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Edited on Wed Sep-15-04 09:17 PM by G_j
or if you read the original article, but here is some more reading material: http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR082404.htmDid the U.S. Commit War Crimes in Vietnam? DAVID MacMICHAEL, dmacm@adelphia.net A disabled veteran of ten years active Marine Corps service in Korea, MacMichael was a Defense Department consultant from 1965 to 1969 in Southeast Asia. During most of that period he was attached to the office of the Special Assistant for Counter-Insurgency at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. In that capacity he reviewed classified reports from the U.S. mission in Vietnam. MacMichael said today: "Some Vietnam veterans are outraged that presidential candidate Kerry in his 1971 Senate testimony spoke of atrocities reportedly committed by U.S. military forces in Vietnam. There is more than a little substance to the charge. The Toledo Blade won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize by revealing that in 1967 the 101st Airborne Division created a 'Tiger Force' ordered to kill all Vietnamese males in Quang Ngi Province. According to official U.S. Army records unearthed by the Blade reporters, Tiger Force killed many hundreds of Vietnamese and, yes, soldiers of that force did proudly ware necklaces of the ears they cut from their victims. The Army did investigate and identified the perpetrators of the crimes but chose not to prosecute them."
MacMichael added: "In 1968, Colonel George S. Patton III -- son of the World War II general -- then commanding a brigade in Vietnam, sent out Christmas cards showing dead Vietnamese stacked up Abu Ghraib-fashion with the message 'Peace on Earth' and signed by him and his wife.... And then, of course, there was My Lai. There, C Company of the 11th Brigade of the Americal Division in 1967 entered that village and methodically executed between 347 and 504 of its unarmed inhabitants, men, women and children. At least 100 of them were lined up in an irrigation ditch by Lt. William Calley and shot to death by his GIs. The slaughter only ended when the shocked crew of an Army helicopter gunship landed and forced C Company at gunpoint to cease and desist. My Lai was far from an exceptional case. In fact, it might never have come to light had not a troubled Americal Division mortarman, Tom Glen, who had not been present, heard about it and, after rotating out of Vietnam to the U.S., wrote to the U.S. commander in Vietnam, General Westmoreland. His letter only mentioned My Lai as 'part of the abusive pattern that had become routine in the Americal Division.'"
DAVID CLINE, daoudc@aol.com, www.veteransforpeace.org, www.vvaw.org, www.nhgazette.com/chickenhawks.html
Currently national president of Veterans for Peace and a longtime coordinator of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Cline is a disabled combat veteran. He said today: "After 30 years, some people are trying to whitewash what happened in Vietnam."
S. BRIAN WILLSON, bw@brianwillson.com, www.brianwillson.com
Willson is a former Air Force captain who served in Vietnam. He said today: "As head of a 40-man USAF combat security unit in Vietnam, I was separately tasked to assess 'success' of targeted bombings. I discovered egregious war crimes -- daylight terror bombings of undefended fishing and rice farming villages resulting in mass murders and maimings of hundreds of residents. Subsequently, in conversations with members of the 9th Infantry Division, I heard bravado about slaughter of 11,000 'enemy' from ground operations, though the vast majority proved to be unarmed civilians."
....more....
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http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Tiger_force_120803.htm
Tiger Force (Vietnam) Uncovered and Exposed
Talk of the Town - COMMENT: UNCOVERED
Witness to Vietnam atrocities never knew about investigation
THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 10, 2003
Talk of the Town, p.41
<snip>
At the height of the rampage, the Tiger Force platoon was operating a few dozen miles from a Quang Ngai hamlet that the Army called My Lai 4, and where, in March, 1968, more than five hundred Vietnamese civilians were massacred by a task force whose platoon leaders included William L. Calley, Jr. The Blade quoted a law professor as stating that My Lai might have been avoided if the senior officer corps had acted on complaints of military brutality in Quang Ngai that had been filed by at least two soldiers. The Blade further reported that in the early nineteen-seventies, after Calley's conviction for the murder of twenty-two Vietnamese civilians, in March, 1971, and while the Army was publicly insisting that My Lai was an isolated incident, senior officials in the White House and the Pentagon were provided with periodic reports on the Tiger Force inquiry.
In fact, while the Army was conducting its internal investigation of My Lai, it discovered that a second large massacre had taken place on the same day in the same area, in a hamlet known as My Khe 4, but Lieutenant General William R. Peers, who had served for more than two years in Vietnam and who led the investigation, publicly denied that there were any other incidents. "It was not brought out to me in the evidence," Peers told reporters at the close of the inquiry, and he was not challenged on that assertion, even though two Army officers who had been present at My Khe had already been charged with war crimes. Twenty years later, the Army declassified an April, 1970, memorandum to the General responding to an article I had written about My Lai. It noted that I did not appear to "possess any substantive information concerning the suppression or cover-up aspects of the incident," but that I was being aided in my reporting by someone with access to the official records. It concluded, "The need to terminate such assistance to Mr. Hersh becomes increasingly important when consideration is given to the use Mr. Hersh would make of any information he obtained concerning command reaction and efforts of suppression."
John Dean, the former White House counsel to President Nixon, acknowledged that he had received a series of reports from the Army on the status of pending war-crimes investigations, including My Lai, but that they gave no hint of the extent of the crimes. "It doesn't get to the top unless there's a problem," he told me last month. "I had no knowledge of My Lai"-that is, its full horror--"until it hit the press."
In war-crimes investigations, the disparity between the facts and the military's official versions of them has repeatedly been exposed, often with bruising consequences, by an independent press. The Blade's extraordinary investigation of Tiger Force, however, remains all but invisible. None of the four major television networks have picked it up (although CBS and NBC have been in touch with the Blade), and most major newspapers have either ignored the story or limited themselves to publishing an Associated Press summary. In a column published on the first day of the series, Ron Royhab, the Blade’s executive editor, pointedly wrote that the decision to run the Vietnam stories now had "nothing to do" with the current military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he told me, "We can't have this kind of information and sit on it, because then we'd be a party to a coverup." There is, of course, a hesitancy in time of war--and, in particular, during an increasingly unpopular war against an entrenched guerrilla enemy, to publish stories that could be interpreted as undermining military morale. And news organizations instinctively debunk scoops nom their competitors, especially those in smaller markets. It may be that others in the media are planning to do their own Tiger Force investigations. Let's hope so. Terrible things always happen in war, and the responsibility of the press is to do exactly what the Blade has done-to find, verify, and publish the truth.
-Seymour M Hersh
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