Bob Kerrey's war
Pfaff, William
8 OF SEVERAL HINDS WILLIAM PFAFF BOB KERREY'S WAR U.S. policy condoned atrocity You can never really be rid of the past. Events of the past can resurface and change the orbits of...
...The Phoenix program was devoted to assassinating civilians assessed by young CIA officers as secret Viet Cong members...
...He regarded torture as stupid, and ordered it ended...
...2001, Los Angeles Times Syndicate International 9...
...Did he order women and children to be killed...
...A historian of the period calls this book "the memoirs of a murderer...
...His experience is part of America's Vietnam past, which is still an open account...
...I had neither hate nor pity," he says...
...The burden of Vietnam has been written about and discussed endlessly, and filmed and analyzed and explained...
...The former U.S...
...Editorial writers say that the record of atrocities committed in Algeria must now be wrenched out of the closet in which the government has them locked away...
...My memory of this event," he says, "is clouded by the fog of the evening, age and desire...
...He tortured "out of patriotism," he writes, and adds that Francois Mitterrand—who was then France's minister of justice, later its president—had a representative at the Algerian headquarters "who covered us, and knew exactly what went on...
...General Paul Aussaresses, aged eighty-three, says he will take his chances on being brought to trial...
...This nonsecret was kept hushed because if it were acknowledged, the people to be tried would be those in Washington who framed the war's objectives, conceived the policies, and issued the orders that produced the atrocities...
...Mere "events" in Algeria supposedly were responsible for the national crisis that returned General Charles de Gaulle to power in 1958 and prompted him, two years later, to resolve to leave Algeria to the Algerians—even at the price of mutiny by a part of the French army...
...Jospin has expressed "total moral condemnation...
...Events of the past can resurface and change the orbits of people's lives, as former U.S...
...It was notoriously known in Vietnam that the practice of "free-fire zones" produced indiscriminate civilian casualties, as did B-52 bombings, and air and armored "sweeps" in the Delta...
...Calley actually served four years of house arrest...
...but it was never acknowledged by the army or government until last November, when two retired senior officers admitted their responsibility for torture—one with candor and repentance, the other with cynicism and defiance...
...forces in Vietnam repeatedly committed atrocities because of the demands made upon them by civilian authorities in Washington...
...General Aussaresses and (allegedly) former Senator Kerrey, were executants of atrocities that were implicit in the policies of two governments...
...His regret is that not all of them could be made to talk before they died...
...No, he couldn't have done that...
...The general recognizes this, explaining how he used electricity and near-drownings to force prisoners to betray other Algerian militants...
...It has made an effort to confront the truth, principally through congressional initiatives, and done more than France, for example, with respect to its war, from 1954 to 1962, against popular insurrection in Algeria...
...Now the officer who defended his crimes has written a book...
...Until very recently, the French government was unwilling even to call that war a war...
...senator says tearfully that he doesn't remember what really happened...
...He was let off by the army for the same reason that no one—or virtually no one—who has commented on the Kerrey affair will say that Kerrey should be prosecuted...
...He doesn't think so...
...There had been torture, summary execution, and crimes against civilians in Algeria before de Gaulle's return...
...He wrote it all down every night in four copies, one for his commander, one for another senior officer, and one for the government's resident minister in Algeria...
...Civilian casualties were all but universally identified as Viet Cong soldiers in the bodycounts, which were Washington's index of success...
...Even then, both Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and President Jacques Chirac opposed demands for a parliamentary inquiry...
...This was widely known, or assumed, at the time...
...But no one—except the Bob Kerreys of the war—has paid a price for the fact that U.S...
...Senator Bob Kerrey has now learned...
...His predecessors had considered it indispensable...
...If Kerrey is indeed guilty of the murder of unarmed civilians, it was an act for which Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr., the platoon commander held responsible for the atrocity at My Lai, was sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor...
...The fourth he kept, and still has...
...The conclusion drawn from this, with which the American public perhaps even agrees, is that it is better that the public talk about the guilt or innocence of Bob Kerrey—rather than return to the question of the guilt of those individuals under whose orders he acted...
...The United States is not the only country with a problem about the past...
...The truth that the United States has officially kept secret—but which never was secret—is that atrocities against civilians were widespread in Vietnam, and were implicitly required by commanders because of the orders they were given by the government in Washington...
Vol. 128 • May 2001 • No. 10
