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Banned
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Originally Posted by willravel
After what's happened since 2001, I expect this kinda of sheepish crap from the mainstream media. What surprises me are the reactions here on TFP and on other forums.
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Don't be surprised. Every republican in American thinks Colin Powell would make an excellent running mate choice for John McCain, and many would support Powell if he decided to run for president. How many have even heard of the late Hugh Thompson?
Quote:
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPoli...ory?id=4635175
Bush Aware of Advisers' Interrogation Talks
President Says He Knew His Senior Advisers Discussed Tough Interrogation Methods
By JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG, HOWARD L. ROSENBERG and ARIANE de VOGUE
April 11, 2008
...Contacted by ABC News, spokesmen for Tenet and Rumsfeld declined to comment about the interrogation program or their private discussions in Principals meetings. The White House also declined comment on behalf of Rice and Cheney. Ashcroft could not be reached.
ABC News' Diane Sawyer sat down with Powell this week for a previously scheduled interview and asked him about the ABC News report.
Powell said that he didn't have "sufficient memory recall" about the meetings and that he had participated in "many meetings on how to deal with detainees." ....
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Quote:
http://www.usna.edu/Ethics/Publicati...1-28_Final.pdf
After a long letter-writing campaign begun by Professor David
Egan of Clemson University, who thought Hugh Thompson was
a true American hero who had yet to get the recognition he
deserved, Hugh Thompson was awarded the Soldier’s Medal in
Washington, D.C. on March 6, 1998. This ceremony was days
before Hugh Thompson and fellow crewman Larry Colburn
were scheduled to return to Vietnam to visit My Lai and some
of the people they had saved, 30 years after that dark day in
American history.
1
Page 5
Later, the Army tried to cover up the fact that the victims, all of
them, were unarmed women, old men, children. Even more
would have been murdered if Thompson and Colburn had not
intervened, landing their helicopter near a rice paddy to rescue
some of the villagers.
Page 6
Mr. Thompson
One hundred seventy people were marched down in there,
women, old men, babies. GIs stood up on the side with their
weapons on full automatic and machine gun fire.
Mr. Colburn
There were no weapons captured. There were no draft-age males
killed. They were civilians.
Mike Wallace
And then, as the chopper hovered, Glenn Andreotta saw a young
child still alive in the ditch.
Mr. Colburn
Glenn without hesitation went into the ditch and waded over to
the child, who was still—
Mike Wallace
Ditch full of bodies?
Mr. Colburn
Yes, sir.
Mr. Thompson
Oh, it was full, sir.
Mike Wallace
Full of blood?
Mr. Colburn
Yes, sir. Some of the people were still—they were dying. They
weren’t all dead, and Glenn got to the child and picked him up
and—
Mike Wallace
It was a boy?
Mr. Colburn
I think it was a little boy, yes.
7
Mr. Thompson
I remember thinking that I had a son, you know, that same age.
Mike Wallace
As Thompson was recalling the horrors of that day, an elderly
woman walked toward us. She said that she had been dumped in
a ditch back in 1968 but had survived, shielded by the bodies of
the dead and dying.
Mr. Thompson
Sorry we couldn’t help you that day. Thank you very much.
Woman
Thank you very much.
Mr. Thompson
Yes, ma’am.
Mike Wallace
Why, she wanted to know, were so many villagers killed that day,
and why was Thompson different from the rest of the Americans?
Mr. Thompson
I saved the people because I wasn’t taught to murder and kill. I
can’t answer for the people who took part in it. I apologize for
the ones who did, and I just wish we could have helped more
people that day.
Mike Wallace
In fact, they did help more people. Thompson and Colburn
found 10 villagers cowering in a bunker. They radioed for a
couple of choppers, which airlifted all of them to safety.
And we managed to find two of the women they had saved.
Mrs. Nhung, who is 73 now, was 43 when she was rescued.
Mrs. Nhanh was only six.
Mr. Thompson
You were very small then. You were at the entrance. This is
Larry. This is Larry. He was with me that day.
Page 10
Mike Wallace
For more than 30 years, those horrible images have haunted
Hugh Thompson. Until our trip to Vietnam, though, he was
reluctant to talk publicly about My Lai, and it wasn’t until after
we broadcast the story you’ve just seen that we discovered why.
For now we have learned that the years after the war were almost
as much a nightmare for Thompson as the massacre itself.
<h5>In 1970, Thompson was called to testify on Capitol Hill where he
feels he was treated like a criminal. Mendel Rivers, he was the
Chairman of the House Armed Services Commission.
Mr. Thompson
Yes, sir.
Mike Wallace
And pro-military.
Mr. Thompson
Yes, sir. It was not pleasant going before Congress. The war
effort at that time couldn’t stand any bad press, so they tried to
whitewash it as much as they could.
Mike Wallace
In fact, according to a new biography of Thompson, The
Forgotten Hero of My Lai, Chairman Rivers did everything he
could to protect the GIs who were responsible for the massacre.
Let me read something to you that Mendel Rivers said after you
testified before the Armed Services Committee. “Thompson,” he
said, “gave us no information to lead us to believe that anyone
committed a massacre at My Lai.” Right?
Mr. Thompson
Yes, sir. That’s what I heard he said, and they had everything
classified so you couldn’t say—
Mike Wallace
What do you mean they had it classified?
Mr. Thompson
It was secret hearings.
Mike Wallace
So the American public could not know what went on?
Mr. Thompson
No, sir, and I sure couldn’t say anything, because I was one
scared little guy at that particular time.
Mike Wallace
And then Congressman Rivers went after you personally, no?
Mr. Thompson
Well, he tried to get me to say that I had, you know, threatened to
kill a lieutenant. It was kind of plain that he wanted me to go to
jail. He even made that statement in public.
Mike Wallace
What did your buddies in the Army think of you?
Mr. Thompson
That I was a traitor—they didn’t know the magnitude of My Lai.
Some of them would say, “Oh, that stuff happened all the time.”
I’d say, “No, it can’t happen all the time.” I don’t think I could
live with myself if I thought that was an everyday thing that I was
part of.
Mike Wallace
But recently, the military establishment, which had given
Thompson the cold shoulder for 30 years, has been inviting him
to give lectures on military ethics.</h5> At the U.S. Marine Base in
Quantico, Virginia, he told a stunned audience of Marine officers
some grisly details about the My Lai massacre.
Mr. Thompson in lecture
A lot of the girls didn’t scream too much either, because they had
already cut their tongues out, and a bayonet can kill two real
quick if they’re pregnant. Ain’t that nasty that they—I personally—
I mean, I wish I was a big enough man to say I forgive them, but
I swear to God I can’t....
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Quote:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/112807a.html
....A pilot named Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr. from Stone Mountain, Georgia, 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.
He added 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. …
“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.”
When interviewed in 1995, Glen 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.
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 denied.
After that cursory investigation, Powell drafted a response on December 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.
“There may be isolated cases of mistreatment of civilians and POWs,” Powell wrote. But “this by no means reflects the general attitude throughout the Division. … In direct refutation of this [Glen’s] portrayal … is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”
Ridenhour’s Probe
It would take another Americal veteran, 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. <h3>The IG’s office conducted an aggressive official investigation, in contrast to Powell’s review.</h3>
Courts martial were held against officers and enlisted men who were implicated in the murder of the My Lai civilians. <h3>But Powell’s peripheral role in the My Lai cover-up did not slow his climb up the Army’s ladder.
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 memoirs, 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, Powell penned a partial justification of the Americal’s brutality. Powell explained the routine practice of murdering unarmed male Vietnamese.</h3>
“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. That was precisely the rationalization that the My Lai killers cited in their own defense.
Donaldson Case
After returning home from Vietnam in 1969, 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 in 1995, a senior investigator from the Donaldson case told Robert Parry 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 August 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.”
The old Army 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.
While thousands of other Vietnam veterans joined the anti-war movement upon returning home 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.
Making Contacts
The middle years of Colin Powell’s military career – bordered roughly by the twin scandals of My Lai and Iran-Contra – were a time for networking and advancement.
Powell won a prized White House fellowship that put him inside Richard Nixon’s White House. Powell’s work with Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget brought Powell to the attention of senior Nixon aides, Frank Carlucci and Caspar Weinberger, who soon became Powell’s mentors.
When Ronald Reagan swept to victory in 1980, Powell’s allies – Weinberger and Carlucci – took over the Defense Department as secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense, respectively.
When they arrived at the Pentagon, Powell, then a full colonel, was there to greet them. But before Powell could move to the top echelons of the U.S. military, he needed to earn his first general’s star.......
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Last edited by host; 04-16-2008 at 11:00 AM..
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