LA Times Cover-Up?
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=5D74268B-C69A-47A9-A037-EE17D3C29E1E
By Scott Swett
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, March 13, 2008
Members of the radical group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) are
busy preparing to host a new "war crimes" conference next month in
Washington. The event, billed as Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan,
takes its title from the IVAW's namesake and mentor, the Vietnam
Veterans Against the War (VVAW). However, information has now come to
light that profoundly undermines the VVAW's original atrocity claims.
Recently discovered US Army documents offer a much clearer picture of
the military's investigations of the VVAW's lurid allegations. Of 76
Army witnesses who appeared at the group's 1971 "Winter Soldier"
conference, summary reports of the Army's Criminal Investigation
Division (CID) investigations are available for 48. Three witnesses
were not identified. The rest failed to allege criminal acts and were
apparently not interviewed.
The Los Angeles Times had access to these records more than a year
ago. In a long 2006 article on war crimes in Vietnam, reporters Nick
Turse and Deborah Nelson reported:
The Times examined most of the [Vietnam War Crimes Working Group]
files and obtained copies of about 3,000 pages – about a third of the
total – before government officials removed them from the public
shelves, saying they contained personal information that was exempt
[sic] from the Freedom of Information Act.
After the high-profile national debate during the 2004 campaign over
John Kerry's 1971 recital of the VVAW's atrocity allegations before a
Senate committee, it is difficult to imagine that the LA Times failed
to carefully examine the Army's VVAW case reports. They must not have
pleased the paper's editors, for the only report concerning a Winter
Soldier allegation the article cited was that for James Henry – the
one and only VVAW witness whose charges were found to merit
additional investigation by the CID.
Instead, the LA Times merely noted:
In 1971, Henry joined more than 100 other veterans at the Winter
Soldier Investigation, a forum on war crimes sponsored by Vietnam
Veterans Against the War.
The FBI put the three-day gathering at a Detroit hotel under
surveillance, records show, and Nixon administration officials worked
behind the scenes to discredit the speakers as impostors and fabricators.
Co-author Turse was clearly well aware of the contents of the CID
reports. In a 2004 Village Voice article in which he attacked the
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, he wrote:
The [National Archives] have hundreds of files of official U.S.
military investigations of such atrocities committed by American
soldiers. I've pored over those recordswhich were classified for
decadesfor my Columbia University dissertation and, now, this Voice article.
Turse provided details of the CID investigations into the Winter
Soldier allegations:
Moreover, according to official records, CID investigators attempted
to contact 41 people who testified at the Detroit session, which
occurred between January 31 and February 2, 1971. Five couldn't be
located, according to records. Of the remaining 36, 31 submitted to
interviews...
Later in the article, Turse observed:
…some veterans told investigators after the WSI that they would not
offer any further testimony or would only speak before Congress or a
congressional committee.
However, Turse omitted the most basic fact about the CID's VVAW
investigations – the fact that all but one case was closed as
unsubstantiated, demonstrably untrue, or for lack of evidence.
Instead, he listed examples of other crimes that were similar to
those alleged at WSI for which the CID had filed charges, implying
that therefore the VVAW's claims must also be valid. What this little
exercise in innuendo really demonstrated was that military judicial
authorities took such allegations seriously and generally obtained
indictments when the evidence warranted – just the opposite of
Turse's conclusion:
But in fact – and despite later claims to the contrary by their
pro-war critics – most of the Winter Soldier participants had
publicly given accounts with their own names, unit identifications,
dates of service, and sometimes rather detailed descriptions of
locations – namely, all the information needed to proceed with
investigations. In practically all the specific Winter Soldier cases,
such probes were never done.
The Army summary reports clearly show that this is untrue. When
information was available, the CID conducted investigations. However,
the most damning indictment of Turse's reporting is his complete
failure to mention that at least ten VVAW activists repudiated some
or all of their testimony when interviewed by military authorities.
Turse and the LA Times had good reason to believe that this
information would remain hidden. The War Crimes Working Group records
at the National Archives are no longer available to the public.
Freedom of Information requests made several years ago have not been
filled, due to an immense backlog in the process of redacting
personal information.
Accurately reporting the results of the Army's VVAW investigations
would significantly damage the longstanding leftist myth that we were
the bad guys in Vietnam: that the Americans, rather than the
Vietnamese communists, employed terror tactics against civilians as a
standard policy – a myth to which Turse and the LA Times are
profoundly committed. They evidently did not foresee the possibility
that other researchers lacking their bias might have also copied
these documents while they were publicly available.
The LA Times article also makes full use of another tactic favored by
anti-military writers: dwelling at length upon a small number of
crimes without providing any statistical context, to leave the
impression that such events are widespread and routine:
In addition to the 320 substantiated incidents, the records contain
material related to more than 500 alleged atrocities that Army
investigators could not prove or that they discounted.
In reality, significant numbers of crimes occur in every group with a
large population. For example, Detroit, population 1.5 million,
recorded more than 700 murders in 1971, the year the Winter Soldiers
gathered there to make their unsubstantiated atrocity claims.
In January of this year, the New York Times published a long article
detailing violent crimes that veterans committed after returning home
from Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the Times carefully avoided
pointing out that civilians actually commit such crimes at a
significantly higher rate. In 2004, the newspaper treated its readers
to more than 50 front page stories on a minor prison abuse scandal in
Iraq that military officials had uncovered and were already handling.
The purpose of such slanted reporting is obvious: to persuade the
public to view the US military with distrust and contempt.
As the LA Times prepares for its next round of layoffs, polls
indicate that the number of news consumers who do not trust the old
media is still rising. One reason for this is the a steady increase
in public awareness of how these news organizations systematically
distort and conceal any information that contradicts their political agenda.
NOTES:
[1] In fact, the collection is not exempt from the FOIA but subject
to its provisions, which is why the raw documents were removed from
public access once the National Archives realized its mistake in
having previously made them available.
---
Scott Swett is the primary author of a new book on the 2004
presidential campaign, To Set The Record Straight: How Swift Boat
Veterans, POWs and the New Media Defeated John Kerry. He is also the
primary webmaster of WinterSoldier.com and SwiftVets.com.
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