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Recent
Stories
April
15, 2003
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Robert
Jensen
Self-Determination in Iraq? Then the
US Must Leave
Dr.
Susan Block
The Rape of Iraq
Ron Jacobs
Aiming at Syria: Stop Them Before They Kill Again
Robert
Fisk
The Final Sacking of Baghdad
Col. Dan
Smith
Post-War Iraq: Asking the Right Questions
Ali
Abunimah and Hussein Ibish
A Cycle of Chaos and Confrontation: Misadventures of the NeoCons
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/15
April
14, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Bush's War Without End
Uri Avnery
Gunboat Democracy: This is Only the Beginning
Wayne
Madsen
Americans: The New Mongols of the Mideast?
Shahid
Alam
Iqra: Iraq is Free
Hani
Shukrallah
Day of the Chicken Hawks
Terry
Jones
The Iraq Gravy Train
John
Chuckman
The Iraq War's Trashiest Piece of Propaganda
Patrick
Cockburn
US has a Lot to Answer For: Violence,
Misery and Poverty in Iraq
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/14
April
12 / 13, 2003
Carol
Lipton
Wag the Kennel: the Kenneth Joseph
Story
Wayne
Madsen
Meet the New Butcher of Baghdad: Maj.
Gen. Buford Blount III
John
Brown
"They Got It Down": the Toppling
of the Saddam Statue
Kathy and
Bill Christison
Final Thoughts from Palestine
William
Blum
Our Vulnerable Warmongers' Rush to Justify Devastation
Wallace
Gagne
Let the Stealing Begin
Ann
Harrison
Rosenthal Update: Judge Delays Ruling in Medical Pot Mistrial
Case
Henry Miller
What is the Greatest Treason?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Render Unto Cesar
Zeljko
Cipris
Mocking Militarism: On Ishikawa Jun's Song of Mars
Ishikawa
Jun
The Song of Mars
Jamey Hecht
Chairman of the Sandwich Board
Adam
Engel
Hell of a Town: Mayor Bloomberg and
the News
Poets'
Basement
Chang Yang-Hao, Adam Engel and Hammond Guthrie
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/12
April
11, 2003
Omar
Barghouti
From Saddam to Uncle Sam
Ron
Jacobs
Greed is Rewarded
David
Vest
The Corporate War on Iraq
Paul
de Rooij
Propaganda Stinkers: Fresh Samples from the Field
Anthony
Gancarski
Foreign Aid: Embezzlement as Public Policy
Mas'ood
Cajee
Franklin Graham: Spiritual Carpetbagger
Michael
Neumann
Now What?
Michael
Berry
The Neo-Cons Have a Dream
Stew Albert
Oh Freedom
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/11
Website
of the Day
About Those Dancing Crowds
April
10, 2003
Zoltan
Grossman
The Perils of Occupation: the Easier
the Victory, the Harder the Peace
Uri
Avnery
The Night After
Wayne Madsen
The Telltale Signs of Empire
David Krieger
Before You Become Too Flushed with Victory, Think of Ali Ismaeel
Abbas
Jeremy
Brecher
What Can the World Do Now That Tanks Prowl Baghdad?
Robert
Jensen
The Unseen War
Geoffrey
Neale
Ashcroft's War on the Constitution:
A Patriot Attack on America
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Last Tango in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
Rumors of War
Joseph
Heller
Nately's Old Man
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/10
Website
of the Day
The
Third Page
April
9, 2003
David
Lindorff
Secret Bechtel Docs Reveal: Yes,
the War Is About Oil
Doug
Lummis
Saving Private Lynch: Hollywood and
War
Susan
Davis
The New York Times and the Peace Movement
David Vest
Smoking Gun? You're Watching It
John
Chuckman
America's Sovereign Right to Do
as It Damn Well Pleases
Akiva
Eldar
Gary Bauer and AIPAC: an Unholy Alliance
with the Christian Right
Ray
Hanania
Suicide Bombers without the Suicide:
Racism, Hypocrisy and the War on Iraq
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/9
April
8, 2003
David
Lindorff
Killing the Messengers: It Doesn't
Matter If It's Deliberate or Accidental
Richard
Lichtman
Dr. Phil in the Trenches
John
Brown
Why Uncle Ben Hasn't Sold Uncle Sam:
a Former Foreign Service Staffer on Bush's Policy Failures
Ben
Terrall
Report from the Oakland Docks: "The
Cops Had No Reason to Open Up on Them"
Jason Leopold
FERC and Wall Street: Conversations
May Have Violated Federal Law
Anthony
Gancarski
Conyers Heeds the Call on Perle
Linda Heard
Journalists Die, the Networks Lie, Iraqis Ask "Why?"
Ahmad
Faruqui
Wallowing in Hypocrisy
Wallace
Gagne
Baghdad Babble
Harry
Browne
Report from the Protests at the Bush/Blair
Summit
Larry Kearney
I Understand There's a Boy in
a Baghdad Hospital
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/8
M. Shahid
Alam
The Israelization of America
April
7, 2003
Todd
Chretien
Wooden Bullets & Grenades: Oakland
Cops Attack Peace Protesters and Dock Workers
David
N. Gibbs
Spying, Secrecy and the University:
The CIA is Back on Campus
Harry Browne
War and Peace Summit a Royal Farce
Gideon
Levy
America is Not a Role Model
Diane
Christian
A Scene from an Obscene War
Jules
Rabin
Remembering Deir Yassin
James Davis
Oddsmaking in Dublin: Will Bush
Shake Gerry's Hand?
Robert
Fisk
The Twisted Language of War
Patrick
Cockburn
Slaughter on the Road to Dibagah
John
Mackay
War and Art
Seth Sandronsky
Wars and the Color Line
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/7
April
5, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Iraqi Humanitarian Relief is
in Shambles
Anne
Gwynne
A Drowning in Salem
Uri
Avnery
Roadmap to Nowhere
Chris
Floyd
Hell for Leather: Bombs, Bullets, Bibles and Bush
William
Cook
Would You Have Sent Your Son (or Daughter) Off to War If...
Gila
Svirsky
A Busy Day for Bulldozers
Mike Ferner
Back from Baghdad: What Next for the Peace Movement?
Joanne
Mariner
Civilian Deaths and Official Apologies
John Stanton
Bush Takes His Killing Orders
from the Lord
Romi
Mahajan
Learning to Count the Dead
Aluf Benn
After Iraq, US Vows to Deal with
Other Mideast Regimes
Mary
Ellen Peterson
Gay Marine Refuses to Fight
William
MacDougall
Country Music and the Crimes of Patriotism
Ron
Jacobs
War and Occupation
Bernie
Pattison
Aborigines and the Different God
Mark
Engler
Iraq War as Arms Expo
Adam Engel
Li'l Box of Love: a Novelini
Poets'
Basement
Tripp, Albert, Katz
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Flesh and Its Discontents: the Paintings of Lucian Freud
Norman
Madarasz
Canada and the War
April
4, 2003
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell's Shame
John
Chuckman
Was Einstein Right About Israel?
David
Krieger
The Meaning of Victory
Tom
Gorman
The Mantra of the Troops: Support
or Treason?
Adam
Federman
The Absence of War
Vijay
Prashad
There Are No More Arguments
Tom
Stephens
The End of the Innocence
Mickey
Z.
Makes Me Sic (Sic): Copy Editing
Bush Speak
Pierre
Tristam
War Coverage: a Dishonest Reality
Show
Hammond
Guthrie
The Deadly Mihrab
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/04
April
3, 2003
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
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Arrogant
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April 18,
2003
"Ripping
the Mask Off the War"
My Lai Revisited
by
JOE ALLEN
March 16 marked the 35th anniversary of one of
most gruesome acts committed by the U.S. Army during the Vietnam
War--the My Lai massacre. That day in 1968, the Army's Charlie
Company murdered 347 unarmed men, women and children in the Vietnamese
village of My Lai.
The event was later described by a member
of Charlie Company as "a Nazi-like thing." For many
people in the U.S. and around the world, My Lai "ripped
the mask off the war," in the words of Sen. George McGovern
(D-S.D.).
Yet today, My Lai has been virtually
forgotten--even though its lessons are more relevant than ever
as the U.S. carries out its slaughter in Iraq.
* *
*
TO UNDERSTAND what happened at My Lai,
it's important to look at the background of the U.S. involvement
in Vietnam and the war strategy pursued there.
Vietnam was a French colony beginning
in the 1870s. While there had always been resistance to French
rule, during the Second World War, a powerful movement for national
liberation emerged. The leading organization was the League for
the Independence of Vietnam--better known as the Viet Minh--led
by the Communist Party, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh.
At the end of the Second World War, the
Viet Minh declared independence, but the French refused to recognize
this, and a bloody nine-year war ensued. The U.S. supported the
French in their attempt to re-conquer their rebellious colony.
The French were defeated at the battle
of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. At the Geneva Conference that year,
a series of accords that officially ended the war called for
the temporary division of Vietnam along the 17th parallel--and
for national elections to reunify the country in two years' time.
U.S. intelligence agencies recognized
that if a fair election were allowed, the Viet Minh would win
90 percent of the vote. The U.S. was determined to make sure
this didn't happen. So it set out to create an anti-Communist
government in South Vietnam, and it installed a right-wing Catholic
living in exile in the U.S., Ngo Dinh Diem, as the head of the
regime.
But by 1963, Diem's totalitarian police
state was so unpopular that a new revolutionary movement, called
the National Liberation Front (NLF)--known as the Viet Cong to
Americans--posed a serious challenge to the regime.
To prevent a triumph of the NLF, the
U.S. decided that Diem had to go. So the Kennedy administration
ordered the CIA to topple Diem's government in November 1963.
But Diem's removal only worsened the Saigon government's crisis.
* *
*
IN ORDER to prevent the triumph of the
NLF, President Lyndon Johnson--using powers granted to him in
the Gulf of Tonkin resolution--invaded South Vietnam in 1965
with a huge military force. The second Vietnam War was on.
The war strategy pursued by the U.S.
was a "war of attrition." The object--in the words
of Gen. William Westmoreland, the commander of all U.S. forces
in Vietnam--was to decimate the North Vietnamese population "to
the point of national disaster for generations to come,"
and to kill off Viet Cong fighters faster than they could be
replaced. The Pentagon called this strategy the "meat-grinder."
The war was directed at the base of popular
support for the NLF: the villages in the countryside. A crucial
ideological component of the "meat-grinder" was racism
against Vietnamese--which was encouraged by the military's very
top brass. Westmoreland, for example, claimed that the "Oriental
doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner."
In 1968, Col. George S. Patton sent out
Christmas cards of dismembered Viet Cong soldiers stacked neatly
in a pile, inscribed with the words "From Colonel and Mrs.
George S. Patton--Peace on Earth."
Charlie Company had been assigned to
Quang Ngai in South Vietnam, a province that was a base of support
for the Viet Minh and, later, the Viet Cong. By the end of the
1967, the U.S. Army had already destroyed 70 percent of Quang
Ngai's villages.
In the weeks before the massacre, several
members of the U.S. company had been killed in ambushes and booby
traps. According to Sgt. Kenneth Hodges, Capt. Ernest Medina
conveyed a straightforward message the night before the assault
on My Lai: "This was a time for us to get even. A time for
us to settle the score. A time for revenge--when we can get even
for our fallen comrades."
"The order we were given was to
kill and destroy everything that was in the village," Hodges
said. "It was clearly explained that there were to be no
prisoners...The order that was given was to kill everyone in
the village."
On the morning of March 16, 1968, Charlie
Company began their four-hour assault on My Lai. Not a single
shot was fired at U.S. troops, and all that they found were women,
children and the elderly. But Charlie Company went on a rape
and murder spree.
The worst of killers was Lt. William
"Rusty" Calley, who herded some 100 unarmed people
into a ditch and had them machine-gunned to death. Calley personally
shot and killed a baby that day.
* *
*
NOT EVERY American soldier participated
in the murder, and some tried to stop it. Lt. Hugh Thompson,
a helicopter pilot, saw the savagery from the air and landed
between American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians. He ordered
his gunner to train his machine gun on the soldiers until they
backed off.
Not only did Thompson witness the events,
but many soldiers had heard the radio communication between Medina,
Calley and their superior officer, Lt. Col. Frank Barker, and
concluded that something had gone terribly wrong. In addition,
army photographer Ron Haeberle had accompanied Charlie Company
that day and photographed everything.
Even so, the cover-up began immediately.
Barker and Americal Division Commander Major Gen. Samuel Koster
did all the necessary paper work and conducted an "investigation"
that exonerated Medina and Charlie Company.
At the time, then-Major Colin Powell
responded to similar allegations of abuses by U.S. armed forces
in Vietnam by claiming, "Relations between American soldiers
and the Vietnamese people are excellent."
A year-and-a-half later, though, army
veteran Ronald Ridenhour wrote a letter to his congressman, Mo
Udall--an antiwar Democrat--telling what he knew. The story blew
wide open.
The initial response was disbelief--until
Haeberle's photos were published in Life magazine and interviews
with Charlie Company soldiers began to appear on TV. A shocked
mother captured the mood, saying, "I gave them a good boy,
and they turned him into a murderer."
The story of My Lai further strengthened
the stance of antiwar activists who argued that U.S. actions
in Vietnam bordered on genocide. The army was forced to set up
a commission to investigate My Lai, which led to charges against
30 officers in the initial cover-up. Medina was also charged
with murdering 100 people.
But none were convicted--except for Calley,
who was found guilty of the premeditated murder of 22 people
in 1971 and was sentenced to life in prison. Army psychiatrist
reported that Calley "did not feel as if he were killing
humans, but rather that they were animals with whom one could
not speak or reason."
President Richard Nixon came to Calley's
rescue--and had him released from prison, pending appeal. He
was paroled in 1974. Calley would later become a well-paid speaker
on the right-wing lecture circuit, earning $2,000 a speech.
As the U.S. occupies Iraq, it should
be remembered that it is there not as a liberator, but a conqueror--just
as it did in Vietnam. In his memoirs, now-Secretary of State
Powell referred to My Lai as one of the "darker chapters
in American military history." He and his new boss are in
the process of writing another.
Joe Allen
writes for the Socialist
Worker.
Today's
Features
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Robert
Jensen
Self-Determination in Iraq? Then the
US Must Leave
Dr.
Susan Block
The Rape of Iraq
Ron Jacobs
Aiming at Syria: Stop Them Before They Kill Again
Robert
Fisk
The Final Sacking of Baghdad
Col. Dan
Smith
Post-War Iraq: Asking the Right Questions
Ali
Abunimah and Hussein Ibish
A Cycle of Chaos and Confrontation: Misadventures of the NeoCons
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/15
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