corbett report: episode215 - history repeating: my lai, abu ghraib, afghanistan

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from corbett report: From My Lai to Abu Ghraib to Afghanistan, we have seen the all-too-familiar pattern: denials followed by excuses followed by faux apologies and offical handwringing. What is never examined is how each event fits into the bigger picture of the dehumanization of war. Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we go in search of the thread that connects our own time to the history that helps to explain it.


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the latest corbett report videos:
The NDAA: Just one more link in the chain of tyranny
Police State International: The globalization of control

the latest corbett report interviews:
Interview 450 – The International Forecaster with Bob Chapman, Interview 451 – Andrew Gavin Marshall on the High-Tech Police State, Interview 453 – Charles Farrier on CCTV in the UK, Interview 454 – Jerome Ravetz on Uncertainty in Science

previous: episode214 - truth music iii

US shame still stings 40 years after my lai massacre

from monsters & critics: The soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 11th US Army Brigade, arrived in the morning. Their mission was clear. "The orders were to shoot anything that moved," one US army officer told journalist Seymour Hersh, the investigative journalist who broke the story in 1969.

As the brigade pulled out three hours later on that fateful day, March 16, 1968, the village of My Lai in south Vietnam's highlands was levelled. Not a living thing stirred. Blood-soaked bodies covered the ground - women, children, old men, dogs. Smoke from burning huts could be seen from afar. The bodies of young women bore evidence of sexual violation.

The number of dead ranged from 347 to 504, victims of a Charlie Company gone amok in blood lust. Not one shot had been fired at the infantry. It would be another year and a half before the American public learned the truth - after a cover-up by the US Army...

Last summer, historians were outraged by US President George W Bush's comparison of Vietnam to Iraq. Bush likened the dangers of withdrawing from Iraq to the 'killing fields' that followed the US withdrawal from Vietnam. The 2008 release of Pinkville, a new film about My Lai by director Oliver Stone - Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) - will no doubt bring up more comparisons to current US military actions.