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Hanoi Directed Kerry Smoking Gun!!!
page: 1share:
Oh my, here it comes, 1 week before the elections, the allegations are starting to appear hot and heavy.
It was only a matter of time before the Vietnam skeleton was pulled out of the closet.
This week should be interesting!!!
Recovered Vietnam documents 'smoking gun' researchers claim.
October 26, 2004
By Art Moore
� 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
The first documentary evidence that Vietnamese communists were directly steering John Kerry's antiwar group Vietnam Veterans Against the War has been discovered in a U.S. archive, according to a researcher who spoke with WorldNetDaily.
John Kerry testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971.
One freshly unearthed document, captured by the U.S. from Vietnamese communists in 1971 and later translated, indicates the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese delegations to the Paris peace talks that year were used as the communications link to direct the activities of Kerry and other antiwar activists who attended.
Kerry insists he attended the talks only because he happened to be in France on his honeymoon and maintains he met with both sides. But previously revealed records indicate the future senator made two, and possibly three, trips to Paris to meet with Viet Cong leader Madame Nguyen Thi Binh then promote her plan's demand for U.S. surrender.
www.worldnetdaily.com...
It was only a matter of time before the Vietnam skeleton was pulled out of the closet.
This week should be interesting!!!
Recovered Vietnam documents 'smoking gun' researchers claim.
October 26, 2004
By Art Moore
� 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
The first documentary evidence that Vietnamese communists were directly steering John Kerry's antiwar group Vietnam Veterans Against the War has been discovered in a U.S. archive, according to a researcher who spoke with WorldNetDaily.
John Kerry testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971.
One freshly unearthed document, captured by the U.S. from Vietnamese communists in 1971 and later translated, indicates the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese delegations to the Paris peace talks that year were used as the communications link to direct the activities of Kerry and other antiwar activists who attended.
Kerry insists he attended the talks only because he happened to be in France on his honeymoon and maintains he met with both sides. But previously revealed records indicate the future senator made two, and possibly three, trips to Paris to meet with Viet Cong leader Madame Nguyen Thi Binh then promote her plan's demand for U.S. surrender.
www.worldnetdaily.com...
It's no wonder the Vietnamese consider him a hero and has his photo up in the hall of hero's, oh wait, they took it down because it made their
canindate look bad.
Whao I just ralized that Kerry is a vietnamese is disguised, we are going to turn comunist if he win and he is bringing all his vietanmese bodies to
fill his cabinet in the governmet, pleassseeeeee don't let him win I am afraidddd for my democratic lifeeeee.
Who really gives a rats ass? This communist crap has been blown out of all proportion, atleast he isnt a warmonger and an idiot.
Originally posted by marg6043 we are going to turn comunist if he win
SI, es muy possible!
Look at what he wants to do with our military and
healthcare. It is socialism. First step towards
communism.
Originally posted by SiRiNO
at least he isnt a warmonger and an idiot.
Kerry is an appeaser of terrorists and an idiot.
You are right, there is a difference from warmonger and idiot.
Vote Kerry - when you absolutely positively HAVE to lose
the war on terror overnight.
Originally posted by SIRR1
It was only a matter of time before the Vietnam
skeleton was pulled out of the closet. This week
should be interesting!!!
The skeleton that I'm REALLY waiting for is the one
that Kerry wasn't honorably discharged when he
ended his term of service (ETS). Bill Clinton gave
him an honorable discharge 20+ years AFTER Kerry
left the Navy. This wouldn't have happened if
Kerry had an honorable discharge to begin with.
Kerry made a HUGE deal of his being a war hero.
He isn't one and he wasn't even honorably discharged
when he left the Navy. THIS is the story I want to
see come out.
actually, it would have been Carter, not Clinton. Clinton get's himself in enough trouble on his own, lets not go accusing him of something he
didn't do.
here's another source for this. (Kerry with Hanoi)
------
Hanoi Approved of Role Played By Anti-War Vets
BY THOMAS LIPSCOMB - Special to the Sun
October 26, 2004
The communist regime in Hanoi monitored closely and looked favorably upon the activities of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War during the period Senator Kerry served most actively as the group's spokesman and a member of its executive committee, two captured Viet Cong documents suggest.
www.nysun.com...
[edit on 26/10/04 by jrsdls]
here's another source for this. (Kerry with Hanoi)
------
Hanoi Approved of Role Played By Anti-War Vets
BY THOMAS LIPSCOMB - Special to the Sun
October 26, 2004
The communist regime in Hanoi monitored closely and looked favorably upon the activities of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War during the period Senator Kerry served most actively as the group's spokesman and a member of its executive committee, two captured Viet Cong documents suggest.
www.nysun.com...
[edit on 26/10/04 by jrsdls]
U.S. actions in Viet-Nam fell within the prohibited classifications of warfare set down at Nuremberg under Article 6 of the Charter of the
International Military Tribunal, under which the Nuremberg Trials of top Nazi civilian and military leaders were held. It reads:. . . The following
acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility: a. Crimes against
peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, or
assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing. b. War crimes: namely, violations of the
laws or customs of war . . . plunder of public property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military
necessity. c. Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian
population, before, or during the war. . . ."
www.g0lem.net...
"A helicopter pilot looked up from his Jack Daniels-and-Coke to relate what had happened to a captive he had been flying back from a battle area. A Vietnamese army officer yelled in the ear of the suspected guerrilla who was tied hand and foot. The man did not respond, so the officer and a Vietnamese soldier heaved him, struggling against his ropes, out of the UH-1B helicopter from 2,900 feet. Then over the roar of the engine, the officer began to interrogate another prisoner who had watched wide-eyed. The answers must have been satisfactory, the flier said, because, though kicked and roughly handled, the guerrilla was alive to be marched off when the helicopter landed. . . . "
Houston Chronicle reporter Jonathan Kapstein, The Nation, Dec. 21, 1964
"In the pleasantly dim officers' club at Vinh Long, South Viet-Nam, a 25-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant described what he had seen one time when soldiers of the Vietnamese 7th Infantry Division captured prisoners. "They had four, all suspected of being Viet-Cong--the first prisoners they had taken in a long time. They lined 'em up and shot the first man. Then they questioned the second. His answers were unsatisfactory, I guess, because they shot him too."
Houston Chronicle reporter Jonathan Kapstein, The Nation, Dec. 24, 1964
"The enemy were very cocky and started shouting anti-American slogans and Vietnamese curses at their captors. The Marines . . . simply lined up the seventeen guerrillas and shot them down in cold blood. . . ."
David Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire, 1965
American pilots "are given a square marked on a map and told to hit every hamlet within the area. The pilots know they sometimes are bombing women and children."
Washington Post, March 13, 1965
The chief foreign correspondent for the London Sunday Mirror, reported that torture was condoned and even supervised by U.S. officers. "No American is in a position to tell his 'pupils' to stop torturing. They are in no mood either. . . ." Some of the standard tortures included "dunking men head first into water tanks or slicing them up with knives. . . . Silk stockings full of sand are swung against temples and men are hooked up to the electric generators of military HQ's."
Donald Wise, London Sunday Mirror, April 4, 1965.
The "Viet-Cong" use terror also, of course, but theirs is of a more selective nature, if only to avoid estranging the peasants and villagers on whom they depend for food and shelter. They will kill and mutilate the body of a Government official, but they generally pick an unpopular and corrupt victim whose death is welcomed by the peasants. U.S. and Government troops in the countryside, on the other hand, feel themselves lost in an enemy sea and tend to strike out indiscriminately at real or imagined guerrillas. Thus, no Vietnamese is exempt from mistreatment and torture.
Donald Wise, London Sunday Mirror, April 4, 1965.
"One of the most infamous methods of torture used by the government forces is partial electrocution--or "frying," as one U.S. adviser called it. This correspondent was present on one occasion when the torture was employed. Two wires were attached to the thumbs of a Viet-Cong prisoner. At the other end of the strings was a field generator, cranked by a Vietnamese private. The mechanism produced an electrical current that burned and shocked the prisoner.
Beverly Deepe, New York Herald Tribune, April 25, 1965
"Other techniques, usually designed to force onlooking prisoners to talk, involve cutting off the fingers, ears, fingernails or sexual organs of another prisoner. Sometimes a string of ears decorates the wall of a government military installation. One American installation has a Viet-Cong ear preserved in alcohol."
Beverly Deepe, New York Herald Tribune, April 25, 1965
"Near the big coastal city of Hue, U.S. Marines set crops on fire and burned or dynamited huts. . . ."
New York Herald Tribune, May 23, 1965
The victims of air raids were always reported in the official U.S. enemy casualty lists as "dead Viet-Cong." The accuracy of such reports was very questionable: "As the Communists withdrew from Quangngai last Monday, U.S. jet bombers pounded the hills into which they were headed. Many Vietnamese--one estimate was as high as 500--were killed by the strikes. The American contention is that they were Viet-Cong soldiers. But three out of four patients seeking treatment in a Vietnamese hospital afterward for burns from napalm or jellied gasoline, were village women.
Jack Langguth, New York Times, June 6, 1965
"Two Viet-Cong prisoners were interrogated on an airplane flying toward Saigon. The first refused to answer questions and was thrown out of the airplane at 3,000 feet. The second immediately answered all the questions. But he, too, was thrown out."
Beverly Deepe, New Herald Tribune, April 25, 1965
"One American helicopter crewman returned to his base in the central highlands last week without a fierce young prisoner entrusted to him. He told friends that he had become infuriated by the youth and had pushed him out of the helicopter at about 1,000 feet."
Jack Langguth, New York Times, July 7, 1965
In July, 1965, U.S. Marines fought a Viet-Cong force which had landed in sampans on the island of An Hoa and attacked a Vietnamese navy post there. The two major towns on the island, Longthanh and Xuanmy, had been occupied by the guerrillas. Together the towns had about 1,500 inhabitants. After the VietCong retreated, "the Marines were ordered to burn Longthanh and Xuanmy to prevent the Viet-Cong from reoccupying them. . . ." Few Viet-Cong had been killed or captured, but two prosperous villages were razed and, according to U.S. sources, about 100 civilians died from U.S. fire. An A.P. dispatch from the island on July 11, 1965, reported that Americans had called An Hoa "Little Hawaii" because "of its rolling surf and happy people. In one day An Hoa became a little hell."
New York Times, July 11, 1965
Marine patrols near the villages of Chan Son and Camne in the Mekong Delta had received light sniper fire from Viet-Cong guerrillas. What happened next was described by U.S. newsmen accompanying the Marines into the villages. "A Marine shouted, 'Kill them! I don't want anyone moving!' . . . The Marines burned huts they believed were the sites of sniper fire. A sergeant said orders called for this. . . . After the firing died down U.S. Marines found a woman and two children among 25 persons they killed. . . . The woman died of a wound in the side, perhaps from one of the 1,000 artillery shells poured into the area. A wailing child beside her had an arm injury. A grenade hurled by a Marine blasted two children to death in an air-raid shelter."
New York Times, August 3, 1965
U.S. Marines burned 150 houses in the hamlet of Chan Son, ignoring "the pleas of old men and women to delay the burnings so that belongings could be removed..... After surrounding the village . . . the Marines poured 3.5 in. rocket fire, M-79 grenade launchers and heavy and light machine-gun fire. The Marines then moved in, proceeding first with cigarette lighters, then with flame throwers, to burn down an estimated 150 dwellings." "I subsequently learned that a Marine platoon on the right flank wounded three women and killed one child in a rocket barrage. The day's operations netted about four prisoners--old men."
Morley Safer, "Evening News with Walter Cronkite" August 4, 1965
Charles Mohr reported from Saigon on subsequent "attempts by public information officers to de-emphasize the importance of civilian deaths and the burning of village huts at the hands of U.S. Marines."
Charles Mohr, New York Times, August 9, 1965
Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze publicly supported the burning of villages as a "natural and inevitable adjunct" to defense of U.S. bases in their vicinity. Nitze declared that "Where neither United States nor Vietnamese forces can maintain continuous occupancy, it is necessary to destroy those facilities."
New York Times, August 15, 1965
Supersonic jets and B-52 bombers blanketed vast areas of the countryside with 1,000-pound bombs, napalm, and white phosphorus. "This is strategic bombing in a friendly, allied country. Since the Viet-Cong doctrine is to insulate themselves among the population and the population is largely powerless to prevent their presence, no one here seriously doubts that significant numbers of innocent civilians are dying every day in South Viet-Nam."
Charles Mohr, New York Times, September 5, 1965
"There is a new breed of Americans that most of us don't know about and it is time we got used to it. The 18- and 19year-olds, fashionably referred to as high-school dropouts, have steel in their backbones and maybe too much of what prize fighters call the killer instinct. These kids seem to enjoy killing Viet-Cong. . . ."
New York Journal-American, September 16, 1965
A U.S. officer serving with a helicopter unit in the Mekong Delta was asked what the answer was to Viet-Cong activity. "'Terror,' he said pleasantly. 'The Viet-Cong have terrorized the peasants to get their cooperation, or at least to stop their opposition. We must terrorize the villagers even more, so they see that their real selfinterest lies with us. . . . Terror is what it takes.'"
Jack Langguth, New York Times Magazine, September 19, 1965
Vietnamese villagers, driven to desperation, occasionally descended en masse on U.S. bases to protest the bombings of their villages. Such demonstrations were violently repressed. In early September a group of villagers marched on the U.S. air base at Danang demanding an end to air attacks on their villages. The demonstration was dispersed and five participants, selected at random, were arrested. Their punishment was swift. "At Danang, three persons were executed by a South Vietnamese firing squad. The execution, held in a soccer stadium, was postponed at the last minute until midnight . . . because news photographers refused to obey an order that no pictures be taken until the final shot had been fired. The three were among five persons arrested Monday during a demonstration by about 200 persons in downtown Danang. They were protesting crop damage from artillery fire and air attacks by U.S. forces."
Chicago Daily News, September 23, 1965
The fate of the other two demonstrators in Da Nang was described in a U.P.I. dispatch from Saigon. ". . . the fourth man would be executed later, but at the moment . . . he was described as a 'singing bird.' The fifth demonstrator, a woman, was sentenced to life in prison although the demonstration had been so small that few were even aware of it."
Washington Daily News, October 4, 1965
At 12:00 o'clock, a helicopter came in and the shirtless Marine in the tent said it was going to Da Nang. . . . A young redheaded machine-gunner sat in the doorway, chewing on a chocolate cracker from a C-ration tin. He kicked a small spool of wire out of the doorway and made room."We just rode Nuongs, you can tell that by the wire here," he said."Why?" he was asked. Nuongs are Chinese mercenaries from Formosa. . . ."They always want the wire for the prisoners," the kid said. "Don't you know that? They get a VC and make him hold his hands against his cheeks. Then they take this wire and run it right through the one hand and right through his cheek and into his mouth. Then they pull the wire out through the other cheek and stick it through the other hand. They knot both ends around sticks. You never seen them with prisoners like that? Oh, you ought to see how quiet them gooks sit in a helicopter when we got them wrapped up like that."
Jimmy Breslin, New York Herald Tribune, September 29, 1965
Hans Henle, a former executive of the information Service of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, commented: "The Viet-Cong fighters are as protected by the Geneva Conventions as the American G.I.s are. Dramatic protests against violations of the Geneva Conventions should have been made when the first Viet-Cong prisoners were shot, when they were tortured, when the American Army started to destroy VietCong hospitals and to cut off medical supply. . . . It is utterly hypocritical to condone wholesale violations of the Red Cross principles on one side and protest reprisals against them. . . ."
New York Times, International Edition only, October 14, 1965
Senator Stephen Young, who had just returned from a fact-finding mission in Viet-Nam, "says he was told by a member of the Central Intelligence Agency in Viet-Nam that the C.I.A. committed atrocities there to discredit the Viet-Cong. Young said he was told that the C.I.A. disguised some people as Viet-Cong and they committed atrocities. . . ."
Associated Press, October 16, 1965. Philadelphia Inquirer, October 20, 1965
Senator Young's revelations landed like a bombshell on official Washington. "The C.I.A. and the State Department went into an uproar," the Herald Tribune reported. "There was deep distress among State Department officials who feared his reported remarks would have disastrous repercussions abroad." But Young refused to back down. "The C.I.A. has employed some South Vietnamese," he reiterated, "and they have been instructed to claim they are Viet-Cong and to work accordingly . . . several of these executed two village leaders and raped some women. I know such men have been employed, and I question the wisdom of that."
New York Herald Tribune, October 21, 1965
In an operation thirty-five miles outside of Saigon, U.S. troops rushed a peasant shack believed to harbor VietCong. One U.S. Lieutenant hurled a grenade through the door but the inhabitants tossed it back out. "Another American soldier charged the shack, pulled the pin on a grenade and gave the fuse a few seconds count-down before pitching it in. Following the explosion the G.I. leaped into the shack with his M-14 rifle blazing. Three men and a baby died. Two women were wounded. Shrapnel took off the lower half of one woman's leg."
New York Post, November 16, 1965
After a platoon of the U.S. 1st Air Cavalry Division was almost wiped out in a battle in the Chu Prong foothills of the Ia Drang valley, "In one place nearby the Americans found three North Vietnamese wounded. One lay huddled under a tree, a smile on his face. "You won't smile any more," said one of the American soldiers, pumping bullets into his body. The other two met the same fate."
Reuters, November 18, 1965
Following the Ia Drang battle, a reporter accompanied U.S. relief forces to a clearing littered with dead from the previous day's fighting. "It was almost impossible to walk twenty paces without stumbling upon a body. . . . Suddenly a few yards away a wounded enemy soldier lifted one arm weakly and an American sergeant poured a long burst of M-16 rifle bullets into him. 'Was he trying to give up, Sarge?' a man asked. 'I'd like to find more of those bastards trying to give up,' the sergeant said bitterly. No one disagreed with him. . . .
Raymond R. Coffey, Chicago Daily News, November 19, 1965
"The International Red Cross Committee is dissatisfied with the way the United States and South Vietnamese Governments observe their pledge to respect the Geneva Conventions protecting war victims. . . . The Committee's representative in Saigon has been unable to visit prisoners taken by American and South Vietnamese troops despite the affirmative reply of the two governments to its appeal for the observance of the conventions. The Saigon authorities were said to have given repeated assurances that they intended to allow the International Red Cross to visit the prisoners but to date have done nothing more about it."
New York Times, November 26, 1965
"Anyone who has spent much time with Government units in the field has seen the heads of prisoners held under water and bayonet blades pressed against their throats. . . . In more extreme cases, victims have had bamboo slivers run under their fingernails or wires from a field telephone connected to arms, nipples or testicles."
William Tuohy, New York Times Magazine, 28 Nov 1965
�Some Viet-Cong suspects do not survive long enough for the third degree. Earlier this year, in an operation along the central coast, a Government detachment failed to flush VC troops suspected of lurking in the area. However, several villagers were rounded up and one man was brought before the company commander. The Vietnamese officer briefly questioned the suspect, then turned to his adviser . . .and said, �I think I shoot this man. Okay?��Go ahead,� said the adviser.The officer fired a carbine round point blank, striking the villager below the chest. The man slumped and died. The patrol moved on. Later, a correspondent asked the adviser, who had seemed a decent enough fellow, why he had given his approval.��These people could have moved to a Government area. In this war they are either on our side or they are not. There is no in-between.��
William Tuohy, New York Times Magazine, 28 Nov 1965
"In mid-August United States and Vietnamese military officials decided the Communists were using Duchai as a base for their operations in the area and that it should be destroyed. For the next two months . . . it was periodically and ferociously bombed by Vietnamese and American planes. . . . At least 184 civilians died during Duchai's two months of agony. Some reasonable estimates run as high as 600. . . . When an American visits Duchai these days, villagers . . . tell him horror stories of how many of the 15,000 former inhabitants were killed by bombs and shells. 'There,' said a fisherman pointing to a bomb crater beside a ruined house, 'a woman and her six children were killed in a bomb shelter when it got a direct hit.' Duchai's solid brick and stucco houses, the product of generations of hard-earned savings by its fishermen, were reduced to rubble or blasted into skeletons. Five-inch naval shells tore gaping holes in walls, and bombs of 750 to 1,000 pounds plunged through roofs, shattering interiors and scattering red rooftiles over the landscape. . . ."
Neil Sheehan, New York Times, November 30, 1965
At least ten other villages in the province had "been destroyed as thoroughly as the five in Duchai" and another twenty-five nearly as badly damaged. Four hundred and fifty other villages have been under intermittent attack by U.S. and Vietnamese planes. "Each month 600 to 1,000 civilians wounded by bombs, shells, bullets and napalm are brought to the provincial hospital in Quangngai town. Officials say that about thirty percent of these cases require major surgery. A recent visitor to the hospital found several children lying on cots, their bodies horribly burned by napalm."
Neil Sheehan, New York Times, November 30, 1965
"The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva . . . complained again that the United States was violating an international accord on the treatment of prisoners. . . ."
New York Times, December 1, 1965
"The indiscriminate use of air power against presumed Viet-Cong targets does much to explain the alienation of the rural population from the Saigon Government. Country people whose only contact with the government comes in the form of napalm and rocket attacks can scarcely be expected to feel sympathetic to the government cause, whatever it may be. On the other hand, they have every reason to feel solidarity with the guerrillas, usually recruited from their villages, who share their peril and their hardships."
Robert Taber, The War o the Flea, Lyle Stuart, 1965
In November 1966 an officer in the Army's Fourth Infantry Division severed an ear from a Vietnamese corpse and affixed it to the radio antenna of a jeep as an ornament. The officer was given a non-judicial punishment and a letter of reprimand.
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
From May to November 1967, the Tiger Force platoon attached to the 101st Airborne murdered hundreds of noncombatant men, women, and children in Quang Ngai province. Some were tortured and mutilated. Some were shot while begging for their lives. Some, hiding in bunkers, were killed by hand grenades. Soldiers collected ears as souvenirs, and a few scalps and gold teeth. It was covered up by the Pentagon.
Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, November 10, 2003
(www.toledoblade.com...)
Military records document that two Tiger Force soldiers who tried to stop the attacks were warned by their commanders to remain quiet before transferring to other units.
Associated Press, 20 Oct 03
�On June 23, 1967, members of the 25th Infantry Division killed two enemy soldiers in combat in Binh Duong province. An army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) probe disclosed that �Staff Sergeant H. then decapitated the bodies with an axe.� H. was court-martialed and found guilty of conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline. His grade was reduced, but he served no prison time.�
Nicholas Turse, �Swift Boat Swill�, The Village Voice, September 21, 2004 www.truthout.org...
In August 1967 Specialist S., a military intelligence interrogator of the 196th Infantry Brigade, "raped . . . a 13-year-old . . . female" in an interrogation hut in a P.O.W. compound. He was convicted of assault and indecent acts with a child. He served seven months and 16 days for his crimes.
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
In September 1967 an American sergeant killed two Vietnamese children--executing one at point blank range with a bullet to the head. Tried by general court martial in 1970, the sergeant pleaded guilty to, and was found guilty of, unpremeditated murder. He was, however, sentenced to no punishment.
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
On January 10, 1968, six Green Berets in Long Hai, South Vietnam, "applied electrical torture via field telephones to the sensitive areas of the bodies of three men and one woman . . . " Four received reprimands and "Article 15s"--a nonjudicial punishment meted out by a commanding officer or officer in charge for minor offenses. A fifth refused to accept his Article 15, and no other action was taken against him. No action was taken against the sixth Green Beret.
Nicholas Turse, �Swift Boat Swill�, The Village Voice, September 21, 2004 www.truthout.org...
A soldier from the Americal Division admitted to his commanding officer and other men of his unit that on February 4, 1968, he gunned down three civilians as they worked in a field (in the same province as My Lai). A CID investigation substantiated his confession and charges of premeditated murder were preferred against him. The soldier requested a discharge, which was granted by the commanding general of the Americal Division, in lieu of court martial proceedings.
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
�A CID investigation disclosed that during late February or early March 1968 near Thanh Duc, South Vietnam, First Lieutenant L. ordered soldier K. to shoot an unidentified Vietnamese civilian. �K. shot the Vietnamese civilian, leaving him with wounds in the chest and stomach. Soldier B., acting on orders from L., returned to the scene and killed the Vietnamese civilian, and an unidentified medic severed the Vietnamese civilian's left arm.� No punishment was meted out because none of the �identified perpetrators� was found to be on active duty at the time of the June 1971 investigation. �
Nicholas Turse, �Swift Boat Swill�, The Village Voice, September 21, 2004 www.truthout.org...
An army task force massacred 583 Vietnamese civilians at the village of My Lai.
Alexander Cochburn, �The Legacy of My Lai�, The Nation, March 26, 1988 (www.thirdworldtraveler.com...)
A soldier named Hugh Thompson in a helicopter gunship saw what was happening. Risking his life. . . , Thompson landed his helicopter between the mass murderers and their victims, turned his machine guns on his fellow Americans, and brought the carnage to a halt.
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
��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.�
Seymour Hersh, �Uncovered,� The New Yorker, November 10, 2003 (www.newyorker.com...)
According to formerly classified Army documents, from March 1968 through October 1969 "Vietnamese [civilian] detainees were subjected to maltreatment" by no less than twenty-three separate interrogators of the 172d Military Intelligence (MI) Detachment. The inquiry found that, in addition to using "electrical shock by means of a field telephone," an all too commonly used method of torture by Americans during the war, MI personnel also struck detainees with their fists, sticks and boards and employed a form of water torture which impaired prisoners' ability to breathe." Documents indicate that no disciplinary actions were taken against any of the individuals implicated in the long-running series of atrocities.
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
On August 9, 1968, a seven-man patrol led by First Lieutenant S. entered Dien Tien hamlet. "Shortly thereafter, Private First Class W. was heard to shout to an unidentified person to halt. W. fired his M-16 several times, and the victim was killed. W. then dragged the body to [the lieutenant's] location. . . . Staff Sergeant B. told W. to bring back an ear or finger if he wanted to prove himself a man. W. later went back to the body and removed both ears and a finger." W. was charged with assault and conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline; he was court-martialed and convicted, but he served no prison time. B. was found guilty of assault and was fined $50 a month for three months. S. was discharged from the army before action could be taken against him.
Nicholas Turse, �Swift Boat Swill�, The Village Voice, September 21, 2004 www.truthout.org...
��Defenseless villagers are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set afire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.� George Orwell wrote those words in 1946 in �Politics and the English Language.� But he could have been describing the way the U.S. waged war in Vietnam more than two decades later. It has now become generally accepted that the American use of massive firepower has caused the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians�perhaps, some U.S. officials admit privately, as many as 100,000. Aside from such aberrant incidents as the massacre at My Lai, the commonly cited culprit is �indiscriminate use of firepower,� a phrase that means American military recklessness. But in my opinion, the U.S. military has been guilty of more than recklessness. It can, I believe, be documented that thousands of Vietnamese civilians have been killed deliberately by U.S. forces.�
Kevin P. Buckley, Newsweek� June 19, 1972, pp. 42-3.www.chss.montclair.edu...
�That is a very serious charge. But any doubts that it is true were dispelled in my mind after an exhaustive examination of one of the most representative�and most "successful"�episodes in the history of pacification in Vietnam. Late in 1968, the U.S. command in Saigon launched an �accelerated pacification program,� a sort of government �land rush,� as officials dubbed it. In support of that campaign, the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division mounted a six-month operation code-named Speedy Express, focusing on the Mekong Delta province of Kien Hoa. In my investigation of Speedy Express, I examined the military record of the operation and interviewed pacification officials familiar with Kien Hoa; I talked with participants in the fighting and combed through hospital records, and I traveled throughout Kien Hoa�on foot, by jeep, in boats and by raft�to talk with the people. All the evidence I gathered pointed to a clear conclusion: a staggering number of noncombatant civilians�perhaps as many as 5,000 according to one official�were killed by U.S. firepower to �pacify� Kien Hoa. The death toll there made the My Lai massacre look trifling by comparison.�
Buckley, continued
�When Speedy Express began, Kien Hoa had long been a Communist bastion, an area as symbolic to the National Liberation Front (NLF) as Boston was to the American revolutionary movement. Many prominent Viet Cong leaders�and indeed the NLF itself�had been born there. NLF control was so strong that many residents regarded the Saigon government as an alien power. But while the Viet Cong had organized a well-trained army in Kien Hoa, the area was much more than a military zone. The children of the soldiers attended NLF schools, and old men and women checked into NLF hospitals if they were ailing. Thousands of families made a living from the flat rice land that makes up most of the province. But to the U.S. command, the areas under Viet Cong control were a theater of war, �Indian country�: where any suspicious movement was justification for opening fire. The residents were �enemy supporters� who could become �citizens� only after an area had been pacified.�
Buckley, continued
�Cumulative statistics for �Speedy Express� show that 10,899 �enemy� were killed. In the month of March alone, �over 3,000 enemy troops were killed � which is the largest monthly total for any American division in the Vietnam war,� said the division's official magazine. When asked to account for the enormous body counts, a division senior officer explained that helicopter crews often caught unarmed �enemy� in open fields. But Vietnamese repeatedly told me that those �enemy" were farmers, gunned down while they worked in their rice fields.� Buckley, continued
�The staggering number of Vietnamese casualties was not the only suspicious aspect of Speedy Express. The operation yielded an embarrassingly small number of enemy weapons captured�only 748, despite nearly 11,000 �kills.� One Ninth Division officer explained that the Viet Cong were shot �before they could get to their weapons,� while a spokesman for the U.S. command said: �Many individuals in the VC and guerrilla units were not equipped with individual firearms.� However, the first explanation is highly implausible and the second is patently false. There is overwhelming evidence that virtually all the Viet Cong were well armed. Simple civilians were, of course, not armed. And the enormous discrepancy between the body count and the number of captured weapons is hard to explain�except by the conclusion that many victims were unarmed, innocent civilians.�
Buckley, continued
�Records at the civilian hospital in Ben Tre provide bloody and convincing evidence of how Vietnamese civilians suffered at the hands of the U.S. military. The hospital served only one small area and received only a fraction of the wounded. (�Many of the people who were wounded in Kien Hoa ever got to any hospital,� said one U.S. official, �because they died on the way.�) yet in the course of Speedy Express, the Ben Tre hospital treated a total of 1,882 civilians with war-connected wounds. Of that number, only 451 were wounded by Viet Cong fire. The remainder, 1,431 civilians, were wounded by what is called, in the irrational parlance of Vietnam, �friendly fire,� or U.S. firepower. In March alone, when the Ninth claimed a record body count, only 25 civilians were admitted with VC wounds�and 343 were treated for �friendly� wounds.�
Buckley, continued
On January 22, 1968, Robert McNamara had told the Senate that "no regular North Vietnamese units" were deployed in the Delta, and no military intelligence documents have surfaced to undermine his claim, so that the cleansing of the area cannot be understood as part of the general argument about resisting Hanoi's unsleeping will to conquest. The announced purpose of the Ninth Division's sweep, indeed, was to redeem many thousands of villagers from political control by the National Liberation Front (NLF), or "Vietcong" (VC).
Christopher Hitchens, The Case Against Kissingerwww.findarticles.com...
From 1967 to 1971, under the Phoenix Program, the CIA created and directed a secret police ostensibly run by the South Vietnamese. Its objective was to destroy the Viet Cong's infrastructure. During the course of the program's existence, the secret police units, operating as virtual death squads, were implicated in burnings, garroting, rape, torture, and sabotage. As many as 50,000 Vietnamese were killed. Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (2000); John Pilger, Heroes (2001)
�By 1967, killing entire families had become an integral facet of the CIA's counter-terror program. Robert Slater was the chief of the CIA's Province Interrogation Center Program from June 1967 through 1969. In a March 1970 thesis for the Defense Intelligence School, titled �The History, Organization and Modus Operandi of the Viet Cong Infrastructure,� Slater wrote, �the District Party Secretary usually does not sleep in the same house or even hamlet where his family lived, to preclude any injury to his family during assassination attempts.� But, Slater added, �the Allies have frequently found out where the District Party Secretaries live and raided their homes: in an ensuing fire fight the secretary's wife and children have been killed and injured.�"
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
�The CIA launched its Phoenix Program in June 1967, after 13 years of tinkering with several experimental counter-terror and psywar programs, and building its network of secret interrogation centers.�
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
�A typical Phoenix operation began in a Province Interrogation Center where a suspected member of the VCI [Viet Cong Infrastructure] was brought for questioning. After a few days or weeks or months undergoing various forms of torture, the VCI suspect would die or give the name and location of his VCI comrades and superiors. That information would be sent from the Interrogation Center to the local Phoenix office, which was staffed by Special Branch and Vietnamese military officers under the supervision of CIA officers. Depending on the suspected importance of the targeted VCI, the Phoenix people would then dispatch one of the various action arms available to it, including Seal teams like the one Bob Kerrey led into Thanh Phong.�
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
�By 1969 the CIA, through Phoenix, was targeting individual VCI and their families all across Vietnam. Over 20,000 people were assassinated by the end of the year and hundreds of thousands had been tortured in Province Interrogation Centers.�
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
"[Everybody] went into the Phoenix hopper: the guilty, the innocent, the enemy killed in action, the casual bodies along the roadside. They'd carry them in and count them up."
Orrin DeForest and Davod Chanoff, Slow Burn (1991)
�On 20 June 1969, the Lower House of the Vietnamese Congress held hearings about abuses in the Phoenix VCI elimination program. Eighty-six Deputies signed a petition calling for its immediate termination. Among the charges: Special Police knowingly arrested innocent people for the purpose of extortion; people were detained for as long as eight months before being tried; torture was commonplace. Noting that it was illegal to do so, several deputies protested instances in which American troops detained or murdered suspects without Vietnamese authority. Others complained that village chiefs were not consulted before raids, such as the one on Thanh Phong.�
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
�After an investigation in 1970, four Congresspersons concluded that the CIA's Phoenix Program violated international law. �The people of these United States,� they jointly stated, �have deliberately imposed upon the Vietnamese people a system of justice which admittedly denies due process of law,� and that in doing so, �we appear to have violated the 1949 Geneva Convention for the protection of civilian people.��During the hearings, U.S. Representative Ogden Reid said, �if the Union had had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon, Georgia.�"
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
David Hackworth, representing the military establishment, defended Bob Kerrey by saying "there were thousands of such atrocities," and that in 1969 his own unit committed "at least a dozen such horrors."
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
�General Bruce Palmer, commander of the same Ninth Division that devastated Kien Koa Province in 1969, objected to the �involuntary assignment� of American soldiers to Phoenix. He did not believe that �people in uniform, who are pledged to abide by the Geneva Conventions, should be put in the position of having to break those laws of warfare.�"
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
Sergeant Roy E. "the Bummer" Bumgarner, a soldier who served with the 1st Cavalry Division and later the 173d Airborne Brigade. According to a former commander, "the Bummer" was rumored to have "personally killed over 1,500 people" during a forty-two week stretch in Vietnam. Even if the number was exaggerated, clues on how Bumgarner may have obtained high "body counts" came to light in the course of an Army criminal investigation of an incident that took place on February 25, 1969. According to investigation documents, Bumgarner and a subordinate rounded up three civilians found working in a rice paddy, marched them to a secluded area and murdered them. "The Bummer" then arranged the bodies on the ground with their heads together and a grenade was exploded next to them in an attempt to cover-up their crime. Assorted weapons were then planted near the mutilated corpses to make them appear to have been enemy troops.
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
During an Army criminal investigation of the incident, men in Bumgarner's unit told investigators that they had heard rumors of the sergeant carrying out similar acts in the past. Said one soldier in a sworn statement to Army investigators: "I've heard of Bumgarner doing it before--planting weapons on bodies when there is doubt as to their military status. I've heard quite a few rumors about Bumgarner killing unarmed people. Only a couple weeks ago I heard that Bumgarner had killed a Vietnamese girl and two younger kids (boys), who didn't have any weapons."
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
"The Bummer" was charged with premeditated murder and tried by general court martial. He was convicted only of manslaughter and his punishment consisted merely of a demotion in rank and a fine of $97 a month for six months. Moreover, after six months, Bumgarner promptly re-enlisted in the Army. His first and only choice of assignments--Vietnam. Records indicate he got his wish!
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
Four US Marines were court-martialed for the apparently unprovoked killing of 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.
Gary D. Solis, Son Thang: An American War Crime (1998)www.azcentral.com...
From January 31 to February 2, 1971, members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War held the Winter Soldier Investigation. They met in a Detroit hotel to document war crimes that they had participated in or witnessed during their combat tours in Vietnam. During the next three days, more than 100 Vietnam veterans and 16 civilians gave anguished, emotional testimony describing hundreds of atrocities against innocent civilians in South Vietnam, including rape, arson, torture, murder, and the shelling or napalming of entire villages. The witnesses stated that these acts were being committed casually and routinely, under orders, as a matter of policy.
ice.he.net...
�According to the formerly classified army records, 46 soldiers who testified at the [Winter Soldier Investigation] made allegations that, in the eyes of U.S. Army investigators, "merited further inquiry." As of March 1972, the army's CID noted that of the 46 allegations, �only 43 complainants have been identified� by investigators. �Only� 43 of 46? That means at least 93 percent of the veterans surveyed were real, not fake. Moreover, according to official records, CID investigators attempted to contact 41 people who testified at the Detroit session, which occurred between January 31 and February 2, 1971. Five couldn't be located, according to records. Of the remaining 36, 31 submitted to interviews-hardly the �few� asserted by [Swift Boat Veterans for Truth]. Moreover, as Gerald Nicosia has noted in his mammoth tome Home to War, �A complete transcript of the Winter Soldier testimony was sent to the Pentagon, and the military never refuted a word of it.��
Nicholas Turse, �Swift Boat Swill�, The Village Voice, September 21, 2004 www.truthout.org...
Under the provisions of Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, the United States is clearly guilty of "War Crimes," "Crimes against Peace" and "Crimes against Humanity," crimes for which the top German leaders were either imprisoned or executed. If we agree with Hermann Goering's defense at Nuremberg that "In a life and death struggle there is no legality," then no action can or should be taken against the government leaders responsible for the war in Viet-Nam. But if Americans still believe that there is a higher law than that of the jungle, we should call our leaders to account.
www.g0lem.net...
www.g0lem.net...
"A helicopter pilot looked up from his Jack Daniels-and-Coke to relate what had happened to a captive he had been flying back from a battle area. A Vietnamese army officer yelled in the ear of the suspected guerrilla who was tied hand and foot. The man did not respond, so the officer and a Vietnamese soldier heaved him, struggling against his ropes, out of the UH-1B helicopter from 2,900 feet. Then over the roar of the engine, the officer began to interrogate another prisoner who had watched wide-eyed. The answers must have been satisfactory, the flier said, because, though kicked and roughly handled, the guerrilla was alive to be marched off when the helicopter landed. . . . "
Houston Chronicle reporter Jonathan Kapstein, The Nation, Dec. 21, 1964
"In the pleasantly dim officers' club at Vinh Long, South Viet-Nam, a 25-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant described what he had seen one time when soldiers of the Vietnamese 7th Infantry Division captured prisoners. "They had four, all suspected of being Viet-Cong--the first prisoners they had taken in a long time. They lined 'em up and shot the first man. Then they questioned the second. His answers were unsatisfactory, I guess, because they shot him too."
Houston Chronicle reporter Jonathan Kapstein, The Nation, Dec. 24, 1964
"The enemy were very cocky and started shouting anti-American slogans and Vietnamese curses at their captors. The Marines . . . simply lined up the seventeen guerrillas and shot them down in cold blood. . . ."
David Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire, 1965
American pilots "are given a square marked on a map and told to hit every hamlet within the area. The pilots know they sometimes are bombing women and children."
Washington Post, March 13, 1965
The chief foreign correspondent for the London Sunday Mirror, reported that torture was condoned and even supervised by U.S. officers. "No American is in a position to tell his 'pupils' to stop torturing. They are in no mood either. . . ." Some of the standard tortures included "dunking men head first into water tanks or slicing them up with knives. . . . Silk stockings full of sand are swung against temples and men are hooked up to the electric generators of military HQ's."
Donald Wise, London Sunday Mirror, April 4, 1965.
The "Viet-Cong" use terror also, of course, but theirs is of a more selective nature, if only to avoid estranging the peasants and villagers on whom they depend for food and shelter. They will kill and mutilate the body of a Government official, but they generally pick an unpopular and corrupt victim whose death is welcomed by the peasants. U.S. and Government troops in the countryside, on the other hand, feel themselves lost in an enemy sea and tend to strike out indiscriminately at real or imagined guerrillas. Thus, no Vietnamese is exempt from mistreatment and torture.
Donald Wise, London Sunday Mirror, April 4, 1965.
"One of the most infamous methods of torture used by the government forces is partial electrocution--or "frying," as one U.S. adviser called it. This correspondent was present on one occasion when the torture was employed. Two wires were attached to the thumbs of a Viet-Cong prisoner. At the other end of the strings was a field generator, cranked by a Vietnamese private. The mechanism produced an electrical current that burned and shocked the prisoner.
Beverly Deepe, New York Herald Tribune, April 25, 1965
"Other techniques, usually designed to force onlooking prisoners to talk, involve cutting off the fingers, ears, fingernails or sexual organs of another prisoner. Sometimes a string of ears decorates the wall of a government military installation. One American installation has a Viet-Cong ear preserved in alcohol."
Beverly Deepe, New York Herald Tribune, April 25, 1965
"Near the big coastal city of Hue, U.S. Marines set crops on fire and burned or dynamited huts. . . ."
New York Herald Tribune, May 23, 1965
The victims of air raids were always reported in the official U.S. enemy casualty lists as "dead Viet-Cong." The accuracy of such reports was very questionable: "As the Communists withdrew from Quangngai last Monday, U.S. jet bombers pounded the hills into which they were headed. Many Vietnamese--one estimate was as high as 500--were killed by the strikes. The American contention is that they were Viet-Cong soldiers. But three out of four patients seeking treatment in a Vietnamese hospital afterward for burns from napalm or jellied gasoline, were village women.
Jack Langguth, New York Times, June 6, 1965
"Two Viet-Cong prisoners were interrogated on an airplane flying toward Saigon. The first refused to answer questions and was thrown out of the airplane at 3,000 feet. The second immediately answered all the questions. But he, too, was thrown out."
Beverly Deepe, New Herald Tribune, April 25, 1965
"One American helicopter crewman returned to his base in the central highlands last week without a fierce young prisoner entrusted to him. He told friends that he had become infuriated by the youth and had pushed him out of the helicopter at about 1,000 feet."
Jack Langguth, New York Times, July 7, 1965
In July, 1965, U.S. Marines fought a Viet-Cong force which had landed in sampans on the island of An Hoa and attacked a Vietnamese navy post there. The two major towns on the island, Longthanh and Xuanmy, had been occupied by the guerrillas. Together the towns had about 1,500 inhabitants. After the VietCong retreated, "the Marines were ordered to burn Longthanh and Xuanmy to prevent the Viet-Cong from reoccupying them. . . ." Few Viet-Cong had been killed or captured, but two prosperous villages were razed and, according to U.S. sources, about 100 civilians died from U.S. fire. An A.P. dispatch from the island on July 11, 1965, reported that Americans had called An Hoa "Little Hawaii" because "of its rolling surf and happy people. In one day An Hoa became a little hell."
New York Times, July 11, 1965
Marine patrols near the villages of Chan Son and Camne in the Mekong Delta had received light sniper fire from Viet-Cong guerrillas. What happened next was described by U.S. newsmen accompanying the Marines into the villages. "A Marine shouted, 'Kill them! I don't want anyone moving!' . . . The Marines burned huts they believed were the sites of sniper fire. A sergeant said orders called for this. . . . After the firing died down U.S. Marines found a woman and two children among 25 persons they killed. . . . The woman died of a wound in the side, perhaps from one of the 1,000 artillery shells poured into the area. A wailing child beside her had an arm injury. A grenade hurled by a Marine blasted two children to death in an air-raid shelter."
New York Times, August 3, 1965
U.S. Marines burned 150 houses in the hamlet of Chan Son, ignoring "the pleas of old men and women to delay the burnings so that belongings could be removed..... After surrounding the village . . . the Marines poured 3.5 in. rocket fire, M-79 grenade launchers and heavy and light machine-gun fire. The Marines then moved in, proceeding first with cigarette lighters, then with flame throwers, to burn down an estimated 150 dwellings." "I subsequently learned that a Marine platoon on the right flank wounded three women and killed one child in a rocket barrage. The day's operations netted about four prisoners--old men."
Morley Safer, "Evening News with Walter Cronkite" August 4, 1965
Charles Mohr reported from Saigon on subsequent "attempts by public information officers to de-emphasize the importance of civilian deaths and the burning of village huts at the hands of U.S. Marines."
Charles Mohr, New York Times, August 9, 1965
Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze publicly supported the burning of villages as a "natural and inevitable adjunct" to defense of U.S. bases in their vicinity. Nitze declared that "Where neither United States nor Vietnamese forces can maintain continuous occupancy, it is necessary to destroy those facilities."
New York Times, August 15, 1965
Supersonic jets and B-52 bombers blanketed vast areas of the countryside with 1,000-pound bombs, napalm, and white phosphorus. "This is strategic bombing in a friendly, allied country. Since the Viet-Cong doctrine is to insulate themselves among the population and the population is largely powerless to prevent their presence, no one here seriously doubts that significant numbers of innocent civilians are dying every day in South Viet-Nam."
Charles Mohr, New York Times, September 5, 1965
"There is a new breed of Americans that most of us don't know about and it is time we got used to it. The 18- and 19year-olds, fashionably referred to as high-school dropouts, have steel in their backbones and maybe too much of what prize fighters call the killer instinct. These kids seem to enjoy killing Viet-Cong. . . ."
New York Journal-American, September 16, 1965
A U.S. officer serving with a helicopter unit in the Mekong Delta was asked what the answer was to Viet-Cong activity. "'Terror,' he said pleasantly. 'The Viet-Cong have terrorized the peasants to get their cooperation, or at least to stop their opposition. We must terrorize the villagers even more, so they see that their real selfinterest lies with us. . . . Terror is what it takes.'"
Jack Langguth, New York Times Magazine, September 19, 1965
Vietnamese villagers, driven to desperation, occasionally descended en masse on U.S. bases to protest the bombings of their villages. Such demonstrations were violently repressed. In early September a group of villagers marched on the U.S. air base at Danang demanding an end to air attacks on their villages. The demonstration was dispersed and five participants, selected at random, were arrested. Their punishment was swift. "At Danang, three persons were executed by a South Vietnamese firing squad. The execution, held in a soccer stadium, was postponed at the last minute until midnight . . . because news photographers refused to obey an order that no pictures be taken until the final shot had been fired. The three were among five persons arrested Monday during a demonstration by about 200 persons in downtown Danang. They were protesting crop damage from artillery fire and air attacks by U.S. forces."
Chicago Daily News, September 23, 1965
The fate of the other two demonstrators in Da Nang was described in a U.P.I. dispatch from Saigon. ". . . the fourth man would be executed later, but at the moment . . . he was described as a 'singing bird.' The fifth demonstrator, a woman, was sentenced to life in prison although the demonstration had been so small that few were even aware of it."
Washington Daily News, October 4, 1965
At 12:00 o'clock, a helicopter came in and the shirtless Marine in the tent said it was going to Da Nang. . . . A young redheaded machine-gunner sat in the doorway, chewing on a chocolate cracker from a C-ration tin. He kicked a small spool of wire out of the doorway and made room."We just rode Nuongs, you can tell that by the wire here," he said."Why?" he was asked. Nuongs are Chinese mercenaries from Formosa. . . ."They always want the wire for the prisoners," the kid said. "Don't you know that? They get a VC and make him hold his hands against his cheeks. Then they take this wire and run it right through the one hand and right through his cheek and into his mouth. Then they pull the wire out through the other cheek and stick it through the other hand. They knot both ends around sticks. You never seen them with prisoners like that? Oh, you ought to see how quiet them gooks sit in a helicopter when we got them wrapped up like that."
Jimmy Breslin, New York Herald Tribune, September 29, 1965
Hans Henle, a former executive of the information Service of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, commented: "The Viet-Cong fighters are as protected by the Geneva Conventions as the American G.I.s are. Dramatic protests against violations of the Geneva Conventions should have been made when the first Viet-Cong prisoners were shot, when they were tortured, when the American Army started to destroy VietCong hospitals and to cut off medical supply. . . . It is utterly hypocritical to condone wholesale violations of the Red Cross principles on one side and protest reprisals against them. . . ."
New York Times, International Edition only, October 14, 1965
Senator Stephen Young, who had just returned from a fact-finding mission in Viet-Nam, "says he was told by a member of the Central Intelligence Agency in Viet-Nam that the C.I.A. committed atrocities there to discredit the Viet-Cong. Young said he was told that the C.I.A. disguised some people as Viet-Cong and they committed atrocities. . . ."
Associated Press, October 16, 1965. Philadelphia Inquirer, October 20, 1965
Senator Young's revelations landed like a bombshell on official Washington. "The C.I.A. and the State Department went into an uproar," the Herald Tribune reported. "There was deep distress among State Department officials who feared his reported remarks would have disastrous repercussions abroad." But Young refused to back down. "The C.I.A. has employed some South Vietnamese," he reiterated, "and they have been instructed to claim they are Viet-Cong and to work accordingly . . . several of these executed two village leaders and raped some women. I know such men have been employed, and I question the wisdom of that."
New York Herald Tribune, October 21, 1965
In an operation thirty-five miles outside of Saigon, U.S. troops rushed a peasant shack believed to harbor VietCong. One U.S. Lieutenant hurled a grenade through the door but the inhabitants tossed it back out. "Another American soldier charged the shack, pulled the pin on a grenade and gave the fuse a few seconds count-down before pitching it in. Following the explosion the G.I. leaped into the shack with his M-14 rifle blazing. Three men and a baby died. Two women were wounded. Shrapnel took off the lower half of one woman's leg."
New York Post, November 16, 1965
After a platoon of the U.S. 1st Air Cavalry Division was almost wiped out in a battle in the Chu Prong foothills of the Ia Drang valley, "In one place nearby the Americans found three North Vietnamese wounded. One lay huddled under a tree, a smile on his face. "You won't smile any more," said one of the American soldiers, pumping bullets into his body. The other two met the same fate."
Reuters, November 18, 1965
Following the Ia Drang battle, a reporter accompanied U.S. relief forces to a clearing littered with dead from the previous day's fighting. "It was almost impossible to walk twenty paces without stumbling upon a body. . . . Suddenly a few yards away a wounded enemy soldier lifted one arm weakly and an American sergeant poured a long burst of M-16 rifle bullets into him. 'Was he trying to give up, Sarge?' a man asked. 'I'd like to find more of those bastards trying to give up,' the sergeant said bitterly. No one disagreed with him. . . .
Raymond R. Coffey, Chicago Daily News, November 19, 1965
"The International Red Cross Committee is dissatisfied with the way the United States and South Vietnamese Governments observe their pledge to respect the Geneva Conventions protecting war victims. . . . The Committee's representative in Saigon has been unable to visit prisoners taken by American and South Vietnamese troops despite the affirmative reply of the two governments to its appeal for the observance of the conventions. The Saigon authorities were said to have given repeated assurances that they intended to allow the International Red Cross to visit the prisoners but to date have done nothing more about it."
New York Times, November 26, 1965
"Anyone who has spent much time with Government units in the field has seen the heads of prisoners held under water and bayonet blades pressed against their throats. . . . In more extreme cases, victims have had bamboo slivers run under their fingernails or wires from a field telephone connected to arms, nipples or testicles."
William Tuohy, New York Times Magazine, 28 Nov 1965
�Some Viet-Cong suspects do not survive long enough for the third degree. Earlier this year, in an operation along the central coast, a Government detachment failed to flush VC troops suspected of lurking in the area. However, several villagers were rounded up and one man was brought before the company commander. The Vietnamese officer briefly questioned the suspect, then turned to his adviser . . .and said, �I think I shoot this man. Okay?��Go ahead,� said the adviser.The officer fired a carbine round point blank, striking the villager below the chest. The man slumped and died. The patrol moved on. Later, a correspondent asked the adviser, who had seemed a decent enough fellow, why he had given his approval.��These people could have moved to a Government area. In this war they are either on our side or they are not. There is no in-between.��
William Tuohy, New York Times Magazine, 28 Nov 1965
"In mid-August United States and Vietnamese military officials decided the Communists were using Duchai as a base for their operations in the area and that it should be destroyed. For the next two months . . . it was periodically and ferociously bombed by Vietnamese and American planes. . . . At least 184 civilians died during Duchai's two months of agony. Some reasonable estimates run as high as 600. . . . When an American visits Duchai these days, villagers . . . tell him horror stories of how many of the 15,000 former inhabitants were killed by bombs and shells. 'There,' said a fisherman pointing to a bomb crater beside a ruined house, 'a woman and her six children were killed in a bomb shelter when it got a direct hit.' Duchai's solid brick and stucco houses, the product of generations of hard-earned savings by its fishermen, were reduced to rubble or blasted into skeletons. Five-inch naval shells tore gaping holes in walls, and bombs of 750 to 1,000 pounds plunged through roofs, shattering interiors and scattering red rooftiles over the landscape. . . ."
Neil Sheehan, New York Times, November 30, 1965
At least ten other villages in the province had "been destroyed as thoroughly as the five in Duchai" and another twenty-five nearly as badly damaged. Four hundred and fifty other villages have been under intermittent attack by U.S. and Vietnamese planes. "Each month 600 to 1,000 civilians wounded by bombs, shells, bullets and napalm are brought to the provincial hospital in Quangngai town. Officials say that about thirty percent of these cases require major surgery. A recent visitor to the hospital found several children lying on cots, their bodies horribly burned by napalm."
Neil Sheehan, New York Times, November 30, 1965
"The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva . . . complained again that the United States was violating an international accord on the treatment of prisoners. . . ."
New York Times, December 1, 1965
"The indiscriminate use of air power against presumed Viet-Cong targets does much to explain the alienation of the rural population from the Saigon Government. Country people whose only contact with the government comes in the form of napalm and rocket attacks can scarcely be expected to feel sympathetic to the government cause, whatever it may be. On the other hand, they have every reason to feel solidarity with the guerrillas, usually recruited from their villages, who share their peril and their hardships."
Robert Taber, The War o the Flea, Lyle Stuart, 1965
In November 1966 an officer in the Army's Fourth Infantry Division severed an ear from a Vietnamese corpse and affixed it to the radio antenna of a jeep as an ornament. The officer was given a non-judicial punishment and a letter of reprimand.
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
From May to November 1967, the Tiger Force platoon attached to the 101st Airborne murdered hundreds of noncombatant men, women, and children in Quang Ngai province. Some were tortured and mutilated. Some were shot while begging for their lives. Some, hiding in bunkers, were killed by hand grenades. Soldiers collected ears as souvenirs, and a few scalps and gold teeth. It was covered up by the Pentagon.
Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, November 10, 2003
(www.toledoblade.com...)
Military records document that two Tiger Force soldiers who tried to stop the attacks were warned by their commanders to remain quiet before transferring to other units.
Associated Press, 20 Oct 03
�On June 23, 1967, members of the 25th Infantry Division killed two enemy soldiers in combat in Binh Duong province. An army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) probe disclosed that �Staff Sergeant H. then decapitated the bodies with an axe.� H. was court-martialed and found guilty of conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline. His grade was reduced, but he served no prison time.�
Nicholas Turse, �Swift Boat Swill�, The Village Voice, September 21, 2004 www.truthout.org...
In August 1967 Specialist S., a military intelligence interrogator of the 196th Infantry Brigade, "raped . . . a 13-year-old . . . female" in an interrogation hut in a P.O.W. compound. He was convicted of assault and indecent acts with a child. He served seven months and 16 days for his crimes.
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
In September 1967 an American sergeant killed two Vietnamese children--executing one at point blank range with a bullet to the head. Tried by general court martial in 1970, the sergeant pleaded guilty to, and was found guilty of, unpremeditated murder. He was, however, sentenced to no punishment.
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
On January 10, 1968, six Green Berets in Long Hai, South Vietnam, "applied electrical torture via field telephones to the sensitive areas of the bodies of three men and one woman . . . " Four received reprimands and "Article 15s"--a nonjudicial punishment meted out by a commanding officer or officer in charge for minor offenses. A fifth refused to accept his Article 15, and no other action was taken against him. No action was taken against the sixth Green Beret.
Nicholas Turse, �Swift Boat Swill�, The Village Voice, September 21, 2004 www.truthout.org...
A soldier from the Americal Division admitted to his commanding officer and other men of his unit that on February 4, 1968, he gunned down three civilians as they worked in a field (in the same province as My Lai). A CID investigation substantiated his confession and charges of premeditated murder were preferred against him. The soldier requested a discharge, which was granted by the commanding general of the Americal Division, in lieu of court martial proceedings.
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
�A CID investigation disclosed that during late February or early March 1968 near Thanh Duc, South Vietnam, First Lieutenant L. ordered soldier K. to shoot an unidentified Vietnamese civilian. �K. shot the Vietnamese civilian, leaving him with wounds in the chest and stomach. Soldier B., acting on orders from L., returned to the scene and killed the Vietnamese civilian, and an unidentified medic severed the Vietnamese civilian's left arm.� No punishment was meted out because none of the �identified perpetrators� was found to be on active duty at the time of the June 1971 investigation. �
Nicholas Turse, �Swift Boat Swill�, The Village Voice, September 21, 2004 www.truthout.org...
An army task force massacred 583 Vietnamese civilians at the village of My Lai.
Alexander Cochburn, �The Legacy of My Lai�, The Nation, March 26, 1988 (www.thirdworldtraveler.com...)
A soldier named Hugh Thompson in a helicopter gunship saw what was happening. Risking his life. . . , Thompson landed his helicopter between the mass murderers and their victims, turned his machine guns on his fellow Americans, and brought the carnage to a halt.
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
��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.�
Seymour Hersh, �Uncovered,� The New Yorker, November 10, 2003 (www.newyorker.com...)
According to formerly classified Army documents, from March 1968 through October 1969 "Vietnamese [civilian] detainees were subjected to maltreatment" by no less than twenty-three separate interrogators of the 172d Military Intelligence (MI) Detachment. The inquiry found that, in addition to using "electrical shock by means of a field telephone," an all too commonly used method of torture by Americans during the war, MI personnel also struck detainees with their fists, sticks and boards and employed a form of water torture which impaired prisoners' ability to breathe." Documents indicate that no disciplinary actions were taken against any of the individuals implicated in the long-running series of atrocities.
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
On August 9, 1968, a seven-man patrol led by First Lieutenant S. entered Dien Tien hamlet. "Shortly thereafter, Private First Class W. was heard to shout to an unidentified person to halt. W. fired his M-16 several times, and the victim was killed. W. then dragged the body to [the lieutenant's] location. . . . Staff Sergeant B. told W. to bring back an ear or finger if he wanted to prove himself a man. W. later went back to the body and removed both ears and a finger." W. was charged with assault and conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline; he was court-martialed and convicted, but he served no prison time. B. was found guilty of assault and was fined $50 a month for three months. S. was discharged from the army before action could be taken against him.
Nicholas Turse, �Swift Boat Swill�, The Village Voice, September 21, 2004 www.truthout.org...
��Defenseless villagers are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set afire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.� George Orwell wrote those words in 1946 in �Politics and the English Language.� But he could have been describing the way the U.S. waged war in Vietnam more than two decades later. It has now become generally accepted that the American use of massive firepower has caused the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians�perhaps, some U.S. officials admit privately, as many as 100,000. Aside from such aberrant incidents as the massacre at My Lai, the commonly cited culprit is �indiscriminate use of firepower,� a phrase that means American military recklessness. But in my opinion, the U.S. military has been guilty of more than recklessness. It can, I believe, be documented that thousands of Vietnamese civilians have been killed deliberately by U.S. forces.�
Kevin P. Buckley, Newsweek� June 19, 1972, pp. 42-3.www.chss.montclair.edu...
�That is a very serious charge. But any doubts that it is true were dispelled in my mind after an exhaustive examination of one of the most representative�and most "successful"�episodes in the history of pacification in Vietnam. Late in 1968, the U.S. command in Saigon launched an �accelerated pacification program,� a sort of government �land rush,� as officials dubbed it. In support of that campaign, the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division mounted a six-month operation code-named Speedy Express, focusing on the Mekong Delta province of Kien Hoa. In my investigation of Speedy Express, I examined the military record of the operation and interviewed pacification officials familiar with Kien Hoa; I talked with participants in the fighting and combed through hospital records, and I traveled throughout Kien Hoa�on foot, by jeep, in boats and by raft�to talk with the people. All the evidence I gathered pointed to a clear conclusion: a staggering number of noncombatant civilians�perhaps as many as 5,000 according to one official�were killed by U.S. firepower to �pacify� Kien Hoa. The death toll there made the My Lai massacre look trifling by comparison.�
Buckley, continued
�When Speedy Express began, Kien Hoa had long been a Communist bastion, an area as symbolic to the National Liberation Front (NLF) as Boston was to the American revolutionary movement. Many prominent Viet Cong leaders�and indeed the NLF itself�had been born there. NLF control was so strong that many residents regarded the Saigon government as an alien power. But while the Viet Cong had organized a well-trained army in Kien Hoa, the area was much more than a military zone. The children of the soldiers attended NLF schools, and old men and women checked into NLF hospitals if they were ailing. Thousands of families made a living from the flat rice land that makes up most of the province. But to the U.S. command, the areas under Viet Cong control were a theater of war, �Indian country�: where any suspicious movement was justification for opening fire. The residents were �enemy supporters� who could become �citizens� only after an area had been pacified.�
Buckley, continued
�Cumulative statistics for �Speedy Express� show that 10,899 �enemy� were killed. In the month of March alone, �over 3,000 enemy troops were killed � which is the largest monthly total for any American division in the Vietnam war,� said the division's official magazine. When asked to account for the enormous body counts, a division senior officer explained that helicopter crews often caught unarmed �enemy� in open fields. But Vietnamese repeatedly told me that those �enemy" were farmers, gunned down while they worked in their rice fields.� Buckley, continued
�The staggering number of Vietnamese casualties was not the only suspicious aspect of Speedy Express. The operation yielded an embarrassingly small number of enemy weapons captured�only 748, despite nearly 11,000 �kills.� One Ninth Division officer explained that the Viet Cong were shot �before they could get to their weapons,� while a spokesman for the U.S. command said: �Many individuals in the VC and guerrilla units were not equipped with individual firearms.� However, the first explanation is highly implausible and the second is patently false. There is overwhelming evidence that virtually all the Viet Cong were well armed. Simple civilians were, of course, not armed. And the enormous discrepancy between the body count and the number of captured weapons is hard to explain�except by the conclusion that many victims were unarmed, innocent civilians.�
Buckley, continued
�Records at the civilian hospital in Ben Tre provide bloody and convincing evidence of how Vietnamese civilians suffered at the hands of the U.S. military. The hospital served only one small area and received only a fraction of the wounded. (�Many of the people who were wounded in Kien Hoa ever got to any hospital,� said one U.S. official, �because they died on the way.�) yet in the course of Speedy Express, the Ben Tre hospital treated a total of 1,882 civilians with war-connected wounds. Of that number, only 451 were wounded by Viet Cong fire. The remainder, 1,431 civilians, were wounded by what is called, in the irrational parlance of Vietnam, �friendly fire,� or U.S. firepower. In March alone, when the Ninth claimed a record body count, only 25 civilians were admitted with VC wounds�and 343 were treated for �friendly� wounds.�
Buckley, continued
On January 22, 1968, Robert McNamara had told the Senate that "no regular North Vietnamese units" were deployed in the Delta, and no military intelligence documents have surfaced to undermine his claim, so that the cleansing of the area cannot be understood as part of the general argument about resisting Hanoi's unsleeping will to conquest. The announced purpose of the Ninth Division's sweep, indeed, was to redeem many thousands of villagers from political control by the National Liberation Front (NLF), or "Vietcong" (VC).
Christopher Hitchens, The Case Against Kissingerwww.findarticles.com...
From 1967 to 1971, under the Phoenix Program, the CIA created and directed a secret police ostensibly run by the South Vietnamese. Its objective was to destroy the Viet Cong's infrastructure. During the course of the program's existence, the secret police units, operating as virtual death squads, were implicated in burnings, garroting, rape, torture, and sabotage. As many as 50,000 Vietnamese were killed. Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (2000); John Pilger, Heroes (2001)
�By 1967, killing entire families had become an integral facet of the CIA's counter-terror program. Robert Slater was the chief of the CIA's Province Interrogation Center Program from June 1967 through 1969. In a March 1970 thesis for the Defense Intelligence School, titled �The History, Organization and Modus Operandi of the Viet Cong Infrastructure,� Slater wrote, �the District Party Secretary usually does not sleep in the same house or even hamlet where his family lived, to preclude any injury to his family during assassination attempts.� But, Slater added, �the Allies have frequently found out where the District Party Secretaries live and raided their homes: in an ensuing fire fight the secretary's wife and children have been killed and injured.�"
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
�The CIA launched its Phoenix Program in June 1967, after 13 years of tinkering with several experimental counter-terror and psywar programs, and building its network of secret interrogation centers.�
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
�A typical Phoenix operation began in a Province Interrogation Center where a suspected member of the VCI [Viet Cong Infrastructure] was brought for questioning. After a few days or weeks or months undergoing various forms of torture, the VCI suspect would die or give the name and location of his VCI comrades and superiors. That information would be sent from the Interrogation Center to the local Phoenix office, which was staffed by Special Branch and Vietnamese military officers under the supervision of CIA officers. Depending on the suspected importance of the targeted VCI, the Phoenix people would then dispatch one of the various action arms available to it, including Seal teams like the one Bob Kerrey led into Thanh Phong.�
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
�By 1969 the CIA, through Phoenix, was targeting individual VCI and their families all across Vietnam. Over 20,000 people were assassinated by the end of the year and hundreds of thousands had been tortured in Province Interrogation Centers.�
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
"[Everybody] went into the Phoenix hopper: the guilty, the innocent, the enemy killed in action, the casual bodies along the roadside. They'd carry them in and count them up."
Orrin DeForest and Davod Chanoff, Slow Burn (1991)
�On 20 June 1969, the Lower House of the Vietnamese Congress held hearings about abuses in the Phoenix VCI elimination program. Eighty-six Deputies signed a petition calling for its immediate termination. Among the charges: Special Police knowingly arrested innocent people for the purpose of extortion; people were detained for as long as eight months before being tried; torture was commonplace. Noting that it was illegal to do so, several deputies protested instances in which American troops detained or murdered suspects without Vietnamese authority. Others complained that village chiefs were not consulted before raids, such as the one on Thanh Phong.�
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
�After an investigation in 1970, four Congresspersons concluded that the CIA's Phoenix Program violated international law. �The people of these United States,� they jointly stated, �have deliberately imposed upon the Vietnamese people a system of justice which admittedly denies due process of law,� and that in doing so, �we appear to have violated the 1949 Geneva Convention for the protection of civilian people.��During the hearings, U.S. Representative Ogden Reid said, �if the Union had had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon, Georgia.�"
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
David Hackworth, representing the military establishment, defended Bob Kerrey by saying "there were thousands of such atrocities," and that in 1969 his own unit committed "at least a dozen such horrors."
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
�General Bruce Palmer, commander of the same Ninth Division that devastated Kien Koa Province in 1969, objected to the �involuntary assignment� of American soldiers to Phoenix. He did not believe that �people in uniform, who are pledged to abide by the Geneva Conventions, should be put in the position of having to break those laws of warfare.�"
Douglas Valentine, �Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial, May 17, 2001www.counterpunch.org...
Sergeant Roy E. "the Bummer" Bumgarner, a soldier who served with the 1st Cavalry Division and later the 173d Airborne Brigade. According to a former commander, "the Bummer" was rumored to have "personally killed over 1,500 people" during a forty-two week stretch in Vietnam. Even if the number was exaggerated, clues on how Bumgarner may have obtained high "body counts" came to light in the course of an Army criminal investigation of an incident that took place on February 25, 1969. According to investigation documents, Bumgarner and a subordinate rounded up three civilians found working in a rice paddy, marched them to a secluded area and murdered them. "The Bummer" then arranged the bodies on the ground with their heads together and a grenade was exploded next to them in an attempt to cover-up their crime. Assorted weapons were then planted near the mutilated corpses to make them appear to have been enemy troops.
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
During an Army criminal investigation of the incident, men in Bumgarner's unit told investigators that they had heard rumors of the sergeant carrying out similar acts in the past. Said one soldier in a sworn statement to Army investigators: "I've heard of Bumgarner doing it before--planting weapons on bodies when there is doubt as to their military status. I've heard quite a few rumors about Bumgarner killing unarmed people. Only a couple weeks ago I heard that Bumgarner had killed a Vietnamese girl and two younger kids (boys), who didn't have any weapons."
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
"The Bummer" was charged with premeditated murder and tried by general court martial. He was convicted only of manslaughter and his punishment consisted merely of a demotion in rank and a fine of $97 a month for six months. Moreover, after six months, Bumgarner promptly re-enlisted in the Army. His first and only choice of assignments--Vietnam. Records indicate he got his wish!
Nick Turse, �The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of�, History News Network, November 17, 2003(hnn.us...)
Four US Marines were court-martialed for the apparently unprovoked killing of 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.
Gary D. Solis, Son Thang: An American War Crime (1998)www.azcentral.com...
From January 31 to February 2, 1971, members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War held the Winter Soldier Investigation. They met in a Detroit hotel to document war crimes that they had participated in or witnessed during their combat tours in Vietnam. During the next three days, more than 100 Vietnam veterans and 16 civilians gave anguished, emotional testimony describing hundreds of atrocities against innocent civilians in South Vietnam, including rape, arson, torture, murder, and the shelling or napalming of entire villages. The witnesses stated that these acts were being committed casually and routinely, under orders, as a matter of policy.
ice.he.net...
�According to the formerly classified army records, 46 soldiers who testified at the [Winter Soldier Investigation] made allegations that, in the eyes of U.S. Army investigators, "merited further inquiry." As of March 1972, the army's CID noted that of the 46 allegations, �only 43 complainants have been identified� by investigators. �Only� 43 of 46? That means at least 93 percent of the veterans surveyed were real, not fake. Moreover, according to official records, CID investigators attempted to contact 41 people who testified at the Detroit session, which occurred between January 31 and February 2, 1971. Five couldn't be located, according to records. Of the remaining 36, 31 submitted to interviews-hardly the �few� asserted by [Swift Boat Veterans for Truth]. Moreover, as Gerald Nicosia has noted in his mammoth tome Home to War, �A complete transcript of the Winter Soldier testimony was sent to the Pentagon, and the military never refuted a word of it.��
Nicholas Turse, �Swift Boat Swill�, The Village Voice, September 21, 2004 www.truthout.org...
Under the provisions of Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, the United States is clearly guilty of "War Crimes," "Crimes against Peace" and "Crimes against Humanity," crimes for which the top German leaders were either imprisoned or executed. If we agree with Hermann Goering's defense at Nuremberg that "In a life and death struggle there is no legality," then no action can or should be taken against the government leaders responsible for the war in Viet-Nam. But if Americans still believe that there is a higher law than that of the jungle, we should call our leaders to account.
www.g0lem.net...
This is gonna be a funny funny week. I love how paranoid all the Bushies are getting.
Look Bush can't even speak for himself so do you really believe he has any chance of being re-elected. Stop wasting your time.
7 days and John Kerry will be our new president.
Look Bush can't even speak for himself so do you really believe he has any chance of being re-elected. Stop wasting your time.
7 days and John Kerry will be our new president.
Definitely won't see this news carried in the mainstream outlets.....
seekerof
seekerof
Originally posted by SIRR1
Oh my, here it comes, 1 week before the elections, the allegations are starting to appear hot and heavy.
It was only a matter of time before the Vietnam skeleton was pulled out of the closet.
Uh...wha...
The "Vietanm Skeleton"? That thing's been out in the open since day one, at Kerry's insistence.
Yeah, Tony Blair was once a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, no doubt controlled from Moscow
Now he says Bush is the most intelligent man he has met
Jeez, he must mix with some thickos!
Now he says Bush is the most intelligent man he has met
Jeez, he must mix with some thickos!
Originally posted by FlyersFan
SI, es muy possible!
Habla muy bien el espanol senorita
don't worry kerry is going to be a great president
[edit on 123131p://222 by marg6043]
Originally posted by marg6043
Don't worry Kerry is going to be a great president.
Too bad you have to wait at least four more years and hope that he can beat whoever the Republicans nominate to suceed Bush. Only time will tell.
Jerome Corsi, a specialist on the Vietnam era, told WND the new discoveries are the "most remarkable documents I've seen in the entire history of the antiwar movement."
Specialist on the Vietnam era? Sure, he co-wrote Unfit for Command, let's see what else he wrote:
* First let's undermine the US in Vietnam. Then we can go for gay marriage. When you get to be Pres. JFK-lite, there will be no end to how much of America we can destroy. www.freerepublic.com...
* Just don't let anybody put a tablet with the Ten Commandments in front of the school where that girl wants to wear a Muslim scarf -- OH, No --- then the RATS would complain. Anti-Christian, Anti-American -- just like their Presidential Candidate -- Jean Francois Kerrie. freerepublic.com...
* After he married TerRAHsa, didn't John Kerry begin practicing Judiasm? He also has paternal gradparents that were Jewish. What religion is John Kerry? www.freerepublic.com...
* Kerry has a long history of Communist supporters. www.freerepublic.com...
* Kerry offers a clear choice. Anti-American hatred. www.freerepublic.com...
* John F*ing Commie Kerry and Commie Ted [Kennedy] discuss their plan to hand America over to our nation's enemies. www.freerepublic.com...
* Isn't the Democratic Party the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA -- oh, I forgot, it was just an accident that Clintoon's first act in office was to promote "gays in the military." RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters -- it all goes together. www.freerepublic.com...
Source: Free Dictionary
Sounds like he's a specialist all right!
Why now?
Corsi told WND the documents have been authenticated with "100 percent certainty."
But why were they unearthed now, just one week before the Nov. 2 election?
Corsi insisted the timing was unintentional.
"It's truly one of those accidents of how things develop in research," he said. "We did not spring any surprise, we just found these documents, and even the archivist didn't know they were there."
Originally posted by SIRR1
Oh my, here it comes, 1 week before the elections, the allegations are starting to appear hot and heavy.
It was only a matter of time before the Vietnam skeleton was pulled out of the closet.
This week should be interesting!!!
Recovered Vietnam documents 'smoking gun' researchers claim.
Man, how intersting. Better look into it.
� 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
Oh, nevermind. World nut daily. Sure. A news source with no principles, no journalistic integrity, and a terrible ludicrous slant. No thanks.
Yeah, Kerry the VC commie stooge......all stories of US wrong-doing in Vietnam were lies.....they did it too anyway.....blah blah blah.
Man if you think this is heavy duty stuff and set to really really really damage Kerry I'd say someone's got something smoking and it ain't no gun.
Man if you think this is heavy duty stuff and set to really really really damage Kerry I'd say someone's got something smoking and it ain't no gun.
h, nevermind. World nut daily. Sure. A news source with no principles, no journalistic integrity, and a terrible ludicrous slant. No thanks.
I suppose that the New York Sun does not meet your approval also.
www.nysun.com...
Originally posted by FlyersFan
Originally posted by SIRR1
It was only a matter of time before the Vietnam
skeleton was pulled out of the closet. This week
should be interesting!!!
The skeleton that I'm REALLY waiting for is the one
that Kerry wasn't honorably discharged when he
ended his term of service (ETS). Bill Clinton gave
him an honorable discharge 20+ years AFTER Kerry
left the Navy. This wouldn't have happened if
Kerry had an honorable discharge to begin with.
Kerry made a HUGE deal of his being a war hero.
He isn't one and he wasn't even honorably discharged
when he left the Navy. THIS is the story I want to
see come out.
I am with you but I dont think it can come out unless he signs the 180, and as we all know he will not do that, and I think we ALL know why.
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