<div>Andreas et. al.</div>
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<div>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.
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<div>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.
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<div>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:</div>
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<div><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,197395,00.html" target="_blank">http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,197395,00.html</a></div>
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<div>After reviewing the 1950 letter, Bugnion said the standard on war crimes is clear.</div>
<div>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>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."
</p>
<p>Solis said soldiers always have the right to defend themselves. But "noncombatants are not to be purposely targeted."</p>
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<p>Info below on the Phoenix program in Vietnam with routine assassinations, etc.</p></div>
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<div><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program</a></div>
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<div>"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."
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<div>More on torture in Vietnam:</div>
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<div><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.newmassmedia.com/nac.phtml?code=new&db=nac_fea&ref=14651" target="_blank">http://www.newmassmedia.com/nac.phtml?code=new&db=nac_fea&ref=14651
</a></div>
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<div>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." </div>
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<div>What was commonplace in Vietnam, is now being done again in prosecuting the "War On Terror."</div>
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<div>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:
</div>
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<div><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.soaw.org/new/type.php?type=8" target="_blank">http://www.soaw.org/new/type.php?type=8</a></div>
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<div>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:
</div>
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<div><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/02/10/do1001.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/02/10/ixportal.html">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/02/10/do1001.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/02/10/ixportal.html
</a></div>
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<div>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:
</div>
<div> </div>
<div><a href="http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/VNrollingthunder.htm">http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/VNrollingthunder.htm</a></div>
<div>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">As the <a href="http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USA.htm">United States</a> 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
<a href="http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WW.htm">Second World War</a> and worked out at approximately 300 tons for every man, woman and child living in Vietnam.</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">As well as explosive bombs the US air force dropped a considerable number of incendiary devices. The most infamous of these was <a href="http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/VNchemical.htm">
napalm</a>, 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.
</font></p></div>
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<div><strong><font color="#7d7dff">7) </font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#000000" size="3"><font color="#7d7dff">Joseph Buttinger attempted to document the effect that the war had on the people of </font>
<font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#000000" size="3"><a href="http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWvietnam.htm">Vietnam</a></font> <font color="#7d7dff">in his book <i>A Dragon Defiant</i> (1972).</font></font>
</strong>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The total tonnage of bombs dropped between 1964 and the end of 1971 was 6.2 million. 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.
</font></p></div>
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<div>Andreas wrote:</div>
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<div>We did.<br><br>In 1949, we signed the additional protocols of the Geneva Convention,<br>banning as a matter of course many of the things we had done in World<br>War II. Previously, in 1929, we had signed and implemented the Third
<br>Geneva Convention, making it the policy of the United States military<br>that we would not mistreat prisoners of war. With limited exceptions,<br>none reflected in the official policy of our military, we did not.<br><br>
If you can find any example of us using torture, or confessions<br>obtained through coercive investigation, as part of World War II -- a<br>period which has been more thoroughly studied in retrospect than<br>anything we are aware of today -- I'd be quite interested.
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<div>Ted Moffett<br> </div>