One of the most valuable services a friend can provide is holding up a mirror. Often disturbing, this gift of self-knowledge can help us avoid mistakes, revealing when we’ve wandered off the path. Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse do that for us today. See the end for other posts about the struggle for America’s soul.
Introduction by Tom Engelhardt
On this one-way planet of ours, it’s hard sometimes to imagine things any other way, but for a moment let’s try. Imagine, for instance, that in recent years the director of Iranian intelligence oversaw a program of “extraordinary rendition” aimed at those who were believed to be prepared to commit acts of terror against that country’s fundamentalist regime. Practically speaking, what this often meant was kidnapping suspects — some quite innocent of such aims — off the streets of Middle Eastern or South Asian cities and transporting them secretly to Iran, to “black sites” set up abroad, or to allied regimes known for their torture practices.
Imagine that these suspects, once in the hands of his agents — the Geneva Conventions having been declared not applicable to them — were then tortured, abused, and sometimes murdered. Imagine that, for this, the director, in a public ceremony with great hoopla, was awarded the Ayatollah Khomeini Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the land, and on retiring honorably wrote a bestselling memoir about his years in office. Imagine as well that, to help Iranian interrogators, lawyers close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had rewritten the law so that acts which the world had long agreed to be torture were now redefined as not so, and on that basis, they were instructed to do such things as waterboarding suspects, even as the fundamentalist regime regularly announced that, on the basis of its own definitions, it did not condone torture.
If such a scenario had occurred, we know what we would think of such people. We know what our media would say about such people. We know what we would demand as a fate for such people — that they be brought to justice.
The present regime in Iran has proven itself quite capable of committing its own set of horrors and tortures. The above description, however, could not be mistaken for the recent history of any agency but the CIA and associated outfits under the purview of the top officials and lawyers of the Bush administration. Indeed, George Tenet, CIA director from 1997-2004, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian honor possible, by George W. Bush in December 2004, when much of the above was already on the public record (and the president certainly knew far more). Tenet did then write At the Center of the Storm, a bestselling memoir, and so on.
Now, a new administration is in power and it has decided to investigate CIA interrogations — but only those acts by Agency operatives (and its private contractors) that went beyondthe bounds of Bush administration extremity, beyond the bounds, that is, of that administration’s pretzled definitions of what was not torture. The rest gets a pass.
On the day that decision made headlines, another report, “U.S. Says Rendition to Continue, but With More Oversight” by David Johnston in the New York Times, barely got noticed, even though it indicated that a now-notorious program of the Bush years would be continued in the Obama era. In other words, the U.S. will go right on turning terror suspects over to third countries for incarceration and interrogation (something criticizedby Barack Obama in his presidential campaign), only with undoubtedly meaningless “diplomatic assurances” of no-torture policies. (Johnston did not even mention the kidnapping part of the process.) I’m still waiting for someone to ask the question: Why turn suspects over to seedy regimes if you don’t expect them to act seedily?
Had China announced that it was going to turn rebel Uighurs captured outside the country over to Uzbekistan, or Myanmar made it clear that it was planning to send dissidents kidnapped in Thailand to Syria, we would denounce such policies to the skies. But it’s us, and as Nick Turse, TomDispatch associate editor and author of the remarkable book on American militarism, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, points out, we are the great exception. If we do it, it essentially doesn’t count — and perhaps more remarkably, it never dents our urge to stand on the highest moral ground around and accuse others of heinous acts. Of course, when you still want to think of yourself as the planet’s sole superpower, you naturally feel you have license to do such things, and leave yourself out of the equation. It’s evidently the global equivalent of James Bond’s license to kill, or Monopoly’s get-out-of-jail-free card.
Apologies, Anger, and Apathy -My Lai and Lockerbie Reconsidered
By Nick Turse, posted at TomDispatch, 30 August 2009 — Reposted in full with permission.
A week ago, two convicted mass murderers leaped back into public consciousness as news coverage of their stories briefly intersected. One was freed from prison, continuing to proclaim his innocence, and his release was vehemently denounced in the United States as were the well-wishers who welcomed him home. The other expressed his contrition, after almost 35 years living in his country in a state of freedom, and few commented.
When Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan sentenced in 2001 to 27 years in prison for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was released from incarceration by the Scottish government on “compassionate grounds,” a furor erupted. On August 22nd, ABC World News with Charles Gibson featured a segment on outrage over the Libyan’s release. It was aired shortly before a report on an apology offered by William Calley, who, in 1971 as a young lieutenant, was sentenced to life in prison for the massacre of civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.
After al-Megrahi, who served eight years in prison, arrived home to a hero’s welcome in Libya, officials in Washington expressed their dismay. To White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, it was “outrageous and disgusting”; to President Barack Obama, “highly objectionable.”
Calley, who admittedat trial to killing Vietnamese civilians personally, but served only three years of house arrest following an intervention by President Richard Nixon, received a standing ovation from the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus, Georgia, the city where he lived for years following the war. (He now resides in Atlanta.) For him, there was no such uproar, and no one, apparently, thought to ask either Gibbs or the president for comment, despite the eerie confluence of the two men and their fates.
Part of the difference in treatment was certainly the passage of time and Calley’s contrition, however many decades delayed, regarding the infamous massacre of more than 500 civilians. “There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” the Vietnam veterantold his audience. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.” For his part, al-Megrahi, now dying of cancer, accepted that relatives of the 270 victims of the Lockerbie bombing “have hatred for me. It’s natural to behave like this… They believe I’m guilty, which in reality I’m not. One day the truth won’t be hiding as it is now. We have an Arab saying: ‘The truth never dies.'”
American Exceptionalism
Calley was charged in the deaths of more than 100 civilians and convicted in the murder of 22 in one village, while al-Megrahi was convicted of the murder of 270 civilians aboard one airplane. Almost everyone, it seems, found it perverse, outrageous, or “gross and callous” that the Scottish government allowed a convicted mass murderer to return to a homeland where he was greeted with open arms. No one seemingly thought it odd that another mass murderer had lived freely in his home country for so long. The families of the Lockerbie victims were widely interviewed. As the Calley story broke, no American reporter apparently thought it worth the bother to look for the families of the My Lai victims, let alone ask them what they thought of the apology of the long-free officer who had presided over, and personally taken part in the killing of, their loved ones.
Whatever the official response to al-Megrahi, the lack of comment on Calley underscores a longstanding American aversion to facing what the U.S. did to Vietnam and its people during a war that ended more than 30 years ago. Since then, one cover-up of mass murder after another has unraveled and bubbled into view. These have included the mass killing of civilians in the Mekong Delta village of Thanh Phong by future senator Bob Kerrey and the SEAL team he led (exposed by the New York Times Magazineand CBS News in 2001); a long series of atrocities (including murders, torture, and mutilations) involving the deaths of hundreds of noncombatants largely committed in Quang Ngai Province (where My Lai is also located) by an elite U.S. unit, the Tiger Force (exposed by the Toledo Bladein 2003); seven massacres, 78 other attacks on noncombatants, and 141 instances of torture, among other atrocities (exposed by the Los Angeles Timesin 2006); a massacre of civilians by U.S. Marines in Quang Nam Province’s Le Bac hamlet (exposed in In These Times magazine in 2008); and the slaughter of thousands of Vietnamese in the Mekong Delta during Operation Speedy Express (exposed in The Nationmagazine, also in 2008). Over the last decade, long suppressed horrors from Vietnam have been piling up, indicating not only that My Lai, horrific and iconic as it may have been, was no isolated incident, but that many American veterans have long lived with memories not unlike those of William Calley.
If you recall what actually happened at My Lai, Calley’s more-than-40-years-late apology cannot help but ring hollow. Not only were more than 500 defenseless civiliansslaughtered by Calley and some of the 100 troops who stormed the village on March 16, 1968, but women and girls were brutally raped, bodies were horrifically mutilated, homes set aflame, animals tortured and killed, the local water supply fouled, and the village razed to the ground. Some of the civilians were killed in their bomb shelters, others when they tried to leave them. Women holding infants were gunned down. Others, gathered together, threw themselves on top of their children as they were sprayed with automatic rifle fire. Children, even babies, were executed at close range. Many were slaughtered in an irrigation ditch.
For his part in the bloodbath, Calley was convicted and sentenced to life in prison at hard labor. As it happened, he spent only three days in a military stockade before President Richard Nixon intervened and had him returned to his “bachelor apartment,” where he enjoyed regular visits from a girlfriend, built gas-powered model airplanes, and kept a small menagerie of pets. By late 1974, Calley was a free man. He subsequently went on the college lecture circuit (making $2,000 an appearance), married the daughter of a jeweler in Columbus, Georgia, and worked at the jewelry store for many years without hue or cry from fellow Americans among whom he lived. All that time he stayed silent and, despite ample opportunity, offered no apologies.
Still, Calley’s belated remorse evidences a sense of responsibility that his superiors — from his company commander Capt. Ernest Medina to his commander-in-chief President Lyndon Johnson — never had the moral fiber to shoulder. Recently, in considering the life and death of Johnson’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who repudiated his wartime justifications for the conflict decades later (“We were wrong, terribly wrong.”), Jonathan Schell asked:
“[H]ow many public figures of his importance have ever expressed any regret at all for their mistakes and follies and crimes? As the decades of the twentieth century rolled by, the heaps of corpses towered, ever higher, up to the skies, and now they pile up again in the new century, but how many of those in high office who have made these things happen have ever said, ‘I made a mistake,’ or ‘I was terribly wrong,’ or shed a tear over their actions? I come up with: one, Robert McNamara.”
Because the United States failed to take responsibility for the massive scale of civilian slaughter and suffering inflicted in Southeast Asia in the war years, and because McNamara’s contrition arrived decades late, he never became the public face of slaughter in Vietnam, even though he, like other top U.S. civilian officials and military commanders of that time, bore an exponentially greater responsibility for the bloodshed in that country than the low-ranking Calley.
Butchery in the Mekong Delta
A few weeks after McNamara’s death, Julian Ewell, a top Army general who served in two important command roles in Vietnam, also passed away. For years, the specter of atrocity had swirled around him, but only among a select community of veterans and Vietnam War historians. In 1971, Newsweekmagazine’s Kevin Buckley and Alex Shimkin conducted a wide-ranging investigation of Ewell’s crowning achievement, a six-month operation in the Mekong Delta code-named Speedy Express, and found evidence of the widespread slaughter of civilians. “The horror was worse than My Lai,” one American official told Buckley. “But… the civilian casualties came in dribbles and were pieced out over a long time. And most of them were inflicted from the air and at night. Also, they were sanctioned by the command’s insistence on high body counts.”
As word of the impending Newsweekarticle spread, John Paul Vann, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who was by then the third-most-powerful American serving in Vietnam, and his deputy, Colonel David Farnham, met in Washington with Army Chief of Staff General William Westmoreland. At that meeting, Vann told Westmoreland that Ewell’s troops had wantonly killed civilians in order to boost the body count — the number of enemy dead that served as the primary indicator of success in the field — and so further the general’s reputation and career. According to Farnham, Vann said Speedy Express was, in effect, “many My Lais.”
A Pentagon-level cover-up and Newsweek’sdesire not to upset the Nixon administration in the wake of the My Lai revelations kept the full results of the meticulous investigation by Buckley and Shimkin bottled up. The publication of a severely truncated version of their article allowed the Pentagon to ride out the coverage without being forced to convene a large-scale official inquiry of the sort which followed public disclosure of the My Lai massacre. Only last year did some of the reporting that Newsweek suppressed, as well as new evidence of the slaughter and the cover-up, appear in a piece of mine in The Nation and only in the wake of Ewell’s death was it mentioned in the Washington Postthat a long-secret official Army report, commissioned in response to Buckley and Shimkin’s investigation, concluded:
“[W]hile there appears to be no means of determining the precise number of civilian casualties incurred by US forces during Operation Speedy Express, it would appear that the extent of these casualties was in fact substantial, and that a fairly solid case can be constructed to show that civilian casualties may have amounted to several thousand (between 5,000 and 7,000).”
A year after the eviscerated Buckley-Shimkin piece was published, Ewell retired from the Army. Colonel Farnham believed that the general was prematurely pushed out due to continuing Army fears of a scandal. If true, it was the only act approaching official censure that he apparently ever experienced, far less punishment than that meted out to al-Megrahi, or even Calley. Yet Ewell was responsible for the deaths of markedly more civilians. Needless to say, Ewell’s civilian slaughter never garnered significant TV coverage, nor did any U.S. president ever express outrage over it, or begrudge the general his military benefits, let alone the ability to spend time with his family. In fact, in October, following a memorial service, Julian Ewell will be buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
Chain of Command
In his recent remarks, William Calley emphasized that he was following orders at My Lai, a point on which he has never wavered. The Army’s investigation into My Lai involved 45 members of Medina’s company, including Calley, suspected of atrocities. In a second investigation, 30 individuals were looked into for covering up what happened in the village by “omissions or commissions.” Twenty-eight of them were officers, two of them generals, and as a group they stood accused of a total of 224 offenses. Calley, however, was the sole person convicted of an offense in connection with My Lai. Even he ultimately evaded any substantive punishment for his crimes.
While an opportunity was squandered during the Vietnam era, Calley’s apology and the response to al-Megrahi’s release offer another chance for some essential soul-searching in the United States. In considering Calley’s decades-late contrition, Americans might ask why a double-standard exists when it comes to official outrage over mass murder. It might also be worth asking why some individuals, like a former Libyan intelligence officer or, in rare instances, a low-ranking U.S. infantry officer, are made to bear so much blame for major crimes whose responsibility obviously reached far above them; and why officers up the chain of command, and war managers — in Washington or Tripoli — escape punishment for the civilian blood on their hands. Unfortunately, this opportunity will almost certainly be squandered as well.
Similarly, it’s unlikely that Americans will seriously contemplate just how so many lived beside Calley for so long, without seeking justice — as would be second nature in the case of a similarly horrific crime committed by an officer serving a hostile power elsewhere. Yet he and fellow American officers from Donald Reh(implicated in the deaths of 19 civilians — mostly women and children — during a February 1968 massacre) to Bob Kerrey have gone about their lives without so much as being tried by court martial, let alone serving prison time as did al-Megrahi.
In the immediate wake of Calley’s contrition, it wasn’t a reporter from the American media but from Agence France Presse (AFP) who thought to check on how Vietnamese survivors or relatives of those massacred at My Lai might react. When an AFP reporter spoke to Pham Thanh Cong, who saw his mother and brothers killed in the My Lai massacre (and now runs a small museum at the village) and asked what he thought of Calley’s apology, he responded, “Maybe he has now repented for his crimes and his mistakes committed more than 40 years ago.” Maybe.
Today, some of Calley’s cohorts, the mostly anonymous others who perpetrated their own horrors in Southeast Asia and never faced even a modicum of justice for their crimes, go about their lives in American cities and suburbs. (Others, who have committed unpunished offenses in the Global War on Terror, are still on active duty.) As a result, the outrage over what happened to the only man convicted of the terrorist act against Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, has a strikingly hollow ring.
A failure to demand an honest accounting of the suffering the United States caused the Vietnamese people and a willingness to ignore ample evidence of widespread slaughter remains a lasting legacy of the Vietnam War. So does a desire to reduce all discussion of U.S. atrocities in Southeast Asia to the massacre at My Lai, with William Calley bearing the burden — not just for his crimes but for all U.S. crimes there. And it will remain so until the American people do what their military and civilian leadership have failed to do for more than 40 years: take responsibility for the misery the U.S. inflicted in Southeast Asia.
Copyright 2009 Nick Turse
About the author
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch and the recent winner of a Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. A paperback edition of his book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books), an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, has recently been published. His website is NickTurse.com.
Afterword
Please share your comments by posting below. Per the FM site’s Comment Policy, please make them brief (250 words max), civil, and relevant to this post. Or email me at fabmaximus at hotmail dot com (note the spam-protected spelling).
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For more information from the FM site
To read other articles about these things, see the FM reference page on the right side menu bar. Of esp interest are:
Some posts about the American spirit, the American soul:
- America’s Most Dangerous Enemy, 1 March 2006
- The corruption of a nation is usually hidden, but sometimes becomes visible, 21 November 2008
- The war for America’s soul, 23 December 2008 — Our changing attitudes to “It’s a Wonderful Life”
- We close our eyes to torture by our government. The Brits are stronger., 9 April 2009
- Sources of inspiration for America’s renewal, 23 April 2009
- So many Americans approve of torture; what does this tell us about America?, 30 April 2009
- Dispatches from the front lines in the war for America’s soul, 11 May 2009
- A great artist died today. We can gain inspiration from his words., 26 June 2009
I was 19 and draft age when this was going on. By the luck of the draw and the grace of God, I never got drafted and didn’t have to participate in that mess. What would I have done? I didn’t want to get sent to the jungles of SE Asia and I didn’t want to go to jail either. Had I gone there and been in a situation like My Lai I can’t even imagine what my response would have been. I have a question and a suggestion for everyone reading this article though. The suggestion is this: Put yourself in the boots of the boys who were sent there, mostly against their will before you condemn them. And the question: Would we be having this discussion if this occurred in WWII against the Nazis or Japanese?
A generally spot on and well written piece. With one exception: “no American reporter apparently thought it worth the bother to look for the families of the My Lai victims, let alone ask them what they thought of the apology of the long-free officer who had presided over, and personally taken part in the killing of, their loved ones.”
NPR did: “In Vietnam, Calley’s My Lai Apology Barely Registers“, Weekend Edition Sunday, 30 August 2009. And the vietnamese they interviewed were appropriately hostile to Calley’s apology:
It is worth noting the pressures brought to bear by 4GW upon those fighting it, to kill indiscriminately – failing eventually to distinguish friend from foe, by-stander from combatant, civilian from insurgent or guerilla in hiding. This is not to excuse or condone My Lai, but simply to note that under conditions like those our forces faced in Vietnam, or like those faced by our troops in Afghanistan or Iraq today – virtually guarantee civilian casualties. The same is true of Israel’s recent incursion into Gaza, which senior IDF leaders described as the “largest hostage rescue operation in history,” the IDF having taken unprecedented steps to avoid civilian casualties – by such means as text messages, cell phones, and other innovative means of notifying civilians to evacuate the area of the fighting-to-come.
What accounts for this dynamic? Simply that 4GW blurs and then obliterates the line between civilian and fighters, because the latter hide among the former, and accept (even welcome) civilian “collateral” casualties as a propaganda victory, and as a means of attaining victory in the all-important moral level of conflict. Not only does the force committing the atrocity or alleged atrocity play into their enemy’s hands politically, and at the level of propaganda, they can also cause self-revulsion in the superior force (if they regard themselves as moral, and come from cultures which recognize humanitarian rules of war) once they realize what they have done. This fractures cohesion, unity of purpose, and undermines the war effort. There is powerful “David vs. Goliath” effect in play, as many 4GW experts have noted elsewhere.
IMO, this is the central dilemma nation-states have to solve if they are ever to reliably win 4th generation conflicts and avoid atrocities; they must either go into conflicts prepared to wipe out their enemies, without regard to civilian costs (the Hama method), what could be called the hard-and-fast approach, or go into conflict with as light a footprint as possible, with the willingness to sacrifice even your own people to minimize civilian casualties on the other side. This approach utilizes what Lind calls the “power of weakness” to establish and keep moral authority. In western societies, the former is politically and morally untenable most of the time, so it is the latter approach. If Lind and other authorities are correct, the worst mistake is to chart a middle course, which feeds the dynamic your foe is seeking to create – a drawn-out war of attrition, with a steady but not overwhelming flow of casualties to sap will to fight back home, leavened with frequent collatoral casualties caused by, for example, an over-reliance on air strikes that kill some bad guys, but also wipe out innocent by-standers, thus giving “David” another propaganda victory. Recognize the “middle way”? You should, it is the method our generals have been using in Afghanistan for the last eight years.
Calley’s apology sounds like a classic “non-apology” apology, that is, saying you are sorry, but without having to face consequences for your actions; making a pro-forma display of remorse without actually feeling it. The U.S. government blew a powerful opportunity to show our adherence to the rule of law by acquiting Calley. He should have been punished more forcefully than he was.
Final question for all you military people out there: What role does training play in avoiding My Lai-type incidents? I imagine training and discipline are crucial, but I haven’t been in those shoes, so perhaps someone can enlighten me.
FM, Have you heard of the Center for Complex Operation? They are a major apologist for our current imperial outlook.
One big difference twixt My Lai and the Lockerbie bombing: the evidence against Lt. Calley is incontrovertible and conclusive, while the evidence against the Lockbie bomber may have been faked. A former Scottish police chief has given investigators a signed statement that the bit of circuit board used to convict the Lockerbie bomber was planted in the wreckage. (source:Centre for Research on Globalization, CRG).
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Fabius Maximus replies: In my experience, the CRG is not a reliable source. Often it is a clearinghouse for leftist urban legends. This incendiary article cites no sources. The only link at the end is broken.
In simpler times, Benjamin Franklin wrote: “What you seem to be, be really.”
To which our world would reply: “We don’t care about inside, but could you please do a better job of faking it outside?”
Thankyou for posting this . I had heard of My Lai but not the sequelae.
On the BBc website , about half UK posters felt the Scottish decision was correct and were angered by the US reaction . Scottish law has criteria for release of seriously ill prisoners , which were met . British opinions raised the issues of Vincennes incident and Iran ; Libyan compensation , paid to Lockerbie families ; doubt over the official version and trial , even by some Lockerbie relatives .
Interestingly ,judging by what I read , more relatives and best mates of thousands of Americans seem to have died at Lockerbie , than 9/11 . The only comparison is the kamikaze crashing of a Messerschmit by a Spitfire , piloted by a Pole who had run out of bullets , over London one sunny afternoon in the Battle of Britain. This was eye-witnessed by the entire population’s sister .
The Framing of al-Megrahi, Gareth Peirce, London Review of Books, 22 September 2009.
The LRB do of course have a self described ‘consistently radical’ editorial orientation, but they are a better source than the CRG. Unfortunately there are no sources here either, a thing commonly lacking from journalistic publications.
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Fabius Maximus replies: Still, LRB is IMO a good source. This does not mean it’s fact, but makes it worth reading. Thank you for posting this!
FM is way off base in dismissing evidence that Megrahi was framed. I now present articles from the New York Times, the UK Guardian, and other sources, as well as statements from the UN observer appointed to witness the trial, all of which describe the trial of Megrahi as “a miscarriage of justice” and the FBI crime lab (which has since been disciplined, shaken up, and become the center of ongoing revelations of malpractice, has been described as “a crime scene in itself” due to the gross misattribution of evidence studied there.
From the Wikipedia entry for Pan Am Flight 103.
“A Scottish judicial review body ruled Thursday that a former Libyan intelligence official jailed for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing might have been wrongfully convicted and was entitled to appeal the verdict against him.”
— Scottish panel Challenges Lockerbie Conviction, New York Times, 29 June 2007
“In his reports, Dr. Köchler was highly critical of the proceedings and questioned the fairness and impartiality of both the Trial and Appeal Courts. In an interview for the BBC on 14 March 2002, he described the dismissal of the appeal as a “spectacular miscarriage of justice.”
— Statement by Dr Hans Köchler, international observer appointed by the United Nations to the Lockerbie Trial in the Netherlands (2000-2002), International Progress Organization, 29 June 2007
“The Lockerbie trial was meant to end the saga of Pan Am flight 103. But it didn’t take into account the wads of US dollars, or the heroin, or the Hizbullah T-shirt found in the wreckage. As the man convicted of the bombing prepares to appeal, John Ashton and Ian Ferguson argue that there has been a top-level cover-up.”
— Flight From The Truth, Guardian, 27 June 2001
“Statement of Dr. Hans Koechler, International Observer at the Lockerbie Trial, on Recent Reports in the Scottish and British Media“, International Progress Organization, 14 October 2005 –transcript of further statement by Dr. Hans Kochler.
Also see Lockerbie revisited
Probe into Lockerbie timer claims, Herald Scotland, 5 September 2007
Please provide similar evidence casting doubt on the guilt of Lt. William Calley or stand revealed as a scammer guilty of the lowest kind of smear tactics (“X source is well known as disreputable” — show us the proof. Give us hard evidence. I’ve given hard evidence backing up my claims — where’s the hard evidence backing up claims that all these news reports and statements from FBI crime lab personnel and UN observers and appeals courts are bogus?).
There can be no reasonable equation between the cases of Lt. Calley and the alleged Lockbie bomber.
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Fabius Maximus replies: I really hate being misquoted.
“FM is way off base in dismissing evidence”
What I said: “In my experience, the CRG is not a reliable source … This incendiary article cites no sources”. Nothing you have shown disproves what I said. Nothing you have cited even addresses what I said.
Nice citations supporting your view of the Lockervie bombing, however! As was the previous comment, citing the LRB. It’s not something I know anything about, so I have not commented on it.
“The U.S. government blew a powerful opportunity to show our adherence to the rule of law by acquiting Calley.”
The victor gets to decide the status of those who commit atrocities. Had the Confederate States of America won the War Between the States, General William Tecumseh Sherman and General Philip Sheridan would have been tried as war criminals – and sentenced to death and hanged. Instead, they are today largely celebrated as “war heroes”.
“I think it is extraordinarily important how we treat prisoners…”
— Maj. Gen. Michael Lehnert, “Marine who built Gitmo: U.S. lost moral high ground“, AP, 25 September 2009 — “The Marine commander who built the Guantanamo Bay prison said Thursday the U.S. lost the “moral high ground” with its brutal treatment of prisoners, and the facility should be closed as quickly as possible.”