Six Questions for Deborah Nelson on Vietnam War Crimes, and Why They Matter Now
By Ken Silverstein
Deborah Nelson is the Carnegie Visiting Professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland at College Park. She is the author of the new book, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S. War Crimes (Basic Books, 2008), based on a declassified army archive and interviews with suspects, whistleblowers, survivors, former commanders, investigators, and Pentagon officials. Nelson was formerly the Washington investigations editor for the Los Angeles Times (full disclosure: I worked for her there), and also reported for the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Her national awards include a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for a series that exposed widespread problems in the federal government’s Indian Housing Program. She recently replied to six questions about her new book.
1. The Vietnam War crimes you wrote about were covered up for many years with government and military complicity. How did they remain buried for so long?
They were classified for the first twenty years, buried in a bureaucracy for the next ten (think closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark), and currently are held hostage by the Privacy Act.
Here’s the history in brief: After Seymour Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre, the Army Staff assembled an internal team of officers to collect and monitor war-crime allegations. They kept tabs on incidents reported to Army investigators, members of Congress, the press, and at public forums. Over the next five years, they amassed an estimated 9,000 pages of evidence. All that motion did not appear to be directed at addressing or preventing atrocities–but rather served as an early-warning system and butt-covering operation for the administration. Few outside a small circle of Pentagon officials knew about it. After the war, the records were packed away, until about 1990, when the Army declassified them. They were stored in boxes on the back room shelves at the National Archives and Records Administration. A decade passed before a small number of scholars and journalists learned of their existence.
One of them was Nick Turse, who had researched the files for his dissertation at Columbia University. He thought some of the cases might be newsworthy and emailed the Los Angeles Times in 2005, when I was the Washington investigative editor. We joined forces to investigate the origin and fate of the files. We tracked down suspects, witnesses, former commanders, investigators and Pentagon officials; we traveled to Vietnam and entered the information from the files into spreadsheets. We discovered that investigators had confirmed cases involving at least 300 allegations of murder, massacre, torture, assault, mutilation and other war crimes–but the Army kept the findings secret from the public. Fewer than half the confirmed cases resulted in courts martial, and convictions were rare.
Unfortunately, the National Archives put the war-crime records back under wraps some time in the last few years. I was told that they contained private information on individuals and had not been properly “sanitized.” Last I checked, there were no plans to process the entire collection. However, NARA is processing individual case files requested under the freedom of information act. I, along with others, have managed to win re-release of some of the cases, although the wait can be inordinately long.
An interesting side-note: During Kerry’s run for president, the Swift Boaters attacked the testimony he made as a young veteran in 1971, when he told the Senate that war crimes were common in Vietnam. One of the officers who helped compile the secret war-crime files. Ret. Brig. Gen. John Johns, contacted Kerry’s campaign staff in 2004. He wanted to tell them that there were records at the National Archives that would show Kerry was right. Johns said he left three messages, but no one called him back.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004324
