Celebrating Cronkite While Ignoring What He Did July 18, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in History, Media, Vietnam.Tags: anti-war, corporate media, david halberstam, dissent, glenn greenwald, journalism, lewis lapham, martin luther king, Media, roger hollander, tim russert, U.S. imperialism, us press, vietnam, vietnam history, Vietnam War, walter cronkite
add a comment
“The Vietcong did not win by a knockout [in the Tet Offensive], but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw. . . . We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. . . .
“For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. . . . To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past” — Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening News, February 27, 1968.
“I think there are a lot of critics who think that [in the run-up to the Iraq War] . . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and you’re a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn’t do our job. I respectfully disagree. It’s not our role” – David Gregory, MSNBC, May 28, 2008.
When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam died, media stars everywhere commemorated his death as though he were one of them — as though they do what he did — even though he had nothing but bottomless, intense disdain for everything they do. As he put it in a 2005 speech to students at the Columbia School of Journalism: ”the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be . . . . By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are.”
In that same speech, Halberstam cited as the ”proudest moment” of his career a bitter argument he had in 1963 with U.S. Generals in Vietnam, by which point, as a young reporter, he was already considered an “enemy” of the Kennedy White House for routinely contradicting the White House’s claims about the war (the President himself asked his editor to pull Halberstam from reporting on Vietnam). During that conflict, he stood up to a General in a Press Conference in Saigon who was attempting to intimidate him for having actively doubted and aggressively investigated military claims, rather than taking and repeating them at face value:
Picture if you will rather small room, about the size of a classroom, with about 10 or 12 reporters there in the center of the room. And in the back, and outside, some 40 military officers, all of them big time brass. It was clearly an attempt to intimidate us.
General Stilwell tried to take the intimidation a step further. He began by saying that Neil and I had bothered General Harkins and Ambassador Lodge and other VIPs, and we were not to do it again. Period.
And I stood up, my heart beating wildly — and told him that we were not his corporals or privates, that we worked for The New York Times and UP and AP and Newsweek, not for the Department of Defense.
I said that we knew that 30 American helicopters and perhaps 150 American soldiers had gone into battle, and the American people had a right to know what happened. I went on to say that we would continue to press to go on missions and call Ambassador Lodge and General Harkins, but he could, if he chose, write to our editors telling them that we were being too aggressive, and were pushing much too hard to go into battle. That was certainly his right.
Can anyone imagine any big media stars — who swoon in reverence both to political power and especially military authority — defying military instructions that way, let alone being proud of it? Halberstam certainly couldn’t imagine any of them doing it, which is why, in 1999, he wrote:
Obviously, it should be a brilliant moment in American journalism, a time of a genuine flowering of a journalistic culture . . .
But the reverse is true. Those to whom the most is given, the executives of our three networks, have steadily moved away from their greatest responsibilities, which is using their news departments to tell the American people complicated truths, not only about their own country, but about the world around us. . . .
Somewhere in there, gradually, but systematically, there has been an abdication of responsibility within the profession, most particularly in the networks. . . . So, if we look at the media today, we ought to be aware not just of what we are getting, but what we are not getting; the difference between what is authentic and what is inauthentic in contemporary American life and in the world, with a warning that in this celebrity culture, the forces of the inauthentic are becoming more powerful all the time.
All of that was ignored when he died, with establishment media figures exploiting his death to suggest that his greatness reflected well on what they do, as though what he did was the same thing as what they do (much the same way that Martin Luther King’s vehement criticisms of the United States generally and its imperialism and aggression specifically have been entirely whitewashed from his hagiography).
So, too, with the death of Walter Cronkite. Tellingly, his most celebrated and significant moment — Greg Mitchell says “this broadcast would help save many thousands of lives, U.S. and Vietnamese, perhaps even a million” — was when he stood up and announced that Americans shouldn’t trust the statements being made about the war by the U.S. Government and military, and that the specific claims they were making were almost certainly false. In other words, Cronkite’s best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do — directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed. These days, our leading media outlets won’t even use words that are disapproved of by the Government.
Despite that, media stars will spend ample time flamboyantly commemorating Cronkite’s death as though he reflects well on what they do (though probably not nearly as much time as they spent dwelling on the death of Tim Russert, whose sycophantic servitude to Beltway power and “accommodating head waiter”-like, mindless stenography did indeed represent quite accurately what today’s media stars actually do). In fact, within Cronkite’s most important moments one finds the essence of journalism that today’s modern media stars not only fail to exhibit, but explicitly disclaim as their responsibility.
UPDATE: A reader reminds me that — very shortly after Tim Russert’s June, 2008 death — long-time Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham attended a party to mark the release of a new book on Hunter Thompson, and Lapham said a few words. According to New York Magazine’s Jada Yuan, this is what happened:
Lewis Lapham isn’t happy with political journalism today. “There was a time in America when the press and the government were on opposite sides of the field,” he said at a premiere party for Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson on June 25. “The press was supposed to speak on behalf of the people. The new tradition is that the press speaks on behalf of the government.” An example? “Tim Russert was a spokesman for power, wealth, and privilege,” Lapham said. “That’s why 1,000 people came to his memorial service. Because essentially he was a shill for the government. It didn’t matter whether it was Democratic or Republican. It was for the status quo.” What about Russert’s rep for catching pols in lies? “That was bullshit,” he said. “Thompson and Russert were two opposite poles.”
Writing in Harper’s a few weeks later, Lapham — in the essay about Russert (entitled “An Elegy for a Rubber Stamp”) where he said Russert’s ”on-air persona was that of an attentive and accommodating headwaiter, as helpless as Charlie Rose in his infatuation with A-list celebrity” — echoed Halberstam by writing:
Long ago in the days before journalists became celebrities, their enterprise was reviled and poorly paid, and it was understood by working newspapermen that the presence of more than two people at their funeral could be taken as a sign that they had disgraced the profession.
That Lapham essay is full of piercing invective (“On Monday I thought I’d heard the end of the sales promotion. Tim presumably had ascended to the great studio camera in the sky to ask Thomas Jefferson if he intended to run for president in 1804″), and — from a person who spent his entire adult life in journalism — it contains the essential truth about modern establishment journalism in America:
On television the voices of dissent can’t be counted upon to match the studio drapes or serve as tasteful lead-ins to the advertisements for Pantene Pro-V and the U.S. Marine Corps. What we now know as the “news media” serve at the pleasure of the corporate sponsor, their purpose not to tell truth to the powerful but to transmit lies to the powerless. Like Russert, who served his apprenticeship as an aide-de-camp to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, most of the prominent figures in the Washington press corps (among them George Stephanopoulos, Bob Woodward, and Karl Rove) began their careers as bagmen in the employ of a dissembling politician or a corrupt legislature. Regarding themselves as de facto members of government, enabling and codependent, their point of view is that of the country’s landlords, their practice equivalent to what is known among Wall Street stock-market touts as “securitizing the junk.” When requesting explanations from secretaries of defense or congressional committee chairmen, they do so with the understanding that any explanation will do. Explain to us, my captain, why the United States must go to war in Iraq, and we will relay the message to the American people in words of one or two syllables. Instruct us, Mr. Chairman, in the reasons why K-Street lobbyists produce the paper that Congress passes into law, and we will show that the reasons are healthy, wealthy, and wise. Do not be frightened by our pretending to be suspicious or scornful. Together with the television camera that sees but doesn’t think, we’re here to watch, to fall in with your whims and approve your injustices. Give us this day our daily bread, and we will hide your vices in the rosebushes of salacious gossip and clothe your crimes in the aura of inspirational anecdote.
That’s why they so intensely celebrated Tim Russert: because he was the epitome of what they do, and it’s why they’ll celebrate Walter Cronkite (like they did with David Halberstam) only by ignoring the fact that his most consequential moments were ones where he did exactly that which they will never do.
© 2009 Salon.com
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.
Robert McNamara’s Second Vietnam July 17, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Foreign Policy, Philippines.Tags: economic imperialism, ferdinand marcos, foreign aid, foreign policy, philippines, philippines economy, philippines industrialization, robert mcnamera, roger hollander, U.S. imperialism, walden bello, World Bank
add a comment
Development from Above?
As president of the Bank, the world’s premier channel for multilateral aid, McNamara did quadruple the institution’s lending portfolio to $12 billion. The key beneficiaries, however, were authoritarian dictatorships. Indeed, the rise to hegemony of authoritarian regimes in the developing world cannot be separated from the massive funding that the World Bank under McNamara provided them. By the late 1970s, five of the top seven recipients of World Bank aid were military, presidential-military, or military-controlled regimes: Indonesia, Brazil, South Korea, Turkey, and the Philippines.
Why did the Bank under McNamara feel a special affinity to military-dominated regimes? A major reason stems from McNamara’s own background. He was one of the prototypes of the “technocrat,” a term coined in the early 1960s to refer to the seemingly apolitical practitioner of the science of political and economic management. As chief executive of the Ford Motor Company and later head of the Defense Department, McNamara ran organizations that were hierarchical and non-democratic in structure. Not surprisingly, he was susceptible to the rhetoric of authoritarian regimes that promised to sanitize the political arena in order, according to them, to allow economic managers the space to modernize the country.
The Marcos Connection
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos was one of the leaders who most successfully cultivated the image of bringing “development from above.” In 1972, he imposed martial law in order, in his words, to “break the democratic deadlock” that had become a barrier to development. “All that people ask,” Marcos explained, “is some kind of authority that can enforce the simple law of civil society. Only an authoritarian system will be able to carry forth the mass consent and to exercise the authority necessary to implement new values, measures, and sacrifices.”
Skillfully deploying a cadre of technocrats to impress the World Bank president, Marcos won McNamara over to backing his regime in a major way. The country was upgraded to what the Bank called a “country of concentration.” Between 1950 and 1972, the Philippines received a meager $326 million in Bank assistance. In contrast, between 1973 and 1981, the Bank funneled more than $2.6 billion into the country. Whereas prior to martial law, the Philippines ranked about 30th among recipients of Bank loans, by 1980 it placed eighth among 113 developing countries.
In return for this massive increase in aid, the Bank was given carte blanche to forge a comprehensive economic development plan for the Philippines. The two pillars of the strategy were “rural development” and “export oriented industrialization.”
Containing the Countryside
“Rural development” was the Bank’s response to the agricultural crisis. The centerpiece of the strategy was increasing the productivity of small farmers through the delivery of “technological packages” and upgrading agricultural support services like credit systems. Rural development, however, had implications that went beyond improved efficiency.
As McNamara explained to the Bank’s board of governors, the strategy would “put the emphasis not on redistribution of income and wealth — as justified as that may be in our member countries — but rather on increasing the productivity of the poor, thereby providing for an equitable sharing in the benefits of growth.” In short, rural development was partly counterinsurgency, directed at defusing the appeal of the revolutionary movement among the restive rural masses. It was, as one development specialist close to the Bank described it, “defensive modernization” which, if successful, will create a smallholder sector closely integrated with the national economy. Bank projects will encourage subsistence farmers to become small-scale market producers. With economic ties to other sectors, the farmers will be loath to link their interests to those not yet modernized and will hesitate to disrupt the national economy for fear of losing their own markets.
Export-oriented Industrialization
When it came to industry, McNamara pushed Marcos and other World Bank clients to “turn their manufacturing enterprises away from the relatively small markets associated with import substitution toward the much larger opportunities flowing from export promotion.” Quotas were to be eliminated and tariffs brought down to expose protected local industries to the winds of international competition; exporters were to be given incentives; export processing zones were to be set up; and wages were to be kept low to attract foreign investors. The Bank shot down a plan by Marcos’ more nationalistic technocrats to set up “11 big industrial projects,” including an integrated steel industry and a petrochemical complex. The Bank did not consider this attempt to create a strategic industrial core to be in line with export promotion.
As in the case with rural development, there was a social logic to export-oriented industrialization. Persisting in industrialization based on the internal market would have meant having to undertake massive income redistribution in order to expand the market necessary to sustain it, a move opposed by the local elite. By instead hitching the industrialization process to growing export markets, the Bank broke the link between industrialization and domestic income redistribution. The cost, however, was intensifying class conflict as governments attempted to keep wages low and exports competitive.
The World Bank vision was grand, but implementation of a project that favored foreign interests and the traditional elites met mass resistance. The project was also dogged by corruption, cronyism, incompetence, and when it came to land reform, lack of political will. Then there was the special problem of Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, who wanted to corner more and more World Bank money for her projects. “Mrs. Marcos,” one Bank bureaucrat wrote in a briefing paper for McNamara, “has identified herself with a few showcase projects that we consider ineffective and which are a bit of a joke among knowledgeable Filipinos.”
Crisis and the Advent of Structural Adjustment
By the early 1980s, the World Bank program was floundering, prompting management to commission political risk analyst William Ascher to assess the situation. Ascher’s findings were grim. The Marcos regime was marked by “increasing precariousness” and “the World Bank’s imprimatur on the industrial program runs the risk of drawing criticism of the Bank as the servant of multinational corporations and particularly of US economic imperialism.”
In a desperate effort to salvage a deteriorating situation, the Bank forced Marcos to appoint a cabinet of technocrats headed by Prime Minister Cesar Virata, its most trusted agent in the country. But the cure that Virata and company administered was worse than the disease. The country was subjected, along with only three other countries that agreed to be guinea pigs, to an experimental Bank program called “structural adjustment” that involved the comprehensive liberalization and deregulation of the economy. The program, one of McNamara’s last innovations before he retired in 1981, sought to fully expose developing economies to international market forces in order make them more efficient. In the Philippines, this adjustment entailed bringing down the effective rate of protection for manufacturing from 44 to 20%. Instead of invigorating the economy, however, this shock liberalization combined with the international recession of the early 1980s to bring about deep economic contraction from 1983 to 1986.
Indeed, structural adjustment led not only to deindustrialization; according to one study, it also created so much unemployment that migration patterns changed drastically. The large migration flows to Manila declined, and most migrants could turn only to open access forests, watersheds, and artisanal fisheries. Thus the major environmental effect of the economic crisis was overexploitation of these vulnerable resources.
Adjustment led to a decade of stagnation from which the country never really recovered, even as its neighbors, who were smart enough to avoid being saddled with the program, were registering 6-10% growth rates in 1985-1995.
Familiar Ending
Yet there was one unintended benefit for the Philippines: The economic chaos that structural adjustment provoked was one of the key factors that brought about the ouster of Marcos in the combined civil-military uprising of February 1986.
By that time, McNamara had been out of the Bank for five years. Ensconced in retirement, he must, however, have seen parallels between the last U.S. helicopters leaving Saigon in 1975 and Marcos going into exile in Hawaii on a U.S. aircraft in 1986. The Philippines was McNamara’s second Vietnam. Like the first, it was a memory the once-celebrated whiz-kid of the Kennedy administration would probably have preferred to bury.
Copyright © 2009, Institute for Policy Studies
Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines and president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition. A retired professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines, he is currently a columnist at Foreign Policy In Focus and a senior analyst at the Bangkok-based analysis and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He is the author of 15 books, the most recent of which is The Food Wars (New York: Verso, 2009). He can be reached at waldenbello (at) yahoo (dot) com.
Robert McNamara and Smedley Butler July 13, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in History, Vietnam, War.Tags: fog of war, general butler, nuremberg, robert mcnamara, roge hollander, smedley butler, tom gallagher, vietnam history, Vietnam War, war, War Crimes
add a comment
Butler, of course, achieved far greater clarity than the ever-hedging McNamara did. Butler’s story is fairly well known: four years after a military career that included service in Cuba, China, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Mexico, Haiti, and France, he wrote a book called “War is a Racket.” He gave speeches in which he would say things like, “during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
Whether any of this later-in-life understanding made Butler a better or worse person I do not know. What I do know, though, is that what Butler was willing to say and write was extremely helpful to more than one generation of antiwar activists: “Hey, you don’t have to take my word for it. Listen to this guy, he should know.”
Likewise, I suggest to no one that they should get over their antipathy to Robert McNamara if that is what they feel – the evil that he and Kissinger and the rest did will long outlive them. And anyone who no longer hates the criminals should certainly remain outraged at their crimes. But let us take something of value out of McNamara’s life.
When we encounter potential military recruits looking to serve in one of the nation’s seemingly always available wars but not looking too closely at exactly what it is we’re fighting for because they assume our leaders wouldn’t lead them astray on matters of life and death, let’s tell them about Robert McNamara. If the man in charge of one of our wars could later write that what the US did at the time was “wrong, terribly wrong,” don’t we all owe it to ourselves to take a closer look at where those in power are leading us today?
And when it comes to questioning the conduct of modern war, it’s hard to beat McNamara’s comments in Errol Morris’ documentary film “The Fog of War”: “We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” he told Morris. “[General Curtis] LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals.” And that was World War II he was talking about – the “good war.” Words to keep in mind the next time one of our drones accidently bombs a wedding.
A remark of McNamara’s made during a C-SPAN discussion of his 1995 memoir, “Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” is a good reminder of just how infuriating he could be, right to the end. In regard to Vietnam, he told his interviewer, “We were fighting — and we didn’t realize it — a civil war. Now, true, obviously there were Soviet and Chinese influence and support and no question that the communists were trying to control South Vietnam, but it was basically a civil war.”
Well, if McNamara didn’t know it was a civil war, it wasn’t because tens of thousands of the war’s opponents hadn’t said so or because President Eisenhower hadn’t publicly acknowledged that Ho Chi Minh would have been elected president of Vietnam in a fair election.
But even if McNamara may never have been a man to be taken entirely at his word, what he went on to say on C-SPAN that day might just have some value today as the US plunges deeper into an already nearly eight year old war in Afghanistan: “And one of the things we should learn is you can’t fight and win a civil war with outside troops, and particularly not when the political structure in a country is dissolved.”
True Cost of Chevron (Alternative Report) June 3, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Africa, Asia, Environment, Human Rights, Latin America, Nigeria.Tags: chevron, chevron contamination, chevron violence, contaminated water, human rights, justice nigeria, nigeria contaminated water, nigeria contamination, nigeria environment, nigeria oil, roger hollander
add a comment
| True Cost of Chevron Coalition Releases Alternative Annual Report“Chevron refuses to clean up its mess in Nigeria.” ChevWrong Ad Campaign designed by Underground Ads | |||||||||
|
|||||||||
| Justice In Nigeria Now! 2017 Mission St. 2nd Fl San Francisco, California 94110  |
Photo LEFT: Fire burning at Chevron Pascagoula, MS refinery, photograph by Christy Pritchett ran August 17, 2007.
Courtesy of the Press-Register 2007 © All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Unpunished Massacre June 2, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Human Rights, Sri Lanka/Tamil, War.Tags: human rights, humanitarian aid, roger hollander, sri lanka, sri lanka civil war, sri lanka massacre, sri lanka refugees, sri lankan government, tamil, tamil camps, tamil prisoners, tamil tigers
add a comment
Photos like this one of a dead Tamil child contradict the Colombo government’s cynical assertion that it had “liberated the civilians held hostage by the Tamil Tigers ‘without spilling a single drop of blood.’” (Photo: Marie-France Calle / Le Figaro)
“The [Sri Lankan] government is keeping close to 300,000 Tamils prisoner in camps surrounded by barbed wire, access to which is severely restricted for humanitarian aid workers and journalists.” (Photo: Marie-France Calle / Le Figaro)
Monday 01 June 2009
by: | Visit article original @ Le Monde | Editorial
The Sri Lankan regime is exultant. It’s about to get away scot-free with the massacre of thousands of civilians on its country’s northeastern beaches. According to a UN estimate, close to 20,000 people could have perished in the Sri Lankan army’s end of January to end of May offensive against the ultra-violent Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) separatist movement. Conducted largely out of camera range, this carnage – reported by Le Monde’s special envoy – has given rise to neither investigation nor sanction.
That explains how Sri Lankan Foreign Affairs Minister Rohitha Bogollagama, could declare on Sunday, May 31: “Sri Lanka will enter into the annals of history as the example of a nation that overcame the scourge of terrorism, even as it tenaciously enforced respect for the precious values of democracy.” With the same cynicism, Colombo asserted that it had liberated the civilians held hostage by the Tamil Tigers “without spilling a single drop of blood.”
The Sri Lankan government came away emboldened from a session of the UN Human Rights Council on May 26 and 27 that turned into a farce. The meeting of this astonishing inner circle finished off with a resolution praising the government for its human rights efforts…. The text, backed by China, India and Pakistan, offers international support for Colombo’s actions.
As for the victims, they remain voiceless. The government is keeping close to 300,000 Tamils prisoner in camps surrounded by barbed wire, access to which is severely restricted for humanitarian aid workers and journalists. The three admirable Tamil doctors who took care of civilians during the bombings are detained in a sinister Colombo interrogation center. The local press is under orders and human rights defenders fear for their lives.
Opposed in battle, the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers are complicit in the carnage. Because it was legitimately struggling against a terrorist movement, the army believed itself entitled to rain down a deluge of fire on the tents of tens of thousands of refugees. No less sanguinary, the Tamil Tigers transformed “their people” into human shields and recruited its children by force.
It’s not too late for the UN to speak up. However, in the absence of an international investigation, democracies must tackle the problem and arraign Colombo. Unless they wish to agree that it’s all right to massacre in silence – an attitude that will feed tomorrow’s terrorism.
——–
Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
U.S. Threat to Atom Bomb North Korea Never Forgotten May 27, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Foreign Policy, History, North/South Korea, War.Tags: 38th parallel, atomic bomb, harry truman, jay janson, korean civil war, korean police action, korean war, north korea history, north korea nuclear, north korea nuclear capacity, noth korea, Obama, obama promise, rhee, roger hollander
add a comment
Jay Janson
www.opednews.com, May 27, 2009
North Korea again in the news.
Ominously, President Obama has promised “action” after denouncing North Korea’s underground nuclear explosion on May 26th. This follows Obama’s recent successful call for increased UN sanctions after North Korea’s space rocket launch – which apparently sent the wrong message with counterproductive effect – that is, unless Obama wanted North Korea to feel threatened.
Scary, because it should be of frighteningly serious concern that yet another nation comes to have nuclear weapon technology that could possibly be transferred to, or fall in the hands of terrorists seeking homicidal vengeance for the America,s predatory hegemony over the poorer and vulnerable nations of the world.
Where is this new diplomacy of open communication with enemy nations the electorate was promised and commercial media keeps announcing?
Shall we not best ponder whether the North Korean insistence that its tests of weaponry are intended enhance its defensive strength in the face of US threats could be based on its perception of reality.
On November 30, 1950, President Truman at a press conference, remarked that the use of the atomic bomb was under active consideration. Koreans heard this as menacingly foreboding apocalypse, for U.S. forces were in retreat and had suffered some serious losses subsequent to China sending ‘volunteer’ forces to help the North Koreans defend as U.S. forces neared the Chinese border some 45 days earlier.
Originally, the civil war had been over, the North having won quickly and easily when the U.S. invaded, subsequently punishing Korea with millions of casualties.
North Korea was bombed to rubble by the U.S. which also leveled almost every town in South Korea to prevent the overthrow of the U.S. sponsored Rhee dictatorship (Rhee was forced to flee the country a few years after the war anyway).
The period immediately before the war was marked by escalating border conflicts at the 38th Parallel and attempts to negotiate elections for the entirety of Korea. The years befpre had seen rebellions in the South, one occasioning a terrible massacre of 30,000 on Cheju Island far off the southern tip of South Korea, under U.S. occupation. Koreans, both North and South, are well aware of this turbulent history that predates the North’s successful invasion
Not many years ago, the president of a civilian government in South
Korea apologized to its people for the massacres that happened there even years after the U.S. ‘police action’ was over.
The Clinton administration expressed regret to Koreans for the massacres of civilians by U.S. troops, which South Koreans were finally permitted to talk about.
But no American president has seen fit to apologize for similar massacres which occurred as the US conquered North Korea. The United States apologizing to an announced ‘enemy’ in today’s climate of empire would be unheard of, especially within conglomerate owned war promoting media. After all, whatever damage done to an designated enemy must be advantageous. Our United States is not about to apologize for what we did to Korea or any other country even before it was designated an enemy. President Wilson signed on to the Japanese occupation of Korea and Truman’s divided Korea in two, once the Japanese surrendered.
Heartlessly, most political leaders in the world dominating industrialized nations insist that the death a couple of million Koreans was worth preventing a unified Korea under communist government. Communist Russia eventually evaporated, and communist, in name only, China and Vietnam are now welcomed trading partners. A permitted communist Korea might have just as likely evolved into an acceptable near capitalist society as well.
North Koreans have the memory of the most brutal of bombings, protracted war, the U.S. invasion which included UN documented massacres, the further devastation incurred in expelling the U.S. Army and Navy with the aid of the Chinese, plus threats of atomic bombing and terrifying cautions and warnings of U.S. bacteriological warfare.
North Koreans, have also experienced terrible suffering during the postwar rebuilding of their scorched land while under duress of strict U.S. sanctions. Progressives in the West attribute some of the responsibility for the severity of the government in the North, and the lack of freedom of its people, to the effects of the merciless and vindictive foreign policy of the U.S., which has kept tens of thousands of troops near its border all these years, while decrying the North’s massive buildup of its military.
Of course all this is justified in U.S. commercial media with an American shrug of the shoulders and, ‘The North attacked the South first,’ and the North was a communist dictatorship. It still is, but a lot more intense about the strength of its military.
Russia and China are for finding a solution in the six party negotiations. Obama is again for increasing punishment, while certainly knowing that this is merely heating up the confrontation between the massive American Empire and a diminutive, by comparison, North Korea, once pulverized by U.S. air power.
Seems like candidate Obama’s promise of talking to one’s ‘enemies’ is being replaced by threats and punishments, rather openly in the case of North Korea, and Iran, while setting stern preconditions for lifting the economic blockade on Cuba.
North Korea is going to a lot of expense to acquire nuclear capability. Is it possible that America has fueled this paranoid impulse with its past threat to nuke North Korea, and its subsequent efforts to isolate and vilify its government as Evil.
Note: For further background on North Korea’s perhaps understandable fears or dangerous paranoia see articles below:
More than 100,000 massacred by allies during Korean War, Telegraph Co.,UK, by Richard Spencer in Seoul, 29 Dec 2008
“More than 100,000 South Korean civilians were massacred by allied troops fighting alongside Britain and the US in the Korean War, an official investigation has revealed.
Obama Calls on U.N. to Punish North Korea Over Rocket, but WHO PUNISHES THE U.S.? April 6, 2009, OpEdNews
Commercial media feeding frenzy on the space missile launch by North Korea at the same time whipping up fear of Iran. Obama has harsh words for North Korea, as earlier for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Venezuela and Iran, which received a kind invite to talk mixed in with such severe public criticism as to make the invitation unacceptable. So far, Obama, both as president and as commander-in-chief belies change to serious diplomacy.
April 17, 2009, OpEdNew
On the Need for Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in America
“In 2005, in keeping with its maturation as a constitutional democracy, the South Korean National Assembly established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to seek to “reveal the truth behind civilian massacres during the Korean War and human rights abuses during the [South Korean] authoritarian period and recent evidence of U.S. and South Korean responsibility for the massacre of civilians before and during the Korean War.”
Feb. 27, 2008, OpEdNews
NY Phil Plays in a Korea Once Destroyed by U.S. Invasion, Flattened by U.S. Bombers
“Beautiful telecast. Koreans interviewed spoke of avowed resolve to protect their country,they knew Americans were their enemies, spoke softly, politely, with calm pleasant countenance. Americans can go on thinking they were good guys doing good. But they might like to remember that ‘good’ was done in Korea, to Koreans, all of whom were not in agreement that it was for their own good. Picasso’s Cheju Massacre Painting sobering”
Leading Sri Lanka Tamil Politician Claims ‘Genocide’ by Military May 12, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Asia, Sri Lanka/Tamil.Tags: genocide, ltte, mahinda rajapaksa, roger hollander, sinhlaese, sri lanka, sri lanka civil war, sri lanka genocide, sri lanka government, sri lanka massacre, sri lanka military, sri lanka parliament, steve herman, tamil, tamil national alliance, tamil tigers, tigers of tamil eelam, tna
add a comment
| Colombo 12 May 2009
|
Sri Lankan ethnic Tamils are seen with the dead bodies of their relatives at a make-shift hospital in Tamil Tiger-controlled no fire zone in Mullivaaykaal, Sri Lanka, 11 May 2009Tamil Tiger rebels say Sri Lanka’s military has renewed shelling Tuesday of the only remaining combat zone. The top government doctor in the rebel-controlled territory says at least 45 patients died when a mortar hit the admissions ward of the only remaining medical facility there. The military has repeatedly denied using heavy artillery to try to protect tens of thousands of civilians trapped with the rebels. It says three divisions continue advancing to rescue all the civilians in the final phase of the offensive to defeat the rebels in the sliver of coastal land they still hold. A senior opposition politician contends the Sinhalese-dominated military is deliberately targeting ethnic Tamils.
Sri Lanka’s government says the impending battlefield defeat of the Tamil Tigers, regarded as a terrorist organization, will bring national reunification and return democracy to the Tamil-dominated north.
An opposition member of parliament, representing the northern Jaffna district, sees only more trouble ahead, because the government is failing to win Tamil hearts and minds.
In a VOA interview, Suresh Premachandran, of the Tamil National Alliance, blamed the military for civilian deaths during this year’s offensive to retake the north and wipe out the rebels.
“Within five months, more than 10,000 killed and 20,000 injured,” he said. “Definitely it’s a genocide. Definitely the international community is having the duty to stop it.”
Top Army commanders contend troops have not killed a single civilian during their offensive.
Government medical workers in the combat zone report hundreds – and possibly thousands – of civilian casualties in recent days.
The TNA’s Premachandran blames the military for this latest artillery barrage and predicts more Tamil deaths.
“Definitely they are the people who are shelling and if they are going ahead with this sort of slaughtering, definitely within another two or three days time another few thousand are going to get killed,” he said.
Government leaders accuse the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of firing artillery, killing civilians and then blaming the military.
Premachandran says the LTTE has been fighting for a “just cause,” but acknowledges the rebels – condemned for their urban suicide bombings and political assassinations – have committed “excesses.”
The TNA has 22 members in parliament, representing the Tamil north and east. Premachandran says he and his party believe in negotiations and the political process to settle the Tamil question in the island nation.
But Premachandran says he has grown increasingly impatient with the political climate, describing the reaction when he and other Tamil politicians speak in parliament.
“Immediately all the people who are in the ruling party start to shout, ‘You LTTE bugger’ and things like that. They are not prepared to listen to us. They are not prepared to discuss matters with us,” he added. “If [an opposition member of parliament] speaks the truth, if he criticizes the undemocratic matters happening in this country, immediately he will be called as an LTTE’er.”
Premachandran says such accusations have a chilling effect. Three of his fellow TNA members of parliament have been assassinated.
The office of President Mahinda Rajapaksa says it is reaching out to Tamil parties to rebuild civil society in the north.
The Tamil National Alliance says it is boycotting such meetings with the government until it shows sincerity in discussing a ceasefire with the LTTE and accepts a political solution.
Up, Up and Away: The West’s Hysterical Reaction to North Korea April 18, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Asia, Foreign Policy, North/South Korea.Tags: ballistic missile, Barack Obama, barack obama china india intelligence iran israel japan law media military north korea npt nuclear nukes obama pakistan ritter russia security south korea wmd, china, India, intelligence, Iran, israel, japan, law, Media, military, missile, non-proliferation, north korea, npt, nuclear, nukes, outer space treaty, pakistan, ritter, roger hollander, russia, security, security council, south korea, UN Charter, wmd
add a comment
Posted on Apr 17, 2009, www.truthdig.com
 |
| AP photo / Ahn Young-joon |
South Koreans watch a TV news program on the launch of a North Korean missile. |
By Scott Ritter
Six minutes before 1 o’clock in the afternoon, on Jan. 23, a 173-foot-tall, two-stage rocket lifted off from Northeast Asia. Capable of carrying a giant 33,000-pound payload, the rocket’s liquid-fuel engine, supplemented by two solid-fuel strap-on booster rockets, generated nearly half a million pounds of thrust before giving way to the second stage, likewise powered by a liquid-fuel engine. After reaching a height of nearly 430 miles, the rocket released into orbit a 3,850-pound satellite, along with seven smaller probes. Other than the small community of scientists interested in the data expected to be collected from the “Ibuki” Greenhouse Gases Observatory Satellite (GOSAT), the rocket’s main payload, very few people around the world took notice of the launch. The United Nations Security Council did not meet in an emergency session to denounce the launch, nor did it craft a package of punitive economic sanctions in response.
The reason? The rocket in question, the H-2A, was launched by Japan, at its Tanegashima Space Launch Facility. Deemed an exclusively civilian program, the H-2A has been launched 15 times since its inaugural mission on Aug. 29, 2001. Four of these launches have been in support of exclusively military missions, delivering spy satellites into orbit over North Korea. Although capable of delivering a modern nuclear warhead to intercontinental ranges, the H-2A is seen as a “non-threatening” system since its liquid-fueled engines require a lengthy fueling process prior to launching, precluding any quick-launch capability deemed essential for a military application.
About the Author  Scott Ritter was a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998 and a U.S. Marine intelligence officer. He is author of “Target Iran” (Nation Books, 2006) and the forthcoming “On Dangerous Ground: Following the Path of America’s Failed Arms Control Policy,” also published by Nation Books. For more on Scott Ritter, including his previous Truthdig columns, click here. |
In contrast, on April 5, at 11:30 in the morning, North Korea launched a three-stage rocket called “Unha,” or “Milky Way,” which it claimed was carrying a single small communications satellite weighing a few hundred pounds. Like the H-2A, the “Unha,” better known in the West as the Taepodong-2, is liquid-fueled, requiring weeks of preliminary preparation before launch. Although North Korea declared the vehicle to be intended for launching a satellite, the launch was condemned even before it occurred as “dangerous” and “provocative,” unlike Japan’s similar efforts.
The Taepodong-2 launch was the second attempt by the North Koreans to get this particular design airborne. In 2006, the first effort ended in failure when the rocket exploded some 40 seconds after liftoff. The second launch, by all accounts (except North Korea’s, which announced that its satellite was successfully orbiting the Earth, broadcasting patriotic music), was likewise a failure. The first stage, based on a Chinese design derived from the CSS-2 missile, seemed to function as intended, given the fact that it splashed down in the Sea of Japan in the area expected. However, the second stage, together with the smaller solid-fuel third stage designed to boost the satellite into orbit, fell several hundred miles short of its anticipated impact area, indicating a failure of the second stage to perform properly and, ultimately, launch the satellite. Western hysteria, which labeled the North Korean rocket a direct threat to the western United States, prompting calls for the missile to be shot down, proved unfounded.
In October 2006, in response to North Korea’s announcement that it had conducted an underground test of a nuclear weapon, the Security Council of the United Nations passed Resolution 1718. This resolution, passed under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, condemned the North Korean nuclear weapon test and called for the imposition of economic sanctions until North Korea’s nuclear weapons program was dismantled and its nuclear program as a whole reintegrated into the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. It also singled out North Korea’s ballistic missile programs, demanding that Pyongyang “not conduct any further … launch of a ballistic missile” and “suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile program and in this context re-establish its pre-existing commitments to a moratorium on missile launching” and “abandon all other existing weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programme in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner.”
The April 5 launch was widely condemned by the United States and others (including Japan, which assumed a leading role in framing the North Korean test as “destabilizing” and “dangerous”). President Barack Obama characterized the North Korean launch as a violation of Security Council resolutions and pushed for the council to punish Pyongyang. However, not everyone shared the sentiments of the United States and Japan. Both Russia and China questioned whether the launch was in fact a violation of Resolution 1718, noting that North Korea had every right to launch satellites. The best the United States and Japan could get from the U.N. Security Council was a statement issued by the council president condemning the launch as a “contravention” of Security Council Resolution 1718 and demanding that North Korea “comply fully” with its obligations under the resolution. The statement also demanded that North Korea not shoot off any more rockets or missiles.
Thus it appears that the United Nations Security Council, and not North Korea, is acting in a manner inconsistent with international law. On March 5, 2009, North Korea notified Russia that it was joining the 1966 Outer Space Treaty. Russia is one of three depository states for that treaty (the other two being the United States and the United Kingdom), and North Korea’s announcement made the commitment binding. At the same time, North Korea informed the U.N. secretary-general that it was joining the 1974 Convention on Registration of Objects Launched Into Outer Space. The Outer Space Treaty proclaims “the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind,” and that “outer space shall be free for exploration and use by all States.” North Korea’s joining the 1974 convention, while not mandatory, put it in compliance with the established practices of other nations having space launch programs, including Iran, which signed the treaty back in 1967, and which on Feb. 2, 2008, successfully launched a satellite on board its two-stage Safir-2 (“Ambassador”) vehicle. While the United States and others strongly criticized the Iranian action, Russia noted that Iran had not violated international law. The same holds true of the North Korean launch.
A major problem confronting President Obama and others who fear that North Korean and Iranian launches are merely a cover for the development of technologies useful for military ballistic missile programs is that, unlike in the nuclear field, where the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT) seeks to control nuclear weapon technologies and activities within a framework of binding international law, there is no corresponding treaty vehicle concerning ballistic missiles. In 1991, the U.N. Security Council did impose restrictions on ballistic missile technology for Iraq in the aftermath of the Gulf War, but this was a case-specific action which, in defining its mandate, had to turn not to an existing body of binding international law-based definitions, but rather to a voluntary arrangement known as the Missile Technology Control Regime [MTCR], brought into being in 1987. Today the MTCR consists of 34 members, all of which have agreed to abide by a regime that controls the availability of missile-related technology to nonmember states. But the MTCR does not carry with it the force of law, and has become politicized over the years through the inconsistent application of its mandate to the point that it is viewed by many nonsignatory nations as sustaining the military advantage of the member nations.
While both North Korea and Iran have come under strong international criticism and sanctions for their respective nuclear and missile activities, it should be noted that neither nation has acted in a manner which violates international law. North Korea withdrew from the NPT prior to testing its nuclear weapon, and Iran’s nuclear enrichment program operates with full transparency and in keeping with its obligations under the NPT. As signatories to the 1966 Outer Space Treaty, both nations are legally permitted to pursue space launch activity, and the MTCR does not ban ballistic missile development, but rather merely prevents signatory nations from providing such technology to nonsignatory nations. But the lack of international outrage and demands for sanctions against nations such as Israel, Pakistan and India (all of which possess nuclear weapons programs operating outside the NPT, as well as military ballistic missile programs designed to deliver these nuclear weapons) undermines the legitimacy of the current attention on North Korea and Iran.
On the day North Korea launched its “Unha” vehicle, President Obama delivered a speech in Prague, the Czech Republic, which was hastily redrafted to take the North Korean action into account. “North Korea broke the rules,” Obama said. “Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.” These bold statements were made at the same time the president was calling for a global abolition of nuclear weapons and a strengthened NPT as “a basis for cooperation,” one which would require “more resources and authority to strengthen international inspections” and deliver “real and immediate consequences for countries caught breaking the rules or trying to leave the treaty without cause.” The president outlined a valid (if vague) course of action concerning nuclear weapons, but having linked nuclear weapons with ballistic missile delivery vehicles, he remained conspicuously mute on how he envisioned containing and controlling that threat.
Expansion of the MTCR is not a viable option, although in its most recent plenary session the MTCR underscored the importance of the regime working closely with the United Nations to follow through on measures put in place under Security Council Resolution 1540, passed in 2004 under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. Those measures require all states to “establish domestic controls to prevent the proliferation of such weapons and means of delivery, in particular for terrorist purposes, including by establishing appropriate controls over related materials, and adopt legislative measures in that respect.” The resolution specifically said that none of its obligations should be interpreted “so as to conflict with or alter the rights and obligations of State parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention or alter the responsibilities of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).” This reflects the reality that there is established, binding international agreement on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. There is no such agreement on ballistic missiles.
This is the missing link in Obama’s call for a nuclear-free world. It will be difficult enough to convince entrenched domestic special interests, both economic and political, that we would be safer without nuclear weapons. It will be impossible to sell such a program internationally unless it is coupled with a similar undertaking involving the very missiles and related technology the MTCR seeks to restrict. Such a restriction cannot be limited to those nations which do not currently possess such technology, but rather must be binding on all nations. While the world was focused on the launch of the North Korean missile, almost unmentioned was the testing of an SS-25 intercontinental missile by Russia on April 10. This missile, designed and equipped to deliver a single 500-kiloton nuclear warhead, flew 6,000 miles before hitting its designated target area (the warhead used was a dummy). And what about February’s test launch of a U.S. Navy D-5 ballistic missile from a Trident submarine? This missile flew some 4,000 miles and was equipped with multiple warheads. There was hardly any mention of the test of a U.S. Minuteman III missile in July 2006, made six days after the U.S. orchestrated Security Council condemnation of North Korea’s failed launch of a Taepodong-2 space launch vehicle. India, Pakistan and Israel have all conducted recent tests of their respective nuclear-capable ballistic missile arsenals. If the world is going to be serious about getting rid of nuclear weapons, then it must also address the issue of eliminating those delivery vehicles which provide the most viable vector for nuclear attack—ballistic missiles.
Combining the goals and intent of the MTCR with the 1966 Outer Space Treaty would be a good place to start. Banning ballistic missiles yet maintaining space launch capability are not mutually exclusive objectives. The technologies might be similar, but the employment methodologies are not. Military ballistic missiles are deployed in secrecy and rapidly prepared for launch. Space launch vehicles are operated in full transparency, on declared schedules with announced objectives. If the list of technologies currently controlled by the MTCR was expanded to include all technologies associated with missile launch activity, and access to such technologies made conditional on their use in declared, carefully monitored space launchings controlled by a binding international treaty, it would be possible to rid the world of the scourge of global nuclear attack by not only removing the nuclear weapons but also the most effective means of their delivery. Obama and others who criticize North Korea and Iran would do well to reflect on such a possibility the next time they embark on the ineffective and hypocritical path of assailing those who simply seek to acquire what we already have—whether it be nuclear weapons, nuclear technology, ballistic missiles or space launch capability.
Scott Ritter was a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998 and a U.S. Marine intelligence officer. He is author of “Target Iran” (Nation Books, 2006) and the forthcoming “On Dangerous Ground: Following the Path of America’s Failed Arms Control Policy,” also published by Nation Books. |
America’s Imperial Wars: We Need to See the Horrors April 11, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel, Gaza & Middle East, Vietnam, War.Tags: Afghanistan War, anti-war, civilian casualties, david lindorff, gaza, Iraq war, marc herold, naplam, phosphorus, us history, us imperial war, Vietnam War, war atrocities, war casualties, war history, war journalism, war media, war reporting
add a comment
Published on Saturday, April 11, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
When I was a 17-year-old kid in my senior year of high school, I didn’t think much about Vietnam. It was 1967, the war was raging, but I didn’t personally know anyone who was over there, Tet hadn’t happened yet. If anything, the excitement of jungle warfare attracted my interest more than anything (I had a .22 cal rifle, and liked to go off in the woods and shoot at things, often, I’ll admit, imagining it was an armed enemy.)
But then I had to do a major project in my humanities program and I chose the Vietnam War. As I started researching this paper, which was supposed to be a multi-media presentation, I ran across a series of photos of civilian victims of American napalm bombing. These victims, often, were women and children-even babies.
The project opened my eyes to something that had never occurred to me: my country’s army was killing civilians. And it wasn’t just killing them. It was killing them, and maiming them, in ways that were almost unimaginable in their horror: napalm, phosphorus, anti-personnel bombs that threw out spinning flechettes that ripped through the flesh like tiny buzz saws. I learned that scientists like what I at the time wanted to become were actually working on projects to make these weapons even more lethal, for example trying to make napalm more sticky so it would burn longer on exposed flesh.
By the time I had finished my project, I had actively joined the anti-war movement, and later that year, when I turned 18 and had to register for the draft, I made the decision that no way was I going to allow myself to participate in that war.
A key reason my-and millions of other Americans’–eyes were opened to what the US was up to in Indochina was that the media at that time, at least by 1967, had begun to show Americans the reality of that war. I didn’t have to look too hard to find the photos of napalm victims, or to read about the true nature of the weapons that our forces were using.
Today, while the internet makes it possible to find similar information about the conflicts in the world in which the US is participating, either as primary combatant or as the chief provider of arms, as in Gaza, one actually has to make a concerted effort to look for them. The corporate media which provide the information that most Americans simply receive passively on the evening news or at breakfast over coffee carefully avoid showing us most of the graphic horror inflicted by our military machine.
We may read the cold fact that the US military, after initial denials, admits that its forces killed not four enemy combatants in an assault on a house in Afghanistan, but rather five civilians-including a man, a female teacher, a 10-year-old girl, a 15-year-old boy and a tiny baby. But we don’t see pictures of their shattered bodies, no doubt shredded by the high-powered automatic rifles typically used by American forces.
We may read about wedding parties that are bombed by American forces-something that has happened with some frequency in both Iraq and Afghanistan– where the death toll is tallied in dozens, but we are, as a rule, not provided with photos that would likely show bodies torn apart by anti-personnel bombs-a favored weapon for such attacks on groups of supposed enemy “fighters.” (A giveaway that such weapons are being used is a typically high death count with only a few wounded.)
Obviously one reason for this is that the US military no longer gives US journalists, including photo journalists, free reign on the battlefield. Those who travel with troops are under the control of those troops and generally aren’t allowed to photograph the scenes of devastation, and sites of such “mishaps” are generally ruled off limits until the evidence has been cleared away.
But another reason is that the media themselves sanitize their pages and their broadcasts. It isn’t just American dead that we don’t get to see. It’s the civilian dead-at least if our guys do it. We are not spared gruesome images following attacks on civilians by Iraqi insurgent groups, or by Taliban forces in Afghanistan. But we don’t get the same kind of photos when it’s our forces doing the slaughtering. Because often the photos and video images do exist-taken by foreign reporters who take the risk of going where the US military doesn’t want them.
No wonder that even today, most Americans oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan not because of sympathy with the long-suffering peoples of those two lands, but because of the hardships faced by our own forces, and the financial cost of the two wars.
For some real information on the horror that is being perpetrated on one of the poorest countries in the world by the greatest military power the world has ever known, check out the excellent work by Professor Marc Herold at the University of New Hampshire (http://cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm and http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2008/10/06/the-imprecision-ofus-bombing-and-the-under-valuation-of-an-afghan-life.html).
Agent Orange in Vietnam: Ignoring the Crimes Before Our Eyes October 17, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Media, Vietnam, War.Tags: War Crimes, roger hollander, Vietnam War, vietnam, geneva conventions, dow chemical, monsanto, dave lindorff, chemical warfare, agent orange, dioxin, vietnam veterans, new yori times, james dao, vietnam defoliation
1 comment so far
On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined “Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange,” which was sure to be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13 ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also responsible for three more dread diseases-Parkinson’s, ischemic heart disease and hairy-cell leukemia.
Under a new policy adopted by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the VA will now start providing free care to any of the 2.1 million Vietnam-era veterans who can show that they might have been hurt by exposure to Agent Orange.
This is another belated step forward in the decades-long struggle by Vietnam War veterans to get the Defense Department and the VA to acknowledge the American government’s responsibility for poisoning them and causing permanent damage to them and often to their children and grandchildren. Dioxin, one of the most poisonous substances known to man, is known to cause many serious systemic diseases, autoimmune illnesses, cancers and birth defects. (It is also a warning about the general Pentagon and government approach to other hazards caused by its battlefield use of toxins-most significantly the increasingly common use of depleted uranium projectiles in bombs, shells and bullets-an approach which features lack of concern about health effects on troops and civilians, denial of information to troops, and denial of care to eventual victims.)
Missing from the Times article, written by military affairs reporter James Dao, which did include mention of the obstructionist role the government has played through this whole sorry saga, was a single mention of the far larger number of victims of Agent Orange in Vietnam-the people on whose heads and lands the toxic chemical was actually dropped, or of the adamant refusal by the US government to accept any responsibility for what it did to them.
According to the article, the VA estimates that there may be as many as 200,000 US veterans who are suffering from Agent Orange-related illnesses. But according to a court case brought on behalf of Vietnamese victims, which was dismissed by a US Federal District Judge who ruled that there was “no basis for the claims,” there are at least three million Vietnamese, and possibly as many as 4.8 million, who are suffering the same Agent Orange-related illnesses as American veterans and their children. It is estimated that as many as 800,000 Vietnamese in the country’s south currently suffer from chronic health problems due to Agent Orange exposure, either to themselves, or to a parent or grandparent. Most of these victims, some of whom are retarded, and others of whom cannot walk or have no use of their arms, need constant care.
Veterans for Peace, an organization whose membership includes a large number of Vietnam War veterans, has issued a call for the US to provide funds for health care, education, vocational education, chronic care, home care and equipment to clean up hotspots of dioxin in Vietnam-a call which Congress and the White House have consistently ignored. Tests have found dioxin levels around the sites of the three main former US bases in what was South Vietnam to be 300-400 times recognized safe levels. The US dumped huge amounts of Agent Orange for miles around those bases to kill off jungle cover that Vietnamese fighters could use to approach the bases, but it was never cleaned up when the US pulled out.
One organization that includes a number of American veterans of the way, including former military doctors or soldiers who later became physicians, is the Vietnam Friendship Village Project USA Inc., which raises funds to help establish communities in Vietnam to care for the victims of Agent Orange.
It may seem a pathetic stab at principle given America’s use of two nuclear weapons against civilian targets in Japan a few years later, but back in World War II, in the midst of the most brutal island-to-island fighting during the Pacific War, a US Judge Advocate General in the Pentagon ruled that a military request for permission to use herbicides against the Japanese on Pacific islands would be illegal under the Hague Convention (forerunner of what are now called the Geneva Conventions). He ruled that trying to destroy the crops of civilians on those islands to deny food to the Japanese troops would be a war crime. The US went ahead and used the herbicides anyway, arguing that even though it was illegal, the US was free to go ahead, since the Japanese had already broken the laws of war by using strychnine to kill military guard dogs in Siberia. Under the rules of war, if one side breaks a rule, the other side is no longer bound by it.
But the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese never used toxic materials against US forces or against South Vietnamese forces. And the Pentagon in the Vietnam War never even considered whether spraying a highly toxic herbicide over 1.4 million hectares-12% of the total land area of Vietnam and almost 25% of the southern half of the country-might be a war crime.
Moreover, the Pentagon knew, before it began its massive defoliation campaign, about studies showing that Agent Orange was heavily laced with deadly dioxin, but covered up those studies, some by the chemical’s makers, Dow Chemical and Monsanto, and never even warned the troops who handled the material daily, or who were sent out to fight in areas that had been heavily sprayed.
The ongoing medical disaster in Vietnam caused by America’s criminal use of Agent Orange to defoliate a nation would be a good place for President Obama to start earning his just-awarded Nobel Peace Prize. He could kick off his peace campaign by finally honoring President Richard Nixon’s immediately broken promise to provide several billion dollars in reconstruction aid to Vietnam at the conclusion of peace talks at the end of the war. Not a dollar of such aid was ever given.
Dao says he didn’t mention significance for Vietnamese dioxin victims of the VA’s decision to recognize three new diseases as being Agent Orange-linked, because “my beat is veterans,” and because he only had 800 words in which to cover his story. That may be true (though surely the Vietnamese at least deserved a one-sentence mention). But back on July 25, when the Times ran a story (by Janie Lorber, not by Dao) about the finding by an expert panel of the National Institute of Medicine linking Parkinsons, ischemic heart disease and leukemia to Agent Orange, upon which the latest VA decision was based, it also failed to mention the Vietnamese victims. In that case, the lapse was simply journalistically inexcuseable, since it was about a new medical finding, not a policy decision regarding the treatment of veterans.
At this point, the only way the New York Times can salvage a bit of its journalistic reputation on this topic would be by having Dao, Lorber or some other reporter write a piece about the impact of America’s Agent Orange use on the people of Vietnam. They could start by calling a veteran at Veterans for Peace or the Vietnam Friendship Village Project USA.
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. He is author of Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains (BantamBooks, 1992), and his latest book “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net