Further to my previous post on the uncovering of further Vietnam War atrocities, the Los Angeles Times (LAT) reporter team of Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson have uncovered further information of more atrocities including suppression of facts of suspected atrocities by senior US Army personal.
This new LAT report centers around US declassified records that show that while the US Army was working energetically to discredit a retired Lt. Col. Anthony Herbert, one of that era’s most decorated solders – who had openly described some of the atrocities in a report to senior officers – military investigators were uncovering prisoner torture and mistreatment that went well beyond what he (Herbert) had described in his report.
The discovery of this new information obtained by the LAT reporters under the US Freedom of Information Act – FOIA (something that seems to work rather better than over there than in the FOIA UK!) of additional atrocities committed during the Vietnam war further exposes the sad truth that the 1968 My Lai massacre was not the isolated incident the US Army tried to portray.
The new report, a must read for anyone that has followed the history of the Vietnam War can be found here – you may need to register with the LAT to gain access, as it seems they have changed how you can access some of their pages – I have a PDF version of it, which I can mail to you if you cannot get hold of it via the LAT site.
The report makes very interesting reading and in fact and shows that US Army perhaps now fully understands that these further recollections from another era will be used in comparison with what went on recently in Iraq – Retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns, a Vietnam veteran who served on the original atrocities enquiry task force, said the declassified files provided important lessons for dealing with the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq. “If we rationalize it as isolated acts, as we did in Vietnam and as we’re doing with Abu Ghraib and similar atrocities, we’ll never correct the problem“.
All credits are due to the LAT reporters for a ongoing good job well done, the Gen. John H. Johns quote in this post is from the same LAT article.
Sad reading for all concerned, but I think we have not heard the last of this or the follow up Iraq story.
Tags: Vietnam War, Abu Ghraib, LA Times, PDF
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