Invoking Viet Nam to cover up Iraq abuses

[darrels joy]

(More BS out of Vietnam reaches the world)
The Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal calls forth questions over the American War in Viet Nam: "How were captured US troops treated?" and "How did the Americans treat the Vietnamese?"

Diem Quynh

The Voice of America has attempted to deflect criticism of American soldiers? treatment of Iraqi prisoners by claiming recently that captured US troops were treated worse in Viet Nam.

Besides begging the fundamental question "what were the Americans doing in Viet Nam in the first place?" the claim is also patently false.

In fact, like in any of the dozens of countries they invaded, it was the Americans who perpetrated well-documented atrocities in Viet Nam, both at the individual and mass levels.

My Lai is a byword for callous mass murder while the Bach Mai hospital and Kham Thien street bombings, though less well-known outside Viet Nam, were no less brutal for their manner of execution. As if to show they were not merely capable of ?impersonal? atrocities (by dropping bombs), the Americans helped run the notorious Con Dao prison with its ?tiger cages?. In each of these 3m by 1.5m cages, they held five Vietnamese prisoners.

Conditions at the prison prompted a visiting US legislator, William R Anderson, to write to then-president Richard Nixon slamming the human rights violations and asking him to reconsider American involvement in the south of Viet Nam.

Candidate in this year?s American presidential elections, John Kerry, who fought in the war, went further in his criticism. In a statement to the US? Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971, he said the war crimes committed by US soldiers in Southeast Asia "were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

But despite these abuses, the Vietnamese did not reciprocate in kind; instead, they treated captured US troops humanely.

A letter written to his family by the US navy?s Lt Stephen Anthony Rudloff shows a glimpse of the treatment received by American troops in captivity. He wrote, "Since my capture, I have been treated very well by the people of the DRVN [Democratic Republic of Viet Nam]. I am well fed, have had my injuries tended to by a doctor, and am in excellent condition."

Another navy man, Lt Albert Molinare, wrote home, "my treatment and the treatment of all the others I?ve talked to has been very fair. I feel we?re eating and living better than many Vietnamese outside the walls. I live with a group of other prisoners and we pass the time playing bridge and pingpong and doing some gardening. It?s nothing like home of course but the treatment has been a pleasant surprise."

Molinare was right that the detainees were living better than most Vietnamese who were subsisting on food rations and under extremely tough conditions.

It was also true that except for their incarceration, the American soldiers lived normal lives in prison though many of them had been caught red-handed committing crimes against humanity. They got fairly good food, exercised, played on the guitar and read books, received letters from home and celebrated Christmas with trees just like they would have at home.

They received periodic medical checks and treatment for injuries and illnesses.

In the three decades since the war, the Americans have used their hegemony over the world media ? including films ? and short public memory to gloss over their atrocities and to demonise Viet Nam.

The VOA report is merely another such attempt. ? VNS
http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/2...Stories/16.htm

American POWs treat themselves to a refreshing game of volleyball.

[darrels joy]

Kerry's Vietnam Remarks Coming Back to Haunt America, Lawmaker Says
By Susan Jones
CNSNews.com Morning Editor
June 23, 2004

(CNSNews.com) - A Republican lawmaker says Sen. John F. Kerry should apologize for his 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Vietnamese government is now using Kerry's 1971 comments to question America's treatment of Iraqi prisoners.

In a one-minute speech on the House floor Wednesday, Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Penn.) noted that the Vietnamese government has weighed in on the Iraqi prison scandal.

"But the official communist Vietnamese news agency isn't citing the Geneva Convention or the U.N.," Pitts said. "It's citing testimony given by John Kerry in 1971."

At that 1971 hearing, Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about a recent investigation in Detroit, where more than 150 Vietnam veterans "testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia -- not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command...."

According to Kerry, some of the 150 veterans admitted they "had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam..."

Vietnam News, which the Republican National Committee describes as an arm of the official Communist Vietnam News Agency, is now repeating John Kerry's 1971 comments to make the point that Americans "perpetrated well-documented atrocities in Vietnam, both at the individual and mass levels."

But, Vietnam News added, "despite these abuses, the Vietnamese did not reciprocate in kind; instead, they treated captured US troops humanely."

Rep. Pitts says there's a problem with Kerry's 1971 testimony, which Vietnam News has seized upon: "The problem is, he relied on a report prepared by a group of people who were not what they seemed," Pitts said in his speech.

"They claimed to be former soldiers. They were not. They were frauds. They were out only to discredit the military and our country. But John Kerry never repudiated or apologized for his statements," Pitts said. Instead, Pitts noted, Kerry attributed his behavior to "youth."

"And now his misleading, inaccurate, hateful words are being used by a government with an atrocious human rights record against this country," Pitts said.

"Senator Kerry should apologize once and for all to our troops and to our nation...And he should disavow these statements as false before more nations decide to rely on his erroneous testimony from 1971," Pitts concluded.

In an April 23, 2004 interview with CNN, Kerry said his 1971 comments were "mostly voice of a young, angry person who wanted to end the war" and "honest expressions of the passion that we brought to the cause."

He told CNN he regretted "any feeling that anybody had that I somehow didn't embrace the quality of the service. But I have always said how nobly I think every veteran served."

He described himself as older and wiser: "But they were the words that came out of my gut at that time, based on the anger and frustration that I felt back when it was happening," Kerry told CNN in April.

He also told CNN, "I'm not going to back down one inch on what I've fought for and what I've stood for all of these years."

[Seascamp]

There it is, My Lai, one more time. It?s something to remember and reflect on from time-to-time and I agree that that shouldn?t slip away. On the other hand, what the author, Jane Fonda and John Kerry, the US media or hardly anyone else has ever mentioned, especially our leftists in denial, is the Hue massacre of 1968. Talk about a media cover-up of a politically inconvenient reality, wow. Well here it is, probably the first for many and even some Vietnam Vets may be learning of this for the first time. During the Tet offensive of Jan-Feb 1968 the PAVN political Cadres came into Hue with a hit list, rounded up some civilians and summarily executed them. Thought to have gone missing in the combat operations, their families looked for them for a year. In 1969 the truth was discovered. Over two thousand decomposed bodies were discovered buried in sand filled mass graves, wrapped in plastic, many tied together and all shot in the head or dead of brutally crushed skulls. Yes that number is 2,000. Civilian teachers, clergy and educated professionals made up the Cadre?s hit list. The place and means of burial strongly suggest that this massacre was to remain a deep dark secret but alas, except for a tiny mention on the way back page of a European weekly magazine, this may have gone completely ignored. It can be presumed that the victims were guilty of being ?Class Enemies? and I speculate that if the Tet Offensive had gone as the Communists planned, the 2,000 number was just for openers. But a reversal in the fortunes of war caused a limiting of murder plans and the subsequent hasty effort to hide the reality of it all. I?d say the job of hiding all this has been excellent and the media cooperation in the cover-up has been superb. If we wish to wash up the My Lai tragedy, why don?t we also bring up the Hue massacre? But just like the Cambodian Holocaust, the Hue massacre didn?t happen either, right?

Scamp

[exlrrp]

The United States better hope that we never have to account for the prisoners we took during the Vietnam war to the extent we demanded the Vietnamese account for theirs. It could not be done. There's hundreds of thousands of missing VC and "North" Vietnamese, including civilians
Mistreatment of prisoners was routine in Vietnam. I personally saw them mistreated and in one case killed and I KNOW this was endemic to the situation.I had hoped that what we learned from the way we mishandled prisoners in Vietnam would have changed but it turns out: not.
Whats intersting about the Abu Ghraib thing is that the military can now point to the civilian contractors as the miscreants, their part was only softening them up for the tough guys--guys that now don't respect the Geneva Convention thanks to the Bush Administration's new concept of compassionate conservatism..
Thats the point of having "civilian" contractors run that part of the show--theyre not responsible to military rules or Congressional oversight. Thats why the Pentagon is at odds with the civilan politicians who are trying to micromanage it (just like Vietnam!!)--Abu Ghraib made them look WAY bad but it was set up by Rumsfelds secret little Intell unit that operated outside the military chain. Left to itself I think the military would have stuck to the Geneva Conventions but they were pushed into a tight spot by someone else's hurry running over the rules


Re: Kerry.
He should consider how Congressional manners have devolved thanks to our unelected vice president and tell Pitts to go piss up a flagpole. What did Pitts do in the war, anyway?
Its smoke and mirrors to keep pumping up this ancient crapola over and over but if anyone should do some apologizing for history, it should be George W Bush for his phenomenally dismal miltary record: Suspended from flying for refusing to take a flight physical--, he ended his career as a pilot suspended from flying!!--it completely ripped off the taxpayers for 2 years of a jet pilots useful life, which they had already paid for. No wonder they gave him an 8 month early out, they were probably tired of watching him sitting around painting rocks white or whatever else a pilot does who's been SUSPENDED FROM FLYING. No wonder he can't account for these times.
.


James Worth

[Arrow]

Mistreatment of prisoners was routine in Vietnam. I personally saw them mistreated and in one case killed and I KNOW this was endemic to the situation. - James Worth -

To say that mistreatment of prisoners was endemic to thesituation is to say thatHugh Thompson the helicopterpilot that stood between the Vietnamese civilians and US troops at My Lai was an exception rather than the rule in regard to the morals of the men that served in combat in Vietnam.I refuse to believe that is true.

To believe it I would have to call into question the integrity of those in my life I know to be men of honor who proved their moral integrity not only on the battlefield in Vietnam but in the morally responsible life they lived as husbands and fathers and citizens since returning from Vietnam.

These men have stated emphatically that mistreatment of prisoners was not a matter of policy in Vietnam nor was it endemic to the situation.


Arrow>>>>>>

"To be sure, Kerry deserves condemnation for his activities as the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (WAW). In the early 1970s,this small organization - never more than 7,000 veterans out of a potential pool of 9 million- became the darling of the anti-war movement and the liberal media. Its activities went far beyond simply criticizing the politics of the war to repeatedly and dishonestly misrepresenting the service of Vietnam veterans and the positive feelings most felt after serving.

Kerry and his WAW compatriots portrayed their fellow veterans as unwilling soldiers, morally debased and haunted by their service. While this might have fit a small minority, the most accurate survey, done by the Harris Poll in 1980, showed that 91% of those who went to Vietnam were "glad they served their country," 74%"enjoyed their time in the military" and 89% agreed with the statement that "our troops were asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in Washington would not let them win."

Kerry's own comments were filled with hyperbolic exaggerations that sought to make egregious acts seem commonplace. During a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 1971, he testified that fellow veterans had routinely "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan. "With those words, he defamed a generation of honorable men. No matter how he spins it today, at a minimum, he owes them a full and complete apology." - James Webb -

[Arrow]

About James Webb:

James Webb was born on February 9, 1946 in St. Joseph, Missouri. Both his mother, Vera Lorraine Hodges, and his father, James Henry Webb, Sr., were descended principally from the Scotch-Irish settlers who came to this country from Northern Ireland in the 18th century and became pioneers in the Virginia mountains. Through the 1800's and early 1900's, Mr. Webb's ancestors moved steadily west and south from Virginia, most often to settlements in North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas and Missouri. In the mid-1900's many members of the family joined the westward migration to California, and the family is now scattered throughout the continental United States.

Both sides of Mr. Webb's family have a strong citizen-soldier military tradition that predates the Revolutionary War. Family members have served during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War. Mr. Webb's father was a career Air Force officer who flew B-17s and B-29s during World War Two, cargo planes during the Berlin Airlift, and was a pioneer in the United States missile program. Colonel Webb, who was the first family member to finish high school and who graduated from the University of Omaha in 1962 after 26 years of night school, put the first Atlas missile into place for the Air Force in the late 1950's, and held an unsurpassed success-rate record as commander of an Atlas, Thor, and Scout Junior missile squadron during the early 1960's. During the Vietnam war he served at Air Force Systems command on sensitive satellite link programs and as a legislative affairs officer in the Pentagon, leading him to become a vocal critic of Defense Secretary McNamara's leadership methods and causing him eventually to retire from the Air Force, partially in protest of the manner in which the Vietnam War was being micromanaged by the political process.

James Webb grew up on the move, attending more than a dozen different schools across the U.S. and in England. He graduated from high school in Bellevue, Nebraska. First attending the University of Southern California on an NROTC academic scholarship, he left for the Naval Academy after one year. At the Naval Academy he was a four-year member of the Brigade Honor Committee, a varsity boxer, and was one of six finalists in the interviewing process for Brigade Commander during his senior year. Graduating in l968 he chose a commission in the Marine Corps, and was one of 18 in his class of 841 to receive the Superintendent's Commendation for outstanding leadership contributions while a midshipman. First in his class of 243 at the Marine Corps Officer's Basic School in Quantico, Virginia, he then served with the Fifth Marine Regiment in Vietnam, where as a rifle platoon and company commander in the infamous An Hoa Basin west of Danang he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star Medal, two Bronze Star Medals, and two Purple Hearts. He later served as a platoon commander and as an instructor in tactics and weapons at Marine Corps Officer Candidates School, and then as a member of the Secretary of the Navy's immediate staff, before leaving the Marine Corps in l972.

Mr. Webb spent the "Watergate years" as a student at the Georgetown University Law Center, arriving just after the Watergate break-in in 1972, and receiving his J.D. just after the fall of South Vietnam in l975. While at Georgetown he began a six-year pro bono representation of a Marine who had been convicted of war crimes in Vietnam (finally clearing the man's name in 1978, three years after his suicide), won the Horan award for excellence in legal writing, and authored his first book, Micronesia and U.S. Pacific Strategy. He also worked in Asia as a consultant to the Governor of Guam, conducting a study of U.S. military land needs in Asia, and their impact on Guam's political future.

Mr. Webb has written six best-selling novels: Fields of Fire (l978), considered by many to be the classic novel of the Vietnam war, A Sense of Honor (l981), A Country Such As This (1983), Something To Die For (1991), The Emperor?s General (1999) and Lost Soldiers (2001). He taught literature at the Naval Academy as their first visiting writer, has traveled worldwide as a journalist, and his PBS coverage of the U.S. Marines in Beirut earned him an Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

In government, Mr. Webb served in the U.S. Congress as counsel to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs from l977 to l98l, becoming the first Vietnam veteran to serve as a full committee counsel in the Congress. During the Reagan Administration he was the first Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs from l984 to l987, where he directed considerable research and analysis of the U.S. military's mobilization capabilities and spent much time with our NATO allies. In 1987 he became the first Naval Academy graduate in history to serve in the military and then become Secretary of the Navy. He resigned from that position in 1988 after refusing to agree in the reduction of the Navy's force structure during congressionally-mandated budget cuts.

Among Mr. Webb's many other awards for community service and professional excellence are the Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Medal of Honor Society's Patriot Award, the American Legion National Commander's Public Service Award, the VFW's Media Service Award, the Marine Corps League's Military Order of the Iron Mike Award, the John Russell Leader-ship Award, and the Robert L. Denig Distinguished Service Award. He was a Fall, 1992 Fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics.

Mr. Webb travels extensively, particularly in Asia, as a journalist, business consultant and screenwriter-producer. He speaks Vietnamese and has done extensive pro bono work with the Vietnamese community dating from the late l970's. In 1989 he met with key Japanese government and industrial officials as a featured guest of the Japanese Foreign Ministry. He has worked on feature film projects with many of Hollywood's top producers. His original story Rules of Engagement, which he alsoexecutive-produced, was released in April 2000 and starred Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. It was the number one film in the US for two weeks.

Hisfifth novel The Emperor's General was purchased by Paramount pictures as the largest book-to-film deal of 1998. He is now working on writing and producing the film version of Fields of Fire, which is to be filmed in theQuang Nam Province of Vietnam in 2003.