81–90 of 107 posts
High point: Thompson told the American troops that, if they opened fire on the Vietnamese civilians in the bunker, he and his crew would open fire on them. Talk about courage. Low point: He concluded — after a decade of research in Pentagon archives and more than 100 interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors — that Americans killing civilians in Vietnam was “pervasive and systematic.” One soldier tol…
https://www.amazon.com/Reporter-Memoir-Seymour-M-Hersh/dp/03...
He's probably one of the most important investigative reporters to have ever lived.
I wouldn't call him forgotten - while I'm bad with remembering names, when I saw "My Lai", the first thing that came to mind was "that badass helicopter pilot who landed his helicopter between civilians and US soldiers, and threatened to open fire to protect the civilians". What I didn't know was that he took so much flak for that - from statements that he should be the one punished to death threats and dead animals…
I sincerely doubt it. He acted with courage and people respect that.
It would have been because he reported it, this would have gotten post war veterans with PTSD in trouble when everyone just wanted to move on.
Not saying he was wrong, but people don't death threat bad asses who are willing to fight other people with guns, that's considered a fair fight.
> Back at their base he filed a complaint about the killing of civilians that he had witnessed.
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I completely agree - US forces behaved terribly during the Vietnam war. Sadly, I can't think of a war where civilians didn't get massacred. Maybe not to the same extent as in Vietnam, but massacres happen. The truly fucked up part is that there are likely many massacres that have never been reported.
Ok, so if you agree, there is no need to give the caveat "massacres happen". I recognize that you don't mean anything by it and it's a natural response when you are somehow associated with something icky to try and rationalize it. Still, it comes off as trying to soften the significance. If this was a discussion of war crimes perpetrated by some other country, would you feel compelled to point out that "massacres hap…
I'm not American, so I have nothing to save face for. And 'massacres happen' is not a caveat, it is a fact. Civilians get massacred in every single war. And the military organizations involved still try to cover it up.
Consider the Haditha massacre in Iraq in 2008. A group of US Marines killed 24 civilians. And yet, despite all the tough talk about My Lai and how it's completely unacceptable, two things came out of Haditha:
- the US military tried to cover it up as soon as it happened.
- nobody served any time for their role in the massacre.
And again, as I said to conclude my last post. "The truly fucked up part is that there are likely many massacres that have never been reported."
I don't understand how that constitutes rationalizing something. Rather, as a society, we must celebrate the people who stop these massacres and human rights violations because they still happen. They have always happened.
High point: Thompson told the American troops that, if they opened fire on the Vietnamese civilians in the bunker, he and his crew would open fire on them. Talk about courage. Low point: He concluded — after a decade of research in Pentagon archives and more than 100 interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors — that Americans killing civilians in Vietnam was “pervasive and systematic.” One soldier tol…
Hasn't really stopped either. Read up on things like the shoddy evidence that goes into drone bombing or the crimes of Seal Team Six or the many other horrific acts the US military has done in recent years and decades. If anything it seems like we are getting better at sweeping this stuff under the rug.
No more draft, career soldiers only Control the media One year tour of duty (they broke this one in Iraq because they were running low)
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Yes it is almost certainly blocked due to a misunderstanding of what the GDPR is .
Another possibility is that they understand GDPR perfectly, and chose not to take on the immense liability associated with accepting traffic from those that are "protected" by it. It's a perfectly reasonable, logical decision, given that GDPR is a complex piece of legislation with enormous room for different interpretations under the laws of 28 unique countries, the enforcement of which is fraught with conflicts of i…
A third of the 100 most viewed US newspapers have shuttered themselves to the EU, however this mass blocking has not seemingly been the norm for newspapers or other businesses in other markets outside the EU, or noticeably stopped any businesses within it from running websites.
What makes US news media companies so fragile when faced with this particular piece of EU legislation, compared to everyone else in the world, that they would rather chuck away eyeballs for their advertisers than deal with it?
If there was any justice in the world, the US officials who dictated military action in Vietnam would be tried for war crimes.
If there was justice in the world, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Obama would all be in The Hague, in irons. There is no justice in the world.
I wonder what would happen if we could live cast our military deployments so that every voter has access to every war crime committed? Maybe then people wouldn't be so quick to sign up for another war. Or they would at least be honest about it.
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If there was justice in the world, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Obama would all be in The Hague, in irons. There is no justice in the world.
Thats far too easy. In a democracy YOU are the state. I wonder what would happen if we could live cast our military deployments so that every voter has access to every war crime committed? Maybe then people wouldn't be so quick to sign up for another war. Or they would at least be honest about it.
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As the article quotes one soldier there was a mai Lai every month. You make it sound like this was a fact in the article. One unnamed soldier claimed that. And I think the free fire zones were much more centered on artillery and air strikes and not ground infiltrations just walking and shooting whomever they wanted to, but it’s still horrible the disregard for human life. But to state as you do that civilian mass mur…
That is pure unresearched wishful thinking. They would fly helicopters up to farmers on a field who would look up at them in confusion and do nothing. Then they'd turn on a siren and when the farmers scattered they shot them all down for taking "evasive action", making them "combatants". There'd be reports of raids with hundreds of "viet cong" killed and a few weapons recovered. The killing machine was about body cou…
And deleted before I could reply - for anyone else interested and just two quick examples, read up on Free-Fire Zones and the Strategic Hamlet Program. The former is the indiscriminate killing of anyone found in the area and the latter is forced relocation of civilians and forced labor to build said new hamlets.
That's top down strategy and can't be put on people losing their composure in the field.
"Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. ..." So much for the World Wide Web. Someone give me back the web 1.0 before 2000, please.
It's a shame that you have a duty to act, but if you don't act, you won't be entitled to nearly the same sympathy when all is said and done.
Ultimately the fact that your market, which is of rather limited interest to the LA Times' advertisers, has chosen to impose costs on them (especially the ongoing cost of evaluating whether or not they could be in breach of current or future EU regulations) which they have no way to recoup. Their fair and simple sole course of action is to give up on serving pages to you.