

[Judi Lynn]

15. ABC article has additional information:

But to date, no U.S. official has explained why charges were never brought despite the military's extensive investigation.

"There was a cover-up," said The Blade's Weiss. "There is no doubt about it."

"We don't know at this point who killed the investigation," said Sallah. "We don't know why no one was charged. We do know it reached the top levels of government."

The Army sent regular reports on the investigation to the Nixon White House between 1971 and 1973, Sallah and Weiss reported. The final decision to keep the case quiet and not prosecute was made in November 1975, when Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, was urging the country to heal from the wounds of Vietnam. It was also the month James Schlesinger resigned as secretary of defense and was replaced by Donald Rumsfeld, who was the youngest secretary of defense in U.S. history.

"The last thing the Ford administration wanted at that point was a Vietnam war crimes trial, something the size of My Lai, because once you court-martial one of these guys … then everything's out of the bag," said Weiss.

Neither Rumsfeld nor Schlesinger would comment on why none of the Tiger Force soldiers were ever prosecuted. A spokesman for Ford said the former president had no comment on the Tiger Force investigation.
(snip/...)

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/WNT/Investigation/vietnam_tiger_force_031112.html

[JohnyCanuck]

18. Coverup = Standard Operating Procedure.

But a test soon confronted Maj. Powell. A letter had been written by a young specialist fourth class named Tom Glen, who had served in an Americal mortar platoon and was nearing the end of his Army tour. In a letter to Gen. Creighton Abrams, the commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam, Glen accused the Americal division of routine brutality against civilians. Glen's letter was forwarded to the Americal headquarters at Chu Lai where it landed on Maj. Powell's desk.

"The average GI's attitude toward and treatment of the Vietnamese people all too often is a complete denial of all our country is attempting to accomplish in the realm of human relations," Glen wrote. "Far beyond merely dismissing the Vietnamese as 'slopes' or 'gooks,' in both deed and thought, too many American soldiers seem to discount their very humanity; and with this attitude inflict upon the Vietnamese citizenry humiliations, both psychological and physical, that can have only a debilitating effect upon efforts to unify the people in loyalty to the Saigon government, particularly when such acts are carried out at unit levels and thereby acquire the aspect of sanctioned policy."

Glen's letter contended that many Vietnamese were fleeing from Americans who "for mere pleasure, fire indiscriminately into Vietnamese homes and without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves." Gratuitous cruelty was also being inflicted on Viet Cong suspects, Glen reported.

<snip>

After that cursory investigation, Powell drafted a response on Dec. 13, 1968. He admitted to no pattern of wrongdoing. Powell claimed that U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were taught to treat Vietnamese courteously and respectfully. The Americal troops also had gone through an hour-long course on how to treat prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, Powell noted.

www.consortiumnews.com/archive/colin3.html

Yes the Major Powell involved in this story of war crime coverups is none other than the hero of Gulf War 1 and the appointed Chief Bush Administration Liar to the UN, Colin Powell. Note that in the past Powell has been accused of covering up the My Lai massacre. However, according to this story he was never given the task of investigating My Lai. The authors do believe that if he had done a proper investigation (instead of a whitewash) of Glen's complaint, it is very likely he would have come across evidence about the atrocity at My Lai and been in a position to bring it to the attention of his superiors. (Glen said later he had heard rumours about My Lai through the grapevine, but was not a direct witness to the event and had not included any accusations about My Lai in his letter)

[Judi Lynn]

20. Thanks for posting this article. Unbelievable.

I'm sure a lot of Americans have had no idea to what extent Powell was involved.

" The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong."

One phrase covers all, apparently.

[Career Prole]

16. Anyone who hasn't yet needs to read the entire Blade series about

the Tiger Force. It's well written, thoroughly investigated and documented complete with eyewitness accounts from former Tiger Force soldiers and Vietnamese survivors. It was awarded the Pulitzer it well deserved.
It documents everything Kerry testified to hearing at the Winter Soldiers meeting, and is invaluable if you need to shut freepers up regarding John Kerry's anti-war activism.
Here's the link...please, if you haven't yet, read it now. Even Rumsfeld is involved.
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20031022/SRTIGERFORCE/110190169

[Karenina]

19. Excellent!

It's said "Justice delayed is justice denied," but when it's here and now, I embrace it with open arms ESPECIALLY here and NOW. ;-)

[burrowowl]

22. About time!

Kick!

[struggle4progress]

23. kick

:kick:

[agincourt]

24. I haven't talked to to many vets.

But the ones that I have, said that bad things were done over there. It just used to be common knowledge. Now they are trying to rewrite history just to make Kerry look bad. I don't think there has ever been a clean guerilla war in all of history.