http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=125702&d=23&m=8&y=2009
Sunday 23 August 2009 (02 Ramadan 1430)
Editorial: My Lai massacre
23 August 2009
After 41 years of silence, the American officer responsible for the
massacre of 500 men, women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai has
finally offered an apology. Lt. William Calley, who led his unit in one of the
most infamous of war crimes, told a meeting in Columbus, Georgia, that he was
deeply sorry for what had happened but insisted he was only following orders.
This excuse, trotted out by Nazi war criminals before him, in no
way exonerates Calley and members of the C-Charlie company he commanded from
this dreadful deed. But it does reopen the question of whether the orders given
Calley by his commanders for this "search and destroy" mission did include an
instruction to massacre the luckless inhabitants of My Lai and torch their
village. Calley first made these claims in his four-month military trial in
1971, at the end of which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. This sentence
was later reduced by President Nixon to just three years house arrest. Amid the
outrage at this change there was widespread suspicion that Calley had indeed
been the scapegoat for senior commanders who had fully intended this young
officer to make an example of a village that US intelligence knew to be
supporting the Viet Cong fighters.
The same excuse, that they were acting under orders, was trotted
out by the US military personnel accused of perpetrating the disgusting torture
and humiliation of Abu Ghraib detainees. Eleven soldiers were convicted and the
prison commander was demoted but the allegations that this behavior had been
ordered by senior officers were never properly tested.
What is clear, however, that the Bush White House played word games
with the legal concept of torture to allow the CIA to use methods such as
waterboarding and mock executions to try and extract confessions from terrorist
suspects. A CIA report due to be published in the coming days, after a freedom
of information challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), is
expected to give extensive detail of abuses which it is clear were sanctioned
at an extremely high level in the Bush administration.
My Lai, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and CIA's extreme renditions and torture
all run completely counter to the values of justice and humanity for which the
US so often claims to stand. Thoughtful Americans argue that the fact that
these atrocities have come to light and that some at least of the guilty have
been punished, demonstrates that at base the US remains a just and civilized
society. Unfortunately, this overlooks one important fact. Every war in which
Americans have been involved in recent history has been fought in someone
else's country. Ordinary American soldiers typify the insularity of the wider
US and the facile conviction that they are always the good guys. Thus when
their hegemony is challenged by people from cultures they neither understand
nor respect, the response is often extreme and brutal and the likes of My Lai
and Abu Ghraib become almost inevitable. For such a multicultural country,
American ignorance is often stunning.
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