May 17, 2001
A CounterPunch
Special Report
Fragging Bob:
Bob Kerrey,
CIA War Crimes,
And The Need For A War Crimes Trial
by Douglas Valentine
By now everybody knows that former Senator
Bob Kerrey led a seven-member team of Navy Seals into Thanh Phong
village in February 1969, and murdered in cold blood more than
a dozen women and children.
What hardly anyone knows, and
what no one in the press is talking about (although many of them
know), is that Kerrey was on a CIA mission, and its specific
purpose was to kill those women and children. It was illegal,
premeditated mass murder and it was a war crime.
And it's time to hold the CIA
responsible. It's time for a war crimes tribunal to examine the
CIA's illegal activities during and since the Vietnam War.
War Crimes
As Policy
War crimes were a central was
part of a CIA strategy for fighting the Vietnam War. The strategy
was known as Contre Coup, and it was the manifestation of a belief
that the war was essentially political, not military, in nature.
The CIA theorized that it was being fought by opposing ideological
factions, each one amounting to about five percent of the total
population, while the remaining ninety percent was uncommitted
and wanted the war to go away.
According to the CIA's mythology,
on one side were communist insurgents, supported by comrades
in Hanoi, Moscow and Peking. The communists fought for land reform,
to rid Vietnam of foreign intervention, and to unite the north
and south. The other faction was composed of capitalists, often
Catholics relocated from North Vietnam in 1954 by the CIA. This
faction was fighting to keep South Vietnam an independent nation,
operating under the direction of quiet Americans.
Caught in the crossfire was
the silent majority. The object shared by both factions was to
win these undecided voters over to its side.
Contre Coup was the CIA's response
to the realization that the Communists were winning the war for
the hearts and minds of the people. It also was a response to
the belief that they were winning through the use of psychological
warfare, specifically, selective terror the murder and
mutilation of specific government officials.
In December 1963, Peer DeSilva
arrived in Saigon as the CIA's station chief. He claims to have
been shocked by what he saw. In his autobiography, SubRosa, DeSilva
describes how the VC had "impaled a young boy, a village
chief, and his pregnant wife on sharp poles. To make sure this
horrible sight would remain with the villagers, one of the terror
squad used his machete to disembowel the woman, spilling he fetus
onto the ground."
"The Vietcong," DeSilva
said, "were monstrous in the application of torture and
murder to achieve the political and psychological impact they
wanted."
But the methodology was successful
and had tremendous intelligence potential, so DeSilva authorized
the creation of small "counter-terror teams," designed
"to bring danger and death to the Vietcong functionaries
themselves, especially in areas where they felt secure."
How
Counter-Terror Worked In Vietnam
Thanh Phong village was one
of those areas where Vietcong functionaries felt secure. It was
located in Kien Hoa Province, along the Mekong Delta. One of
Vietnam's most densely populated provinces, Kien Hoa was precariously
close to Saigon, and is criss-crossed with waterways and rice
paddies. It was an important rice production area for the insurgents
as well as the Government of Vietnam, and thus was one of the
eight most heavily infiltrated provinces in Vietnam. The estimated
4700 VC functionaries in Kien Hoa accounted for more than five
percent of the insurgency's total leadership. Operation Speedy
Express, a Ninth Infantry sweep through Kien Hoa in the first
six months of 1969, killed an estimated 11,000 civilians-supposedly
VC sympathizers.
These functionaries formed
what the CIA called the Vietcong Infrastructure (VCI). The VCI
consisted of members of the People's Revolutionary Party, the
National Liberation Front, and other Communist outfits like the
Women's and Student's Liberation Associations. Its members were
politicians and administrators managing committees for business,
communications, security, intelligence, and military affairs.
Among their main functions were the collection of taxes, the
recruitment of young men and women into the insurgency, and the
selective assassination of GVN officials.
As the CIA was well aware,
Ho Chi Minh boasted that with two cadre in every hamlet, he could
win the war, no matter how many soldiers the Americans threw
at him.
So the CIA adopted the Ho's
strategy-but on a grander and bloodier scale. The object of Contre
Coup was to identify and terrorize each and every individual
VCI and his/her family, friends and fellow villagers. To this
end the CIA in 1964 launched a massive intelligence operation
called the Provincial Interrogation Center Program. The CIA (employing
the US company Pacific Architects and Engineers) built an interrogation
center in each of South Vietnam's 44 provinces. Staffed by members
of the brutal Special Police, who ran extensive informant networks,
and advised by CIA officers, the purpose of the PICs was to identify,
through the systematic "interrogation" (read torture)
of VCI suspects, the membership of the VCI at every level of
its organization; from its elusive headquarters somewhere along
the Cambodian border, through the region, city, province, district,
village and hamlet committees.
The "indispensable link"
in the VCI was the District Party Secretary the same individual
Bob Kerrey's Seal team was out to assassinate in its mission
in Thanh Phong.
Frankenstein's
Monster
Initially the CIA had trouble
finding people who were willing to murder and mutilate, so the
Agency's original "counter-terror teams" were composed
of ex-convicts, VC defectors, Chinese Nungs, Cambodians, Montagnards,
and mercenaries. In a February 1970 article written for True
Magazine, titled "The CIA's Hired Killers," Georgie-Anne
Geyer compared "our boys" to "their boys"
with the qualification that, "Their boys did it for faith;
our boys did it for money."
The other big problem was security.
The VC had infiltrated nearly every facet of the GVN-even the
CIA's unilateral counter-terror program. So in an attempt to
bring greater effectiveness to its secret war, the CIA started
employing Navy Seals, US Army Special Forces, Force Recon Marines,
and other highly trained Americans who, like Bob Kerrey, were
"motivationally indoctrinated" by the military and
turned into killing machines with all the social inhibitions
and moral compunctions of a Timmy McVeigh. Except they were secure
in the knowledge that what they were doing was, if not legal
or moral, fraught with Old Testament-style justice, rationalizing
that the Viet Cong did it first.
Eventually the irrepressible
Americans added their own improvements. In his autobiography
Soldier, Anthony Herbert describes arriving in Saigon in 1965,
reporting to the CIA's Special Operations Group, and being asked
to join a top-secret psywar program. What the CIA wanted Herbert
to do, "was to take charge of execution teams that wiped
out entire families."
By 1967, killing entire families
had become an integral facet of the CIA's counter-terror program.
Robert Slater was the chief of the CIA's Province Interrogation
Center Program from June 1967 through 1969. In a March 1970 thesis
for the Defense Intelligence School, titled "The History,
Organization and Modus Operandi of the Viet Cong Infrastructure,"
Slater wrote, "the District Party Secretary usually does
not sleep in the same house or even hamlet where his family lived,
to preclude any injury to his family during assassination attempts."
But, Slater added, "the
Allies have frequently found out where the District Party Secretaries
live and raided their homes: in an ensuing fire fight the secretary's
wife and children have been killed and injured."
This is the intellectual context
in which the Kerrey atrocity took place. This CIA strategy of
committing war crimes for psychological reasons to terrorize
the enemy's supporters into submission also is what differentiates
Kerrey's atrocity, in legal terms, from other popular methods
of mass murdering civilians, such as bombs from the sky, or economic
boycotts.
Yes, the CIA has a global,
illegal strategy of terrorizing people, although in typical CIA
lexicon it's called "anti-terrorism."
When you're waging illegal
warfare, language is every bit as important as weaponry and the
will to kill. As George Orwell or Noam Chomsky might explain,
when you're deliberately killing innocent women and children,
half the court-of-public-opinion battle is making it sound legal.
Three Old Vietnam Hands in
particular stand out as examples of this incestuous relationship.
Neil Sheehan, CIA-nik and author of the aptly titled Bright Shining
Lie, recently confessed that in 1966 he saw US soldiers massacre
as many as 600 Vietnamese civilians in five fishing villages.
He'd been in Vietnam for three years by then, but it didn't occur
to him that he had discovered a war crime. Now he realizes that
the war crimes issue was always present, but still no mention
of his friends in the CIA.
Former New York Times
reporter and author of The Best and The Brightest, David Halberstam,
defended Kerrey on behalf of the media establishment at the New
School campus the week after the story broke. CIA flack Halberstam
described the region around Thanh Phong as "the purest bandit
country," adding that "by 1969 everyone who lived there
would have been third-generation Vietcong." Which is CIA
revisionism at its sickest.
Finally there's New York
Times reporter James Lemoyne. Why did he never write any
articles linking the CIA to war crimes in Vietnam? Because his
brother Charles, a Navy officer, was in charge of the CIA's counter-terror
teams in the Delta in 1968.
Phoenix
Comes To Thanh Phong
The CIA launched its Phoenix
Program in June 1967, after 13 years of tinkering with several
experimental counter-terror and psywar programs, and building
its network of secret interrogation centers. The stated policy
was to replace the bludgeon of indiscriminate bombings and military
search and destroy operations which had alienated the people
from the Government of Vietnam with the scalpel of assassinations
of selected members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure.
A typical Phoenix operation
began in a Province Interrogation Center where a suspected member
of the VCI was brought for questioning. After a few days or weeks
or months undergoing various forms of torture, the VCI suspect
would die or give the name and location of his VCI comrades and
superiors. That information would be sent from the Interrogation
Center to the local Phoenix office, which was staffed by Special
Branch and Vietnamese military officers under the supervision
of CIA officers. Depending on the suspected importance of the
targeted VCI, the Phoenix people would then dispatch one of the
various action arms available to it, including Seal teams like
the one Bob Kerrey led into Thanh Phong.
In February 1969, the Phoenix
Program was still under CIA control. But because Kien Hoa Province
was so important, and because the VCI's District Party Secretary
was supposedly in Thanh Phong, the CIA decided to handle this
particular assassination and mass murder mission without involving
the local Vietnamese. So instead of dispensing the local counter-terror
team, the CIA sent Kerrey's Raiders.
And that, very simply, is how
it happened. Kerrey and crew admittedly went to Thanh Phong to
kill the District Party Secretary, and anyone else who got in
the way, including his family and all their friends.
Phoenix
Comes Home To Roost
By 1969 the CIA, through Phoenix,
was targeting individual VCI and their families all across Vietnam.
Over 20,000 people were assassinated by the end of the year and
hundreds of thousands had been tortured in Province Interrogation
Centers.
On 20 June 1969, the Lower
House of the Vietnamese Congress held hearings about abuses in
the Phoenix VCI elimination program. Eighty-six Deputies signed
a petition calling for its immediate termination. Among the charges:
Special Police knowingly arrested innocent people for the purpose
of extortion; people were detained for as long as eight months
before being tried; torture was commonplace. Noting that it was
illegal to do so, several deputies protested instances in which
American troops detained or murdered suspects without Vietnamese
authority. Others complained that village chiefs were not consulted
before raids, such as the one on Thanh Phong.
After an investigation in 1970,
four Congresspersons concluded that the CIA's Phoenix Program
violated international law. "The people of these United
States," they jointly stated, "have deliberately imposed
upon the Vietnamese people a system of justice which admittedly
denies due process of law," and that in doing so, "we
appear to have violated the 1949 Geneva Convention for the protection
of civilian people."
During the hearings, U.S. Representative
Ogden Reid said, "if the Union had had a Phoenix program
during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like
Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon, Georgia."
But the American establishment
and media denied it then, and continue to deny it until today,
because Phoenix was a genocidal program -- and the CIA officials,
members of the media who were complicit through their silence,
and the red-blooded American boys who carried it out, are all
war criminals. As Michael Ratner a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional
Rights told CounterPunch: "Kerrey should be tried as a war
criminal. His actions on the night of February 24-25, 1969 when
the seven man Navy Seal unit which he headed killed approximately
twenty unarmed Vietnamese civilians, eighteen of whom were women
and children was a war crime. Like those who murdered at My Lai,
he too should be brought into the dock and tried for his crimes."
Phoenix, alas, also was fiendishly
effective and became a template for future CIA operations. Developed
in Vietnam and perfected with the death squads and media blackout
of Afghanistan and El Salvador, it is now employed by the CIA
around the world: in Colombia, in Kosovo, in Ireland with the
British MI6, and in Israel with its other kindred spirit, the
Mossad.
The paymasters at the Pentagon
will keep cranking out billion dollar missile defense shields
and other Bush league boondoggles. But when it comes to making
the world safe for international capitalism, the political trick
is being more of a homicidal maniac, and more cost effective,
than the terrorists.
Incredibly, Phoenix has become
fashionable, it has adhered a kind of political cachet. Governor
Jesse Ventura claims to have been a Navy Seal and to have "hunted
man." Fanatical right-wing US Representative Bob Barr, one
of the Republican impeachment clique, has introduced legislation
to "re-legalize" assassinations. David Hackworth, representing
the military establishment, defended Kerrey by saying "there
were thousands of such atrocities," and that in 1969 his
own unit committed "at least a dozen such horrors."
Jack Valenti, representing the business establishment and its
financial stake in the issue, defended Kerrey in the LA Times,
saying, "all the normalities (sic) of a social contract
are abandoned," in war.
Bullshit.
A famous Phoenix operation,
known as the My Lai Massacre, was proceeding along smoothly,
with a grand total of 504 Vietnamese women and children killed,
when a soldier named Hugh Thompson in a helicopter gunship saw
what was happening. Risking his life to preserve that "social
contract," Thomson landed his helicopter between the mass
murderers and their victims, turned his machine guns on his fellow
Americans, and brought the carnage to a halt.
Same with screenwriter and
journalist Bill Broyles, Vietnam veteran, and author Brothers
In Arms, an excellent book about the Vietnam War. Broyles turned
in a bunch of his fellow Marines for killing civilians.
If Thompson and Broyles were
capable of taking individual responsibility, everyone is. And
many did.
Phoenix
Reborn
There is no doubt that Bob
Kerrey committed a war crime. As he admits, he went to Vietnam
with a knife clenched between his teeth and did what he was trained
to do kidnap, assassinate and mass murder civilians. But
there was no point to his atrocity as he soon learned, no controlling
legal authority. He became a conflicted individual. He remembers
that they killed women and children. But he thinks they came
under fire first, before they panicked and started shooting back.
The fog of war clouds his memory
But there isn't that much to
forget. Thanh Phong was Kerrey's first mission, and on his second
mission a grenade blew off his foot, abruptly ending his military
career.
Plus which there are plenty
of other people to remind Kerrey of what happened, if anyone
will listen. There's Gerhard Klann, the Seal who disputes Kerrey's
account, and two Vietnamese survivors of the raid, Pham Tri Lanh
and Bui Thi Luam, both of whom corroborate Klann's account, as
does a veteran Viet Cong soldier, Tran Van Rung.
As CBS News was careful to
point out, the Vietnamese were former VC and thus hostile witnesses
and because there were slight inconsistencies in their stories,
they could not be believed. Klann became the target of Kerrey's
pr machine, which dismissed as an alcoholic with a chip on his
shoulder.
Then there is John DeCamp.
An army captain in Vietnam, DeCamp worked for the organization
under CIA executive William Colby that ostensibly managed Phoenix
after the CIA let it go in June 1969. DeCamp was elected to the
Nebraska State Senate and served until 1990. A Republican, he
claims that Kerrey led an anti-war march on the Nebraska state
capitol in May 1971. DeCamp claims that Kerrey put a medal, possibly
his bronze star, in a mock coffin, and said, "Viet Cong
or North Vietnamese troops are angelic compared with the ruthless
Americans."
Kerrey claims he was in Peru
visiting his brother that day. But he definitely accepted his
Medal of Honor from Richard Nixon on 14 May 1970, a mere ten
days after the Ohio National guard killed four student protestors
at Kent State. With that badge of honor pinned on his chest,
Kerrey began walking the gilded road to success. Elected Governor
of Nebraska in November 1982, he started dating Deborah Winger,
became a celebrity hero, was elected to the US Senate, became
vice-chair of Senate Committee on Intelligence, and in 1990 staged
a run for president. One of the most highly regarded politicians
in America, he showered self-righteous criticism on draft dodger
Bill Clinton's penchant for lying.
Bob Kerrey is a symbol of what
it means to be an American, and the patriots have rallied to
his defense. And yet Kerrey accepted a bronze star under false
pretenses, and as John DeCamp suggests, he may have been fragged
by his fellow Seals. For this, he received the Medal of Honor.
John DeCamp calls Bob Kerrey
"emotionally disturbed" as a result of his Vietnam
experience.
And Kerrey's behavior has been
pathetic. In order to protect himself and his CIA patrons from
being tried as a war criminals, Bob Kerrey has become a pathological
liar too. Kerrey says his actions at Than Phong were an atrocity,
but not a war crime. He says he feels remorse, but not guilt.
In fact, he has continually rehabbed his position on the war
itself-moving from an opponent to more recently an enthusiast.
In a 1999 column in the Washington Post, for example, Kerrey
said he had come to view that Vietnam was a "just war. "Was
the war worth the effort and sacrifice, or was it a mistake?"
Kerrey wrote. "When I came home in 1969 and for many years
afterward, I did not believe it was worth it. Today, with the
passage of time and the experience of seeing both the benefits
of freedom won by our sacrifice and the human destruction done
by dictatorships, I believe the cause was just and the sacrifice
not in vain."
Then at the Democratic Party Convention in Los Angeles last summer
Kerrey lectured the delegates that they shouldn't be ashamed
of the war and that they should treat Vietnam veterans as war
heroes: "I believe I speak for Max Baucus and every person
who has ever served when I say I never felt more free than when
I wore the uniform of our country. This country - this party
- must remember." Free? Free to murder women and children.
Is this a consciousness of guilt or immunity?
CBS News also participated
in constructing a curtain of lies. As does every other official
government or media outlet that knows about the CIA's Phoenix
Program, which continues to exist and operate worldwide today,
but fails to mention it.
Why?
Because if the name of one
targeted Viet Cong cadre can be obtained, then all the names
can be obtained, and then a war crimes trial becomes imperative.
And that's the last thing the Establishment will allow to happen.
Average Americans, however,
consider themselves a nation ruled by laws and an ethic of fair
play, and with the Kerry confession comes an opportunity for
America to redefine itself in more realistic terms. The discrepancies
in his story beg investigation. He says he was never briefed
on the rules of engagement. But a "pocket card" with
the Laws of Land Warfare was given to each member of the US Armed
Forces in Vietnam.
Does it matter that Kerrey
would lie about this? Yes. General Bruce Palmer, commander of
the same Ninth Division that devastated Kien Koa Province in
1969, objected to the "involuntary assignment" of American
soldiers to Phoenix. He did not believe that "people in
uniform, who are pledged to abide by the Geneva Conventions,
should be put in the position of having to break those laws of
warfare."
It was the CIA that forced
soldiers like Kerrey into Phoenix operations, and the hidden
hand of the CIA lingers over his war crime. Kerrey even uses
the same rationale offered by CIA officer DeSilva. According
to Kerrey, "the Viet Cong were a thousand per cent more
ruthless than" the Seals or U.S. Army.
But the Geneva Conventions,
customary international law and the Uniform Code of Military
Justice all prohibit the killing of noncombatant civilians. The
alleged brutality of others is no justification. By saying it
is, Kerrey implicates the people who generated that rationale:
the CIA. That is why there is a moral imperative to scrutinize
the Phoenix Program and the CIA officers who created it, the
people who participated in it, and the journalists who covered
it up to expose the dark side of our national psyche, the
part that allows us to employ terror to assure our world dominance.
To accomplish this there must
be a war crimes tribunal. This won't be easy. The US government
has gone to great lengths to shield itself from such legal scrutiny,
at the same it selectively manipulates international institutions,
such as the UN, to go after people like Slobodan Milosevic.
According to human rights lawyer
Michael Ratner the legal avenues for bringing Kerrey and his
cohorts to justice are quite limited. A civil suit could be lodged
against Kerrey by the families of the victims brought in the
United States under the Alien Tort Claims Act. "These are
the kinds of cases I did against Gramajo, Pangaitan (Timor),"
Ratner told us. "The main problem here is that it is doubtful
the Vietnamese would sue a liberal when they are dying to better
relations with the US. I would do this case if could get plaintiffs--so
far no luck." According to Ratner, there is no statute of
limitations problem as it is newly discovered evidence and there
is a stron argument particularly in the criminal context that
there is no statute of limitations for war crimes.
But criminal cases in the US
present a difficult, if not impossible, prospect. Now that Kerrey
is discharged from the Navy, the military courts, which went
after Lt. Calley for the My Lai massacre, has no jurisdiction
over him. "As to criminal case in the US--my pretty answer
is no," says Ratner. "The US first passed a war crimes
statute (18 USC sec. 2441 War Crimes) in 1996--that statute makes
what Kerrey did a war crime punishable by death of life imprisonment--but
it was passed after the crime and criminal statutes are not retroactive."
In 1988, Congress enacted a statute against genocide, which was
might apply to Kerrey's actions, but it to can't be applied retroactively.
Generally at the time of Kerrey's acts in Vietnam, US criminal
law did not extend to what US citizens did overseas unless they
were military.
[As a senator, Kerrey, it should
be noted, voted for the war crimes law, thus opening the opportunity
for others to be prosecuted for crimes similar to those he that
committed but is shielded from.]
The United Nations is a possibility,
but a long shot. They could establish an ad hoc tribunal such
as it did with the Rwanda ICTR and Yugoslavia ICTY. "This
would require action by UN Security council could do it, but
what are the chances?" says Ratner. "There is still
the prospect for a US veto What that really points out is how
those tribunals are bent toward what the US and West want."
Prosecution in Vietnam and
or another country and extradition is also a possibility. It
can be argued that war crimes are crimes over which there is
universal jurisdiction--in fact that is obligation of countries-under
Geneva Convention of 1948--to seek out and prosecute war criminals.
"Universal jurisdiction does not require the presence of
the defendant--he can be indicted and tried in some countries
in absentia--or his extradition can be requested", says
Ratner. "Some countries may have statutes permitting this.
Kerrey should check his travel plans and hire a good lawyer before
he gets on a plane. He can use Kissinger's lawyer." CP
Douglas
Valentine is the author
of The Phoenix Program,
the only comprehensive account of the CIA's torture and assassination
operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY
a chilling novel about the CIA and the drug trade.
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