Where
Are This War’s Heroes, Military and Journalistic?
9 March 2010By Dave Lindorff
When Charlie Company’s Lt. William Calley ordered and
encouraged his men to rape, maim and slaughter over
400 women and children and old people in My Lai in
Vietnam back in 1968, there were at least four heroes
who tried to stop him or bring him and higher officers
to justice. One was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson
Jr., who evacuated some of the wounded victims, and
who set his chopper down between a group of Vietnamese
and Calley’s men, ordering his door gunner to open
fire on the US soldiers if they shot any more people.
One was Ron Ridenhour, a soldier who learned of the
massacre, and began a private investigation,
ultimately reporting the crime to the Pentagon and
Congress. One was Michael Bernhardt, a soldier in
Charlie Company who witnessed the whole thing, and
reported it all to Ridenhour (also confiding that if
Ridenhour didn't succeed in getting prosecutions going
he had a hit list of all the officers involved and
planned to execute them himself!). And one was
journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story in the
US media.
Today’s war in Afghanistan also has its My Lai
massacres. It has them almost weekly, as US warplanes
bomb wedding parties, or homes “suspected” of housing
terrorists that turn out to house nothing but
civilians. But these My Lais are all conveniently
labeled accidents. They get filed away and forgotten
as the inevitable “collateral damage” of war. There
was, however, a massacre recently that was not a
"mistake"--a massacre which, while it only involved
fewer than a dozen innocent people, bears the same
stench as My Lai. It was the execution-style slaying
of eight handcuffed students, aged 11-18, and a
12-year-old neighboring shepherd boy who had been
visiting the others, in Kunar Province, on Dec. 26.
Sadly, no principled soldier with a conscience like
pilot Hugh Thompson tried to save these children. No
observer had the guts of a Michael Brernhardt to
report what he had seen. No Ron Ridenhour among the
other serving US troops in Afghanistan has
investigated this atrocity or reported it to Congress.
And no American reporter has investigated this war
crime the way Seymour Hersh investigated My Lai.
There is a Seymour Hersh for the Kunar massacre, but
he’s a Brit. While American reporters like the
anonymous journalistic drones who wrote CNN’s December
29 report on the incident took the Pentagon’s initial
cover story--that the dead were part of a secret
bomb-squad--at face value, Jerome Starkey, a dogged
reporter in Afghanistan working for the Times of
London and the Scotsman, talked to other sources--the
dead boys’ headmaster, other townspeople, and Afghan
government officials--and found out the real truth
about a gruesome war crime--the execution of
handcuffed children. And while a few news outlets in
the US like the New York Times did mention that there
were some claims that the dead were children, not
bomb-makers, none, including CNN, which had bought and
run the Pentagon’s lies unquestioningly, bothered to
print the news update when, on Feb. 24, the US
military admitted that in fact the dead were innocent
students. Nor has any US corporate news organization
mentioned that the dead had been handcuffed when they
were shot.
Starkey reported the US government’s damning
admission. Yet still the US media remain silent as the
grave.
Under the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to
execute a captive. Yet in Kunar on December 26, US-led
forces, or perhaps US soldiers or contract
mercenaries, cold-bloodedly executed nine hand-cuffed
prisoners. It is a war crime to kill children under
the age of 15, yet in this incident a boy of 11 and a
boy of 12 were handcuffed as captured combatants and
executed. Two others of the dead were 12 and a third
was 15. These are capital offenses under the Geneva
Conventions, to which the US is a signatory. So is
covering up the crime, all the way up the chain of
command.
I called the Secretary of Defense’s office to ask if
any investigation was underway into this crime or if
one was planned, and was told I had to send a written
request, which I did. To date, I have heard nothing.
The Pentagon PR machine pretended to me on the phone
that they didn't even know what incident I was talking
about, but without their "help" I have learned that
what the US military has done--no surprise--is to pass
the buck by leaving any investigation to the
International Security Assistance Force--a fancy name
for the US-led NATO force fighting the Taliban in
Afghanistan. It’s a clever ruse. The ISAF is no more a
genuine coalition entity than was George Bush's Iraq
War Coalition of the Willing, but this dodge makes
legislative investigation of the event impossible,
since Congress has no authority to compel testimony
from NATO or the ISAF as it would the Pentagon. A
source at the Senate Armed Services Committee confirms
that the ISAF is investigating, and that the committee
has asked for a “briefing”--that means nothing would
be under oath--once that investigation is complete,
but don’t hold your breath or expect anything
dramatic.
I also contacted the press office of the House Armed
Services Committee to see if any hearings into this
crime have been planned. The answer is no, though the
press officer asked me to send her details of the
incident (Not a good sign that House members and staff
are paying much attention--the killings led to
country-wide student demonstrations in Afghanistan, to
a formal protest by the office of President Hamid
Karzai, and to an investigation by the Afghan
government, which concluded that innocent students had
been handcuffed and executed, and no doubt contributed
to a call by the Afghan government for prosecution and
execution of American soldiers who kill Afghan
civilians.) For images of the students, go to RAWA. A
number of the shots of the shooting scene show head
wounds consistent with the execution story.
There is still time for real heroes to stand up in the
midst of this imperial adventure that may now
appropriately be called Obama’s War in Afghanistan.
Plenty of men and women in uniform in Afghanistan know
that nine innocent Afghan children were captured and
murdered at America’s hands last December in Kunar.
There are also probably people who were involved in
the planning or carrying out of this criminal
operation who are sickened by what happened. But these
people are so far holding their tongues, whether out
of fear, or out of simply not knowing where to turn
(Note: If you have information you may contact me).
There are also plenty of reporters in Afghanistan and
in Washington who could be investigating this story.
They are not. Don’t ask me why. They certainly should
not be able to call themselves journalists--at least
with a straight face.
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