[Vision2020] Re: Cope with a diversity of political views.....

[Ted Moffett]

Andreas et. al.

While Bush administration policies and the conduct it is condoning regarding
torture is intolerable, and it is astonishing that they are codifying
acceptance of torture to render it "legal," at the same time historical
accuracy demands that we face that there are numerous examples of
torture and human rights violations committed by US operatives (CIA, or its
paid agents) or the US military during WWII and after.  US involvement with
torture and/or Geneva Convention violations is well documented in Korea,
Vietnam, Central America, and other instances.

Official policy is one thing, the reality of war is another.  One reason war
should always be regarded as the last option in international relations is
the nearly unavoidable dehumanization of the conduct on all sides.

I personally know soldiers who fought in Korea and Vietnam who recounted
techniques of torture used on captured enemy that I won't recount here.
However, this story regarding the Korean War is well documented:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,197395,00.html

After reviewing the 1950 letter, Bugnion said the standard on war crimes is
clear.

"In the case of a deliberate attack directed against civilians identified as
such, then this would amount to a violation of the law of armed conflict,"
he said.

Gary Solis, a West Point expert on war crimes, said the policy described by
Muccio clearly "deviates from typical wartime procedures. It's an obvious
violation of the bedrock core principle of the law of armed conflict —
distinction."

Solis said soldiers always have the right to defend themselves. But
"noncombatants are not to be purposely targeted."

-----------------

Info below on the Phoenix program in Vietnam with routine assassinations,
etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program

"The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It's not like
you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to
go into a village and just grab someone and say, 'Where's Nguyen so-and-so?'
Half the time the people were so afraid they would say anything. Then a
Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out
two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash,
and walk him through the village and say, 'When we go by Nguyen's house
scratch your head.' Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the
door, and say, 'April Fool, motherfucker.' Whoever answered the door would
get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist,
including family members. Sometimes they'd come back to camp with ears to
prove that they killed people."
--------------------------
More on torture in Vietnam:

http://www.newmassmedia.com/nac.phtml?code=new&db=nac_fea&ref=14651


The CIA built and maintained interrogation centers in each of South
Vietnam's 44 provinces. Amid repeated allegations that innocent people were
being detained and tortured in these centers, four U.S. members of Congress
traveled to Vietnam to investigate. Their investigation culminated in 1971
with congressional hearings, at the end of which U.S. Reps. Paul McCloskey,
John Conyers, Bella Abzug and Ben Rosenthal stated their belief that
"torture is a regularly accepted part of interrogation."
--------------------
What was commonplace in Vietnam, is now being done again in prosecuting the
"War On Terror."
-------------------
I am sure you have heard of the "School of The Americas" in Fort Benning,
Georgia?  Where torture and interrogation techniques are/were taught?  This
school pre-dates the Bush administration, of course, and is linked to the
deaths of tens of thousands, tortured and murdered in Central America during
the 1980s, during the same time period that Reagan secretly supported the
Contras and death squads in Nicaragua, violating the US Constitution
after the US Congress banned continued support for the Contras, thus the
Iran/Contra scandal, which makes Clinton's sex perjury look like a kid
stealing a cookie and lying about it:

http://www.soaw.org/new/type.php?type=8

--------------------

Also, the carpet bombing of Dresden in WWII, carried out by both British and
American bombers, creating fire storms with enough force to suck people out
of basements, is regarded by many historians as basically a revenge bombing
with little military significance, killing tens of thousands of civilians,
and is widely regarded as a war crime today:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/02/10/do1001.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/02/10/ixportal.html
--------------------
I am sorry, but I am horrified that you dismiss the nightmare of the nuclear
bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima with tens of thousands of innocent
civilians killed, and thousands more suffering horribly for decades after
from radiation effects etc., with two words, while you go on to imply that
after that the USA adopted a more moral approach to war?  So the 100s of
thousands of Southeast Asians killed during the Vietnam war, many if not
most of them innocent civilians, in perhaps the most indiscriminate bombing
campaign in human history, is an expression of these new high moral
standards?  We widely used napalm in Vietnam, and though they don't call it
"napalm" now, we used a similar weapon that is banned under international
treaty due to the horrific cruelty of its use, in Iraq:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/VNrollingthunder.htm

As the United States <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USA.htm> is the
most advanced industrial nation in world it was able to make full use of the
latest developments in technology in its war against North Vietnam. B-52
bombers, that could fly at heights that prevented them being seen or heard,
dropped 8 million tons of bombs on Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. This was
over three times the amount of bombs dropped throughout the whole of the Second
World War <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WW.htm> and worked out at
approximately 300 tons for every man, woman and child living in Vietnam.

As well as explosive bombs the US air force dropped a considerable number of
incendiary devices. The most infamous of these was
napalm<http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/VNchemical.htm>,
a mixture of petrol and a chemical thickner which produces a tough sticky
gel that attaches itself to the skin. The igniting agent, white phosphorus,
continues burning for a considerable amount of time. A reported three
quarters of all napalm victims in Vietnam were burned through to the muscle
and bone (fifth degree burns). The pain caused by the burning is so
traumatic that it often causes death.

*7) Joseph Buttinger attempted to document the effect that the war had on
the people of Vietnam <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWvietnam.htm> in
his book A Dragon Defiant (1972).*

The total tonnage of bombs dropped between 1964 and the end of 1971
was 6.2million. This means that the US has dropped 300 pounds of bombs
for every
man, woman, and child in Indochina, and 22 tons of bombs for every square
mile. Enormous craters dot the landscape in many regions covering dozens of
square miles. Hundreds of villages were totally destroyed by bombs and
napalm, forests over vast areas defoliated, making the land infertile for
years, and crops destroyed, with little or no consideration for the needs of
the people, merely on suspicion that some of the crop might benefit the
enemy... The total number of people made refugees is more than 5 million...
The rise of the refugee population in South Vietnam was partly due also to
the past American policy of removing from countless villages, for strategic
reasons, the entire population, and of putting these unfortunate people in
what were called refugee camps or relocation centres.
-----------------------------

Andreas wrote:

We did.

In 1949, we signed the additional protocols of the Geneva Convention,
banning as a matter of course many of the things we had done in World
War II. Previously, in 1929, we had signed and implemented the Third
Geneva Convention, making it the policy of the United States military
that we would not mistreat prisoners of war. With limited exceptions,
none reflected in the official policy of our military, we did not.

If you can find any example of us using torture, or confessions
obtained through coercive investigation, as part of World War II -- a
period which has been more thoroughly studied in retrospect than
anything we are aware of today -- I'd be quite interested.
--------------------

Ted Moffett
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