3-16-1970 - we should never forget heros like Hugh Thompson

[billy.pilgrim]

and the sacrifices required to be a true American hero

against an act of savage brutality (that ultimately spelled the end to that very wrong war, more and more proof comes out that My Lai type atrocities were a much more common event; yet our current perception of war offers proof that most of us learned nothing and still revere a military that covers up the murder s of women and children and other war crimes – that is unless the other side does it; then we are horrified)


Check out the new book, “Kill Anything That Moves” seems like we covered up a bunch of My Lai type war crimes





http://www.history.com/topics/my-lai-massacre

In one of the most horrific incidents of violence against civilians during the Vietnam War, a company of American soldiers brutally killed the majority of the population of the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai in March 1968. Though exact numbers remain unconfirmed, it is believed that as many as 500 people including women, children and the elderly were killed in the My Lai Massacre.. Higher-ranking U.S. Army officers managed to cover up the events of that day for a year before revelations by a soldier who had heard of the massacre sparked a wave of international outrage and led to a special investigation into the matter. In 1970, a U.S. Army board charged 14 officers of crimes related to the events at My Lai; only one was convicted. The brutality of the My Lai killings and the extent of the cover-up exacerbated growing antiwar sentiment on the home front in the United States and further divided the nation over the continuing American presence in Vietnam.

[billy.pilgrim]

from killing baby vietnamese with the butt of a rifle to killing pakistani babies with a joy stick in Tampa


we be progressing




too bad more of us can't understand, as thompson did, that American values are based on our actions, not hollow words

[Stinger]

Funny you should mention Kill Anything That Moves. I just heard it mentioned in another piece.

http://www.alternet.org/world/10-years- ... ledged-and

10 Years After the Invasion: America Destroyed Iraq But Our War Crimes Remain Unacknowledged and Unpunished
The evil unleashed on the people of Iraq has been painstakingly obscured behind a tapestry of lies.

Forty years after the last U.S. troops came home in defeat from Vietnam, Nick Turse's book, Kill Anything That Moves, has documented the systematic slaughter that thousands of American soldiers took part in and millions of Vietnamese suffered. Turse has restored the lived reality of millions of people to its rightful place in American history, from which it had simply been redacted and suppressed.

As British playwright Harold Pinter said in his 2005 Nobel Speech, "…my contention here is that the U.S. crimes… have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all."

Pinter leads us to the central unmentionable problem of U.S. war policy, that it is in fact a crime, aggression, to attack or invade another country. The judges at Nuremberg called aggression the "supreme international crime", because, as they said, "it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

[billy.pilgrim]

Turse’s book has an interesting background; seems he ran across the documents from a unit in charge of investigating and covering up vietnam atrocities and told his graduate instructor about them. The instructor gave him some money and told him to copy everything as fast as possible. Turse slept in his car outside the building where the documents were and copied from the time doors opened until he had to leave in the evenings. A couple of weeks after he finished the documents were removed from public access.
There were hundreds of My Lais in Vietnam
Just as there are in Iraq and Afghanistan
Just as there always will be when you have a citizenry and a military who dehumanizes the enemy; no big deal to shoot a 6 month old baby gook or rag head or sand nigger
Just as there will always be when Americans can look back at Vietnam and spew up the same old lies about no atrocities, it was a worthwhile war and on and on
When the republicon party can even use lies about what john kerry said and did in vietnam to help defeat him in his bid for president
When we hide the truth, we are doomed to ignorance
A vet told Turse a story about a soldier who was approached by a vietnamese women seeking help. The soldier turned and hit her in the face with the butt of his rifle and walked on without a care in the world. The remorseful vet then told Turse that that soldier had been him.
Some learned; most didn’t; the country didn’t or Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua and Iraq would never have happened

Interesting, it was a PoS congressman Rivers from good ol south carolina who publicly stated that he felt Thompson was the only soldier at My Lai who should be punished (for turning his weapons on fellow American troops) and unsuccessfully attempted to have him court-martialed.[1]

As for the man who stood up to armed soldiers committing war crimes, mutilating bodies, shooting babies
As word of his actions became publicly known, Thompson started receiving hate mail, death threats and mutilated animals on his doorstep.[3]
There is something fundamentally wrong with a society that refuses to separate truth from lies – American Exceptionalism is only for the ignorant

[billy.pilgrim]

Fallujah during the Iraq War

I remember cnn interviewing some gung-ho marine captain in full body armor with all his weapons and air support flying in the background, he was calling the Iraqis “cowards” for not coming out and fighting like men.
Reckon they wouldn’t let him say, “sand nigger” - cnn being so liberal and all

[billy.pilgrim]

I remember cnn interviewing some gung-ho marine captain in full body armor with all his weapons and air support flying in the background, he was calling the Iraqis “cowards” for not coming out and fighting like men...

Like drone pilots.

they shoot babies too

and get medals too

[billy.pilgrim]

I've always wondered if lessons learned from covering up atrocities would have made powell a decent president or just another lackey like reagan

the cons would have run him without the same degree of hate obama got from their racist base and for the country as a whole, a con for the 1st blacl president would have probably been best

but exposing the skeletons of what he did in vietnam and central america has kept him out of politics

[homerfobe]

So pillygrim, tell us. Did you ever serve in the military?

[Stinger]

So pillygrim, tell us. Did you ever serve in the military?

So, homophile, tell us. Did you ever see combat? In Viet Nam? In Afghanistan? In Iraq? In Grenada?

[billy.pilgrim]

I see homie hasn't answered the question posed to him, least I be categorized with ol homie, let me say, no, I did not serve and I did duck and dodge as well as bush, cheney and mittens. difference is, I didn't promote the war, as they did.

oh yeah, I did go to Canada a few times. The drive home was always kinda lonely.

and homie, shooting babies is always wrong, war is a pitiful sorry excuse, but then what else can be expected from a pitiful sorry excuse like you


hugh thompson was in the war, hugh thompson stood up, hugh thompson was a hero on 3/16/70

[billy.pilgrim]

A majority of Americans ages 18-29 don't believe vietnam was a mistake - more proof that american exceptionalism sucks and the cons are winning the war on education


http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/dum ... _20130319/


We make mistakes; we don’t commit war crimes. And if word leaks out that we do, it is handled by throwing out a few bad apples from the otherwise pristine bushel.
Yes, a majority of Americans, 53 percent according to this week’s Gallup poll, think it was “a mistake sending troops to fight in Iraq” 10 years ago. But the lessons of our folly will likely not stick for long. The memories fade as we now see in that same Gallup poll with perceptions of the Vietnam War. A majority of Americans ages 18-29 believe sending U.S. troops to Vietnam was “not a mistake.” By contrast, 70 percent of those 50 and older, the generation with contemporary knowledge of the war, think it was.
That the young now approve of an irrational conflict in which 3.4 million Indochinese and 58,000 Americans died suggests that even the madness that was Iraq will come to be viewed by this fatally jingoistic nation as a good war.

[Ombudsman]

A majority of Americans are still clueless about the Iraq war being about oil despite it's architects admitting it.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/i ... ?hpt=hp_c2

Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq's domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. A decade of war later, it is largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms.


From ExxonMobil and Chevron to BP and Shell, the West's largest oil companies have set up shop in Iraq. So have a slew of American oil service companies, including Halliburton, the Texas-based firm Dick Cheney ran before becoming George W. Bush's running mate in 2000.
The war is the one and only reason for this long sought and newly acquired access.

Oil was not the only goal of the Iraq War, but it was certainly the central one, as top U.S. military and political figures have attested to in the years following the invasion.

"Of course it's about oil, we can't really deny that," said General John Abizaid in 2007, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq. Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Then-Senator and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: "People say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are.
"
These outcomes were by design, the result of a decade of U.S. government and oil company pressure. In 1998, Kenneth Derr, then CEO of Chevron, said, "Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas-reserves I'd love Chevron to have access to." Today it does.

In 2000, Big Oil, including Exxon, Chevron, BP, and Shell, spent more money to get fellow oilmen George W. Bush and Dick Cheney into office than they had spent on any previous election. Just over a week into Bush's first term, their efforts paid off when the National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Dick Cheney, was formed, bringing the administration and the oil companies together to plot our collective energy future. In March, the task force reviewed lists and maps outlining Iraq's entire oil productive capacity.

[rstrong]

"People say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are."

Bullsh*t. That's the childishly optimistic version.

The "liberated" Iraq was always going to remain a member of OPEC. Any cheap oil America would get, would never offset the oil burned by moving half a million soldiers - and their equipment, tanks helicopters, ships etc., half-way around the planet. And rotating them all back home every couple years. And resupplying them from half-way around the world.

The Bush family - and their friends the House of Saud - are in the oil business. They don't want cheap oil. The more expensive oil is, the more money they make.

Popular history tells us that Britain looted India. But in reality Britain lost money on India, and all her possessions. What was happening was the East India Company was looting the British treasury with the help of a few paid politicians.

Likewise, Iraq was about looting the American treasury. Halliburton and KBR built a massive amount of infrastructure in Iraq for the US military. And they'd charge the government 15 million dollars to build a cement factory, then pay an Iraqi firm $80,000 (using Saddam's confiscated funds) to build it. Entire cargo palettes of money - billions of dollars - missing. (That's not an exaggeration. They really did lose actual cargo palettes of money worth billions of dollars.)

How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish.

Note the date of the article: Feb 8, 2007. This is the same day that Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith died.

The Daily Show - a comedy show - covered the Iraq money story and showed footage of Halliburton and military officials each giving their "I dunno..." in front of Congress. Foreign news services like The Guardian and BBC covered the story. But American news services ignored it.

CNN instead switched to 24-7 dead bimbo coverage for the week, and did not have room for the Iraq money story. There was a wonderful moment when Lou Dobbs declared that enough was enough and he wouldn't cover the bimbo story any more.... And then they cut to Wolf Blitzer - with a "deer caught in the headlights" look - standing in front of a wall of monitors showing a bimbo story headline.

Faux News of course didn't cover the Iraq money story.

BBC uncovers lost Iraq billions Around $23 billion may have been lost, stolen or not properly accounted for in Iraq. The United States Department of Justice has imposed gagging orders that prevent further investigation.

VP Cheney - former CEO of Halliburton and still owning plenty of stock in it - was made very rich indeed by his little war. It was a license to print money as long as the war lasted. Small wonder it lasted far longer than WWII.

[billy.pilgrim]

after 9-11 we had the clout to isolate afghanistan and the ruling taliban until they turned over bid laden and if they didn't, a couple hundred special ops could have found bin laden

but rummy had been courting the taliban with a deal to build a pipeline across afghanistan from uzbekistan, so he couldn't make them mad, as long as they controlled the deal

iraq

sect of the treasury - Paul O'neil said that the 1st item on the agenda of the 1st cabinet level meeting of lil bush's 1st term was, "how do we get into Iraq"

[rstrong]

after 9-11 we had the clout to isolate afghanistan and the ruling taliban until they turned over bid laden and if they didn't, a couple hundred special ops could have found bin laden

Only if they were in a position to hand him over:

"In the early days of the Afghan war, Osama was almost captured (or killed) at Tora Bora, where Canadians were tasked with digging up al-Qaida bodies in hopes that one might have been Osama bin Laden.

The feeling at the time was that British commandos had bin Laden holed up, and were poised to capture or kill him, but they were called off because the Americans wanted to do it, and the operation was put on hold for a couple of days.

In the interim, Pakistani helicopters reportedly flew in and removed Osama and his key leaders.

That's essentially what Canadians soldiers who were there say."
- Peter Worthington

(Peter Worthington is a long-time war zone reporter and veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War. He's the founding editor of the Toronto Sun newspaper, which has since expanded into other cities and a Sun TV channel, commonly referred to as "Fox News North." He's stepfather of conservative writer Danielle Crittenden, wife of writer and political advisor David Frum. Incidentally, he was standing next to Jack Ruby when Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald.)

but rummy had been courting the taliban with a deal to build a pipeline across afghanistan from uzbekistan, so he couldn't make them mad, as long as they controlled the deal

I've never been able to believe this one even remotely. Such a deal meant sending the pipeline through the Northern Alliance territory into Taliban territory in the middle of their civil war. Then through Pakistan.... to serve India.

sect of the treasury - Paul O'neil said that the 1st item on the agenda of the 1st cabinet level meeting of lil bush's 1st term was, "how do we get into Iraq"

This on the other hand is both believable and documented.

And no doubt it's why Bush II cut danger pay and death benefits for the military in 2001.

[billy.pilgrim]

negoiating or putting UN pressure on the taliban would have screwed the oil deal

as kerry said in 2004 and as obama did, bin laden was a police action, a small mission to let the world know that the perpd die when they attack the US
unlike lil bush being the poster child for alqueada recruitment


excuse me, it was Turkmenistan

Thursday, December 4, 1997

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/west_asia/37021.stm


o'neil offers proof for the crime