SwiftVets.com

[dmackto]

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0438/turse.php

[rayabacus]

Go to the Winter Soldier site (links at SwiftVets. There are two definitive debunkings of the allegations by Kerry. Most of those relating the atrocities not only did not serve in combat in VietNam, they were malcontents or deseters.

Remember, in any conflict, there are people that are going to commit war crimes, as we can see today in Iraq. What Kerry said was that these atrocities were an every day occurance, standard operating procedure, condoned all the way up the chain of command. Even if the specific incidents rerlated by this author is true, and we have nothing but his word for that (He conveniently did not include pdf's of his files), these were isolated incidents and not standard operating procedure.

Go to Winter Soldier and you can get specific info.
_________________
USMC Recon
Quang Tri
'68 & '69

[Me#1You#10]

Moving to Wintersoldier Forum

and this DOES need fisking.

Thanks

[AC]

Try the article by Owens at http://www.nationalreview.com/owens/owens200409200858.asp

[d19thdoc]

I don’t know who Nicholas Turse is, but if this research was used for a graduate degree, it needs some peer review. I hope they have not yet awarded the degree. If it was published in the Village Voice for propaganda purposes, then we have an understandable basis on which we can proceed.

In an radio interview given this week, John O’Neill made the point that over 200 American military personnel were convicted of serious crimes against the Vietnamese in American military criminal proceedings – out of over 2.5 million who served. If any major American city with an equivalent population could boast an equal record of crime in a ten year period, we would probably declare it a heaven-on-earth, and not draw the conclusion drawn here and by John Kerry in 1971– that everyone in that city must be a criminal! My point, our point, has always been that the Winter Soldier Investigation, and Kerry’s use of it, was in no way ever intended to be any kind of investigation – in any verifiable or credible legal or journalistic sense of the word “investigation.” It was a propaganda exercise, classically typical of the kind run from at least 1965 by leftist groups in Europe especially, designed to move public opinion in a certain direction by any means necessary. It avoided all references to atrocities committed by the Viet Cong, for instance. It was all uncoroborated and undocumented first-person only oral story telling. Is it any wonder it made no dent in the media at all – was ignored by any organ with ordinary journalistic standards? Until Kerry mainstreamed it all, that is.

The issue is exactly what Kerry made the issue in 1971 – not whether or not war crimes took place in Vietnam. That these acts were not only policy, but they were condoned – or perhaps even ordered – by the entire chain of command and the political leadership, and were engaged in by any and all on a daily basis, was his claim. Even if every instance spoken of at the Winter Soldier Investigation were true, that conclusion by Kerry is still not even logically justifiable.

In general:

I wonder how these records got from the U.S Army Crime Records Center at Fort Belvoir into the National Archives. Perhaps the CID made a recent transfer of documents, but, heretofore, they have been very proprietary about keeping their own records to themselves, classified or not. Or, perhaps, when Turse says “National Archives” he is using the term generically. Just a point of curiosity.

I wonder how war crimes could have been official policy if so many cases were prosecuted by the Army? And if the Army was so willing to investigate the Winter Soldier charges?

I wonder what implication we are supposed to draw from the fact that these documents were “classified for decades.” The Operational Reports from my own combat engineer outfit, with the lowest level of classification (“For Official Use Only”) were beyond public scrutiny for ten or twelve years after the date of their production, as a matter of official regulation, not as a matter of conspiracy to deprive the American public of knowledge of how many tons of crushed rock we moved in a week.

A question: Which cases cited at the Winter Soldier Investigation did Turse find verified in the official CID files? Certainly the hundreds of cases he did find did not require a civilian rump tribunal to be uncovered and prosecuted. So, wouldn’t even one of the Winter Soldier cases, so outrageous in their nature, have made it into the Army’s (or Navy’s) criminal justice system if they were true? But not even one ever did.

He repeats Kerry’s characterization of the WSI witnesses as “honorably discharged and many very highly decorated” Vietnam vets. The fact has now been admitted that the organizers did not waste much effort in vetting their witnesses. What they were willing to say was much more important. Instead of granting this, Turse engages in some dubious statistical manipulation to support that proposition. More on that later.

He states that the WSI witnesses were trying to demonstrate that the likes of the My Lai Massacre was not an isolated incident, but “simply one of many U.S.-perpetrated atrocities.” Not quite. They were trying to demonstrate not that individuals committed crimes, but that the war was criminal, and intentionally so. Facts alone could not establish this – only conclusions about the facts could do that – whether rational and logical conclusions, or not. Kerry supplied that rationale. And in fact, this attempt required the denial of individual responsibility altogether. Kerry actually let William Calley off the hook in his own Senate Committee testimony. The crimes were perpetrated by the U.S., not by individuals. Unfortunately this lie indicts everyone who served, but that’s just too bad. They had bigger fish to fry than to worry much about an entire generation of American soldiers.

Turse brings up the use of free-fire zones, again misrepresenting, or perhaps misunderstanding, what that term meant, as well as the bombardment of villages, as if that in itself is somehow shocking. If the enemy attacks from a village, rather than from an open field, should you not attack him there? No one ever mentions 200,000 French civilian casualties in Normandy in the summer of 1944. So maybe it is one’s preconceived ideas about a conflict, and not what happens in the execution of that conflict, which colors one’s judgment of it.

Perhaps as many as 2 million Vietnamese civilians died during the war, we are reminded here . . . and are we supposed to accept the implication that they all died as a result of American military action? No one who was in combat in Vietnam will assume that, but others might be gulled by it. And lest the reply be, “Well, if the U.S. was not conducting military operations, no one would have died.” The fact is, many more than 2 million were simply murdered in “peace time” by the Vietnamese and other South East Asian communists regimes after we were long gone from the scene. What the Vietnamese communists did to their own civilian brothers while we were there makes the Winter Soldier Investigation a minor side show – even if it were all true. Probably the thing about Kerry’s testimony that most infuriated the hundreds of thousands of honorable Vietnam veterans was that he described them in terms that fit the Vietnamese communists exactly, and as they themselves had witnessed.

Turse claims that what the SBVT say, that “few (of the WSI witnesses) were willing to cooperate with military investigators” is untrue. To prove this, he engages in some really spurious statistical manipulation.

He says that 46 soldiers who made allegations at WSI were deemed by the Army to have made allegations which “merited further inquiry.” And of these 46, 43 could be identified. He now says that this proves that “93% (43 out of 46) of the veterans surveyed (emphasis added) were real, not fake.”

Real, not fake. Well, yes, but you can be a fake under your true identity. Just because you use your real name does not somehow validate anything and everything you say. This also means of the 76 Army witnesses, 33 of them (that’s 43.4%) could not even be identified as who they said they were. A real up front and credible bunch, without a doubt.

And further, of the remaining 43 “non-fakes”, the CID attempted to contact 41: of these 41, 5 could not be located; of the remaining 36, 31 “submitted to interviews.” Turse adds, “Hardly the ‘few’ asserted by SBVT.”

Well, not quite.

There were 76 documented witness at WSI who claimed to have been in the Army. This means that the 46 - who had stories that “merited further inquiry” - represented 60% whose stories were even credible, and about 40% whose stories were transparent bunk. And in that category, Joe Bangert’s is my personal favorite. His piece of pornographic fantasy could only have been generated on a bad LSD trip, as it defies the laws of both physics and human anatomy. Turse’s “93%” is a “survey” sample of a sample within a sample (actually 43 out of 76, not 43 out of 46).

Of the 41 men the CID attempted to contact, five disappeared, five refused to be interviewed at all, and 31 (about 41% of the “Army” witnesses) “submitted to interviews.” Submitting to an interview is not cooperation with the process. Especially since Turse reveals again their classic justification for not cooperating: “They wanted to expose atrocities as a product of command policy while denying individual soldiers’ (sic) responsibility in committing the crimes.” So they did not in fact, cooperate at all. They “submitted to interviews” and in those interviews refused to provide the CID with anything on which to thereafter proceed.

Thus, the SBVT statement, “few were willing to cooperate with military investigators” remains unrebutted. In fact, if it is in error at all, it would only be in the use of “few.” It more accurately might have been “none.” None were willing to cooperate with military investigators.

I can say this because it is based on the research of one Nicholas Turse, Ivy League dissertation researcher and writer.

Between 65 and 70 of the 120 military participants (not all participants offered testimony – among these being John Kerry, and there were 16 additional civilian participants) left enough specific identifying information to make a record search for them feasible. So, Turse is, I guess, accurate in saying that ”most” of the witnesses had publicly given their own names, etc. But he concludes with this: “ . . . namely, all the information needed to proceed with investigations. In practically all the specific Winter Soldier cases, such probes were never done.”

Well, no kidding. The only existing witnesses, the only people who were "complainants," refused to cooperate with the investigating authorities. How interested were these witnesses in seeing justice done? Is it an unreasonable assumption that the real reason they did not cooperate was that they knew their allegations could not stand the heat and the light of examination?

Then there is the non-productive Naval Investigative Service probe into the Marine witnesses at WSI. That must have produced better results for the argument against America, don’t you think? I’m also sure some doctoral candidate will look all that up and enlighten us shortly. We can only hope he or she will do so more objectively.
_________________
For The Honor of the Fifty-Eight Thousand.
"He Can Lose, But He Can Not Hide"

[Hammer2]

One thing I have not heard mention of is that crimes by servicemen are published in the Stars and Stripes and other publications for servicemen.

Isn't it more likely that the WSI stories were being repeated by veterans who had read about them, rather than seen them?
Wouldn't that be why their stories matched some of the records in the national archives?

Dosen't the fact that the records the author mentions were about courts martials, convictions, and sentences indicate that, far from being official policy, atrocities were considered crimes and punished accordingly?

How were these atrocities discovered? By our tireless watchdogs in the media? Hardly! They were reported by other soldiers with knowledge of the incident. Soldiers who were exercising their duty to report crimes to the proper authorities, just as a good citizen would at home. Lt. Calley was reported by fellow soldiers, as were the ******** responsible for Abu Ghraib.

This brings us to the big fat $64,000 question - if this motley crew of rag-tag malcontents had actually witnessed the crimes they claimed to have seen, why didn't they report them? They were honor and legally bound to do so, they were guilty of a crime if they didn't, and if officers in their chain of command tried to cover it up, they could always go to a higher level to report it. So why didn't they? Maybe they were lying? Maybe they even committed the crimes themselves?

Why, that would make them war criminals, wouldn't it?
_________________
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilence" - Thomas Jefferson
"An armed society is a polite society" - Thomas Jefferson
"The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it won't be needed until someone tries to take it away." -- Thomas Jefferson

[d19thdoc]

Hammer wrote: