Mỹ Lai and Sy Hersh, a Reappraisal

I made a documentary about the Vietnam War five years ago, Vietnam: American Holocaust. Since I wanted it to be the ultimate Vietnam War documentary, I got the guy who narrated and starred in Apocalypse Now to do the voice-over. I made it because too many educated Americans will tell you 58,000 people died in the Vietnam War, when the real number is closer to three million, give or take 50,000. The tag line I have used to promote the film has been "The Vietnam War was a Mỹ Lai every week." Since most people know about the Mỹ Lai massacre, it is an easy way to say what the film's message is. The month after I released the film, Nick Turse published an article in The Nation titled A Mỹ Lai a Month about Operation Speedy Express, in which 10,889 Vietnamese were killed at the cost of only 267 American lives, which made much the same point.

That point, already known to the Vietnamese, most serious students of the Vietnam War, and certainly most combat vets, is that the only thing really outstanding about the Mỹ Lai massacre is the amount of attention it received.

Consider this relatively unknown massacre related by, Scott Camil, a decorated Vietnam combat Marine who testifies in my film. Why is it any less deserving to be known to the world and remembered throughout history?

In Operation Stone we were sitting up on the rail road trestle with a river on each side. There's another company behind each river. And like the people were running around inside. And we were just shooting them and the newspaper said Operation Stone like World War Two movie. We just sat up there and wiped them out, women, children, everything. Two hundred nine-one of them.

Was this not worthy of Pulitzer Prize winning reportage? Certainly Operation Speedy Express was because it clearly wasn't a simple case of a Lieutenant and his company going off the reservation.

I have long been of the opinion that the US imperialists, even in their limited wisdom, understood they could never obliterate the people's memory of the many atrocities of the Vietnam War, so they allowed one to become famous, they allowed one to be publicized and prosecuted, in the hopes that the public memory of the generalized and pervasive massacres that was the Vietnam War, would be resolved down to the memory of this one atrocity, and in this they have been largely successful. I believe this is the proper context to view Seymour Hersh's Pulitzer Prizing winning reporting on the Mỹ Lai Massacre.

When Sy Hersh asked "Why did the Army choose to prosecute this case?" the answer he got from his "military source" was:

“The Army knew it was going to get clobbered on this at some point, If they don’t prosecute somebody, if this stuff comes out without the Army taking some action, it could be even worse.”

The Mỹ Lai massacre took place on the morning of 16 March 1968 in the Vietnamese village of Son My. In Vietnam, it is properly known as the Son My massacre, but the US army wrongly had it marked Mỹ Lai on the map, and they don't easily admit mistakes so we call it the Mỹ Lai massacre. According to surviving villagers, the 504 unarmed civilians victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated.

The real American heroes at the Mỹ Lai massacre were helicopter pilot Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr, and his crew. They were proving close-air support over Son My for the ground troops. When he saw that innocent civilians were being massacred, he became an interventionist. From Wikipedia:

Thompson then saw a group of civilians (again consisting of children, women, and old men) at a bunker being approached by ground personnel. Thompson landed and told his crew that if the soldiers shot at the Vietnamese while he was trying to get them out of the bunker that they were to open fire at these soldiers. Thompson later testified that he spoke with a lieutenant (identified as Stephen Brooks of the 2nd Platoon) and told him there were women and children in the bunker, and asked if the lieutenant would help get them out. According to Thompson, "he [the lieutenant] said the only way to get them out was with a hand grenade". Thompson testified that he then told Brooks to "just hold your men right where they are, and I'll get the kids out". He found 12–16 people in the bunker, coaxed them out and led them to the helicopter, standing with them while they were flown out in two groups.

Returning to Mỹ Lai, Thompson and other air crew members noticed several large groups of bodies. Spotting some survivors in the ditch, Thompson landed again. A crew member entered the ditch and returned with a bloodied but apparently unharmed child who was flown to safety.

Hugh Thompson

When Thompson got back to base he reported the massacre to his superiors. He told his platoon leader:

"If this damn stuff is what's happening here," you can take these wings right now 'cause they're only sewn on with thread."

 At a time when the official Army line on Mỹ Lai was "U.S. infantrymen had killed 128 Communists in a bloody day-long battle.", Thompson stuck to his story and made it official. That meant being interviewed by a full colonel and the beginning of a record that would make this massacre hard to ignore. Thompson was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for saving the child but he refused it because it was accompanied by a fabricated account of how they saved the child from "intense crossfire."

Another hero of Mỹ Lai was a 21-year-old soldier by the name of Tom Glen. Six months after the massacre, he wrote a letter to General Creighton Abrams, who was then commander of all US forces in Vietnam, in which, after describing the brutality he had witnessed, said:

"It would indeed be terrible to find it necessary to believe that an American soldier that harbors such racial intolerance and disregard for justice and human feeling is a prototype of all American national character; yet the frequency of such soldiers lends credulity to such beliefs. ... What has been outlined here I have seen not only in my own unit, but also in others we have worked with, and I fear it is universal. If this is indeed the case, it is a problem which cannot be overlooked,... "

Colin Powell, then a young major, was assigned to investigate Glen's complaint and came back with the verdict: "In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal Division soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." [the soldiers who committed the Mỹ Lai massacre were from the Americal Division.] Still, the record was building.

Ron Ridenhour

Finally, there was Ronald L. Ridenhour, SP5, a former door gunner and the first real investigator of the Mỹ Lai story. He said that after he first heard about it from a friend:

I spent the remainder of my time in Vietnam trying to locate people who had been there and of course part of it was easy because I was going straight to the divisional LRRP company.  Four or five people who had been my friends in Hawaii and had gone to Charlie company had transferred into the divisional LRRP company within a week or ten days after the massacre. So I was able to go in and talk with them and two of them were very good friends.
...
On my first five missions, of the six men who were on our team, four of them had been at Mỹ Lai. I was going out with these guys and gathering this information. I would go and talk to them and I would try to find each of them, get each of them in a one-on-one conversation.

One of his friends, Michael Terry, was later interviewed and quoted by Sy Hersh. This is how Ridenhour found Sgt. Michael Bernhardt, a witness Sy Hersh would cite 28 times in his first three articles on the massacre:

The one thing I needed that I didn't have was somebody who had been there, who was a witness and who had not participated.  I didn't have any reason necessarily to believe my friends wouldn't be honest when they were asked about it. On the other hand, they had participated in this terrible crime and maybe they wouldn't.  So I felt I needed somebody that I could count on and I knew of such a man, his name was Michael Bernhardt.

Bernhardt wasn't easy to contact because the Army was keeping him on point out in the boonies, trying to get him killed before he could speak out. When he finally got some alone time with Bernhardt, and found that they were of like minds about the massacre, Bernhardt told him his plan was to go around and assassinate the officers involved "one by one", to which Ridenhour responded: "So why don't we try my plan. I'm gonna get an investigation going." 

Once Ridenhour had assembled the facts and witnesses, he sent a letter to 30 members of Congress demanding an investigation. All but three of the recipients of Ridenhour's letter put it in the circular file. Those three, to their credit, were Congressman Mo Udall and Senators Barry Goldwater and Edward Brooke. Udall pushed for a House Armed Services Committee investigation.

With pressure growing, the Army knew they needed a "fall guy", and after spending nearly a year investigating what had become known, even whispered in the halls of Congress, as the "Pinkville incident", they charged one man, Lt. William Calley Jr., "with premeditation murder" of 109 "Oriental human beings" on 6 Sept 1969.  He would become the only person ever convicted in this massacre. They also issued a short press release which was generally ignored.

It is only now, after the Army had built its case and charged Calley [a more cynical person might say,  "After the Army had perfected its cover story."] that Seymour Hersh, the official hero of record in the Mỹ Lai massacre, comes onto the stage. He was alerted to the Calley court marshal by Geoffrey Cowan of The Village Voice. Geoffrey Cowan had earlier been active in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer and had set up the first civil rights newspaper in Mississippi. He became an anti-war lawyer and was working on the anti-war presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy in 1968 when Sy Hersh was its press secretary.

After he received Cowan's tip, Hersh called a trusted friend, a former defense official, and asked "What did this guy Calley do?" From the retired US Army colonel he got the story the Army wanted to put out:

"This Calley is just a madman, Sy just a madman! He just went around killing all those people. Little babies!"

After receiving a small grant from The Fund for Investigative Journalism, Hersh did extensive interviews with Calley's lawyer and finally Calley himself. Hersh later wrote of the 15 hr. interview in which Hersh plied Calley with booze:

"It was silly of him to speak with me, but he just wanted to talk. He went all night."

Calley was a 20-year-old soldier facing capital murder charges talking to an experienced reporter without his lawyer present, but he was by no means innocent, and such tactics certainly could have been justified had Hersh's motive been to end that devastating war, but Sy Hersh admitted 40 years later:

"I’d like to tell you that I thought, oh my God, this is going to kill the war, it’s going to hurt the war effort. But really, fame, fortune and glory raced through my mind. What a story!"

Sy Hersh was getting the story that made him and he was exposing an atrocity, but he was also helping the Army build its case against a scape-goat, and helping to shape the memory the military wanted people to have of the war. "Yes, there were a few atrocities, but we took care of that." His stories ran in 33 newspapers. This is how Sy Hersh became the instrument by which the Mỹ Lai massacre became public knowledge in November 1969. He was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize and a job at the New York Times. At the time, Hersh boasted "I'm a fucking celebrity!"

If I am right about the role that the exposure of the Mỹ Lai massacre was intended to play in the media and the American psych, then Sy Hersh was a good choice to get the scoop because unlike David Halberstam, Dan Rather, Peter Arnett, Barbara Gluck, Bob Simons and many other war correspondents, he lacked experience in Vietnam. Sy Hersh covered the story from the point-of-view of the court marshal, and he covered it initially in three stories from three locations, Fort Benning, GA on 13 November 1969, Washington, DC on 20 November 1969, and Terre Haute, IN on 25 November 1969. He reports on it not as an example of the kind of wholesale slaughter that was the Vietnam War, but in isolation from any other massacre.

In his first article about Calley, Hersh quotes another officer defending Calley on the basis that what he did was nothing out of the ordinary:

"There weren’t any friendlies in the village. The orders were to shoot anything that moved.” Another officer said “It could happen to any of us. He has killed and has seen a lot of killing. ..Killing becomes nothing in Vietnam." 

A few paragraph later Hersh writes of Calley:

Friends described Calley as a “gung-ho Army man ... Army all the way.” Ironically, even his stanchest supporters admit, his enthusiasm may be somewhat to blame. “Maybe he did take some order to clear out the village a little bit too literally” one friend said “but he’s a fine boy.”

Sy Hersh should have known that the order "Kill anything that moves" was often given and often taken very literally. Here's another example from my film as told by Vietnam vet Jamie Henry:

19 women and children were rounded up as Viet Cong Suspects--and the lieutenant that rounded them up called the captain on the radio and he asked what should be done with them.

The captain simply repeated the order that came down from the colonel that morning. The order that came down from the colonel that morning was to kill anything that moves, which you can take anyway you want to take it. When the captain told the lieutenant this, the lieutenant rang off. I got up and I started walking over to the captain thinking that the lieutenant just might do it because I had served in his platoon for a long time. As I started over there, I think the captain panicked, he thought the lieutenant might do it too, and this was a little more atrocious than the other executions that our company had participated in, only because of the numbers. But the captain tried to call him up, tried to get him back on the horn, and he couldn't get a hold of him. As I was walking over to him, I turned, and I looked in the area. I looked toward where the supposed VCS were, and two men were leading a young girl, approximately 19 years old, very pretty, out of a hooch. She had no clothes on so I assumed she had been raped, which was pretty SOP (that’s standard operating procedure for civilians), and she was thrown onto the pile of the 19 women and children, and five men, around the circle, opened up on full automatic with their M-16s. And that was the end of that.

I believe one of the effects of an almost obsessive focus by the media on the single massacre at Mỹ Lai has been to drown out the knowledge of these hundreds of other atrocities, larger and smaller, that gave the war the character of a holocaust in which more than 3 million human beings, "Oriental" or not, were slaughtered by Americans.

The real American heroes of the Son My Massacre are first and foremost the ordinary soldiers who refused such orders and sometimes even offered armed resistance, and then those who refused to let the massacre be covered up. As Hersh reported at the time:

Interviews have brought out the fact that the investigation into the Pinkville affair was initiated six months after the incident, only after some of the men who served under Calley complained.

One of those soldiers was Sgt. Michael Bernhardt, who told Sy Hersh:

“The Army ordered me not to talk, but there are some orders that I have to personally decide whether to obey; I have my own conscience to consider."

These soldiers didn't receive any prizes or fancy new jobs for their troubles, but they should have.

Seymour Hersh's chemical weapons fetish

The Assad regime had Ghouta under siege and been killing the civilians and fighters in this resistive community with conventional shot and shell for almost a year before the sarin gas attack of 21 August killed over 1400 people including 400 children, and immediately after that poison gas attack, they continued the slaughter by conventional means. For example the Violations Documentation Center reports the local opposition media center was attacked the next day:

The day following the massacre, on 22-8-2013, the fighter jets, by two air raids, shelled the Coordination office itself. The office has also been shelled by "FozdiKa" that left it heavily damaged.

While none have the audacity to claim that someone other than the Assad regime is dropping barrel bombs on Aleppo, Homs, Idlib and other opposition areas, that those aren't regime war planes and helicopters that have been bombing schools, hospitals and playgrounds, or that regime artillery hasn't been shelling these areas for more than two years, a wide range of observers from both the far right and the phony left, have come forward to support Assad's claim that he didn't do the sarin attack. Perhaps this is because precisely one year before this attack, in a statement that gave Assad a green-light to continue the slaughter by these conventional means, US President Barack Obama threaten a serious response if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad crossed his redline and used chemical weapons to increase the slaughter.

Probably Assad's most prominent defender against the charge that he was also responsible for the sarin gas attack that his regime initially denied even happened, has been the noted journalist Seymour Hersh, who found a home for his poorly sourced arguments twice in the London Review of Books. Both of these lengthy essays promote Assad's thesis that the opposition gassed their own people in the faint hope that Obama would honor his "red-line" pledge and attack Assad.

Between the 21 August sarin gas attack and Sy Hersh's first defense of Assad for those attacks, Whose Sarin?, 19 December 2013, some 10,176 civilians and opposition fighters were killed without the use of poison gas, and between that essay and his second one, The Red Line and the Rat Line, 7 April 2014, another 10,670 Syrians have been slaughtered, none by poison gas. These figures have been compiled from VDC monthly and weekly martyrs reports. The VDC says these figures only account for those killed by regime forces. They list the regime's army deaths separately. They also use a very conservative methodology in their count. For example they only claim  932 martyrs killed in the 21 August chemical attacks whereas most other sources say between 1400 and 1700 died, they say only 91,923 opposition civilian and fighters, and 12,809 regime forces have been killed since the beginning of the revolution in March 2011, whereas the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says 150,345 were killed by the end of March 2014. Most likely either of those figures represents a serious undercount of the dead, given that an estimated 50,000 are missing, or in Assad's prisons, and we know from recent reports that 11,000, and probably many more of those thought to be in detention are already dead.

Many very good critiques of Sy Hersh's denial of Assad's responsibility for the sarin gas attacks have taken him to task for failing to prove his case, I have written two myself, and those are listed, along with many others, at the end of this piece. The purpose of this essay is not to add more proofs of Assad's responsibility for the poison gas attacks, but put that in a larger context and to point out that most of those killed in the Syrian conflict have been killed with conventional weapons and the vast majority of those have been killed by the Assad regime, so no matter how you slice it, Hersh et al are defending a mass murderer while ignoring all those murders by non-chemical means.

The same people who deny Assad's responsibility for the chemical attacks would also have you believe that the hundred thousand plus non-chemical deaths are more or less equally divided between the combatants, but this is simply not the case. Just this week Reuter reported what Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said:

Pillay said monitors in her office and investigators with the U.N. commission of inquiry in Syria, led by Paulo Pinheiro, had consistently blamed both parties to the Syrian conflict for human rights violations "but you cannot compare the two."

"Clearly the actions of the forces of the government far outweigh the violations (by rebels)," Pillay told reporters. "It's the government that is mostly responsible for the violations and all these perpetrators should be identified and can if there's a referral to the International Criminal Court."

So even if Sy Hersh et al, were successful in their attempts to absolve Bashar al-Assad of the chemical deaths, there can be no doubt that the man they are defending is a mass murderer many times over. Between his two LRB articles, Hersh has spent over ten thousand word denying Assad's responsibility for the chemical attacks without saying anything about his wholesale slaughter by other methods. Sy Hersh has turned Assad's chemical weapons attack into something of a fetish, as if disproving Assad culpability for those 1400 deaths makes him less of a mass murderer.

I am reminded of Bob Marley's song "I Shot The Sheriff" but in Sy Hersh's version it goes like this:

Assad shot the children, but he didn't gas no families.

Many others have critiqued Sy Hersh's thesis, among the best are:

From EA Worldview
There is No Chemical Weapons Conspiracy — Dissecting Hersh’s “Exclusive” by Scott Lucas 8 April 2014
Dissecting Hersh’s “Insurgents Did Chemical Weapons Attacks” — A Sequel by Scott Lucas 8 April 2014

From Brown Moses Blog
Seymour Hersh's Volcano Problem by Eliot Higgins 7 April 2014
What Does Seymour Hersh Knows About Volcano Rockets? by Eliot Higgins 7 April 2014

From War in Context
Seymour Hersh’s alternate reality by Paul Woodward 6 April 2014
Does Seymour Hersh understand how hexamine fits into Syrian sarin? by Paul Woodward 7 April 2014
Seymour Hersh as Dorian Gray by Louis Proyect 9 April 2014

From Arms Control Wonk
Turkey’s Syria Policy: Why Seymour Hersh Got it Wrong by Stein 8 April 2014

From NOW
Hersh and the Red Herring by Dan Kaszeta 8 April 2014

From Linux Beach
Seymour Hersh's Believe It or Don't by Clay Claiborne 8 April 2014
Whose Seymour Hersh? by Clay Claiborne 9 December 2013

From Al Monitor
Seymour Hersh gets it wrong on Turkey by Rasim Ozan Kutahyali, 10 April 2014

Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria

Seymour Hersh's Believe It or Don't

Repetition is at the heart of the Assad-Putin propaganda method, what might also be called the RT method. It is widely supported by the "non-(NATO) interventionist" Left. You make up a lie and you keep repeating it. Lack of proof is not an obstacle, just keep repeating it. Anonymous sources won't impeach its credibility as long as you keep repeating it. Even after it has clearly been disproven, you pay that no nevermind and you keep repeating it. So given how thoroughly he has embraced this method, it should surprise no one that the latest offering from Seymour Hersh, The Red Line and the Rat Line, London Review of Books, 6 April 2014, is essentially a rehash of his earlier LRB piece, Whose Sarin?, in which he first marshalled out his collected conspiracy theories about how Assad's opposition gassed themselves and Obama knew it. I responded to that at the time with Whose Seymour Hersh?, and since I have already refuted Hersh's arguments in that and other pieces, it now seems that I too will have to repeat myself, so please bear with me.

Seymour Hersh brings no new evidence to the table in his new piece, in fact the main thing new is his focus on Turkey as the "bad guy", a theme that is very topical with the Assad propaganda crowd these days, as can be seen from the #SaveKessab campaign.

Seymour Herst's Question has been Answered
The question he made the title of that earlier piece has since been answered definitively by the United Nation on 5 March 2014 in the 7th report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic. On page 19, it says:

The evidence available concerning the nature, quality and quantity of the agents used on 21 August indicated that the perpetrators likely had access to the chemical weapons stockpile of the Syrian military, as well as the expertise and equipment necessary to manipulate safely large amount of chemical agents.

That is a very definitive answer to Hersh's question "Whose sarin?", and from a very authoritative body. That is an answer to which one would think that Sy Hersh must respond to in any subsequent attempt to push his thesis that Assad is innocent and the 21 August sarin attacks in Damascus were the result of rebels using home-made sarin and home-made rockets. So how does he deal with this UN declaration?

Did I mention that ignoring inconvenient facts is another tenet of the Assad-Putin school of propaganda? So nevermind about that. Sy Hersh neither acknowledges nor responds to this UN report. He has his own source, "the [anonymous] former intelligence official." 

In fact, practically everything in this article is based on the word of this anonymous ex-agent, "the former intelligence official", a phrase he uses an astounding 31 times in this 5858 word article. All of Hersh's other sources are just as anonymous and unverifiable, like "a US intelligence consultant", "an American foreign policy expert", "a former US official","a senior Turkish diplomat", etc. None of his sources have names.

Almost none of Hersh's claims can be independently verified because they are secrets that reference unpublished secret papers that few have seen. For example, we are told to trust information from an anonymous Russian source because "the former intelligence official" tells us he is "a good source – someone with access, knowledge and a record of being trustworthy." This only works if you trust Sy Hersh about the trustworthiness of "the former intelligence official" and you trust "the former intelligence official's" judgement about the Russian chap. In short, this article rest entirely on your trust in Seymour Hersh. We are given no way to fact check what he is telling us.

The Former Intelligence Official
Since so much is this article depends on the word of "the former intelligence official," what do we know about him? Sy Hersh tell us a lot just from what he knows about a lot of matters generally kept secret. 

"the former intelligence official":

• Knows what "many in the US national security establishment" are thinking
• Knows "White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff"
• Knew "Every day the target list was getting longer,"
• Knew "the president had given the Joint Chiefs a fixed deadline for the launch"
• Knew what a "Russian military intelligence operative" was passing on to "British military intelligence"
• Knows what US Intel knows and doesn't know about "which batches [of Soviet-manufactured chemical weapons] the Assad government currently had in its arsenal"
• Knows that in "studies done by Western intelligence" in the spring, "The word “sarin” didn’t come up." -- this is a remarkable statement because it implies that "the former intelligence official" has a comprehensive knowledge of all such "studies done by Western intelligence" and since no such studies are cited or linked to, we have to assume most are secret or classified.
• Knows what "the Syrian opposition clearly had learned"
• Knew what "the consulate’s only mission was" in Benghazi
• Knew that "the joint chiefs had been sceptical of the administration’s argument" and opposed the attack because they thought it "would be an unjustified act of aggression" [Where was this 'moral' joint chiefs of Hersh's imagination from Vietnam through Iraq?]
• Knew how "The president’s decision to go to Congress was initially seen by senior aides in the White House"
• Knew what "The joint chiefs asked the White House"

In looking at the extraordinary range of closely-held material coming from Seymour Hersh's "former intelligence official" we have to conclude he is someone with extremely high level access. What could be more secret than the traffic between the president and his military command? And yet Hersh's "former intelligence official" is all up in their business. He knows what's going on inside the White House and he knows the technical details of a number of countries' chemical weapons facilities. Sy Hersh has himself a real master spy here. Imagine what his access would be worth to foreign governments? But what does it mean that he is a "former intelligence official"? We aren't talking "Burn Notice" here, are we? Because then he wouldn't have all that fabulous access.

APAP Rule #1: Don't let facts get in the way
Other Assad/Putin AgitProp questions are raised by Sy Hersh's other unnamed sources, for example Sy Hersh says:

A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in December, the mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian soldier were among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had no mandate to assign responsibility for the attack, but the person with knowledge of the UN’s activities said: ‘Investigators interviewed the people who were there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.’

Could that "person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria" be Carla Del Ponte? If so, there are very good reasons why Hersh might want to keep her identity a secret. Carla Del Ponte has a long and chequered career as a UN functionary. As a member of the UN commission of inquiry in May 2013, she made the provocative accusation that the rebels were the ones using sarin in Syria. Just hours after she went on Swiss TV and said,

"Our investigators have been in neighbouring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals.

"According to their report of last week, which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated."
...
“This was use on the part of the opposition's fighters, not by the government authorities.”

her UN panel issued a statement "to clarify that it has not reached conclusive findings" and no such findings were included in their final report. But it doesn't matter that Carla Del Pointe spoke out-of-court and immediately had her statement rebuked, all the pro-Assad propagandists can ignore those details and continue to claim that a UN official said the rebels did it. If they make it known that they are referring to Del Pointe's statement, it has already been well exposed, but Hersh keeps his "person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria" a secret so we either believe Hersh or we don't.

And again we see that Hersh simply ignores evidence he doesn't like, for while he uses an anonymous  "person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria" to put responsibility for the 19 March sarin attack in Khan Al-Assal on Assad's opposition, he ignores the official published UN findings, which says the Assad regime did this attack:

128. In Al-Ghouta, significant quantities of sarin were used in a well-planned indiscriminate attack targeting civilian-inhabited areas, causing mass casualties. The evidence available concerning the nature, quality and quantity of the agents used on 21 August indicated that the perpetrators likely had access to the chemical weapons stockpile of the Syrian military, as well as the expertise and equipment necessary to manipulate safely large amount of chemical agents. Concerning the incident in Khan Al-Assal on 19 March, the chemical agents used in that attack bore the same unique hallmarks as those used in Al-Ghouta.

So in both the 21 August attack in Ghouta and the 19 March attack in Khan Al-Assal, the official UN commission, using personnel and labs known to us, say that the sarin used was of a "professional" grade that came from Assad's arsenal and was delivered by a professional army with the expertise to handle large amounts of CW, and not the "home-made" sarin, delivered by "home-made" rockets of Sy Hersh's alternate reality. So how does Hersh deal with that gaping contradiction? Easy, in his world, that UN report doesn't exist and never gets mentioned. He has his mysterious alternate sources and he asks us to believe them instead.

more madness to his method
Frankly, I am also suspicious of this bit Sy Hersh gets from an unnamed "Defense Department consultant":

US intelligence has long known that al-Qaida experimented with chemical weapons, and has a video of one of its gas experiments with dogs.

This sounds suspiciously like the phony Syrian Rebel Gas Test on Rabbits Video posted on YouTube and promoted on Alex Jones' Infowars with the headline Shock Video Shows ‘Syrian Rebels’ Testing Chemical Weapons and on PressTV and many other pro-Assad outlets. It was clearly designed to frame the rebels for testing poison gas but was so fake that it was called out by comments like "this vid is total fake, and demonstrates an intent to use chemical agents and blame it on rebels" and "just a bunch of DESPERATE assad supporters staging a FAKE JIHADIST VIDEO" on YouTube and was exposed in my blog here and by Syrian Man in a video critique. Sy's guy has dogs dying in his video, not rabbits, so presumably it is a different video, and since it is not one that has been posted to YouTube, but is instead a secret US intelligence video, we are not in a position say whether it looks real or as fake as the rabbit video.

At another point Sy Hersh show us how a technically truthful statement can communicate a lie. He does a lot of that, for example he writes:

Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press were two kilograms of sarin.

While no one can account for "what local police told the press", many published reports quoted Hüseyin Avni Cos, the governor of Adana, where the arrest were made, as saying:

"We cannot reveal any organisation names right now, but their links will be evident after the questioning, there is no gas or anything of that sort captured as claimed."

Of the twelve people originally arrested, six where released outright and six were charged with suspicion of producing sarin gas. Five of those charged had their charges dropped before trial and the last one was freed at trial. No evidence of sarin or sarin production was ever found in spite of what certain pro-Assad newspapers claimed they were told by local police. But none of this history will stop unprincipled Assad supporters from repeating over and over again with a straight face "than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press were two kilograms of sarin." If you need more details on this incident and the propaganda around it check out my blog post, More False Reports of Sarin Usage by Assad's Opposition in Syria, 3 June 2013.

Sy Hersh's theme, that the chemical attack was a false-flag attack stage by the rebels is not original and goes back to the very earliest gas attacks at the end of 2012, eight months before Obama's "red-line" was drawn.

According to Russia Today, Syrian rebels have obtained chemical weapons from Libya and are planning on using them on civilians, and then blaming it on Assad. This is an effort between the Syrian rebels and their allies in Turkey, alongside cooperation with Libyan rebels under Abdel Hakim bel Haj.

Does the name Michael Maloof ring a bell?
While Hersh doesn't tell us who "the former intelligence officer" is, it does sound like it could very well be Michael Maloof, a former intelligence officer that writes on the neo-con website WND. With regards to the chemical attacks in Syria, he has been singing the same tune as Hersh. Or is it the other way round? For example, 6 months before Hersh's most recent offering, Maloof wrote in WND:

Former U.S. intelligence analysts claim current intelligence analysts have told them Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was not responsible for the Aug. 21 poison gas attack on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria, which killed 1,429 people, of whom more than 400 where children.

They claim the “growing body of evidence” reveals the incident was a pre-planned provocation by the Syrian opposition and its Saudi and Turkish supporters.

“The aim is reported to have been to create the kind of incident that would bring the United States into the war,” one former U.S. intelligence analysts said.

He also claims to have obtained classified documents that sound like the ones shown to Sy Hersh, saying:

in a classified document just obtained by WND, the U.S. military confirms that sarin was confiscated earlier this year from members of the Jabhat al-Nusra Front, the most influential of the rebel Islamists fighting in Syria.

The document says sarin from al-Qaida in Iraq made its way into Turkey and that while some was seized, more could have been used in an attack last March on civilians and Syrian military soldiers in Aleppo.

If Michael Maloof is "the former intelligence officer" that has been informing him, Sy Hersh has good reason for keeping his identity a secret. Michael Maloof was a Pentagon intelligence officer and part of a two-man team created after 9/11 to find links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. He had his security clearance revoked [Burn Notice?] in 2003 amidst allegations that he was involved with a Lebanese-American businessman, Imad El Haje, in a gun-running scheme to supply a West African civil war. Imad El Haje also "approached Maloof on behalf of Syria to seek help in arranging a communications channel between Syria and the Defense Department" eleven years ago. According to Warren P. Strobel of Knight Ridder Newspapers, 6 Nov 2003:

Those close to him contend that his clearances were pulled in retaliation for challenging the official assessment that there were no operational terrorist links between al-Qaida and Iraq.

So we can see that Maloof's love of conspiracy theories goes way back. But it gets worst than that because Maloof tell us who his source is and he names none other than Ray McGovern, a former analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, and his Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). I debunked their theories on how Assad didn't do it and the rebels gassed themselves in my blog post My dare to Ray McGovern & VIPS on Syria CW attack 7 Sept 2013, and in Secret Intel Source of Ray McGovern & VIPS Revealed!, 11 Sept 2013, I show that their theory was plagiarized from one Yossef Bodansky who, as it turns out, is an ally of Bashar al-Assad's uncle, Rifaat al-Assad. Is this the ultimate source of Sy Hersh's exclusive intel?


Many others have critiqued Sy Hersh's latest piece, among the best are:
From EA Worldview
There is No Chemical Weapons Conspiracy — Dissecting Hersh’s “Exclusive” by Scott Lucas 8 April 2014
Dissecting Hersh’s “Insurgents Did Chemical Weapons Attacks” — A Sequel by Scott Lucas 8 April 2014

From Brown Moses Blog
Seymour Hersh's Volcano Problem by Eliot Higgins 7 April 2014
What Does Seymour Hersh Knows About Volcano Rockets? by Eliot Higgins 7 April 2014

From War in Context
Seymour Hersh’s alternate reality by Paul Woodward 6 April 2014
Does Seymour Hersh understand how hexamine fits into Syrian sarin? by Paul Woodward 7 April 2014
Seymour Hersh as Dorian Gray by Louis Proyect 9 April 2014

From Arms Control Wonk
Turkey’s Syria Policy: Why Seymour Hersh Got it Wrong by Stein 8 April 2014

From NOW
Hersh and the Red Herring by Dan Kaszeta 8 April 2014

My blogs on Assad's use of CW in Syria:

• Whose Seymour Hersh? 
• UN: Assad sarin used in attacks | The Left's response?
• How Obama has supported Assad's gas murder always
• Why the return of chemical weapons is a big deal
• The Courage of Ghouta in a Craven World
• Where Robert Fisk's defense of Assad falls down
• More on ex-journalist Robert Fisk's defense of Assad
• Mint Press exposed as Assad apologist, AntiWar.com apologizes
• UN hints Assad used Russian rockets in sarin gas attack
• BREAKING: New Chemical Attack reported in Syria
• Secret Intel Source of Ray McGovern & VIPS Revealed!
• Why did Assad Regime first Deny CW Attack if Blameless?
• Witness to CW Attack: When Paradise turned to Hell.
• Media Body Count Games: Less than 500 or 110,000?
• Dr. Zaher Sahloul on the CW Attacks in Syria
• Why would Assad use CW with UN Inspectors in Syria?
• My dare to Ray McGovern & VIPS on Syria CW attack
• Who Used Sarin in Syria?
• Assad Knows: Chemical Attacks Kill Children First! 
• 1300+ Dead after Obama "Green-lights" new CW attack in Syria 

Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria

How #SaveKessab covers Assad's retreat in Latakia

Ever since Hezbullah took back Quasyr from the opposition, the dominate narrative in the media has been that, slowly but surely, the Assad regime is winning the conflict in Syria. While this has not been the case on the ground, that is how the Assad regime tells it and that is how the mainstream media spins it.

In service of that narrative, they generally make the most of the slightest military gain made by the regime while failing to report altogether important victories by the opposition. Now that the recent opposition gains in Latakia province have gotten too big to ignore, Assad and his minions are attempting to spin these rebel victories into a tale of the continuation of a holocaust carried out by Turkey against Armenians almost a hundred years ago. They have branded this campaign #SaveKessab.

Rebels' Tanks convoy in East Ghouta

Rebels open a new front

The Latakia offensive was started on 21 March 2014 by the combined armed forces of four opposition groups; it began with an attack on the Kessab border crossing with Turkey. The "Antal" campaign, as it is called, has been seven months in the making, in that time, military intelligence was gathered, ammunition was stockpiled, and extensive preparations were made. It is being led by Ansar as-Sham of the Islamic Front, and supported by Ahrar al-Sham, also of the IF, the independent faction Sham al-Islam and the jhadist group Jabhat al-Nursa. It is also now being supported by the Free Syria Army. The strategic goals of phase one of the Antal campaign are to liberate the Kessab border crossing and Kessab city and to relieve pressure on other rebel commands by opening a new front in Assad's heartland. Taking the area around Kessab gives the opposition its first route to the sea and its first port. There are also large criminal gangs that operate out of the area and murder and terrorize Syrian refugees in Turkey, and they need to be neutralized. To accomplish this mission, it was also necessary to take the Syrian Army base at Tower 45, which is the highest point on Jebel Turkman. The Syrian Army had been making use of its control of the high points like Tower 45 and Kessab crossing to rain down artillery shells and death on all the opposition towns below. All of these phase one goals have been accomplished in the first ten days of the campaign. The goals of phase two are TBA.

Latakia is important because even a regime that is willing to starve, gas, shell, and barrel bomb its own children to stay in power needs a loyal home base. Latakia is majority Alawite, Assad's sect, and his ancestral home. It is also heavily Shite and Christian in this majority Sunni Muslim country. As the French did before them, the Assad's have long cultivated a privileged position for the Alawite and used that to purchase their loyalty. The regime has also favored the Shite and Christians of Latakia to assure a solid base of support at home, although not without significant cracks, as exampled by Christian, Alawite and Shite fighters among the revolutionaries.

The rebels have long known that the regime won't fall until Damascus and the coast fall. This campaign is opening a new permanent front in the armed struggle against the Assad regime. It is also designed to shake confident in the regime among its core supporters and provide much needed relief to opposition fighters being pressed hard by the regime on many other fronts by forcing them into withdrawing forces from those battles and sending them to defend this home turf. There are important signs that this is already happening. A government caravan of 25 trucks recently left Idlib and Ariha and another military convoy left Aleppo for Latakia. Also recent reports have Hezbullah showing its colors in Latakia and that means those fighters aren't elsewhere.

An Important Victory
This should be seen for what it is, a dramatic and daring military victory by the co-ordinated opposition that flies in the face of the "Assad is Winning" thesis that seems to be heard everywhere these days. Here's a recent example from one of the usual pro-Assad suspects:

With the restoration of order in Yabroud, and with militant factions folding en masse, it appears that large-scale military operations against Syria have largely drawn to a close and are shifting instead toward a low-intensity terrorist campaign.

So writes Tony Cartalucci on Intifada Palestine, 30 March 2014 as the successful Antal campaign enters its second week. A few paragraphs down he even makes reference to the fighting around Kessab but he twists the facts to serve his narrative.

Syrian forces have pushed the militants to the very borders of Syria.

Just today, Turkey resorted to firing on, and claims to have shot down a Syrian warplane as Syrian forces battled militants along the border.

Tony doesn't tell you that the Turks shot down the Syrian warplane because it over flew Turkish air space while trying to attack rebel forces in Kessab. As you can see from the map, Assad may have real difficulties conducting air operations with modern jets over Kessab without violating Turkish air space. Tony doesn't tell you that the Syrian jet was shot down on a new front in which they took a border post formally occupied by the Syrian army because he is trying to use the fact that this battle is taking place near a border to promote his baseless narrative that the opposition is on the verge of being pushed out of the country.

Map of Kessab region of Syria

The Blogosphere is a Battlefield
This is just one small example of how the Assad forces conduct the public relations war, and since they are as mean spirited and dishonest in that realm as they are in conducting military operations against an unarmed people, instead of acknowledging this rebel victory, the always clever Assad regime has been trying to snatch a kind of PR victory from the jaws of military defeat with its #SaveKessab campaign.

#SaveKeAssadb
It has been able to do this because this area of Latakia, including Kessab, is largely Christian Armenian and the Armenians have a very negative history with Turkey, which still refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide which Turkey carried out during and after World War I.

As the map shows, Kessab sits on a thumb of Syria surrounded on three sides by Turkey, so it is likely to be involved in this particular conflict in many ways. Charges that rebels have infiltrated or been supplied from Turkey, of Syrian war planes over flying Turkish air space, of artillery being fired from Turkey, or mortar shells landing in Turkey are all likely true. This proximity has also allowed some very nefarious propagandists to spin a counter narrative that what is really going on in Kessab is a direct continuation of the Armenian holocaust after the first world war with Turkey now using al Qaeda as its agent of mass murder. This nightmare fantasy has been very effective because it feeds historic emotions among the widespread Armenian diaspora about the Armenian holocaust and strong concerns that Turkey may still be abusing Armenians anywhere. It stands as yet one more example of the Assad regime's willingness to stoke sectarian and religious conflict, even with lies and fabricated evidence, in its desperate effort to stay in power.

Articles like these started showing up in the pro-Assad media and soon the myth of genocide in Kessab was off and running. alakhbar english had this on Wednesday:

Syria’s Kessab: The devastation of an Armenian safe haven
26 March 2014
By Kevork Almassian
The Syrian town of Kessab, once a popular holiday destination, has recently come under heavy gunfire from rebel groups linked to al-Qaeda. Armed men entered the town, looted Armenian shops and homes, taking families hostage, and desecrating the town's three churches.

The attack has forced at least 2,000 ethnic Armenian civilians to seek refuge in Latakia and other neighboring hills. For Syria watchers, this incident further highlights the systematic targeting of Christian communities in the country. More...

The Christian Broadcast Network reported on Thursday that at least three churches had been desecrated and 80 people had been killed, at least one of them beheaded, and RT had this on Monday:

Christians flee Syria’s Kessab, Twitter cries atrocities,
Armenia accuses Turkey
31 March 2014
The Syrian Army is trying to retake the Christian majority town of Kessab reportedly seized by al-Qaeda-linked forces. The attack made hundreds of ethnic Armenians flee and caused international outcry with Armenia blaming Turkey for supporting extremists.
...
The Armenian govt called on the UN to protect Kessab, evoked the Armenian genocide, and accused Turkey of allowing Jihadists cross their border to attack Kessab. Ankara slammed the accusations and condemned the charge as ‘confrontational political propaganda’. More...

Soon, much more gruesome stories of massacres of Armenians in Kessab along with the looting of homes and desecration of Christian churches, complete with pictures, were going viral along with the hashtag #SaveKessab on Twitter and Instagram.

Graphics sold as pictures of Armenian genocide in Kessab on social media

With about 150,000 Syrians slaughtered in the last three years, suddenly celebrities like Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker [1.41 million Twitter followers] were tweeting about genocide in this town of two thousand he probably never even heard of before.

#StopGenocide #SaveKessab I have a lot of Armenian friends I love & support that are like #FAMILY to… http://t.co/ncqJvazYbO
— Travis Barker (@travisbarker) March 30, 2014

Even Kim Kardashian [20.4 million Twitter followers], woke up to the carnage going on in Syria, at least as to how it might effect Armenians.

Please let's not let history repeat itself!!!!!! Let's get this trending!!!! #SaveKessab #ArmenianGenocide
— Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian) March 30, 2014

Funny, I never thought of her as the "never again" type.

The problem is that none of this is true. All of the images that have been published as "documentation" of the need to #SaveKessab, have been shown to be fakes, from other times and other tragic places. There have been no massacres of civilians in Kessab by opposition forces, no looting of homes and no desecration of churches, no ethnic cleansing of Armenians. In this video, Tevan Poghosyan, a Member of the Armenian Parliament who traveled to Latakia and spoke to displaced Armenians from Kessab, talks about what they told him. He said that no Armenians had been killed by the rebel actions and no churches desecrated.

These images ar old hoaxes thrust into media by Assad propagandists and sadly believed by angry Armenians #SaveKessab pic.twitter.com/otKcYJERW2
— Abdul (@al_7aleem) March 29, 2014

That these and all the pictures used to promote the hoax that a massacre of Armenians has taken place in Kessab are fakes has been documented in detail by @al_7aleem in The #SaveKessab hoax propaganda pandemic. Debunked. From another piece that does a very good job of telling this story How a Hashtag Becomes a Tool for Spreading False Rumors: The Case of #SaveKessab published 31 March 2014 on Media.am, we have:

Use of unverified sources, false photos clearly from different time/country/movies(!) and misuse of word 'genocide' are all doing harm.
— Liana Aghajanian (@LianaAgh) March 29, 2014

Liana noticed rather correctly that fake videos especially (with the hashtag #SaveKessab) spread quickly and with great persistence: images of mass executions that have nothing to do with Kessab (the fake video was disseminated by the Russian news site LifeNews, but the original video was uploaded on YouTube on March 20, prior to the attack on Kessab) and videos prepared from clips of feature films.

The Defense Ministry of the opposition’s interim government has said all units of the Free Syrian Army participating in the Latakia offensive “are committed to the protection of civilians and their properties regardless of sect and ethnicity”. The mainly Islamic fighters knew that by laying siege to a largely Christian area, the regime would make the claim that the attack had a sectarian rather than a strategic basis and would make the charge that ethnic cleansing is going on so they have been careful to document the conditions of churches and other property in their hands, as with this video posted to You Tube. Many more videos and stills showing the real state of affairs in Kessab can be found in The Facts about Kassab, posted from Filor Nigo, 30 March 2014.

Rebels show conditions inside Armenian Churches in Kessab

Now the mayor of Kessab is trying to put an end to these stories. KALA news is reporting 31 March 2014, as translated here:

Kessab mayor refutes the murders of Armenian in Kessab information

Kessab Mayor, Vazgen Chaparyan, who continues to reside temporarily in Latakia, stated that thousands of Syrian Armenian Refugees from Kessab refuted this morning to KALA of various news sources That Armenians were killed. he said,

"Armenians are not killed, I do not know from where these rumors are being created. Armenians are still coming down safe into Latakia to secure themselves from war zone, and we already are accommodating them in Latakia in community premises and schools: They are all provided with food and other essential supplies."
...
Mr. Chaparyan also said that they have learned today about Kessab’s 80 elderly left behind ones are still alive, as they are also not captured and nor killed.

"Some have come here now , so they told us. We hope that others will be treated normally as well. And In God's will we will return to our motherland Kessab and we are very grateful for all the people abroad thinking and worrying about us." More...

The people of Kessab have been inconvenienced and displaced, more than a thousand have moved temporarily to Latakia City to get out of the way of fighting armies. Civilians may even be harmed, so far none have been killed, but this could change, but not because they are Armenian and not because Turkey is still bent on carrying forward a hundred year old genocide. These people of Kessab have the unfortunate burden, shared by people in wars throughout history, of being civilians in a conflict zone. They are likely to suffer serious loss only if Assad bombs or shells the town.

Scene from A Bridge Too Far

There is a scene in "A Bridge Too Far", one of my favorite WW2 movies, in which British paratroopers, having just jumped in to take the bridge at Arden, the bridge over the Rhine into Germany, approach a house by the bridge and right on the riverbank. Anthony Hopkins, playing Lt. Colonel Frost, after commenting to his mates "This camouflage may be all very well in the country, but I don't think it will fool anyone in the city," knocks on the door of this stately old house and says in his most polite voice to the man who answers "I'm awfully sorry chap, but I'm afraid we're going to have to occupy your house." And that was the story of this house, its location decided its fate. They probably bought it because it was on the river and overlooked the bridge, but that location also made it unlikely to survive the war.

Now its location has brought this three year long conflict to the Armenian community of Kessab. It is a port city in Latakia and the last Turkish border crossing in the hands of the Assad regime, it was only a matter of time before this war came to Kessab. That is bad enough, but now to have these nefarious propagandists spreading lies about massacres and genocide, causing Armenians all over the globe unnecessary trauma because they have seen old pictures of past massacres relabelled with #SaveKessab, shows that these "Left" opportunists know no bounds and no shame.

#SaveKessab protest at Turkish Consulate in Los Angeles | 28 March 2014

Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria

Remembering 50 years after US Holocaust in Vietnam

Although United States opposition to the Vietnamese struggle for independence goes back to its support of the French in the 1940's, as shown in the documentary film Vietnam: American Holocaust, it was only after the untimely death of President John F Kennedy that America's holocaust in Vietnam really began. The year was 1964. That year, with Lyndon Baines Johnson as the new Commander and Chief, General Westmoreland was made commander of the now rapidly growing US command in Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin attack was faked by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as a false pretext to pass a war resolution against Vietnam, the action figure G.I. Joe was born, and the US began its massive bombing campaign against Vietnam, a campaign that would eventually drop more bombs on that small country than were dropped by all parties to WWII. Before 1964, relatively few Vietnamese or Americans had been killed in the military conflict between the two countries. In 1964 it began a sharp escalation that would eventual deliver some 58,000 Americans and more than 3,000,000 Vietnamese to their graves.

It is now 50 years since those events and 2014 will see many 50th anniversaries of things related to the Vietnam War. Those of us who fought for peace during that war hoped that its conclusion would lead to an America that had "learned its lesson" about the morality and even usefulness of aggressive military power, but we have seen that those lessons were never learned. They waited for a generation to pass and American's aversion to wars against little countries that the warmongers derisively called "the Vietnam Syndrome" to ease, and then it was off to Afghanistan, Iraq and the Drone Wars.

In a further effort to expand popular acceptance of their addiction to war, they already have a 13 year long plan in place that will cost tens of millions of dollars, The United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration. The bill creating it was signed by President Barack Obama. They plan to use the 50th anniversary of Vietnam War events to remake its image in the public mind as another one of America's "good wars."

We need to do everything we can to oppose this makeover and assure that the true picture of the Vietnam War, an inherently anti-war picture, is preserved and passed down to future generations. With that view in mind, I produced and directed Vietnam: American Holocaust in 2008, and I think it is now more important than ever. I offer it as a powerful tool to subvert this planned makeover. Therefore I am asking you to buy this DVD and show it around in the coming year. You should also consider giving a copy to a local library or school. That will help to assure that a true picture of the Vietnam War will be preserved.

Comments on Vietnam: American Holocaust

It was a holocaust. Every American should see this film!
- Ron Kovic,Vietnam veteran & author Born on the 4th of July

I do a lot of public speaking on the subject of Vietnam. As I was watching the documentary, I kept thinking, ‘Wow, I can't wait to get this into the high schools.’ Clay has done an excellent job of piecing together the historical record. He uses footage, some of which I've never seen before, and it is so good. In my talks, I will say Eisenhower said this or McNamara said that. This documentary shows them actually saying it.
-Scott Camil, 1st Marines (1965-1967), Winter Soldier (1971)

Good job with the film. Very powerful. I think [Clay] did a good job of connecting Vietnam and Iraq without beating it into the ground. White phosphorous moment is particularly strong.
-David Zeiger, Director Sir! No Sir!

I love it .It's the best thing I've seen. I've seen Winter Solider, Hearts & Minds, you name it, I've seen it. This is the best thing I've seen.
-David Slaky, Veterans for Peace, St. Louis

This is the best political video on Vietnam and its historic relevance to our times I have ever seen. You really got to it, from the Garvey connection in Harlem of Ho Chi Min to our support of the French and the British release of the Japanese in Vietnam. It cuts deep enough to enrage me.
-Stuart M. Chandler, Rotten Tomatoes

The best documentary ever made on the Vietnam War.
- Blase Bonpane, Director of the Office of the Americas

Thank you so very much. Thank you.
- Vy Xuan Hong, Member, NA, Vietnam

Buy the DVD from the Vietnam: American Holocaust website or Amazon.com

Also visit the Veterans for Peace Full Disclosure: Towards an Honest Commeration of the American War in Vietnam website and sign the Open letter to the American people.