Kerry stand on abuses gets backlashFormer commanders criticize 1971 talk of Vietnam atrocitiesWASHINGTON -- The scenes seemed eerily familiar. In 1971, shocking testimony about US wartime atrocities was delivered in a Senate hearing room by a young US Navy lieutenant, John F. Kerry. On Friday, almost exactly 33 years later, shocking testimony about US wartime abuses was once again laid out in a Senate hearing room, in this case about US treatment of Iraqi prisoners.
Even as President Bush apologized for the abuses by the military under his command, questions have resurfaced about allegations that Kerry, his Democratic challenger for the presidency, made about the behavior of US troops in Vietnam three decades ago. Bush administration officials insist that the abuses in Iraq were confined to a small number of bad apples; Kerry's Vietnam allegations portrayed widespread atrocities against the local population by the US military. His accusations of gang rape and mutilations and village burnings enraged some other veterans, several of whom convened a press conference last week to argue that Kerry is not fit to serve as commander in chief. A worldwide audience already has a good idea of the torment inflicted on Iraqi prisoners, because it was captured on film. But what happened in Vietnam remains murky. Three weeks ago, Kerry said his allegations were a ''little over the top," even as he pointed out that many atrocities have been documented. But the question remains: How widespread was the abuse by American troops in Vietnam? ''There were atrocities, without any question," Robert McNamara, the Vietnam-era defense secretary, said in an interview. ''We had photographs of officers shooting innocent Vietnamese. I would say it was not intentional, at least through the hierarchy of command. But I don't think enough attention was paid to it by the chain of command." The official US record on wartime atrocities in Vietnam is that 278 members of the armed forces were convicted of war crimes in an eight-year period. But some historians say that atrocities were much more widespread than that, although perhaps not as common as Kerry asserted. The most notorious Vietnam atrocity was the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968, in which at least 175 civilian men, women, and children and possibly as many as 400 were killed by US troops. In 1971, Kerry shocked many Americans and caused great consternation in the Nixon White House when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about alleged atrocities that went far beyond My Lai. A decorated combat veteran, Kerry based his remarks partly on the Winter Soldier hearings in Detroit, which featured 150 veterans telling their stories in a forum financed partly by actress Jane Fonda. Kerry told the Senate that soldiers ''personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Kahn." Continued... |
