Shocked Over Kerrey? It's How We Fought the War
<http://www.counterpunch.org/>
Here's one of the many unsettling things about Bob Kerrey, and it doesn't
even address the issue of what exactly he did in the Vietnamese village of
Thanh Phong. Supposedly riddled with indecision whether to accept the Medal
of Honor for a military action subsequent to the one now under dispute, he
finally did so on May 14, 1970, just 10 days after after the Ohio National
Guard killed four anti-war student protesters at Kent State.
In other words, at a moment of maximal national revulsion against the Vietnam
War, former Sen. Kerrey went along with the Pentagon's urgent desire for
heroes and presented his chest to President Richard M. Nixon, who pinned the
medal to it. So much for "ambiguity," one of the words used now to salvage
his reputation. And now, and only now, is he considering whether to give back
the Bronze Star awarded him for the 1969 mission in which (if you believe, as
we do, his fellow SEAL Gerhard Klann) he assisted in the throat-slitting of
an elderly Vietnamese peasant and ordered the killing of 13 women and babies,
or (if you believe him) less wittingly supervised the slaughter of an old man
and 13 or more women and children.
It's pretty clear that Kerrey's raid was part of the CIA's Phoenix program
(as was My Lai, where "Task Force Barker" killed 504 men, women and children
the preceding year). The intent of Phoenix was terror, precisely the killing
of not only suspected Viet Cong, but also their families. The late William
Colby, the CIA man who ran the program, told Congress that between 1967-1971,
20,587 Vietnamese "activists" were killed under the Phoenix program. The
South Vietnamese declared that 41,000 had been killed. Other estimates go as
high as 70,000.
Barton Osborn, an intelligence officer in the Phoenix program, spelled out in
a congressional hearing the prevailing bureaucratic attitude of the agents
toward their campaign of terror: "Quite often it was a matter of expediency
just to eliminate a person in the field rather than deal with the paperwork."
And who was classified as a "VC sympathizer" and, therefore, fair game to be
slaughtered by units like Kerrey's? The CIA's Robert Ramsdell, one of the two
men who developed the My Lai operation, said, "Anyone in that area was
considered a VC sympathizer because they couldn't survive in that area unless
they were sympathizers." Thanh Phong was in "that area," which lends credence
to Klann's account of what Kerrey's raiders did.
The death squads run by the CIA men supervising Phoenix were a particular
favorite of the man who pinned the medal on Kerrey: Nixon. After My Lai there
was a move to reduce funding for these killing programs. According to
journalist Seymour Hersh, Nixon passionately objected: "No. We've got to have
more of this. Assassinations. Killings." The funding was swiftly restored.
When he was at Newsweek in 1998, reporter Gregory Vistica had Kerrey cold,
but the newsmagazine's editors decided that since Kerrey was no longer a
presidential candidate it wasn't worth exposing him. It was apparently OK for
a U.S. senator to be an alleged war criminal. Then the New York Times finally
decided to run Vistica's story because Kerrey had left the Senate. Given the
lack of disquiet among faculty and students, it's also apparently OK for an
alleged war criminal like Kerrey to be head of the New School University in
New York, which in earlier days hosted refugees from Nazi Germany.
So will the Kerrey brouhaha nudge the nation or Congress into confronting the
past and what the Vietnam War really involved? Of course not. Right before
the last election, CounterPunch ran a story by Doug Valentine, who wrote "The
Phoenix Program," one of the best histories of what really happened in
Vietnam. Valentine's CounterPunch story concerned Robert Simmons, in the
midst of an ultimately successful campaign to represent Connecticut in
Congress. The specific charge against Simmons, originally leveled in the
Connecticut paper New London Day in 1994 was that he routinely violated the
Geneva Convention while interrogating civilian prisoners during his 20 months
of service with the CIA in Vietnam. Simmons claimed he'd always steered clear
of the dirty stuff. Same way Kerrey claims that when his unit cut the throats
of the old folk in a Thanh Phong peasant hut, he was outside.
When Simmons was battling to become a congressman (after a long career in
state government in Connecticut), no national paper cared a whit about the
fact that a possible torturer and war criminal was on the hustings. Small
wonder Congress is being protective of Kerrey, admonishing the Pentagon not
to probe what happened at Thanh Phong. How many executive agents of the
Phoenix program are strolling up and down the aisles of government?
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