Obama '08?

A British blog you say?

What a surprise.

Your sister.

Take good care of your nephew.

Quote:

We were also told by more than one that many Vietnamese love Americans today,

If that's how you would like it to be Okie and if you truly believe that the US went there ['there' meaning any one of its invasions] to help people, then why do you go to such extraordinary lengths to cover up these war crimes/instances of mass murder?
Why do you go to such extraordinary lengths to make excuses for those who have perpetrated these vicious crimes that "are not at all part of what we are"?
Why have I never heard anything, from anyone or very few, that the war criminals should be held to account?
You know, Okie, these things just don't square up right.

The Obama administration announced 30 plans Thursday to scale back or eliminate hundreds of federal regulations and save American companies billions of dollars in unnecessary costs.

The proposals, the latest attempt by the administration to burnish its pro-business credentials, will affect workplace safety, environmental protection, endangered species and a number of other areas. Many of the changes involve reducing paperwork or eliminating redundancies in the law.



Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who leads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, will lay out the proposed changes in a speech Thursday morning at the American Enterprise Institute.

One of the proposals, by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, would ensure that required hazard labels and classifications in the United States are the same as those used in other nations, which could save companies $585 million a year.

Last summer, the White House political team, which Messina ran, sensed a political odor emanating from the crystal chandeliers and European masterpieces of Lasry’s home and pulled the plug on a high-dollar fundraiser for Obama there. But with campaign 2012 on the horizon, Messina and company are apparently more willing to hold their noses and pass the hat on Wall Street, especially to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 donors in the crowd.

Monday’s meeting at Lasry’s home was expressly organized as an opportunity for Messina to reach out to erstwhile Clinton supporters, a group the administration hasn’t exactly showered with attention.

“Everyone’s pumped up,” said Messina as he backed toward the house and ducked into the foyer. “We’re going to get this guy elected!”

A different landscape

Democratic officials speaking on background and potential donors and fundraisers who met with Messina at Monday’s numerous meetings had a more clear-eyed view of the campaign manager’s immediate goals and how they contrast with his former aversion to the Lasry manse.

“The difference between then and now is they need you more,” said one attendee of the Lasry event, which was billed as an outreach to former Clinton supporters. The donor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the thinking of top fundraisers, said that Messina’s meetings in New York mark the beginning of a courting process that will culminate in a major date with Obama at the upscale Manhattan restaurant Daniel in June. Fundraisers expect that event to rake in millions.

I am trying to get through your thick liberal head that the vast majority of war crimes or atrocities in Vietnam never ocurred, JTT.

Many My Lais
By TARA MCKELVEY
Published: December 12, 2008

Villagers, acting as human minesweepers, walked ahead of troops in dangerous areas to keep Americans from being blown up. Prisoners were subjected to a variation on waterboarding and jolted with electricity. Teenage boys fishing on a lake, as well as children tending flocks of ducks, were killed. “There are hundreds of such reports in the war-crime archive, each one dutifully recorded, sometimes with no more than a passing sentence or two, as if the killing were as routine as the activity it interrupted,” Deborah Nelson writes in “The War Behind Me.”

The archive in question, a set of Army documents at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Md., reveals widespread killing and abuse by American troops in Vietnam. Most of these actions are not known to the public, even though the military investigated them. The crimes are similar to those committed at My Lai in 1968. Yet, as Nelson contends, most Ameri­cans still think the violence was the work of “a few rogue units,” when in fact “every major division that served in Vietnam was represented.”

...

“Get the Army off the front page,” President Richard Nixon reportedly said. Investigations were a good way to do that. A cover-up attracts attention; a crime that is being looked into does not. The military investigations, Nelson argues, were designed not to hold rapists and murderers accountable, but to deflect publicity. When reporters heard about a war crime, they’d call the Army to see if it would provide information. If they suspected a cover-up, they’d pursue the story. If a military spokesman said an investigation was under way, the story was usually dropped.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/books/review/McKelvey-t.html

I am trying to get through your thick liberal head that the vast majority of war crimes or atrocities in Vietnam never ocurred, JTT.

Not until 1972, however, did the scale of South Korean civilian murders become public knowledge (although still of little interest to the mass media these murders fall into the "constructive" category). [145] Two Vietnamese-speaking Quakers, Diane and Michael Jones, carried out an intensive study of a portion of the area that had been occupied by the South Koreans for half a decade. To summarize their findings [146]:

(a) The South Korean "rented soldiers," as the South Vietnamese describe them, committed a whole series of My Lai-scale massacres, twelve separate massacres of 100 or more civilians having been uncovered in the Jones' study.

These soldiers carried out dozens of other massacres of twenty or more unarmed civilians, plus innumerable isolated killings, robberies, rapes, tortures, and devastation of land and personal property. The aggregate number of known murders by the South Koreans clearly runs into many thousands; and the Joneses examined only a part of the territory "pacified" by these "allied" forces. (b) The bulk of the victims of these slaughters were women, children, and old people, as draft-age males had either joined the NLF, been recruited into the Saigon army, or were in hiding. (c) These mass murders were carried out in part, but only in part [147], as reprisals for attacks on the South Korean forces, or as a warning against such attacks.

Briefly, the civilians of the entire area covered by the South Koreans served as hostages; if any casualties were taken by these mercenaries, as by an exploding mine, they often would go to the nearest village and shoot twenty, or 120, unarmed civilians. This policy is similar to that employed by the Nazis, but South Korean hostage murders of civilians have been relatively more extensive and undiscriminating than those perpetrated by the Nazis in Western Europe during World War II, considering the relative scale of the occupation. (d) These mass murders were carried out over an extended time period, and into 1972, with certain knowledge by U.S. authorities. [148]

There is no evidence that U.S. officials made any effort to discourage this form of "pacification" or that any disciplinary action was ever taken in response to these frequent and sustained atrocities. In fact, there is reason to believe the South Korean policy of deliberate murder of civilians was not merely known and tolerated but was looked upon with favor by some U.S. authorities. Frank Baldwin, of Columbia University's East Asia Institute, reports that the Korean policy was "an open secret in Korea for several years." American officials admitted to Baldwin that these accounts were true, "sometimes with regret, but usually with admiration." [149] (e)

In its request for $134 million for fiscal 1973 to support the continued presence of South Korean troops in Vietnam (raising the 1966-73 total to $1.76 billion), the DOD pointed out to Congress that the South Korean troops "protect" an important section of South Vietnam. It is a fact that the South Koreans have "protected" and given "security" [150] to people in South Vietnam in precisely the Orwellian- official American sense that Nixon, Westmoreland, and the pacification program in general have done.

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Deborah Nelson: The War Behind Me

...

She and Vietnam Scholar, Nick Turse, found out that at the time the Army launched its inquiry into the massacre at My Lai, it also launched a second inquiry into other war crimes. That second inquiry was headed up by a team of officers who worked entirely in secret for more than five years. The team assembled nine thousand pages of evidence chronicling a wide and hideous range of events when American soldiers perpetrated murders of civilians, committed atrocities, and in other ways systematically violated the laws of war and of the Army Field Manual.

Nelson and Turse set out to make their way through this staggering accumulation of reports which added up, in the words of one witness, to “a My Lai a month.”

Most of the incidents in the nine thousand came to light because of ‘whistleblowers’ who wrote letters describing the crimes to political and military leaders, describing the event and naming the perpetrators. After studying those files Nelson went to whatever lengths necessary to find and interview all the protagonists: whistleblowers, perpetrators, investigators, and, in a trip to Vietnam, surviving victims and the families of murdered victims.

As one might surmise, there is no lack of drama in these encounters, perhaps especially those who are politely asked about atrocities they committed decades earlier. Drama reveals character, and

I was especially intrigued by one former soldier who, confronted with overwhelming evidence of his commission of war crimes thirty years earlier, responded over and over, with increasing heat to Nelson’s questions: “WHY DON’T YOU GET A REAL JOB!!”

http://firedoglake.com/2009/02/21/fdl-book-salon-welcomes-deborah-nelson-the-war-behind-me/

What John Kerry testified to Congress was essentially a lie.

Many veterans tried to alert the Pentagon and the public to the problem in the early 1970s at forums sponsored by such groups as Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Most famously, John Kerry, then a leader in the organization, testified on Capitol Hill on April 22, 1971, that U.S. forces had “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 fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war....”[10]

Within days, the declassified records show, the White House quietly requested a list of war-crime investigations from the army.[11] The staff at the Pentagon was ready with a lengthy response that reported 213 suspects and included confirmed cases of acts from the litany cited in Kerry’s testimony.[12]

Yet the Nixon administration went ahead with an aggressive backroom campaign to discredit as fabricators and traitors Kerry and other veterans who spoke out about war crimes. The president and White House aides worked closely with a rival organization, Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, to publicly condemn the allegations.[13] “The big lie” became the group’s familiar drumbeat.

Years later, the founder of the group would boast, “Americans got the message that a motley crew of exaggerators and frauds didn’t speak for Vietnam veterans.”[14] The impression stuck. By the mid-1980s, the whistle-blowers largely had been silenced, and conventional wisdom held that atrocities in Vietnam were overblown.[15] The controversy resurfaced in 2004, when Kerry ran for president. His old detractors ran ads demanding that he disavow his 1971 testimony, confident they would play to a receptive audience; their efforts contributed to his defeat.[16] All the while, the army had evidence in its files that he [Kerry] had spoken the truth.

http://www.thewarbehindme.com/excerpt.php

WASHINGTON – Congress on Thursday passed a four-year extension of post-Sept. 11 powers to search records and conduct roving wiretaps in pursuit of terrorists. Votes taken in rapid succession in the Senate and House came after lawmakers rejected attempts to temper the law enforcement powers to ensure that individual liberties are not abused.