Newsgroup: it.politica.pds
Titolo: L'altra My Lai

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040301&s=sherman
The Other My Lai
by Scott Sherman
In July 2002 a retired US Army colonel who would be dead within months
unburdened himself of twenty-two classified documents concerning war crimes
in Vietnam. The colonel didn't care for journalists, but he was fond of his
neighbor in Springfield, Virginia, a Washington-based science reporter for
the Toledo Blade. Those twenty-two documents laid the groundwork for a
remarkable four-part series published in the Blade this past October--a
series that meticulously reconstructed the activities of an elite US Army
reconnaissance platoon and its descent into barbarism at the height of the
Vietnam War.
The time was May to November 1967; the place was a highly contested region
of Quang Ngai province in South Vietnam--less than twenty miles from My
Lai,
which would be devastated by American soldiers a few months later. The unit
was known as Tiger Force, and its mandate was to annihilate Vietcong and
North Vietnamese forces, insure that civilians were safely herded into
"strategic hamlets" and--as the unit's slogan declared--to "out-guerrilla
the guerrillas." Enraged by prolonged exposure to sniper fire, booby traps
and high casualties, Tiger Force unleashed a reign of terror that left
possibly hundreds of civilians dead. Because of its dispassionate tone and
sturdy documentation--and because it was sponsored by an independently
owned, financially troubled news organization--the Blade series bears a
striking resemblance to Seymour Hersh's My Lai exposé, which was originally
syndicated by the Dispatch News Service in 1969 (and later expanded into a
book, My Lai 4). According to the Blade, elderly farmers were gunned down
in
rice paddies, grenades were hurled into civilian bunkers and prisoners were
scalped and beaten to death with shovels. Ears were severed from the
corpses
of dead Vietnamese, and, with the help of shoelaces, transformed into
ghoulish necklaces. "There was a period," the Blade reported, quoting a
platoon medic, "when just about everyone had a necklace of ears." In the
early 1970s the Pentagon, following a four-year investigation, determined
that eighteen members of Tiger Force had committed war crimes, but none of
the soldiers were ever prosecuted.
Despite its explosive findings, the Blade series--which was assembled from
candid interviews with Tiger Force veterans and Vietnamese civilians, along
with documents from the National Archives--was not a front-page story in
leading American newspapers, most of which printed truncated summaries
published by the Associated Press and Scripps Howard. (Only the Minneapolis
Star Tribune, the Arizona Daily Star and a handful of others deemed the
wire
stories worthy of page 1.) National television greeted the series with
silence. Hersh, writing in the November 10 New Yorker, lamented that this
"extraordinary investigation...remains all but invisible." Prodded by
Hersh,
ABC jumped on the story with two fine segments by Peter Jennings and Ted
Koppel, but for the most part the silence continued. The list of major news
organizations that have yet to acknowledge the Blade series includes NBC,
CBS, CNN, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report and the Wall Street
Journal.
Readers of the New York Times waited eight weeks to hear about the Blade
investigation, at which point they encountered, on page A24, a meandering
article by John Kifner--a piece that confirmed the essential facts of the
Blade investigation but failed to convey the depth and emotional power of
the series itself. "The Kifner piece," says Michael Sallah, who co-wrote
the
Blade series with Mitch Weiss, "was their way of kissing it off. I expected
more original reporting from the Times." (Times public editor Daniel
Okrent,
noting that his newspaper had "diminished" and "devalued" the Blade series,
sought an explanation from editor Bill Keller. "Keller told me," Okrent
wrote on February 1, "that if his own staff had developed the Blade series,
he would have put it on the front page.")
No mention of the Blade series appeared on the Times editorial page, a fact
that was true for almost every other American newspaper as well. For
passion, clarity and good sense, one had to turn to the editorial page of
the Bangor, Maine, Daily News, a 65,000-circulation newspaper, which wrote,
"The newly disclosed series of atrocities cries out for further
investigation--not to punish the G.I.s but to fix blame and punish the
superior officers who sent those soldiers on such bloody missions and have
covered up the atrocities and their own complicity ever since." Declared an
Austin American-Statesman editorial, "The army now must come clean about
what happened and release all available reports, files and information." It
says much about the timidity of our press that newspapers in Bangor and
Austin--and not the New York Times, Washington Post or Los Angeles
Times--had to take the lead in demanding further investigation into the
behavior of soldiers who, by their own admission, committed horrific
atrocities in Vietnam.
Why did major news organizations handle the Blade series with tongs, or not
at all? As Daniel Okrent noted, major newspapers are rarely generous to
their less distinguished rivals. But there seem to be other reasons as
well.
"There is a sense," the Blade's Sallah told NPR's On the Media, "that we
should not be too openly critical and evoke these painful memories of
Vietnam when we're already in a conflict." Indeed, with a few exceptions
like Ted Koppel, US journalists have been noticeably reluctant to ponder
the
contemporary relevance of the Blade report. It was left to the foreign
press
to wonder if there is any symmetry between US intervention in Southeast
Asia
in 1967 and the Middle East in 2004: "Tiger Force continues to be an active
part of the US military," affirmed the Toronto Star. "It is currently on
duty in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq."
-- 
 
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Il 29 Mar 2004, 21:37, 
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 (sergio)
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