Prosecute the War Criminals
Obviously this will just be brushed off and ignored and everyone will continue to say that it's just a few bad apples, that most U.S. soldiers treat Iraqis with respect.
Why did My Lai raise hell in 1968? It wouldn't matter now.
Why did My Lai raise hell in 1968? It wouldn't matter now.
posted by Ted Rall at
4:27 PM
16 Comments:
My Lai didn't exactly raise hell in 1968 dude, or any time after that. It only offended the people that this is offending now, no more. It would be inaccurate to claim there is any less outrage now than then.
The 60s had a lot of unrest, if you stripped it all out, the anger against war crimes in Vietnam (as opposed to college kids not wanting to go) wasn't all that massive. Support for the war was always above 50% statistically across the country.
2 things: everything else in the 60s amplifying our view of the Vietnam protest movement, and the lack of a draft.
It's not that people care about brownskins being raped and murdered, they didn't then and don't now. They only ever cared about Americans dying.
This was a War Crime. The blowing away of the family in the van had no excuse. They clearly where not armed. But then shooting ambulances has become so common it sickens me.
Ted good luck in Afghanistan. I hope you use my $20 well. Coming from a homeless unemployed vet.
Did you hear that Krgystan. The one with the big lakes and not much else, just had a revolution?
I don't know where Aggie Dude is coming from, where it gets its information, how it develops such skewed opinions relative to what really happened in the 60s and in Vietnam. Aggie Dude, let me guess. You're at least 15 years old, but not a day over 19. Things you're shared lately have gotten more bizarre by the sentence.
So a blackskin is covering up brownskins being raped and murdered?
"We don't know how the children got hurt."
What gall! Can this fucker ever sleep at night :-( ?
The NY Times has an oh so helpful article about this atrocity today. The first sentence of this piece sets the tone for what follows: "The sight of human beings, most of them unarmed, being gunned down from above is jarring enough."
Are there any armed people on the ground in the video? I understand that the crew of the Apache had some such impression, but, can anyone who's seen the video support that assertion?
"I don't know where Aggie Dude is coming from, where it gets its information...."
Anon: 9:00 PM. What are you smoking? Just walk around the streets and ask regular people, even people over the age of 50, about the events of the My Lai massacre and see what response you get. Even people who have a very strong opinion about how it was "understandable" have almost no concept of what actually happened.
So how exactly can one say it "raised hell" when 1) only a handful of washed up hippies, academics and random history buffs can tell you anything about it, and 2) it had such a massive impact that the same thing continues now, AND continues to be covered up.
For example, the whistle blower on Abu Ghraib and his entire family were forced to leave their hometown because of how vicious the threats and intimidation against his ENTIRE FAMILY had become. The substantive outcome of My Lai was really similar to Abu Ghraib. . . actually fewer people were punished for My Lai.
This is a REALLY LOW BAR for what is considered "raising hell." The apparatus that leads to these abuses and covers them up is still in place. Whistleblowers are still, first-and-foremost, punished for letting the cat out of the bag.
Dyncorp employees in Bosnia in the 1990s were BUYING sex slaves for gods' sake!!!!!
Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction during the Super Bowl resulted in more heads rolling than My Lai and Abu Ghraib combined.
Face it, what happens to people who are deemed "not American" just doesn't matter to most Americans. "They" are not "us" and therefore not even worth a conversation in most parts of American society.
The most potent thing that the hippies and peace-nicks of the 60s did was give us a 50 year ultra-right wing backlash.
The analysts at Wikileaks confirm that a few of the people in the crowd seem to have been armed. If you look, it does appear that, in addition to the two photographers, one or two other men in the crowd appear to have what may be rifles slung over their shoulders.
Does it matter? When unarmed civilians pull up in a van and selflessly try to pull the survivors to safety and are then fired upon and murdered by soulless monsters with radio chatter that sounds like it could be X-Box Live trash-talking, does it matter if there was an armed man or two in the crowd?
If I had monsters like that patrolling in my country, I'd probably carry an assault rifle too. Almost everyone who spoke on the radio chatter deserves to be executed.
Er, I mean... these subhumans are our greatest heroes; their repugnant and vile actions are a consequence of the fog of war. Only the politicians who orchestrated the war are evil; the monsters who carried out their plans and laughed with each other while doing so bear no responsibility whatsoever. All hail the troops, the moral exemplars of our society! They are just Following Orders!
Ag Dude: You say so much, but you say so little. I'm underwhelmed.
Dyncorp employees in Bosnia in the 1990s were BUYING sex slaves for gods' sake!!!!!
They learned it from the Blue Helmets.
Steve said: "If I had monsters like that patrolling in my country, I'd probably carry an assault rifle too. Almost everyone who spoke on the radio chatter deserves to be executed."
I live in the US. There are monsters in my neighborhood "patrolling"... capitalists "exploiting"... their puppet-politicians and media "bullshitting"...
Long before 9/11 this was true. After 9/11, Cornel West said, "We're all ni**gers now!" In Iraq. In the US. We have no common cause with the owners and operators of Plantation America. You can't "speak truth to power" - they already know the facts, and their values and interests will never let them see it our way. We have no truth they care to hear.
When will we start responding like the "ni**ers" they think we are?
Calm down. If you watch it carefully you'll find that they thought the cameras were RPGs and they were about to get shot down.
This isn't a crime so much as the inevitable result of some idiots descision to patrol the streets of a city with attack helicopters.
You could argue that the pilots should refuse to fly on missions of this sort, but the ultimate blame for this lies squarely on the shoulders of the bastard who decided to use these flying tanks in place of police cars.
And now we find out Barry is killing civilians on buses.
Kind of funny how video of soldiers following the rules of engagement to take out Sadrist thugs...essentially accomplishing the mission....gets turned into the military firing on unarmed civilians. That is the risk reporters take when the embed with the enemy.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Dann, you might rationalize firing on a random group of men, some of which might be carrying guns (in their own homeland), but how on hell can you come up with a flimsy excuse to fire on a van that was picking up the f%cking wounded?!
Spare us your neocon bullshit.
I was most impressed by how accurate the Apache 30mm chain gun is at that range. Considering the circumstances, our guys did nothing wrong. We failed everyone when we sent them over there in the first place.
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