excerpt: "An archivist at the U.S. National Archives asked Turse whether he thought witnessing war crimes could cause PTSD." "....War crimes, for army investigators, were an image management problem. Those charged with war crimes were rarely punished."
Make sure you find this in your copy with the graphics, or read it here while it is still in archives. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/libertyunderground/message/4169 This is in response to a discussion on a group about Bush's War Crimes and whether Obama's war crimes should be looked at as less, and why some people felt his weren't important enough while refusing to look at a supplied list with documentation. Interesting question, if watching might contribute, then what is our culture of violent games and media spread of gore do to the common person? Scott -------------------------------------------------------------------------- *PUT UP, SHUT UP, AND SUCK IT UP* * * * * ** *Yet another "casualty" -- loathed word -- in the battle by the rich to screw everyone else: another ordinary man, facing foreclosure and the loss of everything he'd worked for in his life, committed suicide<http://www.dailymail.com/News/Kanawha/201303070085>. The suicide rate is up in this country and has spiked<http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/05/us-suicide-economy-idUSL5E8M463M20121105>since the Wall Street Crime Spree began in 2007. Add in the number of war veterans committing suicide<http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-02-25/local/37287774_1_special-education-friends-struggles>, and we have a crisis. Not a problem, not an "issue," a crisis. But then, such people are expendable. They always have been. Meanwhile, our political village idiots continue to make deals with each other to cut social benefits and screw us even more, while there is, of course, plenty of money for military contractors and war profiteers. Bomb, baby, bomb<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-syria-20130316%2c0%2c3989647.story> !* ** ------------------------------ IF YOU'RE GOING TO BE ANONYMOUS, THEN TAKE PAINS TO* BE ANONYMOUS. *AND DON'T GLOAT. * * [image: Prepare to be hacked by Anonymous]<http://www.ipost.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/20121123-we-are-anonymous.jpg> *Torture prisoners, bomb cities, commit war crimes, pollute the environment, deny people health care, throw them out of their homes, crash the economy -- all that's okay in the Land of Free. But for the love of god, don't mess with corporations' computers. That could get you fined hundreds of thousands of dollars and locked up for 25 years<http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/03/matthew_keys_anonymous_hacking_charges.php?ref=fpb> .* ** ------------------------------ *IS THAT A BOMB IN YOUR PANTS OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO SEE ME?* ** [image: Road Runner Warner Bros.]<http://tsanewsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Road-Runner-Warner-Bros..jpg> * * *Well, it's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it<http://tsanewsblog.com/9857/news/tsas-blogger-bob-bombs-too-hard-to-spot-unless-they-look-like-road-runner-cartoon/>. Then again, given that you're more likely to be struck by lightning<http://tsanewsblog.com/9862/news/the-washington-post-addresses-a-few-tsa-matters/>, maybe not.* * * ** ------------------------------ *I've written about this book before, but not everybody sees every newsletter, and not everybody can read everything. So in case you haven't seen it yet, read on. And as you're reading, remember Bradley Manning and compare. -Lisa Simeone* [image: Kill Anything That Moves, by Nick Turse Photo: Metropolitan Books]<http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-4264163.php#next> Kill Anything That Moves<http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/kill_anything_that_moves_20130312/> ** *by Chris Hedges* Nick Turses Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam is not only one of the most important books ever written about the Vietnam conflict but provides readers with an unflinching account of the nature of modern industrial warfare. *It captures, as few books on war do, the utter depravity of industrial violencewhat the sociologist James William Gibson calls technowar. It exposes the sickness of the hyper-masculine military culture, the intoxicating rush and addiction of violence, and the massive government spin machine that lies daily to a gullible public and uses tactics of intimidation, threats, and smear campaigns to silence dissenters. * Turse, finally, grasps that the trauma that plagues most combat veterans is a result not only of what they witnessed or endured, but what they did. This trauma, shame, guilt, and self-revulsion push many combat veteranswhether from Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistanto escape into narcotic and alcoholic fogs or commit suicide. By the end of Turses book, you understand why. **** ** ** *This is not the book Turse set out to write.* He was, when his research began in June 2001, a graduate student looking at post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam veterans. An archivist at the U.S. National Archives asked Turse whether he thought witnessing war crimes could cause PTSD. He steered Turse to yellowing reports amassed by the *Vietnam War Crimes Working Group*<http://www.sfgate.com/?controllerName=search&action=search&channel=books&search=1&inlineLink=1&query=%22Vietnam+War+Crimes+Working+Group%22>. The group, set up in the wake of the My Lai massacre, was designed to investigate the *hundreds of reports of torture, rape, kidnapping, forced displacement, beatings, arson, mutilation, executions, and massacres carried out by U.S. troops.* *But the object of the group was not to discipline or to halt the abuses. It was, as Turse writes, to ensure that the army would never again be caught off-guard by a major war crimes scandal. War crimes, for army investigators, were an image management problem.* *Those charged with war crimes were rarely punished. The numerous reports of atrocities collected by the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group were kept secret, and the eyewitnesses who reported war crimes were usually ignored, discredited, or cowed into silence.* **** Turse used the secret Pentagon reports and documents to track down more than 100 veteransincluding those who had reported witnessing atrocities to their superiors and others charged with carrying out atrocitiesand traveled to Vietnam to interview survivors. A decade later he produced a masterpiece. *Case after case in his book makes it painfully clear that soldiers and Marines deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded, or killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children, with impunity. Troops engaged in routine acts of sadistic violence usually associated with demented Nazi concentration camp guards. *And what Turse describes is a woefully incomplete portrait, since he found that *an astonishing number of marine court-martial records of the era have apparently been destroyed or gone missing,* and most air force and navy criminal investigation files that may have existed seem to have met the same fate. **** The few incidents of wanton killing in Vietnamand this is also true for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistanthat did become public, such as My Lai, were dismissed as an aberration, the result of a few soldiers or Marines gone bad. But, *as Turse makes clear, such massacres were and are, in our current imperial adventures, commonplace. The slaughters were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military,* he writes. They were carried out because the dominant tactic of the war, as conceived by our politicians and generals, was *centered on the concept of overkill. And when troops on the ground could not kill fast enough, the gunships, helicopters, fighter jets, and bombers came to their assistance. *The U.S. Air Force contributed to the demented quest for overkilleradicating so many of the enemy that recuperation was theoretically impossibleby dropping the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Vietnam, most actually falling on the south where our purported Vietnamese allies resided. And planes didnt just drop bombs. They unloaded more than 70 million tons of herbicidal agents, 3 million white phosphorus rocketswhite phosphorous will burn its way entirely through a bodyand an estimated 400,000 tons of jellied incendiary napalm. *Thirty-five percent of the victims, Turse writes, died within fifteen to twenty minutes. Death from the skies, like death on the ground, was often unleashed capriciously. It was not out of the ordinary for U.S. troops in Vietnam to blast a whole village or bombard a wide area in an effort to kill a single sniper, Turse writes.* **** Murder is an integral part of war. And the most disturbing form of murder, because it is so intimate, is carried out by infantry troops. *The god-like power that comes with the ability to destroy anything, including other human beings, along with the intoxicating firepower of industrial weapons, rapidly turns those who wield these weapons into beasts. Human beings are reduced to objects, toys to satiate a perverse desire to dominate, humiliate, control, and kill.* Corpses are trophies. *Many of the Vietnamese who were murdered, Turse relates, were first subjected to degrading forms of public abuse, gang rape, torture, and savage beatings.*They were, Turse writes, when first detained confined to tiny barbed wire cow cages and sometimes jabbed with sharpened bamboo sticks while inside them. Other detainees were placed in large drums filled with water; the containers were then struck with great force, which caused internal injuries but left no scars. Some were suspended by ropes for hours on end or hung upside down and beaten, a practice called the plane ride. Or they were chained with their hands over their heads, arms fully extended, so their feet could barely touch the grounda version of an age-old torture called the strappado. *Untold numbers were subjected to electric shocks from crank-operated field telephones, battery-powered devices, or even cattle prods.* Soles of feet were beaten. Fingernails were ripped out. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives, suffocated, burned by cigarettes, or beaten with truncheons, clubs, sticks, bamboo flails, baseball bats, and other objects. Many were threatened with death or even subjected to mock executions. Turse found that detained civilians and captured guerrillas were often used as human mine detectors and regularly died in the process. *And while soldiers and Marines were engaged in daily acts of brutality and murder, the Central Intelligence Agency organized, coordinated, and paid for a clandestine program of targeted assassinations of specific individuals without any attempt to capture them alive or any thought of a legal trial.* ** ** *All that suffering, Turse, writes, was more or less ignored as it happened, and then written out of history even more thoroughly in the decades since.***** Turse, in one of many accounts, describes a string of atrocities committed in the Duc Pho/Mo Duc border region in spring 1967 by Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry under the command of Capt. James Lanning. A wounded detainee, Turse writes, was dumped into a boat and pushed into a rice paddy where he was riddled with bullets and finished off with a grenade. A wounded woman was covered with a straw mat and set on fire. Paul Halverson, a soldier and military combat correspondent who accompanied the unit, when asked about the total number of civilians killed by Lannings force, stated in the book: The entire time I was over therejust by Charlie CompanyId say it would be in the hundreds.**** Maj. Gordon Livingston, a regimental surgeon with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, in 1971 testified before Congress that he witnessed a helicopter pilot who swooped down on two Vietnamese women riding bicycles and killed them with the helicopter skids. The pilot, after being grounded briefly and investigated, was soon exonerated and allowed back in the air. **** *Soldiers and Marines, as is common in all wars, collected body parts of dead Vietnameseheads, noses, scalps, breasts, teeth, ears, fingers, genitalsand displayed them or wore them in necklaces.* There was people in all the platoons with ears on cords, Jimmie Busby, a member of the 75th Rangers during 1970-1971, told an Army criminal investigator. Corpses were dressed up and twisted into comic poses for photographs or gruesomely mutilated. Severed heads of Vietnamese were mounted on pikes or poles in Army camps. The dead were lashed onto Army *vehicleswhich at times ran over Vietnamese civilians for sport*and driven through villages. * Rape was as common as murder.* A veteran from the 198th Light Infantry Brigade is quoted by Turse as saying that he knew of 10 to 15 rapes of young girls by soldiers from his unit within a span of just six or seven months. A Vietnamese woman in an Army report Turse quotes said she was detained by troops from the 173rd Airborne Brigade and then raped by approximately ten soldiers. In another incident, Turse writes, eleven members of one squad from the 23rd Infantry Division raped a Vietnamese girl. As word spread, another squad traveled to the scene to join in. In a third incident, an American GI recalled seeing a Vietnamese woman who was hardly able to walk after she had been gang-raped by thirteen soldiers. A Marine in the book spoke about a nine-man squad that entered a village to hunt for a Viet Cong whore. The squad found a woman, raped her, and then shot her through the head.**** *One marine remembered finding a Vietnamese woman who had been shot and wounded, Turse writes. Severely injured, she begged for water. Instead, her clothes were ripped off. She was stabbed in both breasts, then forced into a spread-eagle position, after which the handle of an entrenching toolessentially a short-handled shovelwas thrust up her vagina. Other women were violated with objects ranging from soda bottles to rifles.* **** Vietnamese who were detained in the countrys massive incarceration archipelago were slapped, punched, kicked, sexually assaulted, given electric shocks and subjected to the water-rag treatment, or waterboarding.**** They tried to force me to confess that I was involved with the Viet Cong, one detainee said of her South Vietnamese and American interrogators. I refused to make such a statement and *so they stuck needles under the tips of my ten fingernails saying that if I did not write down what they wanted, and admit to being Viet Cong, then they would continue the torture. When she did not comply they tied my nipples to electric wires, then gave me electric shocks, knocking me to the floor every time they did so.* They said that if they did not get the necessary information they would continue the torture. *Two American soldiers were always standing on either side of me. ***** Military commanders and politicians were seduced by the destructive fury they could call down on the enemy. Walls of automatic rifle fire, hundreds of rounds of belt-fed machine-gun fire, 90 mm tank rounds, endless sheets of grenades, mortars, artillery shells, and claymore mines saturated the countryside while gigantic 2,700-pound explosive projectiles were fired from battleships along the coast. Canisters of napalm, daisy-cutter bombs, anti-personnel rockets, high-explosive rockets, incendiary rockets, cluster bombs, high-explosive shells, and iron fragmentation bombsincluding the 40,000-pound bomb loads dropped by giant B-52 Strarofortress bombersalong with chemical defoliants and chemical gases were dropped from the sky. The ceaseless assault would, the generals and politicians believed, ultimately ensure victory. The gleeful tally of the dead was captured in the perverse practice of body counts, a macabre scorecard to prove that our side was winning. **** *The official license granted to soldiers and Marines to kill anyone came in the form of the free fire zonea term later changed by the military to the more neutral sounding specified strike zonewhich had at its core the Orwellian logic of military institutions. In these zones, troops were informed, there were no civilians because everyone in a free fire zone was the enemy.* *Women. Children. The elderly. They were all legitimate targets. You could not be held responsible for firing on innocent civilians since by definition there were none there,* an infantryman said. And when patrols shot and killed groups of unarmed civilians outside of officially designated free fire zones they unilaterally decided to designate their killing sites as free fire zones.**** ** ** *War always exalts and elevates psychotic killers. *And Vietnam became their playground. Sgt. Roy Bumgarner of the Armys 1st Cavalry Division and later the 173rd Airborne Brigade reportedly amassed an astonishing personal body count of more than 1,500 enemy KIAs, sometimes logging more kills with his six-man wildcat team than the rest of his 500-man battalion combined. Reports of Bumgarners indiscriminate killing sprees, excessive even by the standards of Vietnam, filtered back to the high command. In March 1968 Pvt. Arthur Williams, a sniper on Bumgarners scout team, informed military authorities that on at least four occasions he had seen Bumgarner kill unarmed Vietnamese civilians, Turse writes. Bumgarner, Turse reports, *often planted Chinese communist grenades on the bodies of his victimsincluding childrenso they could be called in as dead enemy troops.* Charles Boss, who was on the sergeants wildcat team, is quoted as telling an Army criminal investigator only a couple of weeks ago I heard Bumgarner had killed a Vietnamese girl and two younger kids (boys), who didnt have any weapons. Bumgarner was eventually court-martialed after numerous eyewitness reports of his propensity for murder. He was convicted of unpremeditated murder, reduced in rank, and fined. *But he never did any prison time. He continued his career in the military, soon regaining his old rank.* The military was not about to lose his services. He spent seven years in Vietnam. **** *Turse also profiles Col. John Donaldson, a West Point graduate and former Olympian who organized gook hunts from helicopters.* One officer is quoted in the book as saying that Donaldson and his chief intelligence officer flew around in the colonels chopper with a crate of grenades, frags they were called, and popped them in the rice fields over the dinks who would attempt to run for cover when the chopper swooped down to chase them. When enough reports of the colonels killing made it up the chain of command, *his fellow officers, including Colin Powell who had served with him for eight months in Vietnam, made sure the charges were ignored or dismissed. Two of the key witnesses willing to testify against him, apparently under pressure, changed their testimony. The colonel was never reprimanded.* ** ** The killing campaign of Gen. Julian Ewell, nicknamed the Butcher of the Delta, reached staggering *genocidal proportions* in the Mekong Delta where he commanded the 9th Division. Ronald Bartek in the book remembered that the general wanted to begin killing 4,000 of these little bastards, and then by the end of the following month wanted to kill 6,000, and so on from there. Ewell launched an operation called Speedy Express that employed fleets of helicopter gunships, F-4 Phantoms, ships lobbing Volkswagen-sized shells, B-52 bombers, Swift Boats, snipers, teams of Navy SEALs, and thousands of infantry troops. The provincial hospitals were soon flooded with civilian wounded. *A veteran, disturbed by the massive loss of life, wrote a letter to Gen. William Westmoreland*, the armys chief of staff. He explained Ewells tactics: If anybody ever got sniper fire from a tree line wed use gunships and artillery on the villages and go in later. He listed the names of the officers pushing the soldiers to carry out the massacres. *He pleaded with the military to put a halt to the carnage. *He wrote that any civilian who ran from U.S. troops was instantly shot. He detailed in the letter how a battalion would kill maybe 15 to 20 a day. With four battalions in the Brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500 a month, easy. (One battalion claimed almost 1000 body counts one month!) If I am only 10% right, and believe me its lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My Lay each month for over a year. *He signed the letter Concerned Sergeant. The Concerned Sergeant was soon identified* by the Criminal Investigation Command as George Lewis, a member of the 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry, of Ewells 9th Division. *When nothing was done he wrote more letters to senior commanders. But his pleas were ignored. *No one, Turse writes, from the 9th Infantry Division was ever court-martialed for killing civilians during Speedy Express. Ewell, in fact, was awarded a third star and promoted. He went on to help author a counterinsurgency manual for the Army. And, as Turse writes, the rank-and-file troops who spoke out against murder were, for the most part, essentially powerless in the face of command-level cover-ups.**** *Those soldiers and Marines who did report the war crimes they witnessed could sometimes face a fate worse than being pressured, discredited, or ignored.* On Sept. 12, 1969, Turse writes, George Chunko sent a letter to his parents explaining how his unit had entered a home that had a young Vietnamese woman, four young children, an elderly man and a military-age male. It appeared the younger man was AWOL from the South Vietnamese army. The young man was stripped naked and tied to a tree. His wife fell to her knees and begged the soldiers for mercy. The prisoner, Chunko wrote, was ridiculed, slapped around, and [had] mud rubbed into this face. He was then executed. *A day after he wrote the letter Chunko was killed. Chunkos parents suspected that their son had been murdered to cover up the crime.* ** ** *Lt. Col. Anthony Herbert reported to his superiors descriptions of torture at the 172nd Military Intelligence Detachment compound, as well as other horrific stories.* Maj. Carl Hensley was assigned to investigate. *He soon found that the charges were accurate. But, according to his wife, Dolores, the more Hensley dug and the more he prodded the military to respond to the war crimes, the more despondent and depressed he became at home.* Carl withdrew into a shell, she is quoted as saying, stopped eating, did not talk to the children and did not or would not talk to me. Hensley used a shotgun to commit suicide. The Armys official response to the Herbert charges was to produce a 53-page catalog of alleged discrepancies in Herberts public accounts of his time in the military to discredit him. The scores of atrocities that the army uncovered as a result of Herberts charges, Turse writes, would remain secret for decades.**** ** ** *The almost unfathomable scale of the slaughter, the contribution of our technical, industrial, and scientific apparatus to create deadlier weapon systems, implicates huge sections of our society in war crimes. The military and weapons manufacturers openly spoke of the war as a laboratory for new forms of killing. Turses book obliterates the image we have of ourselves as a good and virtuous nation. It mocks the popular belief that we have a right to impose our virtues on others by force. It exposes the soul of our military, which has achieved, through relentless propaganda and effective censorship, a level of public adulation that is terrifying.* *Turse reminds us who we are.* And in an age of expanding wars in the Middle East, routine torture, murderous air and drone strikes, and targeted assassinations, *his book is not so much about the past as about the present. We have worked, consciously and unconsciously, to erase the terrible truth about Vietnam and ultimately about ourselves. This is a tragedy.* *For if we were able to remember who we were, if we knew what we were capable of doing to others, then we might be less prone to replicating the industrial slaughter of Vietnam in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.* **** After the war, Turse concludes, most scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. *Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand forand thus blot outall other American atrocities.* Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from the soldiers perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.**** http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/kill_anything_that_moves_20130312// ------------------------------ *If you wish to be removed from this list, please let us know.* ** *To join the Liberty Underground News service emaillibert...@hotmail.com with "join" for a subject.* ** *You may also join our talk group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/libertyundergroundtalk/ * *or join our Facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/461619557192964/* ** *email: libert...@hotmail.com* ** *Tell your friends about LUV News because some people just don't get it.* [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:laamn-unsubscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:laamn-subscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:laamn-dig...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:laamn-ow...@egroups.com?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:la...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/laamn@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: laamn-dig...@yahoogroups.com laamn-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: laamn-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
