- When Charlie Company's Lt. William Calley ordered and
encouraged his men to rape, maim and slaughter over 400 men, women and
children 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. And one was journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story in
the US media.
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- 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.
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- 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....
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- For the rest of this article, please go to:
- http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
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