Beyond My Lai

Jon Wiener asks, "How long does it take the US government to release documentation about atrocities in which US military forces killed unarmed civilians, women and children? In the case of Vietnam, it's taken almost 40 years."

Wiener is referring, of course, to the recent LA Times exposé on the findings of Nick Turse, who in the course of his dissertation research uncovered documentation of internal military probes into 320 incidents of Vietnam war atrocities, in addition to the infamous slaughter at My Lai. This new material directly contradicts the claim that My Lai was an isolated occurence. As Wiener relates,

The official line that abuses were "confined to a few rogue units" is demolished by the material Turse discovered. Atrocities were committed, according to the Times, by "every army division that operated in Vietnam." They found a pattern of "recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese--families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing," who were "murdered, raped and tortured with impunity" by American soldiers.

Military investigators documented seven large-scale massacres between 1967 and 1971 in which at least 137 civilians were killed. They described 78 other attacks on civilian noncombatants in which US troops killed at least 57, wounded 56 and sexually assaulted 15. They described 141 incidents of torture of civilians, including the use of electric shock.

The evidence against 203 soldiers was strong enough for the military to bring formal charges of war crimes. According to the Times investigation, 57 were court-martialed and 23 convicted – about ten percent. Fourteen were sentenced to prison for terms ranging from six months to 20 years, but most appealed and won significant reductions. The longest sentence, 20 years, went to an interrogator convicted of "committing indecent acts on a 13 year old girl in an interrogation hut." He served only six months.

Army investigators came to no finding about 500 other reports of atrocities, some of which described extensive killing...

Wiener adds that this accounts only for those incidents that were reported, meaning that there were probably "hundreds, perhaps thousands" more. He also dares to link these revelations to what's going on in Iraq, where a similar pattern of "isolated atrocities" has started to emerge in recent months.

"The Vietnam documents inevitably raise the question of whether we are getting the full story now about Iraq, and whether the military has changed its Vietnam-era practices of secret investigations of atrocities concluding with no punishment for the guilty," Wiener asserts. Regrettably, "We may have to wait another 40 years to find out."