Vietnam War

 Vietnam War (War,  Cold war)  

The My Lai massacre, an indiscriminate murder session carried out by US forces - distinguished from an unknown number of other such events by the fact that the story got out, together with images. The 26 soldiers charged with the hundreds of murders eventually served a total of only 3½ years under house arrest.
Date	December 1956 - 30 April 1975
Location	Vietnam,  Cambodia,  Laos,  Thailand
Perpetrators	United States
Witnessed by	Dan Rather
Type	Proxy war
Deaths	2,500,000
Interest of	Max Boot, Thomas Anthony Dooley III, Task Force Alpha
Subpage	•Vietnam War/My Lai Massacre
Description	The Vietnam War was a proxy war lead by US that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from December 1956 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. Millions of people were killed, mostly Vietnamese. JFK was assassinated soon after declaring his intent to withdraw US troops. The war helped the CIA to refine its methods of illegal drug trafficking, torture and the like.

The Vietnam War was a Cold war era military confrontation in Vietnam, nominally due to the doctrine of 'containment' of Soviet influence.

Official Narrative

The main aim of the US government was the prevention of a communist takeover of South Vietnam, as part of the Cold War doctrine of "containment". This fear was of the "domino theory", expressed by Dwight D. Eisenhower during an April 7, 1954 news conference:

Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the "falling domino" principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.

The bleak consequences for Vietnamese population could be inferred from a now infamous report by correspondent Peter Arnett in his writing about Bến Tre city on 7 February 1968: "'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it', a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong."

Gulf Of Tonkin

Full article: Gulf Of Tonkin

As a prelude to the escalation of the conflict by the US, an "incident" was reported in the Gulf Of Tonkin, on the 2nd and then 4th of August, 1964. This was used as a justification for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which began the rapid escalation of the Vietnam war by authorising the use of "conventional" US military forces in South Ease Asia without the inconvenience of a formal declaration of war.

Long suspected of being a False Flag attack, light was shed on the Gulf Of Tonkin incident by the 2005 declassification of an internal National Security Agency historical study on the matter which concluded that the Maddox had engaged the North Vietnamese Navy on August 2, but that there were no North Vietnamese Naval vessels present during the incident of August 4. The report stated regarding August 2:

At 1500G, Captain Herrick ordered Ogier's gun crews to open fire if the boats approached within ten thousand yards. At about 1505G, the Maddox fired three rounds to warn off the communist boats. This initial action was never reported by the Johnson administration, which insisted that the Vietnamese boats fired first.

Regarding August 4, the NSA report concluded that:

It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. [...] In truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on August 2.

On November 30, 2005, the NSA released the first installment of previously classified information regarding the Gulf of Tonkin incident, including a moderately sanitized version of Mr. Hanyok's article. The Hanyok article stated that intelligence information was presented to the Johnson administration "in such a manner as to preclude responsible decision makers in the Johnson administration from having the complete and objective narrative of events." Instead, "only information that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers was given to Johnson administration officials."

Drug dealing

The CIA was involved in Vietnam before the war started. The war allowed the CIA to greatly step up its drug trafficking, which was one purpose of the war.

In 1993, Harry Miller, a Vietnam veteran, sued Larry Silverstein, together with Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Ross Perot and Colin Powell, alleging that they had perpetrated acts including serial murder for 25 years, since the war in Vietnam, as part of a conspiracy to distribute heroin. In January 1994, a New York court threw out the suit; an appeal by Miller was later rejected. The suit was not reported by the commercially-controlled media at the time.

Consequences

Estimates of the casualties vary from about 1,000,000 to 4,000,000, mostly Vietnamese.

After the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, over 100,000s were rounded up in re-education camps to "learn about the ways of the new government" although never tried, judged, or convicted of any crime. After these camps were reported on by the western NGOs and media, the Hanoi government defended the reeducation camps by placing the enemy image "war criminal" on the prisoners. A 1981 memorandum of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to Amnesty International claimed that all those in the reeducation camps were guilty of acts of national treason as defined in Article 3 of the 30 October 1967 Law on Counter-revolutionary Crimes (enacted for the government of North Vietnam), which specifies punishments ranging from 20 years to life in prison or the death penalty. However, it was instead allowing the prisoners to experience "reeducation". A book from 1995 revealed the CIA actually intervened and attempted to steer public opinion by - among other tactics - revealing data gathered by a team of 650 CIA case officers operating in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to NGOs as Amnesty International.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
MLK	“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government.”	MLK	9 November 1967
Anthony Poshepny	“"I used to collect ears... I had a big, green, reinforced cellophane bag as you walked up my steps. I'd tell my people to put them in, and then I'd staple them to this 5,000 kip (Lao currency) notice that this ear was paid for already, and put them in the bag and send them to Vientiane with the report.. I still collected them, until one day I went out on an inspection trip... and I saw this little Lao kid out there, he's only about 12, and he had no ears. And I asked: `'What the hell happened to this guy?' Somebody said, 'Tony, he heard you were paying for ears. His daddy cut his ears off. For the 5,000 kip' .”	Anthony Poshepny	2003
Vladimir Putin	“Western countries have been saying for centuries that they bring freedom and democracy to other nations. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of bringing democracy they suppressed and exploited, and instead of giving freedom they enslaved and oppressed. The unipolar world is inherently anti-democratic and unfree; it is false and hypocritical through and through. The United States is the only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons twice, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. And they created a precedent. Recall that during WWII the United States and Britain reduced Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne and many other German cities to rubble, without the least military necessity. It was done ostentatiously and, to repeat, without any military necessity. They had only one goal, as with the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities: to intimidate our country and the rest of the world. The United States left a deep scar in the memory of the people of Korea and Vietnam with their carpet bombings and use of napalm and chemical weapons. It actually continues to occupy Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea and other countries, which they cynically refer to as equals and allies. Look now, what kind of alliance is that? The whole world knows that the top officials in these countries are being spied on and that their offices and homes are bugged. It is a disgrace, a disgrace for those who do this and for those who, like slaves, silently and meekly swallow this arrogant behaviour. They call the orders and threats they make to their vassals Euro-Atlantic solidarity, and the creation of biological weapons and the use of human test subjects, including in Ukraine, noble medical research. It is their destructive policies, wars and plunder that have unleashed today’s massive wave of migrants. Millions of people endure hardships and humiliation or die by the thousands trying to reach Europe.”	Vladimir Putin	2022

 

Witness

Witness	Description
Dan Rather	US corporate journalist and former news anchor. He made his career by misrepresenting the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. While generally reliably staying within the Overton window of accepted opinions, he was set up and fired in 2004, presumably for showing insufficient patriotism after 911 by revealing the Abu Ghraib torture.

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:CIA Planned Coup	article	2 September 1963	Ngo Dinh Nhu
Document:The US war in Vietnam 1961-75	book extract	13 February 2007	Mark Curtis

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