This is why I can't tolerate Hitchens--he's a friggin' Gucci Marxist. Yet,
he is also a damn good writer and sometimes he hits the right targets
-ron j.
At 12:00 PM 5/5/01 -0700, radman wrote:
> May 4, 2000
>
> Kerrey, Blanton and the Liberals
>
> by Alexander Cockburn
>
>"""" of the fight over segregation in the South. No one is saying that
>Blanton was just a compliant footsoldier in a struggle for which the
>commanding officers in Dixie Strom Thurmond and the others bear
responsibility.
>
> Yet listen to the forgiving words from liberals for Bob Kerrey, yesterday
>a US Senator and today the President of the New School in New York. Bob
>Scheer, Los Angeles Times"", and that our anger should be reserved for
>Robert McNamara, Pentagon chief in the JFK-LBJ years.
>
> Or listen to Vanity Fair and Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens, on a
>Fox talk show the evening of May 1, the day Tom Blanton was put away.
>
> COLMES: What s your view on Bob Kerrey?
>
>&But look, none of the people he killed were raped. None of them were
>dismembered. None of them were tortured. None of them were mutilated, had
>their ears cut off. He never referred to them as gooks or slopes or
>afterwards. So it con for one day s work in a free-fire zone in the Mekong
>Delta, it was nothing like as bad as most days.
>
> It s not as though Hitchens is ill-attuned to the idea of war crimes. He
>has, after all, just published a long indictment of Henry Kissinger, one of
>McNamara s successors in administering the Vietnam strategy that put young
>Kerrey and his fellow SEALs in that tiny Vietnamese village the night of
>February 24, 1969, set to kill anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path.
>
>"""""""""""" too, and I doubt that even Scheer would want to do that.
>
> Scheer, an unrelenting apologist for Bill Clinton down the years should
>surely remember that it was Kerrey who sabotaged Clinton s first budget,
>back in 1993. In Scheer s book that surely classes Kerrey as a bad man. His
>associates in the Senate mostly thought Kerrey was an arrogant shit. A
>Republican staffer who dealt with him down the years described him to
>Jeffrey St. Clair, my CounterPunch"" That s exactly the impression I had of
>Kerrey when I saw him on the campaign trail in New Hampshire in 1992. A
>cold fish, and a nasty one.
>
> Now I can see that Hitchens was maybe trying to hit a vein of Swiftian
>irony in his remarks on that Fox show, trying to say that by the standards
>of what US forces were doing in Vietnam at that time, Kerrey s unit was as
>well mannered as a dinner party designed by Martha Stewart. He only killed
>the women, he didn t rape them first. But Hitchens should know that irony
>doesn t work on TV, and there s no palatable Martha Stewart-like
>comportment when you re cutting throats and shooting babies at a range of
>ten feet.
>
>"" Well, Hitchens has a taste for creeps, but usually they re a little more
>offbeat than the president of the New School. Maybe Hitchens wants tenure
>at the New School. So instead of urging the New School students and faculty
>to demonstrate outside Kerrey s office and demand he be sent to the
>International Court at the Hague to stand trial, and his salary be sent to
>Thanh Phong as reparations, he s kissing Kerrey s ass. People will do
>anything for tenure.
>
>"" I said I hoped it was. What happened to Scheer and Hitchens? What
>happened to the cold steel of their hate? Actually, Scheer never had the
>cold steel of pure hate. He wanted comfort too much and now he s got it.
>Long since, he s gone soft in Santa Monica, going to parties with Oliver
>Stone and Barbra Streisand. Hitchens is a hater, but too obsessively. Just
>because Clinton put his hand up the skirt of some woman Hitchens cared for,
>he confused him with Pol Pot.
>
>"" is no defense. Just listen to his disgusting disclosures to Dan Rather
>in 60 Minutes II, Monday night.
>
> Rather: If in fact it did happen. If there was an old man, an old woman
>and three children being killed. Was it or was it not within the rules of
>engagement for you and your men as you understood it, if necessary, to kill
>those people?
>
> Kerrey: Yes, Again, I don t know how you re gonna cut this tape, but I don
>t have any doubt that the people that we killed were at the very least
>sympathetic to the Viet Cong. And at the very most, were supporting their
>efforts to kill us.
>
> Rather: Old men, women and children
>
> Kerrey: Yes, I mean, the Viet Cong, in a guerrilla war, the people that
>get caught in the middle are the civilians. And the Viet Cong were a
>thousand per cent more ruthless than any standard operating procedure that
>any American GI or Navy SEAL had.
>
> """" than any US force or procedure.
>
> A slice of Rather s CBS interview with Kerrey s fellow SEAL, Gerhard Klann:
>
> Narration: This is also where Bob Kerrey says his unit came under attack.
>
> Rather: Did you take fire coming in?
>
> Klann: No.
>
> Rather: Gunfire of any kind?
>
> Klann: No.
>
> Rather: Anything even remotely sounding like gunfire?
>
> Klann: No, not that I can recall. No.
>
> Rather What d you do this time?
>
> Klann: We gathered everybody up, searched the place, searched everything.
>
> Rather: What was the make-up of this group?
>
> Klann: Probably a majority of em were kids. And women. And some younger
women.
>
> Rather: So you got all the people out of there.
>
> Klann: We herded them together and in a group.
>
> Rather: Were any of these people armed?
>
> Klann: I don t believe so.
>
> Rather: Fair to say you didn t see any weapons?
>
> Klann: I didn t see any.
>
> Rather: Did you decide pretty quickly or not that the target of your
>mission, the Viet Cong leader, was not among them?
>
> Klann: Yeah we got together and we were, hey the guy ain t here. Now we
>got these people, what do we do now?
>
> Rather: What did you do then?
>
> Klann: We killed em.
>
> Rather: What do you mean, you killed em?
>
> Klann: We shot em all.
>
> Rather: Was an order given for that or was it more or less spontaneous?
>
> Klann: I don t think we would have acted spontaneously on something like
>that. There was an order given.
>
> Rather: What was the order?
>
> Klann: To kill em.
>
> Rather: Why?
>
> Klann: Cause we d already compromised ourselves by killing the other group.
>
> Rather: Whose responsibility, whose obligation was it to say that?
>
> Klann: The ultimate responsibility fell on Bob Kerrey.
>
> Rather: Do you remember him saying that?
>
> Klann: I don t remember his exact words, but he was the officer in charge.
>The call was his.
>
> Rather: And then what happened?
>
> Klann: We lined up, and we opened fire.
>
> Rather: Individually or raked them with automatic weapons fire?
>
> Klann: No. We, we just slaughtered them. It was automatic weapons fire.
>Rifle fire.
>
> Rather: At roughly what range?
>
> Klann: Six feet, ten feet, very close.
>
> Rather: Then did the shooting stop?
>
> Klann: Yeah, for a little bit.
>
> Rather: Was it quiet?
>
> Klann: It was dead quiet. It was dead quiet. Then you could just hear
>certain people, hear their moaning. So we would just fire into that area
>until it was silent there. And that was it. And, and until, we were sure
>that everybody was dead.
>
> Rather: You said certain people were moaning or making noises. Were all
>those adults?
>
> Klann: A few. I remember one baby still crying. That baby was probably the
>last one alive.
>
> Rather: What happened to that baby?
>
> Klann: Shot like the rest of em.
>
> Rather: On camera we told Bob Kerrey about Gerhard Klann s account of the
>events at Thanh Phong, and also revealed to him that much of Klann s story
>is supported by a woman who says she was an eyewitness in the village.
>Senator Kerrey seemed stunned, but then conceded that what happened at
>Thanh Phong may have been worse than he remembers.
>
> As Chris Caldwell wrote in New York Press, Kerrey maybe didn t remember
>too clearly what happened at Thanh Phong because his unit was doing the
>same thing every night.
>
> Kerrey s been claiming that he s felt anguish and remorse down the years.
>Nothing he s said in recent weeks supports this claim. Mostly he s been
>saying that it was all an honest mistake, perpetrated under orders that
>permitted him to kill anything in Thanh Phong that moved.
>
> Rather: All but one of the victims were women and children. There was one
>man described as an older man. That being the case, why shouldn t it be
>considered a war crime? Or an atrocity? Or be an investigation?
>
> Kerrey: To describe it as a war crime, I think is wrong. Or to describe it
>as an atrocity, I would say, is pretty close to being right. Because that s
>how it felt and that s why I feel guilt and shame for it.
>
> Rather: Are you concerned at all about the consequences of this becoming
>public?
>
> Kerrey: Well am I, certainly, I m that s a possibility. I ve got to be
>prepared to tolerate any consequences of this. (Edit) I understand that
>that are all kinds of potential consequences, up to and including somebody
>saying, this is a war crime. And let s investigate and charge him and put
>him in prison.
>
> That's reasonable. Let s push a trial of Kerrey, and of his commanding
>officers. Let Kofi Annan send a UN unit down Fifth Avenue to the Village,
>to seize Kerrey. If Blanton can get put in the dock for what he did in the
>Sixties, so can the former Senator, now running the New School where
>fugitive scholars from Hitler s Germany were given shelter, and where
>Hannah Arendt taught.
>
> In the preface to her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism""
>
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