posted on April 18, 2002 11:25:52 AM new
As to the way this, or any other administration is/has been run, I have never doubted for a moment that there are skelitons in more closets then any of us could count. And, in this age, we can bring these old bones to light easier then ever before. Now, for a question for us all:
Who has run the "cleanest" administration ever?
Who has run the "dirtiest"?
I think I will turn this into it's own thread: and remember, this may get very opinionated. State a couple of reasons why you feel the way you do: but lets try to keep the mudslinging at each other to a minimum. After I do some further reaserch for myself, I will post who I think wins the "Mr. Clean" and "Mr. Dirty" award for U.S. Presidental Administration. Lets have some fun now, ya hear???
posted on April 18, 2002 11:57:38 AM new
"I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit - the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of
what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies,randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term Winter Soldier is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriots and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.
We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out....
In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.
We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.
We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by
American bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.
We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings." We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater. We
watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.
Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? ....We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country -
the question of racism which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.
An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.
We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The
Army says they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission - to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning."
John Kerry, before the senate in April, 1971.
Change a few words, substitute one nation for another and what have you got? A plea that bears repeating. Innocent American soldiers killing innocent people en mass for the political and personal priorities of a few powerful officials.
Every administration which does not have as it's dedicated purpose the furtherance of peace in the world is filthy - equally filthy for the corruption of the morality of it's people, and guilty of the wrongful death of it's young.
posted on April 18, 2002 12:44:54 PM new
Impossible for me to answer without all the facts. I'll never have them now that Bush has concealed all those papers of past presidents.
KRS, That war wounded the soul of the USA and we have never recovered. Wars prior to that had been just and for worthy causes.That war was just one big bloody mistake. Since then most of the "skirmishes" that we have been involved in were for political reasons ...or corporate...and the cause is rarely just. We are sending our men in for oil mostly. Tell me, why is it wrong for people to live under some other style of government [like communism] if that is what they like? Why is it up to us to convert them to Capitolism? [I know..Democracy...but we really want them to be Capitalists so they have lots of money to spend] I wish VietNam had never happened, it ruined what we were.
posted on April 18, 2002 01:27:03 PM new
There was a belief that unless the threat of communism was contained at every opportunity we'd be buried. It's why Korea, and it's initially why Vietnam.
posted on April 18, 2002 01:40:23 PM new
As krs pointed out there was no real physical danger to anyone in the US from what was happening in Asia. When you are not fighting to defend yourself except in some abstract philosphical sense of global competition of the systems then there is no excuse for demanding people risk their lives.
Usually we find reason after the fact to believe the competition was more economic that ideological.
The US was clean in the war of 1812. They were taking US sailors off ships on the high seas and basically enslaving them.
There has not been a war since that was really moral.
The war on Spain was corrupt. A land grab.
Mexico was a concern of the British more than any real danger to the US. Texas was not a US interest that had to be defended. California they could have bought like Lousiana or Alaska.
Even the World Wars may have been a righteous war fought for the wrong reasons if you look at why the government really got in it.
Panama-Grenada-Congo(yes we were there)-Somalia - Nicaragua - Haiti - Cuba - Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia/Korea. Was there ever any real threat to the US from any of these places?
