My Lai
massacre
[back] Vietnam war
[back]
Phoenix programme
[A Phoenix operation. The murder of 504 civilians, primarily women and children, including infants, on March 16, 1968. Many of the victims were sexually abused, beaten, tortured, or maimed, and some of the bodies were found mutilated.]
Civilian deaths in South Vietnam from 1965 until 1973 are estimated at 1.5 million
Book
The My Lai Massacre and Its Cover-Up: Beyond the Reach of Law?
: The Peers Commission Report by Joseph Goldstein, William R. Peers, Burke
Marshall, Jack Schwartz, United States Department of the Army (Corporate Author)
Quotes
On August 25, 1970, an article appeared in The New York Times hinting that
the CIA, through Phoenix, was responsible for My Lai. The story line was
advanced on October 14, when defense attorneys for David Mitchell — a sergeant
accused and later cleared of machine-gunning scores of Vietnamese in a drainage
ditch in My Lai — citing Phoenix as the CIA’s “systematic program of
assassination,” named Evan Parker as the CIA officer who “signed documents,
certain blacklists,” of Vietnamese to be assassinated in My Lai. When we spoke,
Parker denied the charge.
......As in any large-scale Phoenix operation, two of Task Force Barker’s companies
cordoned off the hamlet while a third one — Calley’s — moved in, clearing the
way for Kotouc and Special Branch officers who were “brought to the field to
identify VC from among the detained inhabitants.” .....The
CIA, via Phoenix, not only perpetrated the My Lai massacre but also concealed
the crime.
....As Jeff Stein said, “The first thing you learn in
the Army is not competence, you learn corruption. And you learn ‘to get along,
go along.’” Unfortunately not everyone learns to get along. On September 3, 1988, Robert
T’Souvas was apparently shot in the head by his girl friend, after an argument
over a bottle of vodka. The two were homeless, living out of a van they had
parked under a bridge in Pittsburgh. T’Souvas was a Vietnam veteran and a
participant in the My Lai massacre.
.....T’Souvas’s attorney, George Davis, traveled to Da Nang in 1970 to investigate
the massacre and while there was assigned as an aide a Vietnamese colonel who
said that the massacre was a Phoenix operation and that the purpose of Phoenix
was “to terrorize the civilian population into submission.”
Davis told me: “When I told the
people in the War Department what I knew and that I would attempt to obtain all
records on the program in order to defend my client, they agreed to drop the
charges.”
.....Bart Osborn (whose agent net Stein inherited) is
more specific. “I never knew in the course of all those operations any detainee
to live through his interrogation,” Osborn testified before Congress in 1971.
“They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that
any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all
died and the majority were wither tortured to death or things like thrown out of
helicopters.” [book
extract] The My Lai Massacre and The
“Tiger Cages” by Douglas Valentine
But the American establishment and media denied it then, and continue to deny
it until today, because Phoenix was a genocidal program -- and the CIA
officials, members of the media who were complicit through their silence, and
the red-blooded American boys who carried it out, are all war criminals. As
Michael Ratner a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights told
CounterPunch: "Kerrey should be tried as a war criminal. His actions on the
night of February 24-25, 1969 when the seven man Navy Seal unit which he headed
killed approximately twenty unarmed Vietnamese civilians, eighteen of whom were
women and children was a war crime. Like those who murdered at My Lai, he too
should be brought into the dock and tried for his crimes."
......A famous Phoenix operation, known as the My Lai Massacre, was proceeding
along smoothly, with a grand total of 504 Vietnamese women and children killed,
when a soldier named Hugh Thompson in a helicopter gunship saw what was
happening. Risking his life to preserve that "social contract," Thomson landed
his helicopter between the mass murderers and their victims, turned his machine
guns on his fellow Americans, and brought the carnage to a halt.
.....It was the CIA that forced soldiers like Kerrey into Phoenix operations, and
the hidden hand of the CIA lingers over his war crime. Kerrey even uses the same
rationale offered by CIA officer DeSilva. According to Kerrey, "the Viet Cong
were a thousand per cent more ruthless than" the Seals or U.S. Army.
[2001] Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need
For A War Crimes Trial by Douglas Valentine