Quote:The My Lai Massacre

The My Lai massacre was first reported in March 1969, one full year after the event. In April 1969, because of congressional queries, the case was given to the Army inspector general, and in August Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland turned the case over to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID). In November 1969 Seymour Hersh broke the story, telling how 504 Vietnamese civilians were massacred by members of a U.S. infantry company attached to a special battalion called Task Force Barker.

Ten days after Hersh broke the story, Westmoreland ordered General William Peers to conduct an official inquiry. Evan Parker contended to me that Peers got the job because he was not a West Point graduate.2 However, Peers’s close ties to the CIA may also have been a factor. In World War II, Peers had commanded OSS Detachment 101, in which capacity he had been Evan Parker’s boss. In the early 1950s he had been the CIA’s chief of training and its station chief in Taiwan, and as SACSA in 1966 Peers had worked with the CIA in formulating pacification policy. Having had several commands in Vietnam, he was well aware of how the war was being conducted. But the most conclusive evidence linking Peers to the CIA is the report he submitted in March 1970, which was not made available to the public until 1974 and which carefully avoided implicating the CIA.

The perfunctory trials that followed the Peers inquiry amounted to slaps on the wrist for the defendants and fueled rumors of a cover-up. Of the thirty people named in the report, charges were brought against sixteen, four were tried, and one was convicted. William Calley’s sentence was quickly reduced, and in conservative quarters he was venerated as a hero and scapegoat. Likewise, the men in Calley’s platoon were excused as victims of VC terror and good soldiers acting under orders. Of nearly two thousand Americans surveyed by Time magazine, 65 percent denied being upset.

Yet, if most Americans were willing to accept the massacre as necessary to ensure their security, why the cover-up? Why was the massacre portrayed as an isolated incident?

On August 25, 1970, an article appeared in The New York Times hinting that the CIA, through Phoenix, was responsible for My Lai. The story line was advanced on October 14, when defense attorneys for David Mitchell — a sergeant accused and later cleared of machine-gunning scores of Vietnamese in a drainage ditch in My Lai — citing Phoenix as the CIA’s “systematic program of assassination,” named Evan Parker as the CIA officer who “signed documents, certain blacklists,” of Vietnamese to be assassinated in My Lai.3 When we spoke, Parker denied the charge.

A defense request to subpoena Parker was denied, as was a request to view the My Lai blacklist. Outside the courtroom CIA lawyer John Greaney insisted that the agency was “absolutely not” involved in My Lai. When asked if the CIA had ever operated in My Lai, Greaney replied, “I don’t know.”

But as has been established in this book, the CIA had one of its largest contingents in Quang Ngai Province. [See: Map of South Vietnam - pop-up window] Especially active were its Census Grievance cadre, directed by the Son Tinh District RD Cadre intelligence chief, Ho Ngoc Hui, whose VNQDD cadres were in My Lai on the day prior to the massacre. A Catholic from North Vietnam, Hui reportedly called the massacre “a small matter.” 4

To understand why the massacre occurred, it helps to know that in March 1968 cordon and search operations of the type Task Force Barker conducted in My Lai were how RD Cadre intelligence officers contacted their secret agents. The Peers report does not mention that, or that in March 1968 the forty-one RD teams operating in Quang Ngai were channeling information on VCI through Hui to the CIA’s paramilitary adviser, who shared it with the province Phoenix coordinator.

The Phoenix coordinator in Quang Ngai Province at the time of the My Lai massacre was Robert B. Ramsdell, a seventeen-year veteran of the Army CID who subsequently worked for ten years as a private investigator in Florida. Ramsdell was hired by the CIA in 1967. He was trained in the United States and sent to Vietnam on February 4, 1968, as the Special Branch adviser in Quang Ngai Province. Ramsdell, who appeared incognito before the Peers panel, told newsmen that he worked for the Agency for International Development.

In Cover-up Seymour Hersh tells how in February 1968 Ramsdell began “rounding up residents of Quang Ngai City whose names appeared on Phoenix blacklists.”5 Explained Ramsdell: “After Tet we knew who many of these people were, but we let them continue to function because we were controlling them. They led us to the VC security officer for the district. We wiped them out after Tet and then went ahead and picked up the small fish.”6 The people who were “wiped out,” Hersh explains, were “put to death” by the Phoenix Special Police.” 7

Ramsdell “simply eliminated everyone who was on those lists,” said Gerald Stout, an Army intelligence officer who fed Ramsdell names. “It was recrimination.” *8 Recrimination for Tet, at a minimum.

* In August 1966 the CIA’s paramilitary adviser in Quang Ngai, Reed Harrison, unwittingly sent USAID employee Dwight Owen into an ambush outside Tu Nghia. The guerillas who killed young Owen were from the Forty-eighth VC Battalion.

Unfortunately, according to Randolph Lane — the Quang Ngai Province MACV intelligence adviser — Ramsdell’s victims “were not Vietcong.”9 This fact is corroborated by Jeffrey Stein, a corporal working undercover for the 525th MIG, running agent nets in Quang Nam and southern Thua Thien provinces. According to Stein, the VNQDD was a Vietnamese militarist party that had a “world fascist allegiance and wanted to overthrow the Vietnamese government from the right! The people they were naming as Communists were left-wing Buddhists, and that information was going to the Phoenix program. We were being used to assassinate their political rivals.” 10

Through the Son Tinh DIOCC, Phoenix Coordinator Ramsdell passed Census Grievance-generated intelligence to Task Force Barker, estimating “the 48th Battalion at a strength of 450 men.” The Peers report, however, said that 40 VC at most were in My Lai on the day prior to March 16 and that they had left before Task Force Barker arrived on the scene. 11

Ramsdell told the Peers panel, “Very frankly, anyone that was in that area was considered a VCS [Vietcong suspect], because they couldn’t survive in that area unless they were sympathizers.” 12

On the basis of Ramsdell’s information, Task Force Barker’s intelligence officer, Captain Kotouc, told Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker that “only VC and active VC sympathizers were living [in My Lai and My Khe].” But, Kotouc said, because leaflets were to be dropped, “civilians would be out of the hamlets...by 0700 hours.” 13

Phoenix Coordinator Ramsdell then provided Kotouc with a blacklist of VCI suspects in My Lai, along with the ludicrous notion that all “sympathizers” would be gone from the hamlet by early morning, leaving 450 hard-core VC guerillas behind. Yet “the link between Ramsdell and the poor intelligence for the 16 March operation was never explored by the Peers Panel.” 14

As in any large-scale Phoenix operation, two of Task Force Barker’s companies cordoned off the hamlet while a third one — Calley’s — moved in, clearing the way for Kotouc and Special Branch officers who were “brought to the field to identify VC from among the detained inhabitants.” 15

As Hersh notes parenthetically, “Shortly after the My Lai 4 operation, the number of VCI on the Phoenix blacklist was sharply reduced.” 16

In an unsigned, undated memo on Phoenix supplied by Jack, the genesis of the blacklist is described as follows:

There had been a reluctance to exploit available sources of information in the hamlet, village and district. It was, therefore, suggested that effective Cordon and Search operations must rely on all locally available intelligence in order to deprive the Viet Cong of a sanctuary among the population. It was in this context that carefully prepared blacklists were made available. The blacklists were furnished to assist the Allied operational units in searching for specifically identified people and in screening captives or local personnel held for questioning. The information for the blacklists was prepared by the Police Special Branch* in conjunction with intelligence collected from the Province Interrogation Centers.

* In June 1988 Quang Ngai Special Branch chief Kieu participated in a Vatican ceremony which elevated Catholics killed in Vietnam to the status of martyrs.

Kotouc was charged by the Peers panel with concealing evidence and falsifying reports, with having “authorized the killing of at least one VC suspect by members of the National Police,” and with having “committed the offense of maiming by cutting off the finger of a VC suspect.” 17

The CIA, via Phoenix, not only perpetrated the My Lai massacre but also concealed the crime. The Peers panel noted that “a Census Grievance Cadreman of Son My Village submitted a written report to the Census Grievance chief, Quang Ngai, on 18 March 1968,” indicating that “a fierce battle with VC and local guerrillas” had resulted in 427 civilian and guerrilla deaths, 27 in My Lai and 400 in the nearby hamlets of Thuan Yen and Binh Dong!18 The appearance of this report coincided with the release by Robert Thompson of a “captured” document, which had been “mislaid” for nineteen months, indicating that the Cuc Nghien Cuu had assassinated 2,748 civilians in Hue during Tet.

The only person named as having received the Census Grievance report is Lieutenant Colonel William Guinn, who testified in May 1969 that he “could not recall who specifically had given it to him.” In December 1969 Guinn, when shown a copy of the Census Grievance report, “refused further to testify and accordingly, it was not possible to ascertain whether the 18 March Census Grievance report was in fact the one which he recalled having received.”19 With that the matter of the Census Grievance report was dropped.

The My Lai cover-up was assisted by the Son Thinh District adviser, Major David Gavin, who lost a report written on April 11 by Tran Ngoc Tan, the Son Tinh district chief. Tan’s report named the 504 people killed at My Lai, and Tan said that “he discussed [the report] with Gavin” but that “Gavin denies this.” Shortly thereafter Major Gavin became Lieutenant Colonel Gavin. 20

The Eleventh Brigade commander dismissed Tan’s charges as “baseless propaganda.”21 Barker’s afteraction report listed no civilian deaths. Civilian deaths in South Vietnam from 1965 until 1973 are estimated at 1.5 million; none is reported in U.S. military afteraction reports.

The Peers panel cited “evidence that at least at the Quang Ngai Province and Son Tinh District levels, and possibly at 2nd ARVN Division, the Senior U.S. military advisors aided in suppressing information concerning the massacre.” 22

Task Force Barker commander Lieutenant Colonel Barker was killed in a helicopter crash on June 13, 1968, while traveling back to My Lai as part of an investigation ordered by the Quang Ngai Province chief, Colonel Khien. Khien is described “as a big time crook” and a VNQDD politico who “had a family in Hue” and was afraid the VC “were going to make another Hue out of Quang Ngai.” Province Chief Khien and the deputy province senior advisor, Lieutenant Colonel Guinn, both “believed that the only way to win the war was to kill all Viet Cong and Viet Cong sympathizers.” 23

The last piece in the My Lai puzzle concerned Robert Haeberle and Jay Roberts, Army reporters assigned to Task Force Barker. After the massacre Roberts “prepared an article for the brigade newspapers which omitted all mention of war crimes he had observed and gave a false and misleading account of the Task Force Barker operation.” Roberts was charged by the Peers panel with having made no attempt to stop war crimes he witnessed and for failing to report the killings of noncombatants. Haeberle was cited by the panel for withholding photographic evidence of war crimes and for failing to report war crimes he had witnessed at My Lai.

As Jeff Stein said, “The first thing you learn in the Army is not competence, you learn corruption. And you learn ‘to get along, go along.’” 24

Unfortunately not everyone learns to get along. On September 3, 1988, Robert T’Souvas was apparently shot in the head by his girl friend, after an argument over a bottle of vodka. The two were homeless, living out of a van they had parked under a bridge in Pittsburgh. T’Souvas was a Vietnam veteran and a participant in the My Lai massacre.

T’Souvas’s attorney, George Davis, traveled to Da Nang in 1970 to investigate the massacre and while there was assigned as an aide a Vietnamese colonel who said that the massacre was a Phoenix operation and that the purpose of Phoenix was “to terrorize the civilian population into submission.”

Davis told me: “When I told the people in the War Department what I knew and that I would attempt to obtain all records on the program in order to defend my client, they agreed to drop the charges.” 25

Indeed, the My Lai massacre was a result of Phoenix, the “jerry-built” counterterror program that provided an outlet for the repressed fears and anger of the psyched-up men of Task Force Barker. Under the aegis of neutralizing the infrastructure, old men, women, and children became the enemy. Phoenix made it as easy to shoot a Vietnamese child as it was to shoot a sparrow in a tree. The ammunition was faulty intelligence provided by secret agents harboring grudges — in violation of the agreement that Census Grievance intelligence would not be provided to the police. The trigger was the blacklist.

As Ed Murphy said, “Phoenix was far worse than the things attributed to it.” Indeed, the range of transgressions generated by Phoenix was all-encompassing but was most evident in its post-apprehension aspect. According to Jeff Stein, the CIA “would direct the PRU teams to go out and take care of a particular target...either capture or assassination, or kidnapping. Kidnapping was a common thing that they liked to do. They really liked the whole John Wayne bit — to go in and capture someone at night. ... They’d put him in one of these garbage collection type bins — and the helicopter would pick up the bin and fly him off to a regional interrogation center.

“I think it’s common knowledge what goes on at the interrogation center,” Stein writes. “It was common knowledge that when someone was picked up their lives were about at an end because the Americans most likely felt that, if they were to turn someone like that back into the countryside it would just be like multiplying NLF followers.” 26

Bart Osborn (whose agent net Stein inherited) is more specific. “I never knew in the course of all those operations any detainee to live through his interrogation,” Osborn testified before Congress in 1971. “They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all died and the majority were wither tortured to death or things like thrown out of helicopters.” 27

Quote:May 17, 2001
A CounterPunch Special Report
Fragging Bob:

Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes,
And The Need For A War Crimes Trial

by Douglas Valentine

By now everybody knows that former Senator Bob Kerrey led a seven-member team of Navy Seals into Thanh Phong village in February 1969, and murdered in cold blood more than a dozen women and children.

What hardly anyone knows, and what no one in the press is talking about (although many of them know), is that Kerrey was on a CIA mission, and its specific purpose was to kill those women and children. It was illegal, premeditated mass murder and it was a war crime.

And it's time to hold the CIA responsible. It's time for a war crimes tribunal to examine the CIA's illegal activities during and since the Vietnam War.


War Crimes As Policy

War crimes were a central was part of a CIA strategy for fighting the Vietnam War. The strategy was known as Contre Coup, and it was the manifestation of a belief that the war was essentially political, not military, in nature. The CIA theorized that it was being fought by opposing ideological factions, each one amounting to about five percent of the total population, while the remaining ninety percent was uncommitted and wanted the war to go away.

According to the CIA's mythology, on one side were communist insurgents, supported by comrades in Hanoi, Moscow and Peking. The communists fought for land reform, to rid Vietnam of foreign intervention, and to unite the north and south. The other faction was composed of capitalists, often Catholics relocated from North Vietnam in 1954 by the CIA. This faction was fighting to keep South Vietnam an independent nation, operating under the direction of quiet Americans.

Caught in the crossfire was the silent majority. The object shared by both factions was to win these undecided voters over to its side.

Contre Coup was the CIA's response to the realization that the Communists were winning the war for the hearts and minds of the people. It also was a response to the belief that they were winning through the use of psychological warfare, specifically, selective terror * the murder and mutilation of specific government officials.

In December 1963, Peer DeSilva arrived in Saigon as the CIA's station chief. He claims to have been shocked by what he saw. In his autobiography, SubRosa, DeSilva describes how the VC had "impaled a young boy, a village chief, and his pregnant wife on sharp poles. To make sure this horrible sight would remain with the villagers, one of the terror squad used his machete to disembowel the woman, spilling he fetus onto the ground."

"The Vietcong," DeSilva said, "were monstrous in the application of torture and murder to achieve the political and psychological impact they wanted."

But the methodology was successful and had tremendous intelligence potential, so DeSilva authorized the creation of small "counter-terror teams," designed "to bring danger and death to the Vietcong functionaries themselves, especially in areas where they felt secure."


How Counter-Terror Worked In Vietnam

Thanh Phong village was one of those areas where Vietcong functionaries felt secure. It was located in Kien Hoa Province, along the Mekong Delta. One of Vietnam's most densely populated provinces, Kien Hoa was precariously close to Saigon, and is criss-crossed with waterways and rice paddies. It was an important rice production area for the insurgents as well as the Government of Vietnam, and thus was one of the eight most heavily infiltrated provinces in Vietnam. The estimated 4700 VC functionaries in Kien Hoa accounted for more than five percent of the insurgency's total leadership. Operation Speedy Express, a Ninth Infantry sweep through Kien Hoa in the first six months of 1969, killed an estimated 11,000 civilians-supposedly VC sympathizers.

These functionaries formed what the CIA called the Vietcong Infrastructure (VCI). The VCI consisted of members of the People's Revolutionary Party, the National Liberation Front, and other Communist outfits like the Women's and Student's Liberation Associations. Its members were politicians and administrators managing committees for business, communications, security, intelligence, and military affairs. Among their main functions were the collection of taxes, the recruitment of young men and women into the insurgency, and the selective assassination of GVN officials.

As the CIA was well aware, Ho Chi Minh boasted that with two cadre in every hamlet, he could win the war, no matter how many soldiers the Americans threw at him.

So the CIA adopted the Ho's strategy-but on a grander and bloodier scale. The object of Contre Coup was to identify and terrorize each and every individual VCI and his/her family, friends and fellow villagers. To this end the CIA in 1964 launched a massive intelligence operation called the Provincial Interrogation Center Program. The CIA (employing the US company Pacific Architects and Engineers) built an interrogation center in each of South Vietnam's 44 provinces. Staffed by members of the brutal Special Police, who ran extensive informant networks, and advised by CIA officers, the purpose of the PICs was to identify, through the systematic "interrogation" (read torture) of VCI suspects, the membership of the VCI at every level of its organization; from its elusive headquarters somewhere along the Cambodian border, through the region, city, province, district, village and hamlet committees.

The "indispensable link" in the VCI was the District Party Secretary * the same individual Bob Kerrey's Seal team was out to assassinate in its mission in Thanh Phong.

Frankenstein's Monster

Initially the CIA had trouble finding people who were willing to murder and mutilate, so the Agency's original "counter-terror teams" were composed of ex-convicts, VC defectors, Chinese Nungs, Cambodians, Montagnards, and mercenaries. In a February 1970 article written for True Magazine, titled "The CIA's Hired Killers," Georgie-Anne Geyer compared "our boys" to "their boys" with the qualification that, "Their boys did it for faith; our boys did it for money."

The other big problem was security. The VC had infiltrated nearly every facet of the GVN-even the CIA's unilateral counter-terror program. So in an attempt to bring greater effectiveness to its secret war, the CIA started employing Navy Seals, US Army Special Forces, Force Recon Marines, and other highly trained Americans who, like Bob Kerrey, were "motivationally indoctrinated" by the military and turned into killing machines with all the social inhibitions and moral compunctions of a Timmy McVeigh. Except they were secure in the knowledge that what they were doing was, if not legal or moral, fraught with Old Testament-style justice, rationalizing that the Viet Cong did it first.

Eventually the irrepressible Americans added their own improvements. In his autobiography Soldier, Anthony Herbert describes arriving in Saigon in 1965, reporting to the CIA's Special Operations Group, and being asked to join a top-secret psywar program. What the CIA wanted Herbert to do, "was to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families."

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."

This is the intellectual context in which the Kerrey atrocity took place. This CIA strategy of committing war crimes for psychological reasons * to terrorize the enemy's supporters into submission * also is what differentiates Kerrey's atrocity, in legal terms, from other popular methods of mass murdering civilians, such as bombs from the sky, or economic boycotts.

Yes, the CIA has a global, illegal strategy of terrorizing people, although in typical CIA lexicon it's called "anti-terrorism."

When you're waging illegal warfare, language is every bit as important as weaponry and the will to kill. As George Orwell or Noam Chomsky might explain, when you're deliberately killing innocent women and children, half the court-of-public-opinion battle is making it sound legal.

Three Old Vietnam Hands in particular stand out as examples of this incestuous relationship. Neil Sheehan, CIA-nik and author of the aptly titled Bright Shining Lie, recently confessed that in 1966 he saw US soldiers massacre as many as 600 Vietnamese civilians in five fishing villages. He'd been in Vietnam for three years by then, but it didn't occur to him that he had discovered a war crime. Now he realizes that the war crimes issue was always present, but still no mention of his friends in the CIA.

Former New York Times reporter and author of The Best and The Brightest, David Halberstam, defended Kerrey on behalf of the media establishment at the New School campus the week after the story broke. CIA flack Halberstam described the region around Thanh Phong as "the purest bandit country," adding that "by 1969 everyone who lived there would have been third-generation Vietcong." Which is CIA revisionism at its sickest.

Finally there's New York Times reporter James Lemoyne. Why did he never write any articles linking the CIA to war crimes in Vietnam? Because his brother Charles, a Navy officer, was in charge of the CIA's counter-terror teams in the Delta in 1968.


Phoenix Comes To Thanh Phong

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. The stated policy was to replace the bludgeon of indiscriminate bombings and military search and destroy operations * which had alienated the people from the Government of Vietnam * with the scalpel of assassinations of selected members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure.

A typical Phoenix operation began in a Province Interrogation Center where a suspected member of the VCI 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.

In February 1969, the Phoenix Program was still under CIA control. But because Kien Hoa Province was so important, and because the VCI's District Party Secretary was supposedly in Thanh Phong, the CIA decided to handle this particular assassination and mass murder mission without involving the local Vietnamese. So instead of dispensing the local counter-terror team, the CIA sent Kerrey's Raiders.

And that, very simply, is how it happened. Kerrey and crew admittedly went to Thanh Phong to kill the District Party Secretary, and anyone else who got in the way, including his family and all their friends.


Phoenix Comes Home To Roost

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.

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.

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."

But the American establishment and media denied it then, and continue to deny it until today, because Phoenix was a genocidal program -- and the CIA officials, members of the media who were complicit through their silence, and the red-blooded American boys who carried it out, are all war criminals. As Michael Ratner a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights told CounterPunch: "Kerrey should be tried as a war criminal. His actions on the night of February 24-25, 1969 when the seven man Navy Seal unit which he headed killed approximately twenty unarmed Vietnamese civilians, eighteen of whom were women and children was a war crime. Like those who murdered at My Lai, he too should be brought into the dock and tried for his crimes."

Phoenix, alas, also was fiendishly effective and became a template for future CIA operations. Developed in Vietnam and perfected with the death squads and media blackout of Afghanistan and El Salvador, it is now employed by the CIA around the world: in Colombia, in Kosovo, in Ireland with the British MI6, and in Israel with its other kindred spirit, the Mossad.

The paymasters at the Pentagon will keep cranking out billion dollar missile defense shields and other Bush league boondoggles. But when it comes to making the world safe for international capitalism, the political trick is being more of a homicidal maniac, and more cost effective, than the terrorists.

Incredibly, Phoenix has become fashionable, it has adhered a kind of political cachet. Governor Jesse Ventura claims to have been a Navy Seal and to have "hunted man." Fanatical right-wing US Representative Bob Barr, one of the Republican impeachment clique, has introduced legislation to "re-legalize" assassinations. David Hackworth, representing the military establishment, defended Kerrey by saying "there were thousands of such atrocities," and that in 1969 his own unit committed "at least a dozen such horrors." Jack Valenti, representing the business establishment and its financial stake in the issue, defended Kerrey in the LA Times, saying, "all the normalities (sic) of a social contract are abandoned," in war.

Bullshit.

A famous Phoenix operation, known as the My Lai Massacre, was proceeding along smoothly, with a grand total of 504 Vietnamese women and children killed, when a soldier named Hugh Thompson in a helicopter gunship saw what was happening. Risking his life to preserve that "social contract," Thomson 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.

Same with screenwriter and journalist Bill Broyles, Vietnam veteran, and author Brothers In Arms, an excellent book about the Vietnam War. Broyles turned in a bunch of his fellow Marines for killing civilians.

If Thompson and Broyles were capable of taking individual responsibility, everyone is. And many did.


Phoenix Reborn

There is no doubt that Bob Kerrey committed a war crime. As he admits, he went to Vietnam with a knife clenched between his teeth and did what he was trained to do * kidnap, assassinate and mass murder civilians. But there was no point to his atrocity as he soon learned, no controlling legal authority. He became a conflicted individual. He remembers that they killed women and children. But he thinks they came under fire first, before they panicked and started shooting back. The fog of war clouds his memory

But there isn't that much to forget. Thanh Phong was Kerrey's first mission, and on his second mission a grenade blew off his foot, abruptly ending his military career.

Plus which there are plenty of other people to remind Kerrey of what happened, if anyone will listen. There's Gerhard Klann, the Seal who disputes Kerrey's account, and two Vietnamese survivors of the raid, Pham Tri Lanh and Bui Thi Luam, both of whom corroborate Klann's account, as does a veteran Viet Cong soldier, Tran Van Rung.

As CBS News was careful to point out, the Vietnamese were former VC and thus hostile witnesses and because there were slight inconsistencies in their stories, they could not be believed. Klann became the target of Kerrey's pr machine, which dismissed as an alcoholic with a chip on his shoulder.

Then there is John DeCamp. An army captain in Vietnam, DeCamp worked for the organization under CIA executive William Colby that ostensibly managed Phoenix after the CIA let it go in June 1969. DeCamp was elected to the Nebraska State Senate and served until 1990. A Republican, he claims that Kerrey led an anti-war march on the Nebraska state capitol in May 1971. DeCamp claims that Kerrey put a medal, possibly his bronze star, in a mock coffin, and said, "Viet Cong or North Vietnamese troops are angelic compared with the ruthless Americans."

Kerrey claims he was in Peru visiting his brother that day. But he definitely accepted his Medal of Honor from Richard Nixon on 14 May 1970, a mere ten days after the Ohio National guard killed four student protestors at Kent State. With that badge of honor pinned on his chest, Kerrey began walking the gilded road to success. Elected Governor of Nebraska in November 1982, he started dating Deborah Winger, became a celebrity hero, was elected to the US Senate, became vice-chair of Senate Committee on Intelligence, and in 1990 staged a run for president. One of the most highly regarded politicians in America, he showered self-righteous criticism on draft dodger Bill Clinton's penchant for lying.

Bob Kerrey is a symbol of what it means to be an American, and the patriots have rallied to his defense. And yet Kerrey accepted a bronze star under false pretenses, and as John DeCamp suggests, he may have been fragged by his fellow Seals. For this, he received the Medal of Honor.

John DeCamp calls Bob Kerrey "emotionally disturbed" as a result of his Vietnam experience.

And Kerrey's behavior has been pathetic. In order to protect himself and his CIA patrons from being tried as a war criminals, Bob Kerrey has become a pathological liar too. Kerrey says his actions at Than Phong were an atrocity, but not a war crime. He says he feels remorse, but not guilt. In fact, he has continually rehabbed his position on the war itself-moving from an opponent to more recently an enthusiast. In a 1999 column in the Washington Post, for example, Kerrey said he had come to view that Vietnam was a "just war. "Was the war worth the effort and sacrifice, or was it a mistake?" Kerrey wrote. "When I came home in 1969 and for many years afterward, I did not believe it was worth it. Today, with the passage of time and the experience of seeing both the benefits of freedom won by our sacrifice and the human destruction done by dictatorships, I believe the cause was just and the sacrifice not in vain."

Then at the Democratic Party Convention in Los Angeles last summer Kerrey lectured the delegates that they shouldn't be ashamed of the war and that they should treat Vietnam veterans as war heroes: "I believe I speak for Max Baucus and every person who has ever served when I say I never felt more free than when I wore the uniform of our country. This country - this party - must remember." Free? Free to murder women and children. Is this a consciousness of guilt or immunity?

CBS News also participated in constructing a curtain of lies. As does every other official government or media outlet that knows about the CIA's Phoenix Program, which continues to exist and operate worldwide today, but fails to mention it.

Why?

Because if the name of one targeted Viet Cong cadre can be obtained, then all the names can be obtained, and then a war crimes trial becomes imperative. And that's the last thing the Establishment will allow to happen.

Average Americans, however, consider themselves a nation ruled by laws and an ethic of fair play, and with the Kerry confession comes an opportunity for America to redefine itself in more realistic terms. The discrepancies in his story beg investigation. He says he was never briefed on the rules of engagement. But a "pocket card" with the Laws of Land Warfare was given to each member of the US Armed Forces in Vietnam.

Does it matter that Kerrey would lie about this? Yes. 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."

It was the CIA that forced soldiers like Kerrey into Phoenix operations, and the hidden hand of the CIA lingers over his war crime. Kerrey even uses the same rationale offered by CIA officer DeSilva. According to Kerrey, "the Viet Cong were a thousand per cent more ruthless than" the Seals or U.S. Army.

But the Geneva Conventions, customary international law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice all prohibit the killing of noncombatant civilians. The alleged brutality of others is no justification. By saying it is, Kerrey implicates the people who generated that rationale: the CIA. That is why there is a moral imperative to scrutinize the Phoenix Program and the CIA officers who created it, the people who participated in it, and the journalists who covered it up * to expose the dark side of our national psyche, the part that allows us to employ terror to assure our world dominance.

To accomplish this there must be a war crimes tribunal. This won't be easy. The US government has gone to great lengths to shield itself from such legal scrutiny, at the same it selectively manipulates international institutions, such as the UN, to go after people like Slobodan Milosevic.

According to human rights lawyer Michael Ratner the legal avenues for bringing Kerrey and his cohorts to justice are quite limited. A civil suit could be lodged against Kerrey by the families of the victims brought in the United States under the Alien Tort Claims Act. "These are the kinds of cases I did against Gramajo, Pangaitan (Timor)," Ratner told us. "The main problem here is that it is doubtful the Vietnamese would sue a liberal when they are dying to better relations with the US. I would do this case if could get plaintiffs--so far no luck." According to Ratner, there is no statute of limitations problem as it is newly discovered evidence and there is a stron argument particularly in the criminal context that there is no statute of limitations for war crimes.

But criminal cases in the US present a difficult, if not impossible, prospect. Now that Kerrey is discharged from the Navy, the military courts, which went after Lt. Calley for the My Lai massacre, has no jurisdiction over him. "As to criminal case in the US--my pretty answer is no," says Ratner. "The US first passed a war crimes statute (18 USC sec. 2441 War Crimes) in 1996--that statute makes
what Kerrey did a war crime punishable by death of life imprisonment--but it was passed after the crime and criminal statutes are not retroactive." In 1988, Congress enacted a statute against genocide, which was might apply to Kerrey's actions, but it to can't be applied retroactively. Generally at the time of Kerrey's acts in Vietnam, US criminal law did not extend to what US citizens did overseas unless they were military.

[As a senator, Kerrey, it should be noted, voted for the war crimes law, thus opening the opportunity for others to be prosecuted for crimes similar to those he that committed but is shielded from.]

The United Nations is a possibility, but a long shot. They could establish an ad hoc tribunal such as it did with the Rwanda ICTR and Yugoslavia ICTY. "This would require action by UN Security council could do it, but what are the chances?" says Ratner. "There is still the prospect for a US veto What that really points out is how those tribunals are bent toward what the US and West want."

Prosecution in Vietnam and or another country and extradition is also a possibility. It can be argued that war crimes are crimes over which there is universal jurisdiction--in fact that is obligation of countries-under Geneva Convention of 1948--to seek out and prosecute war criminals. "Universal jurisdiction does not require the presence of the defendant--he can be indicted and tried in some countries in absentia--or his extradition can be requested", says Ratner. "Some countries may have statutes permitting this. Kerrey should check his travel plans and hire a good lawyer before he gets on a plane. He can use Kissinger's lawyer." CP

Douglas Valentine is the author of The Phoenix Program, the only comprehensive account of the CIA's torture and assassination operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY a chilling novel about the CIA and the drug trade.

Quote:http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/New_World_Order/ImperialBrainTrust_CFR.html

Imperial Brain Trust

The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy

by Lawrence H. Shoup and William Minter

Authors Choice Press, paperback, 2004





p5
The Council on Foreign Relations, despite its relative public obscurity, plays a key part in molding United States foreign policy. In the Council, the leading sectors of big business get together with the corporate world's academic experts to work out a general framework for foreign policy.

p11
The origins of the Council on Foreign Relations lie in the reactions of a small number of American "men of affairs" to the First World War. At the Versailles Conference a group of American and British participants began discussing the need for an organization which could engage in the continuous study of international relations.

p12
The conception of the scheme was primarily that of British historian Lionel Curtis, formerly a colonial official in South Africa. 3 For the previous nine years Curtis had been in charge of setting up a network of semisecret organizations in the British Dominions and the United States. 4 These bodies, called the Round Table Groups, were established by Lord Milner, a former British secretary of state for war, and his associates in 1908-1911. "The original purpose of the groups was to seek to federate the English-speaking world along lines laid down by Cecil Rhodes and William T. Stead, and the money for the organizational work came originally from the Rhodes Trust."

Rhodes was an extremely wealthy imperialist whose will to power is illustrated by a statement he once made to a friend: "The world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered, and colonized. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that." Rhodes declared that his life ambition was "the furtherance of the British Empire, the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under its rule, the recovery of the United States of America, the making of the Anglo-Saxon race into one Empire." To achieve this grandiose end in 1891 Rhodes proposed the founding of a worldwide organization for the preservation and extension of the British Empire. The original purpose of the Round Table was thus to establish an "organic union" for the entire British Empire with one imperial government, and to try to associate other nations with the empire.

p15
The object of the Council on Foreign Relations is to afford a continuous conference on foreign affairs, bringing together at each meeting international thinkers so that in the course of a year several hundred expert minds in finance, industry, education, statecraft and science will have been brought to bear on international problems.

p15
The [Council on Foreign Relations] was composed almost entirely of 'high-ranking officers of banking, manufacturing, trading and finance companies, together with many lawyers... concerned primarily with the effect that the war and the treaty of peace might have on post-war business."

p23
The Council, dominated by corporate leaders, saw expansion of American trade, investment, and population as the solution to domestic problems. It thought in terms of preservation of the status quo at home, and this involved overseas expansion. As [Isaiah] Bowman put it in 1928, "foreign raw materials, imports, and exports were necessary if we are to avoid crises in our constantly expanding industries." Since the era of cheap land was over and population was increasing, "eastern social and industrial problems cannot be solved in the historical manner by a flow of population to another region."" Thus the United States had to increase its exports, "sell something abroad in greater degree-if not wheat or maize, then steel or copper. "

p28
The Second World War and the subsequent cold war ... marked a move on the part of the United States toward a full-blown imperialism-a largely successful attempt to organize a single, world-spanning political economy with the United States at the center.

p30
Council on Foreign Relations principal goals

To help in the education of American public opinion to understand and support ... the right kind of American foreign policy.

p31
Council on Foreign Relations, 1951 report

In speaking of public enlightenment, it is well to bear in mind that the Council has chosen as its function the enlightenment of the leaders of opinion. These, in turn, each in his own sphere, spread the knowledge gained here in ever-widening circles.

p33
[Council on Foreign Relations] members and leaders had a key role in the tactical decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson was President Roosevelt's senior adviser on atomic questions, and headed the special Interim Committee which President Truman established in late April 1945 to recommend action on the bomb. The eight-man committee was dominated by five Council members, including Stimson, the chairman, who had been active in Council programs for over ten years. 61 One of the five Council men, scientist Karl T. Compton, president of M.I.T., stated at the time that the bomb should be used to "impress the world," giving credence to those who have argued that the bomb was used on Japan primarily to intimidate the Russians, and thereby reinforce the American position of world dominance.

Decisions on the proper postwar political economy for Germany also occupied a key place in United States foreign policy between 1944 and 1946. The choices made by the Council and American officials played a central role in the development of the cold war. The basic question facing the policymakers was whether a moderate or harsh peace should be made with Germany. A corollary to this issue involved a decision as to which nation-Germany or the Soviet Union was the main long-term threat to the United States, and thus which nation should be given preference in allocating resources to rebuild from the extensive devastation both countries suffered during the war.

Two positions on these interrelated questions emerged in the 1944 -1946 period. One was the famous Morgenthau Plan proposed by Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Morgenthau, which envisaged Germany as the main enemy and proposed a harsh peace. Such a settlement involved the creation of a deindustrialized, agrarian Germany incapable of conducting a modern war. The second American position on this question was put forward mainly by Council members and the War and Peace Studies groups. It involved a "moderate" peace for Germany -denazification, destruction of war potential, some reparation, but also the reintegration of Germany into the American-dominated postwar world economy, and the avoidance of measures which might cause political instability or unrest. The Council position implied that Germany was not a long-term threat to the United States and that Germany's economic reconstruction should be given precedence over the needs of the Soviet Union. The conflict with the Soviet Union over reparations and the rebuilding of the German economy was the crucial reason for the break with the Soviets over Germany and the consequent partition of that nation.

p50
[Council on Foreign Relations] goals remain, as always, to influence the government and public opinion in favor of an imperial role for the United States. Since World War II, such a role has involved being the leading counterrevolutionary power, the policeman of the world.

p11
The Council Foreign Relations and the New York financial oligarchy, which it primarily represents, have a leading position in molding United States foreign policy.

p117
Near the end of the Second World War, two of the Council's senior directors wrote that the CFR had "served an increasingly useful function in the period of the twenties and thirties; but it was only on the outbreak of World War II that it was proved to have come of age." They were referring to the Council's successful efforts, through its special War and Peace Studies Project, to plan out a new global order for the postwar world, an order in which the United States would be the dominant power. The War and Peace Studies groups, in collaboration with the American government, worked out an imperialistic conception of the national interest and war aims of the United States. The imperialism involved a conscious attempt to organize and control a global empire. The ultimate success of this attempt made the United States for a time the number one world power, exercising domination over large sections of the world-the American empire.

p172
Leaders of the United States have always declared that the foremost objective of their policies has been the promotion of the country's collective interest-the "national interest." As Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes put it in the 1920s, "foreign policies are not built upon abstractions. They are the result of practical conceptions of national interest." The national interest is rarely an objective fact, however, as is indicated by the truism that in every country it is always redefined after a revolution.

The very idea of "national" interest assumes that everyone's interests are identical, or nearly so, and this is far from

true in a capitalist society. The working class and upper class have very different interests at home and abroad. The working class is most concerned with domestic society and change: redistribution of income and wealth, full employment, worker control of industry, and more egalitarianism generally. The capitalist class, on the other hand, has an interest in preventing basic changes in society, and a desire to maintain the socioeconomic system from which it greatly benefits. Since domestic problems can be solved through foreign expansion, without alteration of the existing domestic system from which the corporate upper class obtains its power and privilege, it has a much greater interest in foreign policy.

The concept of the national interest put forth by the Council on Foreign Relations laid the basis for American war aims in the Second World War. The nation's interest was first of all defined and discussed within an economic framework, focusing on the most basic facts and long-term trends: the type of economic structure existing in the United States, its requirements, and the regions of the world crucial to the satisfaction of these needs. It was therefore inherently a status quo formulation, aimed at preservation rather than change. If one accepts the set of assumptions, values, and goals implied in the Council's sketch of the national interest - a capitalist system with private ownership of the productive property of the society, resulting in inequality in the distribution of wealth and income and attendant class structure - the analysis cannot be refuted. The Council planners had identified the basic needs of such a system, and any discussion o the national interest necessarily had to address itself to these requirements. Since those in power define the national interest as the preservation of the existing set of economic, social, and political relationships and of their own rule, the national interest in a capitalist society is little more than the interest of its upper class. The Council, as a key organization of this class, was in the lead in defining its class interest. One has to transcend its values, assumptions, and goals in order to question its formulation of the national interest.

The American capitalist class, through the Council, had proposed to preserve and extend American capitalism by a policy of empire-building-overseas expansion of United States power. This necessarily meant conflict and possible war ...

p262
For the past several years there has been, within the Council and among ruling-class leaders, a "great debate" over the future of American foreign policy. Two main conceptions have emerged. The first, the "power-realist" or balance-of-power approach, stresses national sovereignty and the traditional concerns of international relations-the balance of power and maintenance of stability and military strength. Secretary of State Kissinger and conservative nationalists generally have been leading exponents of this perspective. Kissinger's policy, central in his term of office, of manipulating the balance of power-especially the United States-Soviet-Chinese triangle-is a classic example of this approach. It attempts to combine the flexibility of a Bismarck within a Metternichian alliance framework, to have the best of both worlds.

The second perspective, liberal internationalism or "transnationalism," is now emerging as dominant within the CFR. It sees the era of the nation-state drawing to a close and transnational forces joining various regions of the world together in political and economic federation. Arguing that the world is becoming increasingly economically and environmentally interdependent, it places primary emphasis on cooperative relations with Western Europe and Japan, as well as certain compromises with the Third World. Trilateral commissioners Zbigniew Brzezinski, George W. Ball, Edwin 0. Reischauer, and, on a practical level, David Rockefeller are a few of the leading exponents of this perspective.

Brzezinski, Ball, and Reischauer have all criticized Kissinger's balance-of-power approach in recent articles or books. Council director Brzezinski is representative of the approach of the Trilateral Commission, which he directs. Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, Brzezinski argues that Kissinger has neglected both the Third World and traditional allies in his efforts to achieve détente with the Soviets and Chinese and in relations with the Middle Eastern nations. Summarizing present world trends, Brzezinski states that a "profound transformation" of the present global order is now taking place and nation-states are losing their centrality, although for the present time their role remains crucial.

There is a basic crisis in the present international system because of the challenge of a stronger Western Europe and Japan, and because of an upheaval in economic relations between the rich advanced capitalist nations of the North and the poor Third World nations of the South. Because of these trends, Brzezinski concludes, the old political and economic ) system created by the United States during and after the Second World War is now "severely shaken. "

p264
The emerging Council perspective is thus one of transnationalism. This has been made even more evident in the first publication of the 1980's Project, The Management of Interdependence; A Preliminary View, by Miriam Camps. Camps, a senior research fellow at the Council, wrote the book after heading a CFR study group op the subject, which met for almost two years in l971-1973.

... Central to Camps's book is a vision of a world political economy where power to manage or "steer" the global order is shared by the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. In her conclusion, called "Collective Management.

... Camps argues that no nation today can play the determining role that the United States has played in the past and that therefore collective management on the part of the advanced industrial capitalist powers is required. The "United States, Western Europe, and Japan will in effect share leadership." 41 These three regions, the "Trilateral World," make up the core / of the highly industrialized, rich capitalist nations.

... a global system is the goal, with far-reaching coordination of domestic and foreign policy among the advanced capitalist nations - collective management - and the "steering" of the structure by the Trilateral World-the United States, Western Europe, and Japan." A free-trade perspective is also evident. This, Camps argues, would be "desirable on many grounds. "

p269
Another of the central focuses of the Council [on Foreign Relations] -Trilateral Commission's planning for the future concerns the role of the Third World in the new international economy. Active Council member C. Fred Bergsten, a former National Security Council staff member under Kissinger and presently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has taken the lead in defining the importance of and the "threat" from the Third World. Bergsten chaired a discussion group at the Council during 1972 and 1973 on "American Interests in the Third World," and continued as the discussion leader of a similar Council group during 1974 -1975. Bergsten published his views in the summer of 1973, criticizing the Nixon administration's neglect of the Third World and its treatment of this region of the globe "solely as pawns on the chessboard of global power politics." Bergsten argued that the Third World is currently very important to the United States, Europe, and Japan. The United States "is rapidly joining the rest of the industrialized countries in depending on the Third World for a critical share of its energy supplies and other natural resources." Oil, copper, natural rubber, bauxite, timber, and other Third World raw materials were mentioned as vitally important to the Trilateral World. American investments in the Third World are of "strategic importance" for the United States balance of payments and important for corporate profit levels. The real market value of American investments in the Third World is "at least" $46 billion. The United States, Bergsten concluded, faces a serious threat from the Third World. Supplies could be withheld or the Trilateral World could be forced to compete for scarce resources, dividing the Trilateral World and driving up prices. The Third World, therefore, should be higher on the list of American foreign policy priorities. Trilateral Commission director Brzezinski also said at the commission's spring 1975 meeting in Japan: "The main axis of conflict at most international conferences today is not between the Western world and the Communist world but between the advanced countries and the developing countries. The Third World wants an equal distribution of gains from a world economic system, and its general strategy is to use its control over many raw materials to break the traditional patterns of world trade and thus create a new international economic order.

p273
The Council's present plans for the Third World involve no real changes in the global distribution of wealth and power. The most that can possibly be expected by the Third World from Council blueprints is more access to the markets of the advanced countries, some shift in older industrial technology from the Trilateral World to the Third World, higher raw material prices, a somewhat greater voice in the management of some world economic institutions, and little else. Developing nations are still viewed primarily as sources of raw materials and export markets for the Trilateral World. An international division of labor would be maintained which would give the Third World little chance to develop the manufacturing which produces wealth. The overall aim of Council planning efforts for a new world economy is, thus, to preserve, as much as possible, the existing structure of Western power and predominance. Council plans include, as a prime goal, increasing integration of the world capitalist system, a structure which perpetuates underdevelopment in the Third World ...

p273
There is a large body of evidence ... that the actual result of multinational corporate capitalism in the Third World is poverty and repressive governments.

p274
The real problem, which Council on Foreign Relations leaders in general cannot recognize because of their class interests, is that it is capitalism itself and capitalist institutions like the IMF which perpetuate poverty and underdevelopment.

p278
This study has revealed the roots of United States imperialism in the economic, political, and strategic needs of the dominant sector of the American ruling class, led by the Council on Foreign Relations. Their will to power, a drive for world hegemony, has made the United States the largest imperial power in human history, deploying forces on every continent and controlling the economics and politics of much of the world. The basic reason for these policies has been, as we have shown in our case studies, the need of American capitalism for a world order open and receptive to its expansion. In contrast to the die-hard ultra-right perspective of laissez-faire and nationalistic competition, there is a measure of realism on the part of the Council in accepting irreversible changes, rejecting the extreme anti-communist "roll-back" position, and showing a willingness for détente. But there is an(equally)firm determination to maintain a world in which United States capitalism will feel at home. War in Indochina, the fantastic waste of vast military spending, the encouragement of assassinations of foreign leaders, support of reactionary regimes the world over, bribes and corruption, as well as the domestic repression necessary to maintain imperialism abroad-political trials of dissenters, FBI-CIA harassment of radicals, and wiretaps-are all the result of and testimony to the destructive nature of imperialism.

p279
In the Council on Foreign Relations the leading sector of the upper class has a very useful instrument. There it can get together, and bring in others of its choice recruited from academia and government service, to discuss just what sort of foreign policy it judges to be reasonable. There corporate leaders can set the agenda of issues to be discussed and the terms of debate. Through their media connections and in other ruling class-sponsored organizations they can widen the debate. When Council leaders take up government office, they have the opportunity to implement the ideas of the capitalist class, while keeping in touch with their peers currently not in government office. If it does happen that a policy alternative emerges from some other source that deviates too radically from their assumptions, the weight of ruling-class opinion can be brought to bear to label it foolish and unrealistic, unworthy of serious consideration. It is these men who deem themselves competent to judge what is the "national interest" in foreign relations. If, as invariably happens, their idea of the national interest corresponds with what serves their own interests as a class, then to such men this state of affairs is only natural, and the way things should be.

The Council's War and Peace Studies Project established the framework for a stable capitalist world under United States leadership following World War II. This framework lasted almost a quarter of a century, although the world's self-appointed policeman was unable to enforce complete stability on a troubled world. By the 1970s the postwar system was obviously inadequate, and the opinion leaders of the United States ruling class are ... planning a new global structure, engineering a new consensus which might ensure another quarter century of relative stability, enhancing cooperation among the advanced capitalist powers, and attempting to hold off revolutionary change for yet another generation.

David Healy Wrote:I'm continually stunned how otherwise intellectual people are surprised by the depths of brutality in war. Perhaps its time for those that beat the drum the loudest to speak with those as to the why(s), and wherefore(s) of those combat actions. Blaming those on the ground for carrying out ones country policy AND battle tactics (of which terror and assassination may be tactics) during the time of war, is utter foolishness, a waste of time -- and serves only to prop up failing media EGO'S. Especially those ego's that can't quite grasp the big picture or theater context.... Wringing hands 40 years after the fact provides what again?

David Healy Wrote:Perhaps that's why GOD has a special place in mind for leaders of countries who can't resist the urge to conquer.

David Healy Wrote:btw, TERROR is nothing more than another tactic of war.

David Healy Wrote:And imagine this, the fore runner of the CIA the OSS, during WW2, provided assistance and arms to none other than, yep, Ho Chi Minh!

David Healy Wrote:The Phoenix program was one answer in combating Ho's Viet Cong (who today would be termed terrorists) reign of murderous terror against his/their own countrymen, the South Vietnamese. Make no mistake the majority of the Viet Cong were So. Vietnamese! Well, it didn't work! Ho and his merry band of terrorists murdered more than anyone can imagine.... Not unlike past megalomaniacs, simply fewer in number. Being a South Vietnamese tribal leader or hamlet elder, or family member no matter how distant was not a good gig during the mid-late 60's thru the mid 70's

Members of the Phoenix program I knew, whom lived to well into their 70's, I never heard one complaint about sleepless nights. But they were the consummate, professional soldiers. The best America had and currently HAS in my estimation...

Quote:Colin Powell and Lessons of My Lai
By Robert Parry
September 4, 2009


In an Aug. 28 editorial, The New York Times applauded a belated “note of personal regret” from former Lt. William Calley for his role in the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968. But neither the Times nor any other leading U.S. news outlet has ever suggested that remorse might also be due from Colin Powell, who as a young Army major helped cover up the crime.


Powell’s role in rebuffing an early appeal from a GI for an investigation of Americal Division abuses of Vietnamese -- encompassing My Lai -- was an important early marker in Powell’s career as he climbed the ladder of Pentagon and Washington success by never standing up for a principle that made a superior uncomfortable.

That pattern continued through the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and culminated in the deadly falsehoods that Powell presented to the United Nations in 2003 justifying the invasion of Iraq.

For his part, Calley told a Kiwanis Club gathering in Columbus, Georgia, that “there is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. … I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families.”

Calley’s remorse may be decades overdue but at least he has paid a price for his role as the senior officer on the ground during the massacre. By contrast, Powell, who helped keep the slaughter under wraps several months after the fact, has enjoyed a long career of endless praise as an American hero.

In view of Calley’s recent remorse and the Times editorial, we are republishing below a part of a series on Powell’s real record that I co-authored with Norman Solomon in 1996. The story deals with Powell’s two tours in Vietnam. (For more details on Powell's biography, see the book, Neck Deep.)

Early Days in Vietnam

On Jan. 17, 1963, in South Vietnam's monsoon season, U.S. Army Capt. Colin Powell jumped from a military helicopter into a densely forested combat zone of the A Shau Valley, not far from the Laotian border.

Carrying an M-2 carbine, Capt. Powell was starting his first -- and only -- combat assignment. He was the new adviser to a 400-man unit of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Across jungle terrain, these South Vietnamese government troops were arrayed against a combined force of North Vietnamese regulars and local anti-government guerrillas known as the Viet Cong.

The 25-year-old Powell was arriving at a pivotal moment in the Vietnam War. To forestall a communist victory, President John F. Kennedy had dispatched teams of Green Beret advisers to assist the ARVN, a force suffering from poor discipline, ineffective tactics and bad morale.

Already, many U.S. advisers, most notably the legendary Col. John Paul Vann, were voicing concerns about the ARVN's brutality toward civilians. Vann feared that the dominant counterinsurgency strategy of destroying rural villages and forcibly relocating inhabitants while hunting down enemy forces was driving the people into the arms of the Viet Cong.

But as Colin Powell arrived, he was untainted by these worries. He was a gung-ho young Army officer with visions of glory. He brimmed with trust in the wisdom of his superiors. Capt. Powell also felt the deepest sympathy for the ARVN troops under his command, but only a cold contempt for the enemy.

Soon after his arrival, Powell and his ARVN unit left for a protracted patrol that fought leeches as well as Viet Cong ambushes. From the soggy jungle brush, the Viet Cong would strike suddenly against the advancing government soldiers. Often invisible to Powell and his men, the VC would inflict a few casualties and slip back into the jungles.

In My American Journey, Powell recounted his reaction when he spotted his first dead Viet Cong. "He lay on his back, gazing up at us with sightless eyes," Powell wrote. "I felt nothing, certainly not sympathy. I had seen too much death and suffering on our side to care anything about what happened on theirs."

While success against the armed enemy was rare, Powell's ARVN unit punished the civilian population systematically. As the soldiers marched through mountainous jungle, they destroyed the food and the homes of the region's Montagnards, who were suspected of sympathizing with the Viet Cong. Old women would cry hysterically as their ancestral homes and worldly possessions were consumed by fire.

"We burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters," Powell recalled. "Why were we torching houses and destroying crops? Ho Chi Minh had said the people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam. ... We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference did it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death?"

For nearly six months, Powell and his ARVN unit slogged through the jungles, searching for Viet Cong and destroying villages.

Then while on one patrol, Powell fell victim to a Viet Cong booby trap. He stepped on a punji stake, a dung-poisoned bamboo spear that had been buried in the ground. The stake pierced Powell's boot and quickly infected the young soldier's right foot. The foot swelled, turned purple and forced his evacuation by helicopter to Hue for treatment.

Although Powell's recovery from the foot infection was swift, his combat days were over. He stayed in Hue, reassigned to the operations staff of ARVN division headquarters. As part of his work, he handled intelligence data and oversaw a local airfield. By late autumn 1963, Powell's first Vietnam tour ended.

On his return to the United States, Powell did not join Vann and other early American advisers in warning the nation about the self-defeating counterinsurgency strategies. In 1963, Vann carried his prescient concerns back to a Pentagon that was not ready to listen to doubters. Then, when his objections fell on deaf ears, Vann resigned his commission and sacrificed a promising military career.

In contrast, Powell recognized that his early service in Vietnam put him on a fast track for military success. He signed up for a nine-month Infantry Officer Advanced Course that trained company commanders. In May 1965, Powell finished third in a class of 200 and was the top-ranked infantryman. A year later, he became an instructor.

In 1966, as the numbers of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam swelled, Powell received a promotion to major, making him a field-grade officer before his 30th birthday. In 1968, Powell continued to impress his superiors by graduating second in his class at Fort Leavenworth's Command and General Staff College, a prestigious school regarded as an essential way station for future Army generals.

Recognizing Powell as an emerging "water-walker" who needed more seasoning in the field, the Army dispatched Powell to a command position back in Vietnam. But on his second tour, Powell would not be slogging through remote jungles. On July 27, 1968, he arrived at an outpost at Duc Pho to serve as an executive officer.

Then, to the north, at the Americal headquarters in Chu Lai, division commander Maj. Gen. Charles Gettys saw a favorable mention of Powell in the Army Times. Gettys plucked Powell from Duc Pho and installed him on the general's own staff at Chu Lai.

Gettys jumped the young major ahead of more senior officers and made him the G-3 officer in charge of operations and planning. The appointment made "me the only major filling that role in Vietnam," Powell wrote in his memoirs.

But history again was awaiting Colin Powell. The Americal Division was already deep into some of the cruelest fighting of the Vietnam War. The "drain-the-sea" strategy that Powell had witnessed near the Laotian border continued to lead American forces into harsh treatment of Vietnamese civilians.

Though it was still a secret when Powell arrived at Chu Lai, Americal troops had committed an act that would stain forever the reputation of the U.S. Army. As Major Powell settled into his new assignment, a scandal was waiting to unfold.

My Lai

On March 16, 1968, a bloodied unit of the Americal Division stormed into a hamlet known as My Lai 4. With military helicopters circling overhead, revenge-seeking American soldiers rousted Vietnamese civilians -- mostly old men, women and children -- from their thatched huts and herded them into the village's irrigation ditches.

As the round-up continued, some Americans raped the girls. Then, under orders from junior officers on the ground, soldiers began emptying their M-16s into the terrified peasants. Some parents used their bodies futilely to shield their children from the bullets. Soldiers stepped among the corpses to finish off the wounded.

The slaughter raged for four hours. A total of 347 Vietnamese, including babies, died in the carnage. But there also were American heroes that day in My Lai. Some soldiers refused to obey the direct orders to kill and some risked their lives to save civilians from the murderous fire.

A pilot named Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr. from Stone Mountain, Ga., was furious at the killings he saw happening on the ground. He landed his helicopter between one group of fleeing civilians and American soldiers in pursuit.

Thompson ordered his helicopter door gunner to shoot the Americans if they tried to harm the Vietnamese. After a tense confrontation, the soldiers backed off. Later, two of Thompson's men climbed into one ditch filled with corpses and pulled out a three-year-old boy whom they flew to safety.

Several months later, the Americal's brutality would become a moral test for Major Powell, too.

A letter had been written by a young specialist fourth class named Tom Glen, who had served in an Americal mortar platoon and was nearing the end of his Army tour. In the letter to Gen. Creighton Abrams, the commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam, Glen accused the Americal division of routine brutality against civilians.

Glen's letter was forwarded to the Americal headquarters at Chu Lai where it landed on Major Powell's desk.

"The average GI's attitude toward and treatment of the Vietnamese people all too often is a complete denial of all our country is attempting to accomplish in the realm of human relations," Glen wrote.

"Far beyond merely dismissing the Vietnamese as 'slopes' or 'gooks,' in both deed and thought, too many American soldiers seem to discount their very humanity; and with this attitude inflict upon the Vietnamese citizenry humiliations, both psychological and physical, that can have only a debilitating effect upon efforts to unify the people in loyalty to the Saigon government, particularly when such acts are carried out at unit levels and thereby acquire the aspect of sanctioned policy."

Glen's letter contended that many Vietnamese were fleeing from Americans who “for mere pleasure, fire indiscriminately into Vietnamese homes and without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves.” Gratuitous cruelty was also being inflicted on Viet Cong suspects, Glen reported.

“Fired with an emotionalism that belies unconscionable hatred, and armed with a vocabulary consisting of 'You VC,' soldiers commonly 'interrogate' by means of torture that has been presented as the particular habit of the enemy. Severe beatings and torture at knife point are usual means of questioning captives or of convincing a suspect that he is, indeed, a Viet Cong. ...

“It would indeed be terrible to find it necessary to believe that an American soldier that harbors such racial intolerance and disregard for justice and human feeling is a prototype of all American national character; yet the frequency of such soldiers lends credulity to such beliefs. ...

“What has been outlined here I have seen not only in my own unit, but also in others we have worked with, and I fear it is universal. If this is indeed the case, it is a problem which cannot be overlooked, but can through a more firm implementation of the codes of MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and the Geneva Conventions, perhaps be eradicated."

In 1995, when we questioned Glen about his letter, he said he had heard second-hand about the My Lai massacre, though he did not mention it specifically. The massacre was just one part of the abusive pattern that had become routine in the division, he said.

Powell's Response

The letter's troubling allegations were not well received at Americal headquarters.

Major Powell undertook the assignment to review Glen's letter, but did so without questioning Glen or assigning anyone else to talk with him. Powell simply accepted a claim from Glen's superior officer that Glen was not close enough to the front lines to know what he was writing about, an assertion Glen denies.

After that cursory investigation, Powell drafted a response on Dec. 13, 1968. He admitted to no pattern of wrongdoing. Powell claimed that U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were taught to treat Vietnamese courteously and respectfully. The Americal troops also had gone through an hour-long course on how to treat prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, Powell noted.

"There may be isolated cases of mistreatment of civilians and POWs," Powell wrote in 1968. But "this by no means reflects the general attitude throughout the Division." Indeed, Powell's memo faulted Glen for not complaining earlier and for failing to be more specific in his letter.

"In direct refutation of this [Glen's] portrayal," Powell concluded, "is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent."

Powell's findings, of course, were false, though they were exactly what his superiors wanted to hear.

It would take another Americal hero, an infantryman named Ron Ridenhour, to piece together the truth about the atrocity at My Lai. After returning to the United States, Ridenhour interviewed Americal comrades who had participated in the massacre.

On his own, Ridenhour compiled this shocking information into a report and forwarded it to the Army inspector general. The IG's office conducted an aggressive official investigation, in marked contrast to Powell's review.

Confirming Ridenhour's report, the Army finally faced the horrible truth. Courts martial were held against officers and enlisted men who were implicated in the murder of the My Lai civilians.

But Powell's peripheral role in the My Lai cover-up did not slow his climb up the Army's ladder. After the scandal broke, Powell pleaded ignorance about the actual My Lai massacre.

Luckily for Powell, Glen's letter also disappeared into the National Archives -- to be unearthed only years later by British journalists Michael Bilton and Kevin Sims for their book, Four Hours in My Lai.

In his best-selling memoir, Powell did not mention his brush-off of Tom Glen's complaint.

Powell did include, however, another troubling recollection that belied his 1968 official denial of Glen's allegation that American soldiers "without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves."

After a brief mention of the My Lai massacre in My American Journey, Powell penned a partial justification of the Americal's brutality. In a chilling passage, Powell explained the routine practice of murdering unarmed male Vietnamese.

"I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male," Powell wrote. "If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him.

"Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen [West Germany], Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong."

While it's certainly true that combat is brutal and judgments can be clouded by fear, the mowing down of unarmed civilians in cold blood does not constitute combat. It is murder and, indeed, a war crime.

Neither can the combat death of a fellow soldier be cited as an excuse to murder civilians. Disturbingly, that was precisely the rationalization that the My Lai killers cited in their own defense.

But returning home from Vietnam a second time in 1969, Powell already had begun to prove himself the consummate team player. Those skills were tested again when Powell was drawn into another Vietnam controversy involving the killing of civilians.

In a court martial proceeding, Powell sided with an Americal Division general who was accused by the Army of murdering unarmed civilians while flying over Quang Ngai province. Helicopter pilots who flew Brig. Gen. John W. Donaldson had alleged that the general gunned down civilian Vietnamese almost for sport.

In an interview, a senior investigator from the Donaldson case told us that two of the Vietnamese victims were an old man and an old woman who were shot to death while bathing. Though long retired -- and quite elderly himself -- the Army investigator still spoke with a raw disgust about the events of a quarter century earlier. He requested anonymity before talking about the behavior of senior Americal officers.

"They used to bet in the morning how many people they could kill -- old people, civilians, it didn't matter," the investigator said. "Some of the stuff would curl your hair."

For eight months in Chu Lai during 1968-69, Powell had worked with Donaldson and apparently developed a great respect for this superior officer.
When the Army charged Donaldson with murder on June 2, 1971, Powell rose in the general's defense. Powell submitted an affidavit dated Aug. 10, 1971, which lauded Donaldson as "an aggressive and courageous brigade commander."

Powell did not specifically refer to the murder allegations, but added that helicopter forays in Vietnam had been an "effective means of separating hostiles from the general population."

Mysterious Interview

Powell apparently was questioned by Army authorities about his knowledge of Donaldson's alleged atrocities. But his answers may be lost to history. In his memoirs, Powell provides a brief -- and incorrect -- description of the 1971 interview in the context of the My Lai massacre.

"I was serving in the Washington area, and was called to appear before a board of inquiry conducted by Lt. Gen. William Ray Peers at Fort Belvoir, Virginia," Powell wrote. "The board wanted me to give a picture of fighting conditions in the Batangan Peninsula in 1968 [where the My Lai massacre had occurred]. I knew it had been a hellhole, a rough piece of territory inhabited by VC sympathizers."

Powell's account of the interview is itself a bit of a mystery. While it's true that in 1971, a commission headed by Gen. Peers was investigating the My Lai cover-up, all the Peers interviews were conducted at the Pentagon, not at Fort Belvoir.

Also, by 1971, the Army knew a great deal about the "fighting conditions in the Batangan Peninsula" and would not need the opinion of an officer who arrived months after the My Lai massacre. Further, when we examined the Peers Commission records at the National Archives branch at Suitland, Md., we found no indication that Colin Powell ever had been interviewed by the board.

There was, however, an investigation at Fort Belvoir conducted in the same time frame by the Army's criminal investigation unit. It was examining the murder allegations against Powell's friend, Gen. Donaldson.

The retired Army investigator told us that Powell was questioned in that case. But the investigator said Powell volunteered little knowledge about the atrocities. The investigator doubted that any record was made of the interview.

Nevertheless, the investigator claimed that "we had him [Donaldson] dead to rights," with the testimony of two helicopter pilots who had flown Donaldson on his shooting expeditions. Still, the investigation collapsed after the two pilot-witnesses were transferred to another Army base and apparently came under pressure from military superiors.

The two pilots withdrew their testimony, and the Army dropped all charges against Donaldson. "John Donaldson was a cover-up specialist," the old investigator growled.

While thousands of other Vietnam veterans joined the anti-war movement and denounced the brutality of the war, Powell held his tongue. To this day, Powell has avoided criticizing the Vietnam War other than to complain that the politicians should not have restrained the military high command.

With the My Lai cloud dissipated, Major Powell's career advanced smartly. Powell often says he learned many lessons from Vietnam. One lesson he doesn't mention is that a military bureaucrat succeeds best by sidestepping controversy and keeping quiet when superiors screw up.

As the years unfolded, that proved to be a very valuable lesson indeed.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

Quote:I'm continually stunned how otherwise intellectual people are surprised by the depths of brutality in war.

Quote:Paul David Meadlo recalled the briefing his company received from Captain Medina the afternoon before the assault. Medina told the men, Meadlo testified, that all the My Lai villagers were "Viet Cong or Viet Cong sympathizers, and we were supposed to kill everything there �women, children, livestock." Three defense witnesses corroborated that.

Staff Sergeant Dennis R. Vasquez, who was a witness at both trials last week, gave some of the most damaging testimony against the officers so far. Vasquez was an artillery air observer flying in Lieut. Colonel Barker's helicopter that morning. He reported landing inside the village, where Barker and Medina conferred. According to Vasquez, Barker told Medina that "everything was going fine, going smooth, going to plan." The day before, Vasquez recalled, there had been a meeting of officers in which Colonel Henderson urged his brigade officers to "go in there aggressively, close with the enemy and wipe them out for good."

Quote:The first reports claimed that "128 Viet Cong and 22 civilians" were killed in the village during a "fierce fire fight". General William C. Westmoreland, MACV commander, congratulated the unit on the "outstanding job". As related at the time by the Army's Stars and Stripes magazine, "U.S. infantrymen had killed 128 Communists in a bloody day-long battle."

Initial investigations of the My Lai operation were undertaken by the 11th Light Infantry Brigade's commanding officer, Colonel Henderson, under orders from the Americal Division's executive officer, Brigadier General George H. Young. Henderson interviewed several soldiers involved in the incident, then issued a written report in late April claiming that some 20 civilians were inadvertently killed during the operation. The army at this time was still describing the events at My Lai as a military victory that had resulted in the deaths of 128 enemy combatants.

Quote:Meadlo testified, that all the My Lai villagers were "Viet Cong or Viet Cong sympathizers, and we were supposed to kill everything there �women, children, livestock." Three defense witnesses corroborated that.

Quote:However, the argument articulated in this post is not a slur on soldiers who fought bravely and with honour. It is attempt to place My Lai in a context other than that "a few rotten eggs". For me, that context is the Phoenix Program.