May 8, 2001
CounterPunch
Exclusive:
The apologia of Christopher Hitchens
Kerrey, Scheer and Hitchens:
Liberals Rush to Defend
Democrat War Criminal
Liberals have massed to defend Kerrey,
usually by saying that he was just a grunt following orders.
In the Los Angeles Times Bob Scheer announced that Kerrey is
"a good man" and that the fellow who should be in the
dock is Robert McNamara, who wasn't even Secretary of Defense
when Kerrey lined up those women and babies in Thanh Phong and
had his unit of SEALs machine-gun them at a range of ten feet.
On Fox, Christopher Hitchens,
implacable foe of the war criminal Kissinger, had similar kind
words for Kerrey:
"Colmes
What's your view on Bob Kerrey?
Hitchens Of Bob Kerrey? Well, he's my president,
in fact, since I teach at the New School, and I think he wouldn't
-- he wouldn't have made that bad a president. I know him slightly.
I like him very much. But look, none of the people he killed
were raped. None of them were dismembered. None of them were
tortured. None of
them were mutilated, had their ears cut off. He never
referred to them as gooks or slopes or afterwards. So it --con
-- for one day's work in a free-fire zone in the Mekong Delta,
it was nothing like as bad as most days."
Why does Scheer say Kerrey
is a "good" man and Hitchens confide to the Fox audience
that "I like him very much"? There's far more evidence
to say "Bob Kerrey is an evil man." His political career
offers meager evidence to back any plea that Kerrey improved
the human condition and if we are to say that he is a good man
solely because he voted against the war on Iraq, then we have
to call Sam Nunn "good" too, and we doubt that even
Scheer would want to do that.
It's not as though we can't
reach back into the past, identify the suspect, put him in the
dock and then convict him. That's what a jury on a courtroom
in Birmingham, Alabama, just did on on May 1 to 62-year old Tom
Blanton, sentencing him to life for the church bombing that killed
four little girls in 1963. No one talked about the "ambiguities
of that bitter and divided time", or the "fog"
of the fight over segregation in the South. No one said that
Blanton was just a compliant footsoldier in a struggle for which
the commanding officers in Dixie - Strom Thurmond and the
others bear responsibility.
It's a class thing. Blanton
was a southern cracker, dressed all wrong. He never dated Debra
Winger.
Hitchens isn't ill-attuned
to the idea of war crimes. He has, after all, just published
a long indictment of Henry Kissinger, one of McNamara's successors
in administering the Vietnam strategy that put young Kerrey and
his fellow SEALs in that tiny Vietnamese village the night of
February 24, 1969, set to kill anyone unfortunate enough to cross
their path.
Now we can see that Hitchens
was maybe trying to hit a vein of Swiftian irony in his remarks
on that Fox show, trying to say that by the standards of what
US forces were doing in Vietnam at that time, Kerrey's unit was
as well mannered as a dinner party designed by Martha Stewart.
He only killed the women, he didn't rape them first. But Hitchens
should know that irony doesn't work on tv, and there's no palatable
Martha Stewart-like comportment when you're cutting throats and
shooting babies at a range of ten feet.
Why did Hitchens have to insist
he likes Kerrey "very much" Well, Hitchens has a taste
for creeps, but usually they're a little more off-beat than the
president of the New School. Maybe Hitchens wants tenure at the
New School. So instead of urging the New School students and
faculty to demonstrate outside Kerrey's office and demand he
be sent to the International Court at the Hague to stand trial,
and his salary be sent to Thanh Phong as reparations, he's kissing
Kerrey's ass. People will do anything for tenure.
What happened to Scheer and
Hitchens? "Is your hate pure," our old friend the late
James Goode used to ask of us. What happened to the cold steel
of their hate? Actually, Scheer never had the cold steel of pure
hate. He wanted comfort too much and now he's got it. Long since,
he's gone soft in Santa Monica, going to parties with Oliver
Stone and Barbra Streisand. Hitchens is a hater, but too obsessively.
Just because Clinton put his hand up the skirt of some woman
Hitchens cared for (though he's never named her), he confused
him with Pol Pot. Perhaps he can only get mad about one person
at a time: Mother Teresa, Ronald Reagan, Paul Johnson, Bill Clinton,
Kissinger.
Kerrey's an admitted war criminal. "Following orders"
is no defense. There was a man who tried to stop the massacre
at My Lai, at great personnel risk. The late Ron Ridenhour, also
at personal risk, worked to expose My Lai even when he was still
a soldier in Vietnam.
Just listen to Kerrey's disgusting
disclosures to Dan Rather in 60 Minutes 11, Monday night.
"Rather:
If in fact it did happen. If there was an old
man, an old woman and three children being killed. Was it or
was it not within the rules of engagement for you and your men
as you understood it, if necessary, to kill those
people?
Kerrey Yes, Again, I don't know how you're
gonna cut this tape, but I don't have any doubt that the people
that we killed were at the very least sympathetic to the Viet
Cong. And at the very most, were supporting their efforts to
kill us. (edit)
Rather Old men, women and children
Kerrey Yes, I mean, the Viet Cong, in a guerrilla
war, the
people that get caught in the middle are the civilians. And
the Viet Cong were a thousand per cent more ruthless than any
standard operating procedure that any American GI or Navy SEAL
had. (edit)"
Here's Scheer's "good
man" STILL saying that the babies he killed "were a
thousand per cent more ruthless" than any US force or procedure.
A slice of Rather's CBS interview
with Kerrey's fellow SEAL, Gerhard Klann:
"Narration: This is also where Bob Kerrey says his unit
came under attack.
Rather: Did you take fire coming in?
Klann No.
Rather Gunfire of any kind?
Klann No.
Rather Anything even remotely sounding like
gunfire?
Klann No, not that I can recall. No.
Rather What'd you do this time?
Klann We gathered everybody up, searched
the place, searched everything.
Rather What was the make-up of this group?
Klann Probably a majority of em were kids.
And women. And some younger women.
Rather So you got all the people out of there.
Klann We herded them together and in a group.
Rather Were any of these people armed?
Klann I don't believe so.
Rather Fair to say you didn't see any weapons?
Klann I didn't see any.
Rather Did you decide pretty quickly or not
that the target of your mission, the Viet Cong leader, was not
among them?
Klann Yeah we got together and we were,
hey the guy
ain't here. Now we got these people, what do we do now?
Rather What did you do then?
Klann We killed em.
Rather What do you mean, you killed em?
Klann We shot em all.
Rather Was an order given for that or was
it more
or less spontaneous?
Klann I don't think we would have acted
spontaneously on something like that. There was an order given.
Rather What was the order?
Klann To kill em.
Rather Why?
Klann Cause we'd already compromised ourselves
by killing the other group.
Rather Whose responsibility, whose obligation
was
it to say that?
Klann The ultimate responsibility fell on
Bob Kerrey.
Rather Do you remember him saying that?
Klann I don't remember his exact words,
but he was the
officer in charge. The call was his.
Rather And then what happened?
Klann We lined up, and we opened fire.
Rather Individually or raked them with automatic
weapons
fire?
Klann No. We, we just slaughtered them.
It was automatic weapons fire. Rifle fire.
Rather At roughly what range?
Klann Six feet, ten feet, very close.
Rather Then did the shooting stop?
Klann Yeah, for a little bit.
Rather Was it quiet?
Klann It was dead quiet. It was dead quiet.
Then you could just hear certain people, hear their moaning.
So we would just fire into that area until it was silent there.
And that was it. And, and until, we were sure that everybody
was dead.
Rather You said certain people were moaning
or making
noises. Were all those adults?
Klann A few. I remember one baby still crying.
That baby was probably the last one alive.
Rather What happened to that baby?
Klann Shot like the rest of em.
Rather On
Camera We told Bob
Kerrey about Gerhard Klann's account of the events at Thanh Phong,
and also revealed to him that much of Klann's story is supported
by a woman who says she was an eyewitness in the village. Senator
Kerrey seemed stunned, but then conceded that what happened at
Thanh Phong may have been worse than he remembers.
As Chris Caldwell wrote in
New York Press, Kerrey maybe didn't remember too clearly what
happened at Thanh Phong because his unit was doing the same thing
every night.
Kerrey's been claiming that
he's felt anguish and remorse down the years. Nothing he's said
in recent weeks supports this claim. Mostly he's been saying
that it was all an honest mistake, perpetrated under orders that
permitted him to kill anything in Thanh Phong that moved.
"Rather
All but one of the victims were women and
children. There was one man described as an older man. That being
the case, why shouldn't it be considered a war crime? Or an atrocity?
Or be an investigation?
Kerrey To describe it as a war crime, I think
is wrong. Or to describe it as an atrocity, I would say, is pretty
close to being right. Because that's how it felt and that's why
I feel guilt and shame for it.
Rather Are you concerned at all about the
consequences of this becoming public?
Kerrey Well am I, certainly, I'm that's a
possibility. I've
got to be prepared to tolerate any consequences of this.
I understand that that are all kinds of potential consequences,
up to and including somebody saying, this is a war crime. And
let's investigate and charge him and put him in prison."
That's reasonable. Let's push
for a trial of Kerrey, and of his commanding officers. Let Kofi
Annan send a UN unit down Fifth Avenue to the Village, to seize
Kerrey. If Blanton can get put in the dock for what he did in
the Sixties, so can the former Senator, now running the New School
where fugitive scholars from Hitler's Germany were given shelter,
and where Hannah Arendt taught. When Kerrey was confronted by
the reporter Gregory Vistica in 1998 he knew the secret was out,
and though Newsweek suppressed the story then, Kerrey must have
known it was come out one day. He decided not to run for the
Democratic presidential nomination and in 2000 he quit the Senate,
using the New School as a sanctuary and as cover.
In the preface to her book,
"The Origins of Totalitarianism" Arendt wrote, "We
can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past
and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply
think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in
oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally
come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition.
This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts
to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for
a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better
future, are vain." CP
STOP PRESS!
CounterPunch has received a call from Hitchens. He is eager to
stress that at the time he made those comments on Fox he was
not up to speed on Kerrey's account of his actions at Thanh Phong.
(We should note that Hitchens appeared on Fox on Monday, April
30, by which time the Kerrey affair had been headline material
across the weekend.) In his call to us Hitchens was at particular
pains to stress his disgust at the New School's board members
who have issued a statement asserting that it is improper to
attribute specific blame for war crimes, which as we have noted
above has been a standard liberal line.
He said he was forwarding the
text of an open letter to his colleagues at the New School. We
have received portions of this, though a middle section is lacking,
and in its place, possibly owing to Hitchens' declared distaste
for e-mail there is what appears to be the email address of the
NYU faculty. However, we do have the creditable final section,
which runs as follows:
"It [the statement] also
- but this is only a detail - takes at face value the sleazy
and evasive and self-pitying utterances made by our new President
and my former friend. That passive acceptance might just have
passed muster if Kerrey had said ONE WORD about the Vietnamese
civilians he admits to having killed. (Let's pass over the ones
he isn't so sure he killed.) But examine the remarks issued under
his name and under the names of Tishman and Scaturro [NYU trustees].
There isn't even a polite nod in the direction of the victims.
This is a scandal pure and simple. Should I dilate on the supposed
principles of the School? Why embarrass myself, or you? Last
month you didn't know that Kerrey had left a ditchful of civilians
behind him and accepted a medal for an action that read - officially
phrased - 21 VC KIA (BC). That means twenty-one Vietcong, killed
in action (body count). So - a liar as well as a killer, since
he knew the figures were falsified. This month you do know. So
perhaps by the watercooler or in the corridor we hear: 'Oh hi
Bob! Shit happens, right?'
"One or the other thing,
but not both. He may have been a victim himself but he must be
honest about what he did and he must say a word or two about
the people he slaughtered. The board and the trustees, meanwhile,
have no right to defend him in the terms they outline, which
are terms that would exculpate any Nazi or any stressed-out ethnic
cleanser." CP
Read the real
story of the CIA's assassination program in Vietnam in Doug Valentine's
groundbreaking book The
Phoenix Program.
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